Thursday, April 25, 2013
Black Scholar Magazine Hits the Streets of Oakland at Academy of da Corner
This week the Black Scholar Magazine's pamphlet series was given out on the streets of Oakland at Marvin X's Academy of da Corner. The poet had found in the Hare archives a box of Dr. Hare's pamphlet Combatting Black Apathy. Dr. Hare said he didn't mind if they were given out freely to spread consciousness in the hood. The 1973 pamphlet is a classic on the social psychology of life in the hood then and now. The essay opens with the following:
There is a problem gripping the black movement--and crippling it. One encounters it in every college audience and every pool room or house party or wherever black people gather and ponder the revolutionary course for the black future or try to clarify the confusion of the present. It is the problem that revolves around apathy and it correlates, futility and despair....
Dr. Hare continues:
...Within this nothingness, we remain convinced of our own powerlessness, which we magnify, by identifying with the all-powerful oppressor. We are reluctant to rebel against the oppressor who has, so to speak, come to represent our ego ideal. We turn, therefore, into intransigent pessimism, into put-down militancy, labeling everything anybody tries to do as somehow jivetime, niggerish, bourgeois, or not "for real." In compensation, we jump super bad, so bad that it is not necessary for us to act. And since there can be no real solution of us, our solution is escape....
In the course of our escape we run the gamut of preoccupations with palliatives. One wave of brothers and sisters may trip out on the excessive use of drugs or religious fanaticism ( or even astrology....
Thus we are engulfed in a forest fire of pessimism and quiescence. And there is a danger that this pessimism can lead (at worst) to a fratricidal crossfire of bullets; at best to perennial or pathological bickering--which it has done. Historically, fratricide occurs at a certain stage in a movement, when an oppressed race begins to feel too weak to fight the real enemy, the oppressor himself. They begin to turn their anger in upon themselves and develop self-hatred. This self- hatred is projected on to their brothers.
The more acute case of this syndrome will manifest itself in maverick assassination, which in its more hideous forms, amounts to collective suicide. We must come to see that to kill a brother or sister similarly victimized by oppression, but struggling for freedom in a different way, is like killing a part of oneself, the hated part of oneself. Unfortunately, fratricide will increase. But we can offset it by shaping a clear picture of who our real enemy is and by moving to combat white racism; so that the frustration and anguish otherwise unrelieved will not accumulate and get turned inward upon ourselves.
Another way of offsetting fratricide and pathogenic squabbling is to build a genuine love for our black brothers and sisters, to replace self hatred with self love.... For this is our basic task, to build a sense of unity, unity of struggle, even when there is no unity of opinion. Because it is necessary to realize that we are all in this quagmire together; and it doesn't move us any closer to freedom when we unload our misdirected anguish on ourselves.
As things now stand, we have broken off into minute ideological camps, into tiny cults and revolutionary cliques--each believing itself to be in possession of the only way to fight the enemy....
The people were happy to receive the pamphlet that sold for 35 cents in 1973 but could sell for $35.00 today. Marvin gave multiple copies to some of the street people to pass out. They did so gladly
for a couple of dollars so they could get something to eat.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Notes from the Master Teacher of Black Studies, Dr. Nathan Hare
Marvin,
That’s no joke. As a college student I prided myself on my memory, but when I got to the University of Chicago it appeared to me I had been largely memorizing the wrong things; but I hung on and stuck to task and got to the end of my first year and was asked by my advisor what I was doing my master’s thesis on, something that might well have been done by then. Thus, on top of having less time to put into the memory bank that was paying back less and less, a professor of mine, the one who had been a classmate of E. Franklin Frazier’s, and was married to the daughter of the great Robert E. Park (Everett Hughes) told our class to “develop the habit of talking back to books” (by which he meant write in the margins as we read – I’d seen that going on but thought the people were kooks or downright crazy. After a while of talking back to books, I found I could come up with my own ideas and thoughts, so it took me two more years to get the master’s degree, three years in all, I was writing so much in the margins of books and with considerable vengeance. Meanwhile my unlearned relatives thought I wasn’t up to task, that my small black undergraduate college they knew had failed to prepare me. It became a big joke among some to ask me when I was going to get my master’s degree, as conventional wisdom was it was one year in and out, like at Harvard in those days when they didn’t require a thesis for the master’s in sociology, or you didn’t get the master’s, my people thought, and figured it was very likely I wasn’t going to get mine ( my relatives and acquaintances cocked their heads and crowed in sheer delight).
They didn’t know you didn’t have to have the master’s to get the Ph.D. at Chicago, and my superfluous coursework (inasmuch as I continued to carry a full load required by my Danforth Fellowship) would count toward the Ph.D. and it would take me only one more year of coursework and two years in all to finish my work and examinations for the Ph.D. I took my comprehensive exam ahead of time to fail and practice like just about everybody. People would take off and prepare for a quarter and even grow a beard to symbolize or signify their determination leading up to the vaunted “Comps.” I continued my full course load and twenty hour a week research assistantship at the Population Center, and even did a three-hour interview plus travel stint that weekend for the National Opinion Research Center. I also went to my Advanced Sociological Theory class on the morning of the first day of the Comps. The Theory course was one of two of the required courses of the total units needed for the Ph.D, so six students in the class taking the exam were absent from the class. “Hey, Nat, I thought you were taking the Comps,” the other students cried when I walked in. They wore a look on their faces suggesting they thought I had lost it or something.
I left the theory class and went to the Comps, where soon the clock struck one to signal the beginning of four questions to fill the four hours of the first of the two-afternoon Comps. I picked up the exam and couldn’t believe my eyes. The first question was: “Compare the contributions of Parsons and Merton to a general theory of social action.” The professor of the Theory class, apparently thinking the test takers would be absent, had lectured an hour and a half of the contributions of Robert Merton. I quickly summarized the lecture and concluded that “Merton didn’t begin to develop a general theory of social action, not to mention Parsons” (because I didn’t know that much about Parsons anyway). I then enjoyed the extra time I had left to ponder the other three questions on the first afternoon of the Comps.
Later, the chairman of the department at the time, Philip Hauser, told a group of students and faculty at a gathering in his large Hyde Park home-- he didn’t mention the fact that I was the only black person, it being so visibly apparent -- that only two of the twelve of us taking the Comps had passed all four sections (you could pass one section and take a failed section next time, and there was no stigma to failing any section at any time, which is why I was taking it early to get the feel of it). Prof. Hauser went on to say that I had made the highest score (the tests were written in bluebooks with only an ID number for grading purposes, not our names). They must have wondered who in the world could handle Merton with such ease, so wish he hadn’t just tossed off Parsons, guess he ran out of time or it got lost but he surely knew something about Parsons (because the Theory professor, Peter Blau, would later have a transformative effect on the field of sociological theory.
Parsons was thought to be exceedingly heavy, but his jealous detractors said he wrote poorly and appeared to believe if something was unintelligible that made it profound.
My apologies to Parsons for dissing him, but it’s a world I never made.
Nathan
UC Berkeley Bancroft Library offer declined, Stanford University Coming to view the Hare's Archives
Marvin X says the University of California's Bancroft Library doesn't have enough money to acquire the Dr. Nathan Hare and Dr. Julia Hare archives. When the UCB Bancroft Library curators arrived to inspect the archives, they asked Marvin what was the asking price? The poet took his time to reply. He said, "You know America deprived Dr. Nathan Hare of a livelihood, kicking him out of a Black college, Howard University, and a white college, San Francisco State University. We feel Dr. Hare deserves a generous compensation for his contribution to Black Studies and he has the archives to prove his profound contribution.
What do you want, the curators asked again? We want two million dollars!
"Marvin, we are poor, we cannot afford that. We tried to get the Alice Walker papers, but we couldn't afford her."
Stanford University is scheduled to view the Hare's archives in a few days. The archives include nearly two hundred boxes at this point. When the poet informed the Bancroft people Dr. Hare has books with hand written notes, they expressed interest in his books with margin notes. This may expand his archives to 300 boxes. Dr. Hare informed Marvin, "All my books have margin notes!"
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Terrorism and White Privilege: How to Recover from White Supremacy Type l
Terrorism and Privilege:
Understanding the Power of Whiteness
by
Tim Wise
Posted on April 16, 2013
As the nation weeps for the victims of the horrific bombing in Boston yesterday, one searches for lessons amid the carnage, and finds few. That violence is unacceptable stands out as one, sure. That hatred — for humanity, for life, or whatever else might have animated the bomber or bombers — is never the source of constructive human action seems like a reasonably close second.
But I dare say there is more; a much less obvious and far more uncomfortable lesson, which many are loathe to learn, but which an event such as this makes readily apparent, and which we must acknowledge, no matter how painful.
It is a lesson about race, about whiteness, and specifically, about white privilege.
I know you don’t want to hear it. But I don’t much care. So here goes.
White privilege is knowing that even if the Boston Marathon bomber turns out to be white, his or her identity will not result in white folks generally being singled out for suspicion by law enforcement, or the TSA, or the FBI.
White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for whites to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening, or threatened with deportation.
White privilege is knowing that if the bomber turns out to be white, he or she will be viewed as an exception to an otherwise non-white rule, an aberration, an anomaly, and that he or she will be able to join the ranks of pantheon of white people who engage in (or have plotted) politically motivated violence meant to terrorize — and specifically to kill — but whose actions result in the assumption of absolutely nothing about white people generally, or white Christians in particular.
Among these: Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols and Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph and Joe Stack andGeorge Metesky and Byron De La Beckwith and Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton and Herman Frank Cash and Robert Chambliss and James von Brunn and Lawrence Michael Lombardi and Robert Mathews and David Lane and Chevie Kehoe and Michael F. Griffin and Paul Hill and John Salvi andJustin Carl Moose and Bruce and Joshua Turnidge and James Kopp and Luke Helder and James David Adkisson and Scott Roeder and Shelley Shannon and Dennis Mahon and Wade Michael Page andJeffery Harbin and Byron Williams and Charles Ray Polk and Willie Ray Lampley and Cecilia Lampley and John Dare Baird and Joseph Martin Bailie and Ray Hamblin and Robert Edward Starr III and William James McCranie Jr. and John Pitner and Charles Barbee and Robert Berry and Jay Merrell andBrendon Blasz and Carl Jay Waskom Jr. and Shawn and Catherine Adams and Edward Taylor Jr. and Todd Vanbiber and William Robert Goehler and James Cleaver and Jack Dowell and Bradley Playford Glover and Ken Carter and Randy Graham and Bradford Metcalf and Chris Scott Gilliam and Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder and Buford Furrow and Benjamin Smith and Donald Rudolph and Kevin Ray Patterson and Charles Dennis Kiles and Donald Beauregard and Troy Diver and Mark Wayne McCool and Leo Felton and Erica Chase and Clayton Lee Wagner and Michael Edward Smith and David Burgert and Robert Barefoot Jr. and Sean Gillespie and Ivan Duane Braden and Kevin Harphamand William Krar and Judith Bruey and Edward Feltus and Raymond Kirk Dillard and Adam Lynn Cunningham and Bonnell Hughes and Randall Garrett Cole and James Ray McElroy and Michael Gorbey and Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman and Frederick Thomas and Paul Ross Evans andMatt Goldsby and Jimmy Simmons and Kathy Simmons and Kaye Wiggins and Patricia Hughes and Jeremy Dunahoe and David McMenemy and Bobby Joe Rogers and Francis Grady and Cody Seth Crawford and Ralph Lang and Demetrius Van Crocker and Floyd Raymond Looker and Derek Mathew Shrout and Randolph Linn.
Ya know, just to name a few.
And white privilege is being able to know nothing about the crimes committed by most of the terrorists listed above — indeed, never to have so much as heard most of their names — let alone to make assumptions about the role that their racial or ethnic identity may have played in their crimes.
White privilege is knowing that if the Boston bomber turns out to be white, we will not be asked to denounce him or her, so as to prove our own loyalties to the common national good. It is knowing that the next time a cop sees one of us standing on the sidewalk cheering on runners in a marathon, that cop will say exactly nothing to us as a result.
White privilege is knowing that if you are a white student from Nebraska — as opposed to, say, a student from Saudi Arabia — that no one, and I mean no one would think it important to detain and question you in the wake of a bombing such as the one at the Boston Marathon.
And white privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Belfast. And if he’s an Italian American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.
In short, white privilege is the thing that allows you (if you’re white) — and me — to view tragic events like this as merely horrific, and from the perspective of pure and innocent victims, rather than having to wonder, and to look over one’s shoulder, and to ask even if only in hushed tones, whether those we pass on the street might think that somehow we were involved.
It is the source of our unearned innocence and the cause of others’ unjustified oppression.
That is all. And it matters.
For the addiction to white supremacy type ll, see Marvin X's How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2007.
For the addiction to white supremacy type ll, see Marvin X's How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2007.
Will America follow Spain: Expel All Muslims?
Paul Robeson as Othello, the Moor (Muslim) in Shakespeare's Classic
Near the beginning of the eighth century, a Muslim army, made up largely of Moors and some Arabs, invaded and conquered nearly the entire peninsula. During the next 750 years independent Muslim states were established and the entire area of Muslim control became known as Al-Andalus. Meanwhile the Christian kingdoms in the north of the peninsula began the long and slow Christian recovery, a process called theReconquista, which was concluded in 1492 with the fall of Granada.
Over time, various small and large kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula began to coalesce into larger states.[1] The Christian kingdoms came to dominate nearly all of Iberia by the 13th century, those being the Kingdom of Portugal, the Kingdom of Aragon, the Kingdom of Castile and theKingdom of Navarre. Although colloquially and literarily the expression "King of Spain" or "King of the Spains" was already widespread,[2] and although the two crowns, Aragonese and Castilian, were held by the same monarch, they retained their individual institutions and identities until the enactment of the Spanish Constitution of 1812.[3] Portugal was also ruled by the House of Habsburg with Castile and Aragon but this came to an end with a revolt after sixty years.
The year 1492 was the starting point of the modern history of Spain, with the expulsion of the Moors and the successful voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World.[4] TheSpanish Empire was launched, as was the Spanish Inquisition; Jews and Muslims who refused to convert were expelled from the country.
Will America follow Spain and expel all Muslims? History has a strange way of repeating itself, so don't think such a thing cannot happen. Long ago the Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught his followers the day would come when we would depart America, exiting through Mexico. So be prepared for this announcement over the media:
ALL MUSLIMS HAVE 24 HOURS TO LEAVE AMERICA AND ALL NIGGERS TOO!
Of course if this should happen, how many Muslims (and Niggers) would hear the message and how many would be able to leave on such short notice? During Katrina, many Blacks were unable to leave the flooded area, some didn't have transportation, some were obese so they couldn't swim or walk.
What if all those remaining will be confined to ghettoes, i.e., concentration camps? Of course we're already concentrated in the hood, a toxic environment worse than slaughter: inferior food, schools, reactionary religious leaders and politicians, white supremacy education, drugs, large numbers in jail and prison (the New Slavery under the constitution); those in the Big Yard under police occupation, Stop and Frisk. So what may appear to be a bad thing (expulsion) may be a good thing.
--Marvin X
Boston Terrorists were Double Agents?
The Tsarnaev brothers were double agents who decoyed US into terror trap
DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis April 20, 2013, 4:39 PM (GMT+02:00)
The big questions buzzing over Boston Bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have a single answer: It emerged in the 102 tense hours between the twin Boston Marathon bombings Monday, April 15 – which left three dead, 180 injured and a police officer killed at MIT - and Dzohkhar’s capture Friday, April 19 in Watertown.
The conclusion reached by DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism and intelligence sources is that the brothers were double agents, hired by US and Saudi intelligence to penetrate the Wahhabi jihadist networks which, helped by Saudi financial institutions, had spread across the restive Russian Caucasian.
Instead, the two former Chechens betrayed their mission and went secretly over to the radical Islamist networks.
By this tortuous path, the brothers earned the dubious distinction of being the first terrorist operatives to import al Qaeda terror to the United States through a winding route outside the Middle East – the Caucasus.
This broad region encompasses the autonomous or semi-autonomous Muslim republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Chechnya, North Ossetia and Karachyevo-Cherkesiya, most of which the West has never heard of.
Moscow however keeps these republics on a tight military and intelligence leash, constantly putting down violent resistance by the Wahhabist cells, which draw support from certain Saudi sources and funds from the Riyadh government for building Wahhabist mosques and schools to disseminate the state religion of Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis feared that their convoluted involvement in the Caucasus would come embarrassingly to light when a Saudi student was questioned about his involvement in the bombng attacks while in a Boston hospital with badly burned hands.
They were concerned to enough to send Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saudi al-Faisal to Washington Wednesday, April 17, in the middle of the Boston Marathon bombing crisis, for a private conversation with President Barack Obama and his national security adviser Tom Donilon on how to handle the Saudi angle of the bombing attack.
That day too, official Saudi domestic media launched an extraordinary three-day campaign. National and religious figures stood up and maintained that authentic Saudi Wahhabism does not espouse any form of terrorism or suicide jihadism and the national Saudi religion had nothing to do with the violence in Boston. “No matter what the nationality and religious of the perpetrators, they are terrorists and deviants who represent no one but themselves.”
Prince Saud was on a mission to clear the 30,000 Saudi students in America of suspicion of engaging in terrorism for their country or religion, a taint which still lingers twelve years after 9/11. He was concerned that exposure of the Tsarnaev brothers’ connections with Wahhabist groups in the Caucasus would revive the stigma.
The Tsarnaevs' recruitment by US intelligence as penetration agents against terrorist networks in southern Russia explains some otherwise baffling features of the event:
1. An elite American college in Cambridge admitted younger brother Dzhokhar and granted him a $2,500 scholarship, without subjecting him to the exceptionally stiff standard conditions of admission. This may be explained by his older brother Tamerlan demanding this privilege for his kid brother in part payment for recruitment.
2. When in 2011, a “foreign government” (Russian intelligence) asked the FBI to screen Tamerlan for suspected ties to Caucasian Wahhabist cells during a period in which they had begun pledging allegiance to al Qaeda, the agency, it was officially revealed, found nothing incriminating against him and let him go after a short interview.
1. An elite American college in Cambridge admitted younger brother Dzhokhar and granted him a $2,500 scholarship, without subjecting him to the exceptionally stiff standard conditions of admission. This may be explained by his older brother Tamerlan demanding this privilege for his kid brother in part payment for recruitment.
2. When in 2011, a “foreign government” (Russian intelligence) asked the FBI to screen Tamerlan for suspected ties to Caucasian Wahhabist cells during a period in which they had begun pledging allegiance to al Qaeda, the agency, it was officially revealed, found nothing incriminating against him and let him go after a short interview.
He was not placed under surveillance. Neither was there any attempt to hide the fact that he paid a long visit to Russia last year and on his return began promoting radical Islam on social media.
Yet even after the Boston marathon bombings, when law enforcement agencies, heavily reinforced by federal and state personnel, desperately hunted the perpetrators, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was never mentioned as a possible suspect.
Yet even after the Boston marathon bombings, when law enforcement agencies, heavily reinforced by federal and state personnel, desperately hunted the perpetrators, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was never mentioned as a possible suspect.
3. Friday, four days after the twin explosions at the marathon finishing line, the FBI released footage of Suspect No. 1 in a black hat and Suspect No. 2 in a white hat walking briskly away from the crime scene, and appealed to the public to help the authorities identify the pair.
We now know this was a charade. The authorities knew exactly who they were. Suddenly, during the police pursuit of their getaway car from the MIT campus on Friday, they were fully identified. The brother who was killed in the chase was named Tamerlan, aged 26, and the one who escaped, only to be hunted down Saturday night hiding in a boat, was 19-year old Dzhokhar.
We now know this was a charade. The authorities knew exactly who they were. Suddenly, during the police pursuit of their getaway car from the MIT campus on Friday, they were fully identified. The brother who was killed in the chase was named Tamerlan, aged 26, and the one who escaped, only to be hunted down Saturday night hiding in a boat, was 19-year old Dzhokhar.
Our intelligence sources say that we may never know more than we do today about the Boston terrorist outrage which shook America – and most strikingly, Washington - this week. We may not have the full story of when and how the Chechen brothers were recruited by US intelligence as penetration agents – any more than we have got to the bottom of tales of other American double agents who turned coat and bit their recruiters.
Here is just a short list of some of the Chechen brothers’ two-faced predecessors:
In the 1980s, an Egyptian called Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed offered his services as a spy to the CIA residence in Cairo. He was hired, even though he was at the time the official interpreter of Ayman al-Zuwahiri, then Osama bin Laden’s senior lieutenant and currently his successor.
He accounted for this by posing as a defector. But then, he turned out to be feeding al Qaeda US military secrets. Later, he was charged with Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam.
On Dec. 30, 2009, the Jordanian physician Humam Khalil al-Balawi, having gained the trust of US intelligence in Afghanistan as an agent capable of penetrating al Qaeda’s top ranks, detonated a bomb at a prearranged rendezvous in Kost, killing the four top CIA agents in the country.
Then, there was the French Muslim Mohamed Merah. He was recruited by French intelligence to penetrate Islamist terror cells in at least eight countries, including the Caucasus. At the end of last year, he revealed his true spots in deadly attacks on a Jewish school in Toulouse and a group of French military commandoes.
The debate has begun over the interrogation of the captured Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarmayev when he is fit for questioning after surgery for two bullet wounds and loss of blood. The first was inflicted during the police chase in which his brother Tamerlan was killed.
An ordinary suspect would be read his rights (Miranda) and be permitted a lawyer. In his case, the “public safety exemption” option may be invoked, permitting him to be questioned without those rights, provided the interrogation is restricted to immediate public safety concerns. President Barack Obama is also entitled to rule him an “enemy combatant” and so refer him to a military tribunal and unrestricted grilling.
According to DEBKAfile’s counter terror sources, four questions should top the interrogators' agenda:
a) At what date did the Tsarnaev brothers turn coat and decide to work for Caucasian Wahhabi networks?
b) Did they round up recruits for those networks in the United States - particularly, among the Caucasian and Saudi communities?
c) What was the exact purpose of the Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath at MIT in Watertown?
d) Are any more terrorist attacks in the works in other American cities?
c) What was the exact purpose of the Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath at MIT in Watertown?
d) Are any more terrorist attacks in the works in other American cities?
Notes from the Master Teacher of Black Studies, Dr. Nathan Hare
I feel so blessed to have a daily dialogue with the father of Black Studies, Dr. Nathan Hare, my elder, comrade and colleague who wrote the introduction to my autobiography Somethin' Proper, Black Bird Press, 1998, and the foreword to my manual How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, BPP, 2007.
For many years now, Dr. Hare and I have worked together on such projects as the 1980 Black Men's Conference (15 years before the Million Man March), the 2001 Kings and Queens of Black Consciousness at San Francisco State University (absent most faculty in the Black Studies Department, although it was sponsored by the department); the 2004 Black Radical Book Fair in San Francisco's Tenderloin (where I spent 12 years as a dope fiend). Dr. Hare facilitated Black Reconstruction, the prototype for my Pan African Mental Health Peer Group to recover from the addiction to white supremacy.
Today I feel especially blessed to be in possession of the archives of Dr. Nathan Hare and Dr. Julia Hare. The Christians say God may not be there when you want Him but He's always on time. And so it is! When I recovered from Crack after a twelve year run, I wanted to catch up on Black Consciousness so I wrote various people to send me literature so I might catch up, but no one responded.
As I have been arranging the Hare archives, it is awesome to find so many original documents that are invaluable for any North American African in search of our true identity. The archives contain most of the Black Scholar magazines (founded by Dr. Hare), Negro Digest/Black World, Liberator, Freedomways, Ebony, Sepia, Jet, Phylon, Negro History Bulletin, Journal of Black Studies, etc. As one of my interns said, "Marvin, you got the Hare's whole life in his and Julia's archives."
Again, I am honored to work on this project that is the reeducation I've needed. One of my interns who studied Black Studies on the east coast, bemoaned the fact that she'd never heard of Dr. Hare until she attended his 80th birthday party. She felt culturally deprived and wondered why? We know it is due to revisionist history, wherein important people are deleted from the narrative for ideological and white supremacy type ll (Dr. Hare term) reasons.
--Marvin X
A Note from Dr. Nathan Hare
Marvin,
Barack Obama went to Chicago in part because Frank Davis had told him about it, but also his mother had wanted to be a student there but was only fifteen so her father wouldn’t let her and she would tell Obama about it. Meanwhile he had gotten here to Loyola Marymount in LA but, where tried to get hip, but transferred to Columbia, where he was studying when his mother wrote that she was in the hospital with cancer. For reasons of his own he declined to droop everything and go wherever she was – somewhere in Indonesia as I recall – and visit her. She died. So when he got out of Columbia, he went to Chicago, in particular the University of Chicago, and dug in around in the slum district in which the University had surrounded itself but tried to dig out of with only partial success in the mid to late 1950s, My older sister has said that people would say “that little old guy who hangs around the University of Chicago. He attended Columbia and Harvard Law but got his education and made his mark at the University of Chicago as a lecturer in the law department and life and organizing in the hood. I also knew Valerie jarrett’s father in law, the newspaper columnist, Vernon Jarrett. Indeed, when we were grappling with the Oakland superintendent movement from the National Black Men’s Conference you spearheaded with the help of John Douambia (sp?) – I was luncheon speaker – I happened to tell him on the phone when talking about the Black Think Tank that we were doing that. I told him how the NAACP had taken up my idea I had issued at a California Conference on black Education during a panel discussion chaired by Willie Brown. I called for raising the concept of “excellence” in black education to the level of excellence in athletics and music. You didn’t hear excellence as a buzz word for blacks in education. But I went on to say this in the same year, 1975 (when I received the Distinguished Alumni Award for my alma mater, Langston, around the country. I sent it to places like Jet and Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push (which became “Push for Excellence.” Also Marva Collins started her private school on the concept of excellence that year. Langston of course took it up full bloom for decades but now speak of “greatness” with the new regimes after the death of their 25 year president, Julia’s brother in law.
Anyway, at the Sacramento conference where I first raise the cry for excellence I had read in a book on Jewish education that they always pushed excvellence, Willie Brown cut me off at the five minute mark. Verna Canson, the west Coast regional director of the NAACP, sitting beside me said “I like that, how would you do it?” I said I don’t know, but I can think of academic Olympics in junior high schools and high schools,etc. A month later I was listening to KDIA as everybody in the community did of a Sunday afternoon in those days and I kept saying to Julia that the woman on Dr Fahim’s show, Margaret Busch Wilson, national chairman of the NAACP, was using my stuff. I kept saying she’s got my stuff, but I had never met her. I thought back to the California Conference and Verna Canson and recalled that I had mentioned it to her and she had passed it on. Anyway, as I started to say, a few years passed and ACT-SO (academic tournament for black kids, though mostly the middle class elite) began to flourish. So when I was talking to Vernon Jarrett, the journalist and father in law of Valerie Jarrett, I told him about all of this. I was startled to look up in a few months and see that Vernon Jarrett and the NAACP were saying that Vernon Jarrett had started ACT-SO.
Tell me how long the train’s been gone.
Nathan
Monday, April 22, 2013
University of California, Berkeley to inspect the Dr. Nathan Hare and Dr. Julia Hare Archives
Marvin X, Dr. Julia Hare, Dr. Nathan Hare and Attorney Amira Jackmon, Agent of the Community Archives Project at Academy of da Corner, Oakland. The UCB Bancroft Library has acquired the archives of several North American African authors, including Eldridge Cleaver, Ishmael Reed, Ted Joans, Marvin X and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks.
The University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library will view The Dr. Julia Hare and Dr. Nathan Hare papers at the Community Archives Project, according to Marvin X, project director. We have 100 boxes ready for them to examine and another 100 not organized. This is an awesome task but our interns have been hard at work these past weeks. The 100 boxes include financial records, a collection of the Black Scholar Magazine, founded by Dr. Hare, plus BSM documents, including Dr. Hare's letter of resignation; letters and correspondence from/to the Hares, primary documents from Dr. Hare's brief tenure at Howard University and San Francisco State University, including his proposal for the first Black Studies program at a major college campus--he is considered the father of Black Studies; manuscripts, drafts, notes (several boxes include Dr. Nathan Hare's notes on newspaper clippings; Dr. Julia Hare's speeches and speech notes, her manuscripts and drafts; newspaper and magazines articles by the Hares, including articles in such magazines as Black Scholar Black Male/Female Relations, (the Hare's publication), Sepia, Ebony, Black World/Negro Digest, UMASS Review, Washington Post, Sun Reporter, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Sociology: records from Dr. Nathan Hare's clinical psychology practice; photos, magazine articles about the Hare's; audio and video tapes, floppy disks containing extensive emails; materials from Dr. Hare's boxing career; articles from his tenure at Howard University; dissertations from his comrades in struggle such as Max Stanford (Dr. Muhammad Ahmed, former leader of RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement); awards and honors. Stanford University has arranged to view the papers as well.
The UCB Bancroft has acquired the archives of several North American African authors, including
Eldridge Cleaver, Ishmael Reed, Ted Joans, Marvin X and Pulitzer-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks.
11 Jan 2001
By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations
Berkeley - Personal papers of poet Gwendolyn E. Brooks, the first African American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, are now part of the African American writers collection at the University of California, Berkeley's Bancroft Library.Brooks gave her blessing to the UC Berkeley acquisition before she died on Dec. 3 at the age of 83. Brooks packed the campus's Zellerbach Hall for a 1974 poetry reading and again in 1997 for a reading in Wheeler Auditorium. Some 700 people were turned away from the overflowing Wheeler, and Brooks signed books until nearly midnight for those who remained.
Robert Hass, a former U.S. poet laureate and a professor of English at UC Berkeley, called Brooks one of the most important African American poets of the 20th century.
"She brought the impulses of the Harlem Renaissance to focus by writing about black life in Bronzeville during the Depression and the war years with a candor and sympathy and art that was, in its quiet way, a watershed in American literary and cultural history," he said.
"Berkeley - particularly because of June Jordan's work here - is a fine place for materials on a woman who for all her life wrote 'poetry for the people,'" said Susan Schweik, a UC Berkeley professor of English who has critiqued Brooks' work. Jordan is a UC Berkeley professor of African American studies and a poet, novelist and essayist.
Brooks' emergence in the post-Harlem Renaissance period positioned her for more than five decades as a compelling voice and vitality in African American poetry. The granddaughter of a slave, she was known for poetry that explored poverty and racism while promoting an understanding of African American culture. She wrote children's books, an autobiography, one novel, a collection of poetry about South Africa, and other volumes of poetry that included one of her most popular, "We Real Cool" (1966).
"If any one American writer naturalized the facts of black life, looked at it as lives people led, lives that happened to be inescapably caught in a racialized world but not absolutely defined by that fact, it was she," said Hass. "This curiosity, this art without a social agenda, was a kind of declaration of independence."
Retrieved from a former Brooks home on the South Side of Chicago, the collection now at UC Berkeley contains manuscripts of her poems and speeches, family photos, awards, weekly journals, clippings that reflect source material for poems, 50 years of correspondence with her publishers, and letters. Library officials said the yet-to-be-catalogued 22 boxes of materials constitute a representative sample of her papers from the 1930s to 1980.
"She (Brooks) was most grateful we had these documents. She said, 'You have my blessings to buy it,'" said longtime Brooks friend Daphne Muse.
Muse is an advisor to The Bancroft Library's African American writers collection and is research coordinator for the UC Berkeley McNair Scholars Program. As an adjunct lecturer at nearby Mills College in Oakland during the mid 1970s and early '80s, Muse taught Brooks' poetry in her classes. She said the Brooks material is a significant, unifying addition to UC Berkeley's African American collection.
Launched in 1978, the library's African American writers collection provides access to thousands of books, manuscripts, correspondence and other rare works by black authors. Materials range in date from the 1790s to the present and are regularly used by students, faculty members and outside researchers.
"Without this documentation, there would be gaping holes in what future researchers do here at UC Berkeley, and this canon includes both mainstream and once-marginalized voices," Muse said. The archive provides "a trail of how a poem finds its voice and reams of materials that thread her life together," she added.
It includes letters between Brooks and poet/art critic Ted Berrigan; author/anthologist Arna Bontemps, who helped lead the Harlem Renaissance; and Robert Creeley of the Black Mountain Poets group; as well as the late writer and Black Panther activist Eldridge Cleaver.
Brooks is said to have launched her writing career as a child by sending poems to a community newspaper to surprise her family.
Her first book of poetry, "A Street in Bronzeville," was published in 1945 and told of ordinary life in a real Chicago neighborhood. It gained her national recognition and led to awards that included a Guggenheim Fellowship and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Her second book of poetry, "Annie Allen," (1949) earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. This series of poems traced the life of a young black girl growing up in Chicago.
"Chicago really shaped her, and she really shaped Chicago," Muse said. "Long before Chicago had Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan, there was Gwendolyn Brooks."
Muse noted that one group of young black poets from Chicago, the "Jump Badders," worked with Brooks to publish a poetry anthology. Haki Madhubuti (Don Lee), Johari Amini and Carolyn Rodgers were among these writers whom Brooks helped. In turn, they radicalized Brooks and, after she published "Riot" in 1969, she pledged to use only black publishing houses.
Schweik said Brooks' work is important because of her early use of traditional form for radically new ends, her mentoring of black and women poets, and her pioneering of writing on race and gender issues. Brooks is believed to have written the first published poem on abortion in the United States, Schweik said. Brooks read "The Mother" during a gathering of American poets honored at the White House by President Jimmy Carter in January 1980.
Brooks is important also because of the range and shifts in her writing style over the decades "as she responded, quickly and profoundly, to social changes and to movements for social change," Schweik said.
Brooks' awards included a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Foundation's medal for distinguished contributions to American Letters, the National Endowment for the Humanities' 1994 Jefferson Lecturer post, the Frost Medal, and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award. Brooks was named consultant-in-poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985-86 and was the first black woman to be so honored. Illinois named her the state poet laureate in 1968.
Despite her huge success, Brooks never became a "diva," said Muse.
"She wore it all so simply, and the remarkable thing about her was the inordinate amount of time she spent with other writers, especially young voices," Muse said. "She was a deep thinker without being tortured by it. She was intellectually honest and generous and a fabulous listener; that's why she worked so well with young people."
"Through her poetry, presence and uncomplicated demeanor," Muse said, "Brooks firmly admonished black people not to be clubbed into submission and to stand tall in their power and honor their truth."
A volume of Brooks' poetry will be published posthumously this spring. Published by Third World Press, it is titled "In Montgomery, New and Other Poems."
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