Plato Negro's Academy of da Corner at Berkeley Flea Market this weekend

Catch Marvin X at the Harlem Book Fair, July 20, 2013, at the National Writers Union Booth

Poet/teacher Marvin X in front of his Academy of da Corner booth at Berkeley Juneteenth, with librarian Ayiba (Linda) Jolivet and UC professor emeritus/novelist Cecil Brown, who will release his latest work PRYOR LIVES (How Richard Pryor became Richard Pryor), a study, memoir and biography rolled into one. photo Princess O. Davis


This weekend, Berkeley's Flea Market at Ashby BART (the crossroads of North American African culture), will feature Marvin X at his Academy of da Corner. "Plato Negro" is Oakland's philosopher, poet, playwright, producer, teacher, aka Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland (Ishmael Reed); the USA's Rumi (Bob Holman); a master teacher in many fields of thought; one of America's great story tellers; I'd put him ahead of Mark Twain! (Rudolph Lewis). Look for him at booth #600, first row. He will be autographing his many books, including his latest The Wisdom of Plato Negro, parables, fables, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2012, How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy and the most requested title Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality, BBP, Berkeley, 2006.

This book is an encyclopedia of knowledge. He's a griot if there ever was one!
--Mumia Abu Jamal, Live from Death Row

Marvin X has done extraordinary mind and soul work in bringing our attention to the importance of spirituality, as opposed to religion, in our daily living. Someone�maybe Kierkegaard or maybe it was George Fox who�said that there was no such thing as "Christianity." There can only be Christians. It is not institutions but rather individuals who make the meaningful differences in our world. It is not Islam but Muslims. Not Buddhism but Buddhists. Marvin X has made a courageous difference. In this book he shares the wondrous vision of his spiritual explorations. His eloquent language and rhetoric are varied�sophisticated but also earthy, sometimes both at once.

Highly informed he speaks to many societal levels and to both genders�to the intellectual as well as to the man/woman on the street or the unfortunate in prison�to the mind as well as the heart. His topics range from global politics and economics to those between men and women in their household. Common sense dominates his thought. He shuns political correctness for the truth of life. He is a Master Teacher in many fields of thought�religion and psychology, sociology and anthropology, history and politics, literature and the humanities. He is a needed Counselor, for he knows himself, on the deepest of personal levels and he reveals that self to us, that we might be his beneficiaries.

All of which are represented in his Radical Spirituality�a balm for those who anguish in these troubling times of disinformation. As a shaman himself, he calls too for a Radical Mythology to override the traditional mythologies of racial supremacy that foster war and injustice. If you want to reshape (clean up, raise) your consciousness, this is a book to savor, to read again, and again�to pass onto a friend or lover.
�Rudolph Lewis, Editor, ChickenBones: A Journal

Marvin X is available for readings, lectures and performance. jmarvinx@yahoo.com
www.blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com

Catch Marvin X at the Harlem, NY Book Fair, July 20, 2013, National Writers Union Booth!

Marvin X interviewed at the, March, 2013, Black Power Babies Conversation, Philadelphia, PA., event produced by his daughter Muhammida El Muhajir, Sun In Leo.com

He also participated in the Black Love Lives Conference (produced by Nisa Ra), University of Penn, reading with Philly's living legend, pianist Alfie Pollitt, at the Cleft Jazz Club. 

Eldridge Cleaver: My friend the Devil, a memoir 

by Marvin X, Black Bird Press, Berkeley CA 

2009

Marvin X wrote his memoir of Eldridge Cleaver in three weeks, posting a chapter per day on the internet. See www.nathanielturner.com. 

The Wisdom of Plato Negro 

parables/fables

"Marvin X is Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland."--Ishmael Reed

His most recent book is The Wisdom of Plato Negro, parables/fables, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2012. President Davis and Reginald James, students at Marvin X's Academy of da Corner, Oakland.
President is now at Howard University, Reginald at UC Berkeley. Pictured at Sankofa Books, Washington DC.

Muhammida el Muhajir produced this event at Oakland's Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. Daughter hired him to write a poem dedicated to Oakland native Keyshia Cole. Marvin X opened for Keyshia Cole with the poem, accompanied by Academy students Aries Jordan and her sister, Toya.

Marvin X and his mentor, the legendary poet-philosopher-musician Sun RA

Crisis of Black Intellectuals and the Drs. Julia and Nathan Hare Archives

One would think the sale of the Hare archives would be a small matter, especially when we consider that Dr. Nathan Hare is the father of Black Studies with a PhD in sociology and psychology. How many professors of Black Studies, aka Pan African Studies, Africana Studies, Diaspora Studies, Negro Studies, have benefited from the ground breaking work and sacrifice of Dr. Hare who was thrown out of Howard University (he was preceded by the removal of the great sociologist Dr. E. Franklin Frazier, author of the classic Black Bourgeoisie, Hare's writing continued the tradition of lambasting the Black bourgeoise with his now classic The Black Anglo-Saxons).

Dr. Hare was then invited to be the first chair of a Black Studies program on a major white university campus at San Francisco State College, now University. The longest strike in American academic history ensued with violence and imprisonment of protesters. In the end, Dr. Hare was removed from his chair and what followed can only be described as a watered down, Miller Lite version of Black Studies that has persisted ever since, although hundreds of "tenured nigguhs" benefited from the struggle of students and radical professors like Dr. Hare who were purged from white and negro academia.

Dr. Hare bemoaned recently that is was pitiful that of the hundreds of Black Studies departments in America, not one was able to hire him, as though his blackness was simply unforgivable. We wonder will his archives suffer the same fate. Black academics have shown little desire to help us with the project to have his archives placed in a secure institution. A few have given contacts with curators at various institutions, but their interest in aiding has been Miller Lite, some of these intellectuals simply disappeared from the radar screen after professing they would be helpful with the organization and acquisition of the archives.

It has been suggested the price is too high, but after a life of de facto house arrest and black or rather white listing, why should the Hare archives go for peanuts, especially when the collection is substantial, over 200 cartons of letters, manuscripts, notes attached to news clippings, margin notes in books, records of his clinical psychology practice, photos, notebooks, speech notes and drafts, published articles in magazines, newspapers and books, including his collection of Black Scholar Magazine, of which he was the founding publisher,  awards and honors, audio and video tapes, hundreds of floppy disks, etc.

And let us not leave out the public career of his wife, Dr. Julia Hare, known as the female Malcolm X. One need only view her performance on Tavis Smiley's State of the Black World. Both are living legends of the movement toward better male/female relations. They founded Black Male/female Relations magazine, Kupenda or Black Love groups. The subject of Nathan Hare's psychology dissertation was Black Male/female relations. Their 57 year marriage is testament they know how to have successful male/female relations and should be honored for demonstrating Black Love Lives (Nisa Ra film).

We call upon Black academics to use their resources and contacts to assist with the sale of these important archives of two of the most important intellectuals North American Africans have produced.
In short, the price is negotiable so make us an offer we can't refuse. Dr. Hare has asked me to consummate this project at the earliest possible date. We call upon you for your immediate assistance.
Let me hear from you ASAP.
Sincerely,

Marvin X, M.A.
Agent, the Drs. Nathan and Julia Hare Archives
510-200-4164
jmarvinx@yahoo.com

P.S. At the very least, intellectuals and academics are urged to write letters of support, calling upon academic institutions and/or private institutions take a serious look at acquiring the archives. They are now available for viewing. Call me for an appointment. MX

Notes from the Master Teacher of Black Studies

Dr. M,

Also folded in the book with the birthday greeting card to me from Max Stanford, aka Dr. Muhammad Ahmed (most feared black militant by FBI in the late 1960s) is a note from a boy named Cadence, saying “I love Dr. Julia Hare.”

Nathan

From: Nathan Hare [mailto:nhare@pacbell.net] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2013 6:01 AM
To: Marvin X Jackmon (jmarvinx@yahoo.com)
Subject: Endless Archives and Bottomless Pockets

Marvin,

I notice you left the birthday card from Max Stanford (Muhammad Ahmed), I guess because it was tucked in one of a stack of books. One of them, “Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology” (Macmillan, 1972), has me and Tolson in it (pre-Great Debaters, Wiley College, where he practiced and James Farmer was a student before Tolson moved on to Langston and left debating for poetry and drama, aiming at Broadway and hitting Hollywood); indeed the editors   discuss Tolson and celebrate him as one of my teachers in the preface to my essay, “The Challenge of a Black Scholar,” I see they gave it a section all by itself, “Essay” under  “Part VI: The Present Generation: Since 1945,” though near the tail end of the book, just before Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and The Blues, in that order.

Talk about black studies, which they also mentioned, the article was also reprinted in a number of places, like such other articles as “Black Ecology,” in a number of different languages around the world. In fact I just got a call on Friday from a University of Pennsylvania black female professor  of ethics (as you know they worry about what’s right and wrong -- while I worry about what’s right, I know what’s wrong ), wanting to interview me on the article. I told her I’d have to take a look at it and get back to you, because I’ve forgotten what I said in it, especially since I was writing it while I was in jail in San Francisco (they didn’t let me keep anything but a paperback I had with me when arrested, Karl Mannheims “Idelogy and Utopia.” No pencil, so I used my thumbnail to mark off passages I wanted to quote or paraphrase.  But I didn’t just use Mannheim, lest black intellectuals say it’s not black enough, not even black studies in the first place. And anyway, how come you didn’t mention Moses.

I also don’t want you to take the book, “Medicine in the Ghetto” too lightly, not even my essay in it. Its editor, John Norman, was the director of the conference put on by the Harvard Medical School at Wentworth-by-the-Sea in New Hampshire in the late spring of 1969, but he was black, as were most of the participants. On my panel was the now late Charles Sanders, then the managing editor of Ebony magazine, when magazines were magazines and print media was print, The chairman of the panel, I believe, was the president of Meharry Medical College (I know he was the one who invited me). I forget the other person or two.

Some people think black studies is equivalent only to ancient history (“contributionism” a term I coined in the early 1960s at Howard – I note that white individuals have taken it up but could find no reference before the early 1960s, and certainly I coined it for myself and my students at Howard. Indeed circa 1970 the black sociologist, West Indian, at Harvard, wrote an essay in the” Crimson,” in which he referred to me and “Contributionsm” but added two categories. Jancie Hale Bensin in her book on black children, their cultural roots and learnin styles, summarizes Patterson’s  article but gives “contributionism” not to me as Patterson had, but to him. (Patterson may have mentioned me but kept the term for himself, a common ploy of black intellectuals (creatures who think black studies is equivalent only to an account of how  the first physician or something was black, Imhotep, and arguments over the proper spelling of his name, Immutef, or the first god was black (wouldn’t you know it?), the first devil, to the first person to make a spool or a piece of thread, etcetera. That’s one reason black studies and black intellectuality in general got bogged down and locked in antiquity from 1969 to 2009; and only came out to wail and bash the first black president for not picking them up and flinging them into the kingdom of snow white liberation.

As regards the stuff in my storage in the office building, I admit I wasn’t up to the challenge of taking those heavy file cabinets of files packed and crammed in there last Sunday morning. Don’t know whether that’s worth just going one day back again and wrenching the cabinets out and seeing what if anything we need to keep that’s not in current use. If so we would need Ali or some such heavyweight to help, I think, to boost the meager might of two old men and a pretty woman or two; although it was precisely two women of the physical stature to rival Ali who crammed them in there in the first place. The ringleader was a literary enthusiast and skimmed and got away with my big volume of the complete works of Shakespeare and God knows what. We weren’t thinking about archives -- at least I wasn’t. It’s like one continual try in a marathon game of finders keepers.

It’s good you’re making a movement out of the Archives Project, just don’t make me the sacrificial lamb. I’m trying to work my way out of this quagmire, this nightmare of deprivation, before I wrap my smothering blanket around me and lie down to pleasant dreams.

Hotep (is that black enough for you?),

Nathan

Call for a Bay Area Black Radical Book Fair

 Ishmael Reed

Academy of da Corner and Black Bird Press call for a Bay Area Black Radical Book Fair. The following authors are invited to participate:

Douglas Allen
Judy Juanita
Ishmael Reed
Cecil Brown
Dr. Nathan Hare
Angela Davis
Fuad Satterfiled
Marvin X
Jerri Lange
Dr. Ayodele Nzinga, PhD
Phavia Kujichagulia

If you are an author and wish to participate, contact Marvin X at 510-200-4164 or jmarvinx@yahoo.com.

We suggest each author contribute $100.00 to cover expenses of this event including space rent, promotion, printed program and refreshments.

Suggested topics for workshops:

How to write your book
How to Publish Your Book
How to Promote Your Book
Why we need a Black Writers Union
Will Your Book Help Free Us (Sonia Sanchez quote)
Writing in the Digital Age

Panels and Talks on Critical Issues

We think there should be panels and talks on current issues that can be discussed from a black radical point of view, especially from a revolutionary black nationalist point of view. But let all schools of thought contend. I come from a black nationalist point of view because we must look out for self first. The Latinos know this, thus the cry La Raza, La Raza, La Raza. Everybody knows self first except the so called Negro. He's for everybody else except himself, thus he ends up on the bottom of the multi-cultural ladder!-- Marvin X


Possible location: Black Repertory Group Theatre, Geoffrey's Inner Circle and the Joyce Gordon Gallery. Tentative sponsors: Oakland Post Newspaper Group, KPOO radio, KPFA radio, Comcast 78, Do for Self Books.

Tentative Date: September, 2013

Each author will be given time to read and promote their book, along with a table. Each author is expected to help promote this event to insure there are more people than authors in attendance.

From Black Bird Press

Eldridge Cleaver: My friend the Devil, A Memoir by Marvin X, 2009, Black Bird Press, Berkeley

Black Mentacide - Bobby Wright

Effeminization of the Black Male Part 1 - History of "Homosexuality"

The primary effort of white supremacy racists and enslavers was to punk out the Afrcian, to transform him from Kunta Kinte to Toby, to make a bitch out of him so he would not be a threat to the eternal servitude of American democracy or the free slavery economic system. Yes, transform him from Superman to Girlieman, a male bitch walking around showing his behind to the world--who wants to see a nigguh's ass. So even the women must show their behind to keep up with the bitch brothers. It's the mental punk that is the problem, that weak minded, passive ass nigguh that submits to sucking the white man's penis at every and any turn, who will sell another brother out to please the white man, this is the real punk.--Marvin X

Did You Vote Nigger?

Much of Marvin X's poetry is militant in its anger at American racism and injustice. For example, in “Did You Vote Nigger?” he uses rough dialect and directs his irony at African Americans who believe in the government but are actually its pawns.--Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature

Did You Vote Nigger

Did u vote nigger
Like yo life depended on it?
Did u vote nigger
Cause yo master told u to
when why & how?
Did u vote nigger
Cause u think they gon stop
The lynching of yo mind
Like they stopped
The bombing of yo Brother's house in Vietnam
So you could vote nigger
on time?
Did u vote nigger
For a brand new devil
To burn yo black behind
The next four years
Like they been burn in
Yo black behind
The last 400 years?
Did u vote nigger
Cause u think somebody gon give u freedom
Gon give u a job
Gon give u land
God give u clothes
Did u vote nigger
Cause u feel like an a/mer/ri/can
Do u really feel like an a/mer/ri/can NIGGER?
Well that's what you are
An american nigger
Made in the USA
Caution: Live nigger, handle with care
Do Not Bend or fold
Did u vote nigger
U ought to be shame of yo self
Nobody vote for freedom
Take yo freedom
If u want it
The Earth belongs to Allah
The Black Man and Woman
Ain't no white man gon give u freedom
The master would be a fool to tell the slave
how to escape
Wake up nigger!
It's later than you think
Elijah say, Vote for Allah, come follow me!
As-Salaam-Alaikum.
--Marvin X, 
from Woman--Man's Best Friend, Al Kitab Sudan Press, San Francisco, 1973

As they say in DC, No representation, no taxation! The Nationalist strives for his own nation state rather than persist in the dream/nightmare of a life in an oppressive society. Revolution/separation is the only solution. How can one persist with belief in society where one cannot secure work at a living wage and health benefits fit for human beings? The Land Question is not the question but the answer that all human beings seek. Ask the Kurds! Native Americans, Jews, et al. All this poppycock about remaining in the American political system, especially after the romanticism of a Negro as President has ended, and the duplicity of the Democrats and Republicans is now crystal clear, we should be prepared, ready and able to jump out the box of Americana and do for self, a task no more difficult than trying to survive the present morass and eternal quagmire. America is the bad lover so often heard in The Blues, that lover who jilted us and left us half dead on the roadside. Oh, where is that Good Samaritan, ah, it is inside our wretched, fearful self, not individual but communal SELF. The only thing to fear is fear itself! An African proverb tells us, "Wood may remain in the water ten years but it will never become a crocodile."

--Marvin X

--- On Thu, 6/27/13, Jesse Douglas Allen-Taylor  wrote:

Date: Thursday, June 27, 2013, 12:38 AM

COUNTERPOINTS: IN THE WAKE OF THE SUPREME COURT VOTING RIGHTS RULING

A preliminary-but basic-thought in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act.

I was too young to be involved in the fight for the original passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, but I was in South Carolina during the struggle for renewal of the bill in the early 1980's.

Many have forgotten that the Republicans temporarily took control of the United States Senate in 1980 during the year Ronald Reagan was elected President. That elevated South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond to the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Thurmond immediately said that one of his goals as chair would be to kill the Voting Rights Act, which was up for renewal in 1982.

In South Carolina, we formed a group called the South Carolina Voting Rights Campaign to fight for renewal of the act. To show South Carolina support for the Act, we set a goal of 10,000 signatures on petitions. By the time the petition campaign ended, we delivered more than 30,000 signatures to every Congressional District office in the state as well as to the U.S. Congress in Washington. At the same time, we sponsored workshops and rallies and demonstrations throughout South Carolina in support of the Voting Rights Act. When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference held a march from Selma, Alabama to Washington D.C. for the same purpose, we helped coordinate the march when it came through our state.

One of our actions was to follow Senator Thurmond every time he returned to South Carolina for a public event, holding demonstrations to protest his stand against the Voting Rights Act.

Some of us were jailed during those actions.

The fight put up by the South Carolina Voting Rights Campaign in 1981 and '82 was only a small part of the Voting Rights Act support going on in South Carolina, throughout the South and many parts of the nation, and in the nation's capitol. It was because of those nationwide actions that Congress made some portions of the Voting Rights Act permanent, and extended others for 25 years through 2007. Without those actions, Senator Thurmond and his friends would almost certainly been successful, and the Voting Rights Act would have been killed more than 30 years ago.

That should give us a guide on how to react to the Supreme Court's recent ruling, particularly as we observe state governments from Ohio to Texas enact laws making voting harder and harder for people who do not vote the way those governments would like them to vote.

This hits African-Americans the quickest and the hardest, but it is certainly not limited to us and ours.

The authority to participate in the governing of our communities, our cities, our state, and our country-the right to vote-is not secured by the Supreme Court.

That authority is not secured by a Presidential proclamation, or a civil war, or an act of Congress, or a voter initiative.

Our right to participate in the governing of our own lives was and is both authorized and held by our own hands.

It can be permanently minimized, or taken away altogether, only if we allow it.

The question, therefore, is not about what the Supreme Court has done. The question is, what must and will we do in response?

Richard Pryor Lives by Cecil Brown

RICHARD PRYOR IN BERKELEY

• PRYOR LIVES!

Fruitvale Station

22JUN

Ryan Coogler, director the film ‘Fruitvale Station’, & Cecil Brown

Yesterday evening, I attended the premier of the Oscar Grant film Fruitvale Station. Years before Oscar Grant was even born, Richard Pryor warned the black community of police brutality. He joked publicly about how the police kill black people and claim it was an “accident.”
The officer who killed Oscar Grant claimed it was an “accident.”

White cops always claimed it was an accident when they kill black people. Richard made us laugh about this cosmic excuse years ago.
“How can you just make a mistake and kill a nigger? Ooops! my gun just went off and killed a few niggers” he exclaimed, causing all of those who were listening to laugh. He made us aware of the inhumane way that white policemen treat black people when they are stopped. Richard told us how to react when the police ask us our identification. We know that before we can reach for our driver licenses, we must yell loud so that everybody can hear us, I AM REACHING FOR MY DRIVER’S LICENSE!

The movie about Oscar Grant’s tragic life, however, was not funny. Even as you sat in the audience, you hear the tears of people crying in the darkened theater. The film was gripping and emotionally draining.

Cecil Brown & Cephus Johnson, Oscar Grant’s uncle.

I asked Cephus, Oscar’s uncle, if he thought white Americans would embrace the film. Yes, he said, because it is a story that all people can relate to. He said that the audience in Cannes loved it, including the white audience.
In my book, Pryor Lives!, I tie Richard’s theme of police brutality to Oscar Grant, and other murders of black men in this country.

.

Richard Pryor Documentary Screening in LA – May 28

31MAY

Here is Rashaan, Cecil, Marie Zenovich, the director of the new Richard Pryor documentary Omit the Logic, and Stan Shaw.

Thom Mount was Richard’s favorite producer. Here he is in between Cecil, Rashaan, and Stan Shaw. He produced the movies, Bill Durham, a romantic comedy about baseball, Which Way Is Up?, and 10 other films that Richard starred in.

Here is Cecil, with Sara Hutchison, the producer of  Omit the Logic.

This is Stan Shaw, one of Richard’s best friends who also starred with him in several movies.

Tags: Bay Area, California, Cecil Brown, Oakland, Richard Pryor

• COMMENTSLeave a Comment
• CATEGORIESUncategorized

FRONT COVER

BACK COVER

RICHARD PRYOR