Marvin X is Nazzam Al Sudan, Organizer of the Black Nation

Marvin X's first Arabic  and Islamic teacher  was Ali Sheriff Bey, who gave him the name Nazzam Al Sudan, Organizer of the Black Nation. A master of languages, Ali Sheriff Bey told Marvin  Nazzam means organizer, systematizer,  one who creates an original mythology with the body of his work.

We know you agree Marvin X is writing his mythology before our very eyes. He wrote his memoir of Black Panther Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver on the internet, day by day, chapter by chapter; in three weeks; the man he introduced to the Black Panthers, the man he'd visited in Soledad Prison as part of a visit of Black Dialogue Magazine staff arranged by Cleaver's lawyer Beverly
  Axelrod.When Eldridge returned from exile, as with his release from prison, again, the first person he hooked up with was Marvin X. When they established the Black House, Marvin was the secretary, one who controlled communications. He had control when anybody called Eldridge at the Black House. Calls from Cleaver's lawyer/lover came through Marvin X; calls from the man Eldridge mentored Bob Avakian of the RCP or Revolutionaruy Action Party, Marvin transferred to Eldridge.
Marvin X says the most dangerous motherfucker in any organization is the secretary. This is the motherfucker who knows everything. As per Eldridge Cleaver, I probably know more about him than any man. I taught him how to tie a tie. He paid me to organize his ministry the Eldridge Cleaver Crusades, but the supreme irony was that his chore staff were Black Muslims, the only Blacks who were fearless enough to work with him. The Christian Blacks were in mortal fear they were going to get killed for fucking with white man. As we know, the majority of Negroes or North American Africans are mortally afraid of the white man. So Cleaver's core staff were Black Muslims because they were fearless.

In order to advance his ministry, he used the Muslims as props while giving his testimony. The Muslims didn't care because they were getting paid, so he told Christian audiences that he had saved these heathen --and the Christians, Born Again Christians, ate it up like a hog eating slop/

We did not know our  visit to Soledad Prison Cultural Club was the beginning of the American Prison Movement. WE could see when we entered the meeting inside Soledad Prison that the brothers had organized a revolutionary organization inside the prison. Prison Movement Kumasi says while the masses were having their revolution in the streets, the brothers in prison were having our revolution. It was clear to us the Eldridge Cleaver and Alprintis Bunchy Carter were fully in charge of the Black Culture Club. Any brother in prison would tell you it was kill or be killed, so we must understand lessons learned in prison were practiced when brothers got on the outside. In the Black Panther film Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Marvin X says, "Do you think a personality such as Eldridge Cleaver would not impose control in anhy organization?"

Human Earthquake hits Central Valley: Marvin X at University of California, Merced, Kim McMillan's Theatre class

Professor Kim McMillan's Theatre and Social Justice students welcome Marvin X to University of California, Merced. They treated him to a reading of his first play Flower for the Trashman, a Black Arts Movement Classic; it appears in the anthology Black Fire and the just released SOS: A Black Arts Movement Reader. It was written in 1964 while he was an undergrad in the English/Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University, and produced by the Drama Department at SFSU. He received his B.A. and M.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.

Marvin X was invited to have a conversation with UC Merced students in Professor Kim McMillan's Theatre and Social Justice class. Students surprised the poet when they took turns reading his first play Flowers for the Trashman, musical version Take Care of Business, music by Sun Ra. Students have also read the scene Salaam, Huey Salaam about his last meeting with Black Panther co-founder Dr. Huey P. Newton in a West Oakland Crack house. Salaam, Huey, Salaam, a scene from One Day in the Life, the docudrama of Marvin's addiction and recovery (It's the most powerful drama I've seen--Ishmael Reed) was co-written by playwright Ed Bullins and produced in New York at Woody King's New Federal Theatre. The full length drama was produced in New York at Sista's Place in Brooklyn and the Brecht Forum in Manhattan; in Newark, NJ, it was performed at Amiri Baraka's house.

He enjoyed hearing the students read Flowers for the Trashman that is included in SOS: the Black Arts Movement Reader, edited by Sonia Sanchez, John Bracey and James Smethurst, UMASS Press.
During the Q and A, Marvin told the students Flowers for the Trashman was not only written at the beginning my writing career, but it was written at the beginning of the 1960s Black Arts and Black Liberation Movement. The language reveals Marvin's leaning toward the Nation of Islam which he joined in 1967. Salaam, Huey, Salaam was written in the fourth quarter of my life and at the end of the Black Liberation Movement. The revolutionaries at Sista's Place in Brooklyn said no excuse was acceptable for radicals like Marvin, Huey and Eldridge getting addicted to Crack, but Marvin says we were exhausted from years of struggle. In the scene, Huey tells Marvin, "We had to experience this, Jackmon. But we can come out of it, we came out of slavery." But Huey and Eldridge never made it back from Crack!

Student reading Marvin's first play Flowers for the Trashman, produced by the Drama Department at San Francisco State University, 1964, while he was an undergrad in the English/Creative Writing Department. the novelist John Gardner was the professor who suggested he write Flowers for the Trashman since he was flunking Gardner's English Lit. class. Gardner took the script to the Drama Department.

Catch Marvin X at the 

Second Annual Sacramento Black Book Fair, June 5, 6, 7, 2015

Sacramento Juneteenth, Inc. & Sacramento Black Book Fair VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL This album has 2 photos and will be available on OneDrive until 8/19/2015.

The Second Annual Sacramento Black Book Fair June 5-7, 2015  is presented in conjunction with the Juneteenth Festival

The historic McClatchy Park known as “The Village,” Saturday, June 6 and June 7, 2015 will be jumping at the Callie Carney Amphitheater featuring gospel, jazz music, bands, poetry, food trucks, vendors and much more!!!

Free and open to the public!!

·         Join Sacramento Juneteenth, Inc. & Sacramento Black Book Fair (SBBF), Saturday, June 6 from 12 noon-5:00pm at McClatchy Park @ Callie Carney Amphitheater, (35th Street & 5th Ave.) Sacramento, CA 95817. The event will feature the Juneteenth Festival’s auditions, bands, vendors, food trucks, Oak Park Farmer's Market, and much more!!! For more info visit:http://sacramentojuneteenthinc.org/festival/auditons

• Join the Sacramento Black Book Fair (SBBF) Sunday, June 7 from 12 noon-5:00pm McClatchy Park at Callie Carney Amphitheater. The program will feature: Stacey Noble, Singer, Norman McDaniel & EarCandy ~ Jazz,, gospel music, vendors, Brother Hypnotic & local poets, food trucks, music, and much more!!!  

For more info visit. http://www.sacramentoblackbookfair.com.

 Thank you and join the celebration!!!

Second Annual Sacramento Black Book Fair (SBBF)

2015 Co-Sponsors/Community Partners:

African Research Institute

Black United Fund of Sacramento Valley

The Black Group

Brickhouse Art Gallery

Blue Nile Press

City of Sacramento – Neighborhood Services Department

Friends of the Sacramento Public Library

JTEnterprises

Roberts Family Development Center

Sacramento Area Black Caucus

Sacramento City Councilmember Allen Warren

The Sacramento City Teachers Association

Sacramento City Councilmember Steve Hansen

Sacramento City Councilmember Rick Jennings, III

Sacramento City Councilmember Jay Schenirer

Teichert Foundation

The Talking Drums News

Colonial Heights Library Affiliated Friends

Kakwasi Somadhi

Underground Books

Sacculturalhub.com

Drexel University Sacramento

Sacramento Juneteenth, Inc.

Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.,Eta Gamma Omega Chapter

Sacramento Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated

Fred and Ruth Foote

ZICA Creative and Literary Guild

Center for African Peace & Conflict Resolution, CSUS

Black Humanists and Non-Believers of Sacramento

Sacramento Section- The National Council of Negro Women

Mary McLeod Bethune Readers are Leaders Club

Tracy & Symia Stigler

Young Scholars –Calvary Christian Center

Sacramento Poetry Center

Sister to Sister Book Group

100 Black Men of Sacramento

Sacramento Food Bank & Family Services

Brenda’s Mane Event

Black Parallel School Board

Literary Ladies Alliance

The Merritt Law Clinic

Sisters Quilting Collective

NIA –Women of Purpose

Leslie & Faye Wilson Kennedy

Sacramento Chapter-Black Child Development Institute

Pam Haynes

Black Images Book Club

The Borden Family

OBBC (Book Club)

Sacramento Black Chamber of Commerce

Allegro Book Club

Sacramento Public Library Foundation

The California Endowment

The Office of Campus Community Relations, University of California, Davis

Los Rios Community College District

Roy Kaufman

Sacramento Observer Newspapers

California Black Chamber of Commerce

University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law

Dr. Tchaka Muhammed

Crystal Bowl

Brenda & Keith Dabney

The Scott Family

Dorothy Benjamin & Family

Sacramento Chapter of The Links Incorporated

Phil Nelson & Family

 Endorsed by:

Mayor Kevin Johnson

Women's Civic Improvement Club

Oak Park United Methodist Church

Guild Theater

Sacramento City Unified School District

Sacramento Public Library

Assembly member Kevin McCarty

California Legislative Black Caucus

916Ink

Crocker Art Museum

Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (SAYS)

Sojourner Truth Art Museum

Visit: http://www.sacramentoblackbookfair.com

EXPULSION OF MALCOLM X: Michael Lange as Malcolm X

Marvin X back in da Bay

Wish somebody could hep me
hep me
back in da bay
made it out Chicago
Chicago gave a nigguh love
Chicago style
smooth love
cool love
love a nigguh love
Chicago style
treated a nigguh first class
nigguh love first class treatment
wow
ouuuuouwwow
baraka style
gave them Dope
baraka style
they loved it
must be the devil
must be the devil
ain't capitalism
ain't Chase
ain't Rockefeller
must be the devil
ain't nigguhs
ain't Africans
we sold ourselves into slavery right
the King didn't sell us
we sold ourselves
put ourselves on the slave ship
marched down to the shore
wavying the red flag
we marched through the door of no return
yes, the door of no return
imagine
door of no return
but then we returned
tears moans
but no white supremacy
except in African face
a little relief from raw colonialism
black face white supremacy
a little less stress
black face white supreamcy
black flag Nkrumah said
National anthem Nkrumah said
colonialism playing possum
who own the banks
who own the land
who own the minerals
must be the devil
must be the devil....
--Marvin X

Black Bird Press News & Review: Photo essay by Afrah: Marvin X ends Chicago tour at South Shore recording studio

Black Bird Press News & Review: Photo essay by Afrah: Marvin X ends Chicago tour at South Shore recording studio

Bro. Marvin X,

Peace. It was truly a pleasure meeting and reading with you at Eliel's place last Saturday (Transition East) in Chicago.

We are looking forward to forging something positive and powerful in the space.

Please take good care. Talk soon.

Peace,

Kazembe

--

Lasana Kazembe, Ph.D.

Call/Text: (312) 282-7590

Email: kazembe1@gmail.com

Web: http://kazembe.webs.com/

Consulting Website: http://kazembeconsulting.webs.com/

Twitter: @Kazembe

Blog: http://blkartsmovement.tumblr.com

"A person is a person because there are people."

Sun Ra Interview (Helsinki, 1971)

In this interview, Sun Ra gives us the full range of his mythology. His music is a demonstration of his mythology or an enactment, i.e., ritual is an enactment of myth. --Marvin X

Sun Ra's reading list at UC Berkeley, 1971

Marvin X and Sun Ra taught at the University of California Berkeley, Black Studies, 1971. In fact, Sun Ra told Marvin X he would be teaching at UCB, though Marvin X didn't believe Sun Ra because in 1969 Gov. Ronald Reagan had  removed Angela Davis from teaching at University of California, Los Angeles  and Marvin X from lecturing at Fresno State University.  He removed Angela because she was a Black Communist and Marvin X because he was a member of the Nation of Islam who'd refused to serve in Viet Nam war against the peace loving people of Viet Nam. Marvin X and Sun Ra collaborated on a musical production of Marvin's first play Flowers for the Trashman, musical version named  Take Care of Business or TCB. They produced a five hour (normal for a Sun Ra conert) at the Harding Theatre on Divisadero Street, San Francisco, including a cast of fifty musicians, actors and dancers, dancers under choreographers Ellendar Barnes and Raymond Sawyer. Concert was without intermission.

Sun Ra’s Full Lecture & Reading List From His 1971 UC Berkeley Course, “The Black Man in the Cosmos”

A pioneer of “Afrofuturism,” bandleader Sun Ra emerged from a traditional swing scene in Alabama, touring the country in his teens as a member of his high school biology teacher’s big band. While attending Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University, he had a out-of-body experience during which he was transported into outer space. As biographer John Szwed records him saying, “my whole body changed into something else. I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn.” While there, aliens with “little antenna on each ear. A little antenna on each eye” instructed him to drop out of college and speak through his music. And that’s just what he did, changing his name from Herman Blount and never looking back.

Whether you believe that story, whether Sun Ra believes it, or whether his entire persona is a theatrical put-on should make no difference. Because Sun Ra would be a visionary either way. Combining Afrocentric science fiction, esoteric and occult philosophy, Egyptology, and, with his “Arkestra,” his own brand of free jazz-futurism that has no equal on earth, the man is truly sui generis. In 1971, he served as artist-in-residence at UC Berkeley and offered a spring semester lecture, African-American Studies 198, also known as “Sun Ra 171,” “The Black Man in the Universe,” or “The Black man in the Cosmos.” The course featured readings from—to name just a few—theosophist Madame Blavatsky, French philosopher Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, black American writer and poet Henry Dumas, and “God,” whom the cosmic jazz theorist reportedly listed as the author of The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (otherwise known as the King James Bible).

Now we have the rare opportunity to hear a full lecture from that class at the top of the post. Listen to Sun Ra spin his intricate, bizarrely otherworldly theories, drawn from his personal philosophy, peculiar etymologies, and idiosyncratic readings of religious texts. Hearing him speak is a little like hearing him play, so be prepared for a lot of free association and jarring, unexpected juxtapositions. Szwed describes a “typical lecture” below:

Sun Ra wrote biblical quotes on the board and then ‘permutated’ them—rewrote and transformed their letters and syntax into new equations of meaning, while members of the Arkestra passed through the room, preventing anyone from taping the class. His lecture subjects included Neoplatonic doctrines; the application of ancient history and religious texts to racial problems; pollution and war; and a radical reinterpretation of the Bible in light of Egyptology.

Luckily for us, some sly student captured one of those lectures on tape. For more of Professor Ra’s spaced out presentation, see the Helsinki interview above, also from 1971. And if you decide you need your own education in “Sun Ra 171,” see the full reading list from his Berkeley course below, courtesy of the blog New Day.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Radix
Alexander Hislop: Two Babylons
The Theosophical works of Madame Blavatsky
The Book of Oahspe
Henry Dumas: Ark of Bones
Henry Dumas: Poetry for My People eds. Hale Charfield & Eugene Redmond, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1971
Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, eds. Leroi Jones & Larry Neal, New York: William Morrow 1968
David Livingston: Missionary Travels
Theodore P. Ford: God Wills the Negro
Rutledge: God’s Children
Stylus, vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1971), Temple University
John S. Wilson: Jazz. Where It Came From, Where It’s At, United States Information Agency
Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochannan: Black Man of the Nile and His Family, Alkibu Ian Books 1972
Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney: The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires, and the Law of Nature, London: Pioneer Press 1921
The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (Ra’s description; = The King James Bible)
Pjotr Demianovitch Ouspensky: A New Model of the Universe. Principles of the Psychological Method in Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion and Art, New York: Knopf 1956
Frederick Bodmer: The Loom of Language. An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages, ed. Lancelot Hogben, New York: Norton & Co. 1944
Blackie’s Etymology

Countless other free courses from UC Berkeley can be found in our collection, 1100 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
via Dangerous Minds and audio courtesy of Sensitive Skin Magazine
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness