Paul Robeson play at Black Rep

Fresh from Paradise Island, BahamasTour The Legendary  Berkeley Black Rep  "Keepers of the Culture"  presents: The NAACP Theater Award Winning  "Best One Person Show" "The World is my Home- The Life of Paul Robeson" (CLICK ON PICTURE FOR WEBSITE ) 14th Anniversary Glossy Color 2x3 Commemorative Poster    Berkeley Black Rep. Grp 3201 Adeline Street  Berkeley, California    Friday & Saturday - Oct. 28-29th  Curtain 7:00pm       Tickets:  510/652 2120   Special Guest Appearance by  Bay Area Performer of the Year  Steve Harvey Show winner; "Dee Dee Simon"  The Black Rep Grp. was started in the 1950's by the late Birel & Nora Vaughn; High School teachers in Vicksburg, Miss.  to celebrate the contributions of Black Artists.  Ruby Dee & Ossie Davis named them the "Keepers of the Culture"  After three aborted attacks by the KKK one which almost harmed their baby daughter Mona; they were forced to flee Mississippi & settle in Berkeley Calif.  Thru persistence & hard work they continued their mission to preserve our culture & founded what is now the Berkeley Black Rep.    Their revolutionary vision is kept alive today by that three year old baby girl that fled Miss. with them years ago their surviving daughter  Dr. Mona Vaughn Scott.  I am honored to bring my passion peice back to their stage. We hope you can support us.       " In my humble attempt to use Art as a vehicle for social change. This  is more than just a show for me; it's a prayer for the forsaken & forgotten.  A story of heart & hope, of broken promises & broken dreams, a love song for the brave & broken-hearted enslaved Africans, who found enough forgiveness in their tortured souls to live, laugh & love. To remind us as we're sharing this brief moment in time on this third Rock from the Sun; to embrace our common humanity with kindness."      Stogie Kenyatta                FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER & FACEBOOK     Click on pic for website For Worldwide Bookings Contact Nicholas Anderson at Kingston Rose Mgmt   kingrosemgmt@gmail.com

State of the Black World Conference IV, Newark, NJ, November 16-20, 2016

Tom Hayden, Antiwar Activist dead at 76

JUSTICE INITIATIVE Tom Hayden, Civil Rights and Antiwar Activist Turned Lawmaker, Dies at 76 By ROBERT D. McFADDEN OCT. 24, 2016 New York Times Tom Hayden Tom Hayden, who burst out of the 1960s counterculture as a radical leader of America's civil rights and antiwar movements, but rocked the boat more gently later in life with a progressive political agenda as an author and California state legislator, died on Sunday. He was 76.   His wife, Barbara Williams, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Mr. Hayden had been suffering from heart problems and fell ill while attending the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July.   During the racial unrest and antiwar protests of the '60s and early '70s, Mr. Hayden was one of the nation's most visible radicals. He was a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, a defendant in the Chicago Seven trial after riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and a peace activist who married Jane Fonda, went to Hanoi and escorted American prisoners of war home from Vietnam.   As a civil rights worker, he was beaten in Mississippi and jailed in Georgia. In his cell he began writing what became the Port Huron Statement, the political manifesto of S.D.S. and the New Left that envisioned an alliance of college students in a peaceful crusade to overcome what it called repressive government, corporate greed and racism. Its aim was to create a multiracial, egalitarian society.   Like his allies the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who were assassinated in 1968, Mr. Hayden opposed violent protests but backed militant demonstrations, like the occupation of Columbia University campus buildings by students and the burning of draft cards. He also helped plan protests that, as it happened, turned into clashes with the Chicago police outside the Democratic convention.   In 1974, with the Vietnam War in its final stages after American military involvement had all but ended, Mr. Hayden and Ms. Fonda, who were by then married, traveled across Vietnam, talking to people about their lives after years of war, and produced a documentary film, "Introduction to the Enemy." Detractors labeled it Communist propaganda, but Nora Sayre, reviewing it for The New York Times, called it a "pensive and moving film."   Later, with the war over and the idealisms of the '60s fading, Mr. Hayden settled into a new life as a family man, writer and mainstream politician. In 1976, he ran for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate from California, declaring, "The radicalism of the 1960s is fast becoming the common sense of the 1970s." He lost to the incumbent, Senator John V. Tunney.   But focusing on state and local issues like solar energy and rent control, he won a seat in the California Legislature in Sacramento in 1982. He was an assemblyman for a decade and a state senator from 1993 to 2000, sponsoring bills on the environment, education, public safety and civil rights. He lost a Democratic primary for California governor in 1994, a race for mayor of Los Angeles in 1997 and a bid for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council in 2001.   He was often the target of protests by leftists who called him an outlaw hypocrite, and by Vietnamese refugees and American military veterans who called him a traitor. Conservative news media kept alive the memories of his radical days. In a memoir, "Reunion" (1988), he described himself as a "born-again Middle American" and expressed regret for "romanticizing the Vietnamese" and for allowing his antiwar zeal to turn into anti-Americanism. "His soul-searching and explanations make fascinating reading," The Boston Globe said, "but do not, he concedes, pacify critics on the left who accuse him of selling out to personal ambition or on the right 'who tell me to go back to Russia.' He says he doesn't care." Tom Hayden, pictured far left, longtime activist and former California state senator. He was one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society. In 1962 he was the principal author of the Port Huron Statement - the revolutionary SDS document.   (Photo - C. Clark Kissinger)   "I get re-elected," Mr. Hayden told The Globe. "To me, that's the bottom line. The issues persons like myself are working on are modern, workplace, neighborhood issues."   Thomas Emmet Hayden was born in Royal Oak, Mich., on Dec. 11, 1939, the only child of John Hayden, an accountant, and the former Genevieve Garity, both Irish Catholics. His parents divorced, and Tom was raised by his mother, a film librarian.   He attended a parish school. The pastor was the Rev. Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio priest of the 1930s and a right-wing foe of the New Deal.   At Dondero High School in Royal Oak, Mr. Hayden was editor of the student newspaper. His final editorial before graduation in 1957 almost cost him his diploma. In his exhortation to old-fashioned patriotism, he encrypted, in the first letter of each paragraph, an acrostic for "Go to hell."   His turn to radical politics began at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he was inspired by student protests against the anti-Communist witch hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee and by lunch counter sit-ins by black students in Greensboro, N.C. In the summer of 1960, he met Dr. King in California, and he soon joined sit-in protests and voter registration drives in the South.   Perceiving a need for a national student organization to coordinate civil rights projects around the country, he joined 35 like-minded activists at Ann Arbor in 1960 and formed Students for a Democratic Society. He also became editor of the campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily. He earned a bachelor's degree in sociology at Michigan in 1961 and did graduate work there in 1962 and 1963.   His 1961 marriage to Sandra Cason, a civil rights worker, ended after two years. He met Ms. Fonda at an antiwar rally. They were married in 1973 and had a son, Troy Garity. Ms. Fonda had a daughter, Vanessa, by her former marriage to the film director Roger Vadim. Mr. Hayden and Ms. Fonda divorced in 1990. He married Ms. Williams, a Canadian actress, in 1993. They adopted a son, Liam. Along with his wife, Mr. Hayden is survived by the three children.   In 1961, Mr. Hayden joined the Freedom Riders on interstate buses in the South, challenging authorities who refused to enforce the Supreme Court's rulings banning segregation on public buses. His jailhouse draft of what became the 25,000-word S.D.S. manifesto was debated, revised and formally adopted at the organization's first convention, in Port Huron, Mich., in 1962.   "We are people of this generation," it began, "bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." It did not recommend specific programs but attacked the arms race, racial discrimination, bureaucracy and apathy in the face of poverty, and it called for "participatory democracy" and a society based on "fraternity," "honesty" and "brotherhood."   Mr. Hayden was elected president of S.D.S. for 1962-63. In 1965, he made the first of several trips to Vietnam, accompanying Herbert Aptheker, a Communist Party theoretician, and Staughton Lynd, a radical professor at Yale. While the visit was technically illegal, it was apparently ignored by the State Department to allow the American peace movement and Hanoi to establish informal contacts. The group went to Hanoi and toured villages and factories in North Vietnam. Mr. Hayden wrote a book, "The Other Side" (1966), about the experience.   At Hanoi's invitation, Mr. Hayden attended a 1967 conference in Bratislava, in what was then Czechoslovakia, and met North Vietnamese leaders, who agreed to release some captured American prisoners as a gesture of "solidarity" with the American peace movement. Mr. Hayden then made a second journey to Hanoi to discuss the details, and soon afterward picked up three American P.O.W.s at a rendezvous in Cambodia and escorted them home.   Mr. Hayden directed an S.D.S. antipoverty project in Newark from 1964 to 1967, and in his last year witnessed days of rioting, looting and destruction that left 26 people dead and hundreds injured. In "Rebellion in Newark" (1967), he wrote, "Americans have to turn their attention from the lawbreaking violence of the rioters to the original and greater violence of racism."   In 1968, Mr. Hayden helped plan antiwar protests in Chicago to coincide with the Democratic National Convention. Club-swinging police officers clashed with thousands of demonstrators, injuring hundreds in a televised spectacle that a national commission later called a police riot. But Mr. Hayden and others were charged by federal officials with inciting to riot and conspiracy. The Chicago Seven trial became a classic confrontation between radicals and Judge Julius Hoffman, marked by insults, angry judicial outbursts and contempt citations.   In 1970, all seven defendants were acquitted of conspiracy, but Mr. Hayden and four others - Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger and Rennie Davis - were convicted of inciting to riot and sentenced to five years in prison. The verdicts were overturned on appeal, as were various contempt citations, on the basis of judicial bias. Mr. Hayden's book "Trial" (1970) recounted the events.   Although Ms. Fonda was a wealthy movie star and financially supported Mr. Hayden's early political career, she and Mr. Hayden lived for years in a modest home in Santa Monica, near but not on the ocean. They did their own shopping and laundry, cooked meals in a tiny kitchen with an old stove and shared child-care duties for Troy and Vanessa.   Mr. Hayden was Gov. Jerry Brown's appointed chairman of the SolarCal Council, which encourages solar energy development, from 1978 to 1982. He lost a Democratic primary for governor in 1994 to Kathleen Brown, the governor's sister, who lost the general election to the Republican governor, Pete Wilson. In 1997, as the Democratic candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, Mr. Hayden lost to the Republican incumbent, Richard J. Riordan.   After his legislative career, he directed the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Culver City, Calif., a platform for his opposition to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He taught at California colleges and at Harvard, and wrote articles for The Times, The Washington Post and The Nation.   Mr. Hayden, who lived in Los Angeles, wrote more than 20 books, including several memoirs, re-examinations of the civil rights and antiwar movements, and volumes on street gangs, Vietnam, his own Irish heritage, the environment and America's future. His last book, "Listen Yankee!: Why Cuba Matters," was published in 2015.   His personal papers, 120 boxes covering his life since the 1960s, were given in 2014 to the University of Michigan. Besides troves on civil rights and antiwar activities, they included 22,000 pages of F.B.I. files amassed in a 16-year surveillance of Mr. Hayden.   "One of your prime objectives," J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime F.B.I. director, said in one memo, "should be to neutralize him in the New Left movement." Related articles: The Port Huron Statement at 50      1960s Radicals Predict Rebirth of Social Activism

Mentally ill Black Woman murdered in NYC by pigs

This just in from Charles Barron!...
NYPD kills a mentally challenged 66 year old grandmother...called a 'good shooting'!...How can shooting down a 66 year old grandmother in anyway be called 'good'!...
Eleanor Bumphers all over again...
Stay in the streets yg people!...
And o yes, Saturday, Oct 22nd, the 80th birthday of Chairman Bobby Seale is the 15th Nat'l Day Against Police Brutality!
Keep the pressure on the pig!
Her name was Deborah Danner...
Say her name!...
--Baba Zayid 
Newark, NJ

Comment by Marvin X

Elijah told us we live under the shadow of death in America. I'm amazed pigs are not trained to deal with the mentally ill, perhaps, it is because they suffer mental illness themselves!
A low information person told me today America is not Iraq or Syria, and this mental state that we are not in a long protracted low intensity war with America is precisely why we are shot down like dogs. They taught us in Boy Scouts to be prepared. Yet we make our daily round in the mind fields of America totally unprepared for war. How can anyone be prepared for war with pants hanging on their behinds? How can we be prepared for war without a united front that Amiri Baraka talked about?

Fanon said the only way the oppressed can regain their mental equilibrium is by joining the revolution. We must resist the white supremacy global bandits and their slave catchers in blue uniforms.
As per the mentally ill, i.e., those suffering traumatic slave system diseases, either mild, moderate or severe, must attempt the mental health peer group. There are simply not enough mental health workers in our community, so we must heal ourselves. See my manual How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, Black Bird Press, introduction by Dr. Nathan Hare.---Marvin X

BAMBD News from our Pan Africa Editor: Black Love Ghana Tour 2017

The Movement's Pan Africa Editor, Muhammida El Muhajir, and Oakland poet Samantha Akwei in Accra. Samantha was on a family visit to Accra. Muhammida is a North American African who has resettled in Accra. She and her mother, Nisa Ra, have organized the Black Love Ghana Tour.

Professor Griff | Exposes Afrika Bambaataa & Zaza Ali, Clarifies Birdman...

Zaza Ali tells black women stop blaming everything on black men

The Majic of JuJu, an appreciation of the Black Arts Movement by Kalamu Ya Salaam

An Excerpt—A Dialogue between Kalamu ya Salaam (Deep River) and Margo Natalie Crawford (Afro-Blue)
                                  
Afro-Blue:  James Baldwin in his short story “Sonny’s Blues” (1957) depicts the blues as “deep water.” When I hear your name, Deep River, it makes me think about the deep rivers of the black aesthetic experience.
         Langston Hughes says “I’ve Known Rivers” and Baldwin says:  “He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing — he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.”
         But let me explain my name.  I call myself “Afro-Blue” as a way of escaping other prisms like “Afro-pessimism” and, also, “Afro-centrism.” When I read The Magic of Juju, I felt the “deep water” of the Black Arts Movement. In the midst of some of the current art of drowning, I sometimes feel nostalgic for this movement that predates me. I think the children of the Black Power movement feel the presence of its absence. Do you feel nostalgic about the Black Arts Movement? Why did you write The Magic of Juju?
Deep River: Why not? Everybody has an autobiography—I mean that literally. Everybody has a story to tell: how I came to be who I am. I happened to have been born during interesting times and, under the influence of Langston Hughes, I decided early on to pursue writing. That was nearly fifty years ago. So that is one reason: self reflection, thinking about how I became who I am, why and what were the ramifications of the choices I made.
Another reason is—and this is in no particular order—I did not see any books on our work, on the Black Arts Movement. Tons of Harlem Renaissance work, bunches of books on the Black Panthers. But where were the books on the Black Arts Movement, a movement that was more far reaching that the Harlem Renaissance, which by the way I think is both mis-named and misunderstood (I’ll come back to that in a minute). Moreover, I’m sure the absence of books on the Black Arts Movement is not an accident but rather part of a systemic effort at erasing our history.
Writing The Magic of Juju is itself an act of defiance. I know—check that, I should say “I believe” because I don’t have hard evidence in hand—I believe that the academy has actively discouraged detailed investigations of the Black Arts Movement primarily because of the politics. Although most critics will not say so outright, the reality is that the Black Arts Movement is characterized as racist because, to use a shorthand, we were perceived as “hating whites.”
Now, who is in charge of the academy? For sure it’s not Blacks, nor is it—Gates and a handful of others notwithstanding—Negroes are not in charge either, not in the overall sense. Sure, a few individuals with considerable influence, and some might even argue with more than a little power, exist but considering the literally thousands of higher-ed institutions, the overwhelming majority of gate keepers are not only racially white, they have a white consciousness, which in order to remain white necessarily means excluding blacks and other people of color.
Look, to put it bluntly, you can not remain “white” and be intimate with “non-whites,” which is why race mixing, i.e. miscegenation, has a pejorative connotation. It seems to me, if one is truly democratic, then one is open to the world. We who are called African American have been open. True, our openness has not been always by choice but we have learned to live with a spectrum of color rather than some dark essential. Look, Elijah Muhammad was obviously of mixed racial heritage—if you catch my meaning.
Black consciousness is not a reflection of biological essentialism. (I know this seems a bit off the path from explaining why I wrote The Magic of Juju, but this is an essential aspect of the real answer.) For me, Black consciousness is a political concept, not a biological concept. I define Blackness as color, culture and consciousness. Moreover, color is the least important element and consciousness the most important element.
Color is raw biology. For African Americans that rawness means, to use that loaded term, “miscegenation.” Indeed, for us in the diaspora, and particularly for those of us in the good old USofA, there is no purity in blackness. We are the original melting pot. We are America at its biological best in that, whether by choice or by circumstance, we embrace all elements.
Culture is collective behavior, views and values. Certainly an individual can manifest a culture but the culture itself is developed at a collective level.
Consciousness is identity both personal and social. This is the crux of blackness precisely because biology is not a choice; you don’t choose your parents, your ancestors. Culture is collective and thus never simply the result of individual action. We are born into cultures and as we humans come to consciousness we have the opportunity to shape the cultures into which we were born or to assimilate into a different culture. Consciousness is dynamic, ever changing even as it has a specific beginning on an individual level. Of course we can go Jungian and talk about the collective consciousness of a specific group of people in a particular time and space. In any case, whether consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously, we humans make choices.
With whom and with what do we identify? That is the ultimate determinant of our behavior at the level of choice. Of course we don’t control all elements of our lives—but concerning the myriad of matters over which we do have a choice, consciousness becomes the key to determining our behavior and to a large extent determining our destiny.
The big, two-part question is with whom do we identify and how do we actualize our identity? That was a key element of the Black Arts Movement. We identified with working class Black people, which effectively often, but not necessarily, put us at odds with many academics who are petit-bourgeoisie to the max.
I’m defining class in terms of relationship to the means of production and accumulation of wealth. Those who sell their labor to earn a living are working class. Those who manage the labor of others or who offer professional services are the petit-bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie are those who earn their living and accumulate wealth based on earning profits, collecting rent and/or interest accrued from their property, both intellectual and material. That’s a simplistic thumbnail, but it’s important to understand this distinction because most of the people who write books are petit-bourgeoisie in their orientation whether they are actually petit-bourgeoisie in their consciousness. For example, just because you are a licensed professional, a Ph.D. or an M.D. or J.D., your degree doesn’t necessarily tell us with whom you identify and in whose interest you work.
In general, however, the petit-bourgeoisie identifies with the bourgeoisie rather than the working class. One can immediately see the conflict that the Black Arts Movement had with academics. There is a similar dynamic happening with hip hop, except because of the commercial success of hip hop within the capitalist society, there is an acceptance of hip hop in academic circles far greater than the academic acceptance of the Black Arts Movement. In America, money will change you and change how you are viewed and are accepted by mainstream society.
Part of the Magic of Juju, the concept, is the reality that juju transforms. Blackness is not static, unchanging. Baraka called it the changing same. The key though is that we change both ourselves and our environment. Any study of Black culture necessarily has to be a study of change within a give society, a given space and time, whether we are looking locally, regionally, nationally or internationally. We set the parameters of our study—and even those parameters will change over time—then we proceed to study what happens/happened and why. We might even venture a guess about what will happen next.
I’m taking the time to sketch out some of these definitions because other wise we cannot have a real dialogue if we don’t share a common understanding. It’s not about agreement but rather about epistemology, how it is we know whatever it is we think we know. The first step in knowing is having a common language. In Black culture the common tongue is first music and then orature and kinetics, and only at a tertiary level, literacy. That is a big difference between Black culture and what is commonly called White culture. White culture in the USA validates literacy, business, and technology.
You want to peep where a Black person’s consciousness is? Check out the music they listen to—not the books they read or the movies they watch, check out the music they listen to—and if they don’t listen to music, there better be some major extenuating circumstances, otherwise you’re not dealing with a conscious Black person. Notice, I said “music” as a general category rather than a specific genre of music.
I’ve written extensively about music. During my days as a music critic I won two ASCAP Deems Taylor awards for excellence in writing about music. The reason I mention that is to make clear that I choose not to identify with the mainstream even though I have the ability to compete and excel in the mainstream. Black Arts Movement artists chose not to identify with the mainstream even though we were capable of doing so. Blackness consciousness is just that: a conscious choice rather than a biological default.
Moreover, our blackness includes whiteness, redness, brownness, yellowness and any other human “ness” there is. All of that is part of who we are. The expansiveness of Blackness is a major threat to those who want to be White. Our very being threatens White existence. We are tar babies. Touch us and get stuck.

—Kalamu ya Salaam

Prince / Miles Davis Full Concert 12-31-87 (Miles From The Park)

Life is Living Festival, Bobby Hutton/Deferemry Park, Oakland, pics by Standingrock 10/8/16

MILES DAVIS: TIME AFTER TIME