sister tchaiko kwayana joins ancestors

Sister Tchaiko Kwayana: An Original Educator of the African World

Submitted by Dr. Matthew Quest on Tue, 05/30/2017 

by Dr. Matthew Quest

Educator and popular historian Sister Tchaiko R. Kwayana (1937-2017) taught in Africa, South America and the US. A forerunner of the Black Power and Black studies movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, she also challenged post-civil rights, post-colonial independence black-led regimes where they emerged as authoritarian and oppressive, betraying the goals of national liberation and Black autonomy.

Sister Tchaiko Kwayana: An Original Educator of the African World

by Matthew Quest

Kwayana was born Annie Florence Elizabeth Cook in 1937. She was raised in the small town of Buena Vista, Georgia. As a year old baby in her father’s arms, she was introduced to Jim Crow white supremacy at the point of a gun and was disturbed by degrading threats, as her father wished to get her water from a local restaurant.
She grew up experiencing segregation at restaurants, movie theaters, denial of access to public swimming pools, the ever-present danger of being swindled out of one’s land.  She didn't learn to ride a bicycle or swim for fear by her parents of foul play. They protected her in a Southern culture where mutilated black bodies could be found lynched, at the bottom of wells, or in gutters. But she was also raised in an African American community that prided itself on self-reliance.
Her father, Rev. James John Cook, was a Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) minister, and her mother Mrs. Dorthula Theresa Coan Cook, cut wood in her South Carolina sharecropping home, and worked as a live-in maid in New York to send her brothers and sisters and herself to college.
Her father taught by example that the proper measure of respect with white people was not simply whether they called you by your first or last name, or treated you professionally in a customer service setting while in reality keeping you in your subordinate place. Key for Rev. Cook was whether white people respected you enough to listen to you, discuss philosophy, worldviews, and lend each other books. Those whites whom wished to keep black people in their place did not acknowledge that people of color had something to teach them about culture, or their own self-government, in an exchange of equals.
Tchaiko’s mother taught her about work ethic and believed, at first, that the children should join work gangs, most often led by white men, so they knew how to pick peaches and cotton. Her father agreed these skills should be learned and preserved in their children, but this educational experience of engaging the land should be found among black families in their own community.
Her mothers’s and father’s approach to education complemented each other. Her mother taught in a one-room schoolhouse and watched over young girls, even those who became pregnant and were cast out of church communities. She made sure they got their education. She taught Tchaiko to read at four.
Tchaiko recalled that while she changed her name in search of her own identity, (“Tchaiko” in Shona means “one who seeks truth,” and “Ruramai,” her maiden name, means “take a clear path to a given goal,”) she did not anticipate how this would make her mother feel. Her mother, Dorthula, always wanted to live near a historically black college and felt “founder’s day” and graduation ceremonies, marking the overcoming of obstacles to an education, were of communal significance.
Tchaiko studied at Paine College, an HBCU in Augusta, Georgia and later at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City. Around the age of 20, Tchaiko became a grade school teacher in Augusta, Georgia, having graduated high school early at the age of 16. Soon by railroad, she would migrate to teach Mexican American farm workers in Texas, work in a child care center for African American migrant farmers in Sherbourne, New York and more affluent students in an education workshop at Fresno State College. When she taught at a Boys High School in Lagos Nigeria, the only female on the staff, she beat all the students and faculty in the 100 yard dash.
From 1960 to 1968, Tchaiko helped form the Donald Warden led Afro-American Association (AAA) in the San Francisco Bay Area, which eventually gave birth in 1966, to Huey Newton’s and Bobby Seale’s Black Panther Party, Maulana Karenga’s US (“us versus them”) cultural nationalist movement known best for founding the Kwanzaa holiday, and the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) that manifested aspects of class struggle and cultural nationalist ideas. As James Smethhurst, a scholar of the Black Arts Movement, has put it: at the same time as Maulana Karenga, Tchaiko pioneered the study of precolonial and ancient African civilizations and projected new philosophies of culture, but without the subordination of women.
The AAA recognized that the vote, formal education, and civil rights didn’t necessarily translate to empowerment, and it was wrong to blindly worship constitutional forms. What was needed was education rooted in African history and culture for the development of autonomous community institutions – the desire to be only Americans and not Afro-Americans made this more difficult because it papered over the history of empire and slavery that made blacks fall outside classical notions of ethnic and immigrant social mobility. Civil rights paved the way for middle and professional classes to thrive but not the marginal working class, unemployed, or street force.
Despite the BPP and US’s later deadly conflict in 1969, their basic principles were not irreconcilable. Maulana Karenga was insightful that meditations on African languages and history could produce new philosophical and epistemic breakthroughs. If Huey Newton’s initial criticism of RAM was unnecessarily harsh, Newton was also correct that the AAA had an insufficient critique of capitalism, and confrontation with police brutality was needed. But Newton was part of those who originated these radical breakthroughs after a period of intellectual development. Many were mentored toward deeper conclusions through critical dialogues as young college students by the AAA as personified by Warden, Kwayana, and others who were a few years older. This was before or concurrent with historical moments such as Malcolm X breaking with the Nation of Islam (1963-1964), Malcolm’s death in February 1965, and the Black Power and Black Studies rebellions of 1966-1971. Tchaiko was innovating and organizing before these became mass movements.
In the period Tchaiko taught in Nigeria (1962-1964), she became inspired by those who participated in Wole Soyinka’s 1960 Black Masks group. They heightened her awareness of pidgin or creole English, as a phenomenon that like Gullah/Geechee heritage in South Carolina and Georgia, contained African cultural retentions and knowledge systems, but also was a gateway to better understanding the thought of Black toilers. She spent her holidays in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana where a large African American community had settled led by Maya Angelou before Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966. Soon Tchaiko would develop lifelong friendships with the artists Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence, and until his death, a close friendship with Langston Hughes when she had her apartment in Harlem. Tchaiko also became close with Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Amiri Baraka.
In 1968 Tchaiko (still as Ann Cook) published her first major article, “Black Pride: Some Contradictions?,” that became serialized in the popular journals of the period through 1970 such as Hoyt Fuller’s Negro Digest (soon to be renamed Black World), and Jitu Weusi’s Black News. Her article was also in conversation with debate about the need for independent Black media and communications in Soulbook, a unique theoretical journal that brought together activists of the Revolutionary Action Movement and the Republic of New Africa but also activists of Guyana, South Africa, and Ghana to discuss the emerging conflicting tendencies in the black liberation movement.
Her essay also had a subtle chiding of Kenya’s Tom Mboya for referring to African Americans as “cousins.” Mboya in his Challenges of Nationhood, a collection of essays and speeches, approached African American cultural nationalism with some reasonable critiques but also a tone of smug contempt. Tchaiko reminded that African Americans were “brothers” not “cousins,” and anticipated the contemporary concern that some Africans, more recently from the continent, don’t like the descendants of the enslaved or find them inauthentic. She contested nobody could disinherit Black people from the African heritage if they searched for it, and worked hard to claim and affirm it. It was not a given, as Tchaiko showed, that Africans on the continent had overcome their own internalized racism and colonialism.
“Black Pride” was published in Toni Cade Bambara’s edited volume The Black Woman (1970) that included contributions from Patricia Robinson, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni, and Grace Lee Boggs. What did Tchaiko have to say that made this a classic of Black political thought?
“Black Pride” explored how in the period of 1968-1970, where “Black revolution” was widely discussed, the search for African identities became a fashion, co-opted by corporate media and consumer culture. “African” fashion shows were adapted to Western conceptions of gender and sexuality. It wasn’t simply “black” culture was being appropriated by white chauvinists. African Americans were carelessly engaging African symbolism and substance as well. Deeper color complexes within the community, as represented by blow out Afros and skin bleaching, Tchaiko explained, was covering up an inability to deal with the presence within the black community of anti-black racism.
Tchaiko critiqued what we now know as Afrocentric interpretations of history for its monumentalism and high modernism, its search for Egyptian pyramids to approximate Western skyscrapers in technology and architecture, and Mali’s Timbuctoo to prove that Africans could write. Affirming Blacks were “the first” or “equal to” Western civilization’s standards and achievements sometimes fell short of unveiling the autonomous thought of the African heritage. African American Islam, while encouraging a culture of modesty and discipline Tchaiko could support, was obscuring deeper questions about Islam’s role in facilitating racism and slavery on the African continent. While African American’s anti-racist initiative to switch from unquestioned loyalty to Christianity (as a result of its silences on slavery) to openness to Islam was a sign of critical thinking, not enough questions about “monotheism” as Westerners had assimilated it was happening.
Tchaiko argued that besides the study of an African language, blacks would better relate to Africa if they did not visit as tourists in air conditional hotels, and related not to the African urban but rural agrarian life found also in the American South. Farming, herding chickens and cattle, shucking peanuts; being aware of Yoruba cosmologies, keeping in mind that most Africans were peasants who lived by oral history (though precolonial writing systems were present and she would disseminate information about these) would bring Blacks closer to the African heritage.
She also explained that traveling in Latin America with the proper mindset could illuminate African cultural retentions just as well as visiting West Africa. Her discussions of her visit with the Djuka of Suriname, a Maroon community hostile to the ways of assimilated middle classes, revealed to Tchaiko their collective memory of African cosmologies and how this informed their sense of independence, defending their own family forms, but also their own sense they were part of an African world.
In her 1968 sojourn to South America she also met Abdas Do Nascimento in Brazil. His T.E.N., the black experimental theatre group, was teaching against anti-black racism within Brazil’s national culture, revealing how colonial legacies, in this case the Portuguese, could promote genocidal thoughts as internalized racism.
Tchaiko brought her independent initiative, in search of African survivals and rejecting white supremacist epistemic burdens to Guyana in 1968, where she met her future husband of 46 years, the Pan African and independent socialist Eusi Kwayana, now 92 years old.
Tchaiko Kwayana with her essay on black pride in many ways wrote her husband into African Diaspora History and African World History. Eusi, then Sidney King, had been a minister in the government and co-leader of the Cheddi Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was a political prisoner when Anglo-American imperialism overthrow their democratically elected government in 1953-1954. Had this not occurred the Cuban Revolution would not have been the first socialist government in the region.
In the late 1950s to the early 1960s, King transitioned from a critical supporter of Jagan, to a critical supporter of Forbes Burnham’s People’s National Congress (PNC). King advised Burnham’s PNC in various ways through official independence for Guyana in 1966. King gave Burnham the idea of a cooperative republic or cooperative socialism as the philosophical foundation for the post-independence government. From 1968-1971, when Ann Cook first met Sidney King, he had built an organization called ASCRIA (African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa). In between her travels, in this same period as Ann F. Cook, she was the director of SEEK at City College in Harlem, a program for those who were said to be disadvantaged or underprivileged. Out of these students came the rebellions for Black Studies and open admissions. It was a time when City College, though a campus in Harlem, was still overwhelmingly white.
ASCRIA was first a cultural front around the PNC government, teaching a cultural revolution, very similar to Tchaiko’s thoughts on “black pride.” The contradictions of Black Nationalism and pseudo-socialism of Burnham’s regime unfolded from 1971-1975. Wildcat strikes of landless sugar workers, bauxite workers, and independent cooperatives were coordinated by or supported by ASCRIA in a manner that presented African (and Indian) labor’s self-emancipation as the embodiment of national liberation against Burnham’s increasing populist authoritarian regime. ASCRIA struggled, and was successful, to discard the idea that black power was people of color holding the same elite posts and coveted positions as whites.
Great international controversy was fomented as to the split between Eusi Kwayana and Forbes Burnham in 1973-1974. This was a result of Tchaiko Kwayana being instrumental in linking up Guyana with the Black Power movement that was increasingly turning toward Pan Africanism in the early 1970s and critiques of post-civil rights, post-colonial independence regimes.
The movement for the Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania up to 1973 saw Burnham as a sponsor of a Pan African secretariat, led by Bro. Zolili, a science teacher from California. Burnham’s regime was a friend to African American political prisoners. RAM’s Herman Ferguson (underground as Paul Adams) and the African American children’s book author, Tom Feelings, were now employed by the Guyana government. But other RAM members, Mamadou Lumumba and Shango Umoja, became dissidents against Burnham, siding with ASCRIA, and were cast out of the country in 1973. Amiri Baraka and Jitu Weusi for a time did not know whose side to take. Nevertheless, this revealed the conflicting tendencies within the Black Power and Pan African movements. CLR James soon led a boycott of the Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania that shortly before James had traveled the world organizing.
During this time, Burnham singled out Tchaiko specifically for her dynamic community organizing with ASCRIA -- and smeared her as a meddling outsider. This was recorded in the publications ASCRIA Bulletin and ASCRIA Drums. Burnham’s Pan African façade of his increasingly dictatorial regime was starting to evaporate.
Tchaiko also remembers these times for how she learned more about popular educational methods from observing Eusi who was teacher and principal at County High School in Buxton, Guyana. He taught his young students to be confident reading Shakespeare, participate in theatrical productions, and to take down oral histories from community elders to be aware of the African heritage and survivals in their community. At the same time he linked a return to the land, the hinterland of Guyana, with respect for Amerindians as they affirmed African culture. The Kwayanas were part of the social revival of African drumming, and showed those that practiced Comfa, and the Jordanites of Guyana, on their own authority had been initiating the search for African survivals before ASCRIA. He embraced all in the Guyana, including Indians and Amerindians, who sincerely searched for their heritage but did not use their self-determination to undermine others.
In 1973 Tchaiko with Eusi Kwayana published Scars of Bondage: a first study of the slave colonial experience of Africans in Guyana. It stood out for its descriptions of the self-emancipating African personality under adversity and for its documentation of African cultural survivals underscoring the enslaved brought with them their own history and identity despite the barbarism of the Middle Passage and the destructive environment Africans found imposed on them by those who strived to master them.
In 1974-1975, Tchaiko Kwayana was part of the merger of ASCRIA with Indian Political Revolutionary Associations, the Ratoon group, and the Working People’s Vanguard Party that became the Walter Rodney led Working People’s Alliance (WPA). The Kwayanas worked with Rupert Roopnarine, CY Thomas, Josh Ramsammy, Bonita Harris, Tacuma Ogunseye, Karen de Souza, Jai Parsam, Omawale, Ohene Koama, and Andaiye (whose Red Thread collective later projected the need to count women’s caring work). In 1979-1980, in the confrontation with Forbes Burnham’s PNC government’s violent repression, the historian Walter Rodney was assassinated. Tchaiko with the Women Against Terror group received a beating in the Bourda Green area of Georgetown in a 1983 protest. She had struck police with her umbrella who were injuring youth. Tchaiko was present in the struggle for “people’s power and no dictator.”
Tchaiko went to live in Atlanta in the mid-1980s to raise the Kwayana children but also to organize Helping Uplift Guyanese (HUG), coordinating global aid and solidarity with the Guyanese working people.
With John Henrik Clarke, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, Ivan Van Sertima, Jan Carew, Joyce Gleason Carew, and Runoko Rashidi, Tchaiko Kwayana was part of the circle around the Journal of African Civilizations that established contributions of Africans to science and technology, and African women’s contributions, from antiquity to precolonial times. This was a bold endeavor that not only discussed Egypt, Nubia and the Nile Valley but Latin America, Amerindians, and China from an African world perspective. Tchaiko was also among the early scholars who wished to recognize the women’s initiatives of the Marcus Garvey movement before this became a trend in university life.
So how are we to assess Tchaiko Kwayana, “the English Teacher”? Whether instructing in creative writing, crafting autobiographies, teaching how to write open letters to government officials, or interpreting comparative literature, she received awards and recognition from government certification authorities but also met controversy among administrators above her.
Tchaiko with her “identity papers” and “writing our hope” projects tried to get grade school children and their parents to practice their writing as they recorded their own history. She taught also at the college level and in upward bound programs.
One of her Atlanta grade school students wrote an open letter to the Atlanta Daily World. Reagan and Gorbachev, it was argued, were mistaken as individuals to discuss nuclear weapons and the potential destruction of the world. They did not best represent the nations for which they spoke and that a selection of ordinary people could resolve matters best. Many years later, a San Diego student, an Asian American, wrote a historical treatment of white supremacy that found its way on to the internet as a polished pamphlet. Tchaiko Kwayana teaching methods equally captivated those of African, Asian, Latin American, Native America, and European descent.
Tchaiko marshaled Wordsworth’s reflections on Tinturn Abbey to remind “that [from] gleams of half extinguished thought… the pictures of the mind revives again” and Shakespeare’s As You Like It, to suggest that one could “find tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.” These came together with a quotation from Runoko Rashidi: “among the greatest crimes is to teach a people that their history began with invasion, colonization, and enslavement.”
Tchaiko, like Wole Soyinka, could frame the Western canon, as reconcilable with an African cosmology where the dead, the living, and the unborn of the natural world were in conversation and where ideas and images inscribed in stone (whether in Ancient Egypt or Olmec Mexico) could revive a consciousness of history. She could find herself in trouble when she found, especially with American literature, as represented by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, that the treatment of the historical background of the novel in public schools often emphasized Europeans, and left out the intellectual and political experience of the African world and the colonized. She became heralded for teaching American literature by underscoring antiquity and precolonial origins not European settler-colonialism.
Tchaiko became a master-teacher of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, where both the historical background of precolonial and ancient African civilizations, and the colonial experience of Native Americans, could not be ignored. Was Tchaiko at the end of her radical life teaching “history” in her “English” classes with some controversy?
Tchaiko Kwayana was reminding students not to be a social statistic, not simply in a racially degraded way, but in a manner that “achieves” very little but uncritical assimilation. She was preparing scholar-citizens and self-directed learners, not those who merely pursue credits to graduate or who simply react to misinformation. Tchaiko was doing more than teaching students to identify with diversity, equality, and tolerance. For behind these words narrow conceptions exist. Tchaiko was not looking for greater inclusion or representation in this world. She was trying to establish, defend, and design her own world, and she gave so many the strength for this endeavor.
Matthew Quest has taught History and Africana Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. A scholar of CLR James, see his essay on James and the Haitian Revolution in The Black Jacobins Reader . 

• Dr. Matthew Quest's blog

obama: ahollow man with ruling class ideas

Obama: a Hollow Man Filled With Ruling Class Ideas

by Paul Street

June 2, 2017- counterpunch.org
A “Hollow” Man Who Was “Unwilling to Fight the Good Fight”

What on Earth motivated the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and law professor David J. Garrow to write an incredibly detailed 1078-page (1460 pages with endnotes and index included) biography of Barack Obama from conception through election to the White House? Not any great personal affinity for Obama on Garrow’s part, that’s for sure. Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama is no hagiography. On the last page of this remarkable tome, Garrow describes Obama at the end of his distinctly non-transformative and “failed presidency” as a man who had long ago had become a “vessel [that] was hollow at its core.”

Near the conclusion, Garrow notes how disappointed and betrayed many of Obama’s former friends felt by a president who “doesn’t feel indebted to people” (in the words of a former close assistant) and who spent inordinate time on the golf course and “celebrity hobnobbing” (1067). Garrow quotes one of Obama’s “long-time Hyde Park [Chicago] friend[s],” who offered a stark judgement: “Barack is a tragic figure: so much potential, such critical times, but such a failure to perform…like he is an empty shell…Maybe the flaw is hubris, deep and abiding hubris….” (1065). Garrow quotes the onetime and short-lived Obama backer Dr. Cornel West on how Obama “posed as a progressive and turned out to be a counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a national security presidency…a brown-faced Clinton: another opportunist.”
The subject of Garrow’s meticulous history is a single-minded climber ready to toss others (including family members, lovers, and close friends) aside in service to an all-consuming quest for political power fueled by a belief in his own special “destiny.” (It is clear from Rising Star that Obama was set on a run for the presidency by age twenty-five.) Dozens of former Obama associates interviewed by Garrow report having been impressed, even blown away by the future president as a young man. But many others were put off by Obama’s sense of superiority and arrogance (“full of himself” by the recollection of one Harvard Law classmate [p. 337]) and by his often lecturing, professorial “know it all” presentation – and by his transparent hyper-ambition.
During his time at Harvard Law, fellow students invented “the Obamanometer” – a numerical measure of how long Obama would spend taking up class time with long-winded dialogue with the professor, often while claiming to speak on behalf of his fellow students.
Obama struck many on his way up as far too impressed with his own awesomeness. As one of his fellow black Illinois state senators commented to another veteran legislator as Obama began his eight-year career in the Illinois Senate in 1996, “Can you believe this guy’s some thirty years old [and] he’s already written a book about himself?” (p.600)
Progressives lobbyists found Obama “a disappointing legislator” during his time in the Illinois Senate.  According to Al Sharp, executive director of Protestants for the Common Good, state senator Obama was “so very pragmatic” that “he,” in Garrow’s words, “was unwilling to fight to the good fight.” By Garrow’s account. “Legal aid veteran Linda Mills recalled that [state senator] Barack ‘sponsored a number of bills I wrote,’ but ‘I stopped seeking him out as a chief sponsor early on’ because Barack was ‘disengaged’ rather than actively pushing the bills. ‘He was never involved in the legislation,’ and on many days Barack was simply ‘unavailable. Golfing, playing basketball.  He was just out to lunch so often’” (p.731)
An Ugly Offer: Money for Silence
I find a different story related in Rising Star just as disturbing. It comes from April of 2008, when then presidential candidate Obama was being compelled by the Hillary Clinton campaign to throw his onetime South Side Chicago “spiritual mentor”

Reverend Jeremiah Wright under the bus because Obama’s association with the fiery Black and left-leaning pulpit master was costing him too many white votes. On April 12, 2008, Obama visited Wright, asking him not to do “any more public speaking until after the November election.” Wright refused. “Barack left empty-handed but before long Wright received an e-mail from Barack’s close friend Eric Whitaker, also a Trinity [church] member, offering Wright $150,000 ‘not to preach at all’ in the months ahead.” (p.1044). Wright refused.
How was that for progressive hope and change?
“A Work of Historical Fiction”

Young Obama tried to beat historians to the punch by writing a deceptive, self-serving account of his own first three and half decades gracing the planet with his “special qualities.” Garrow, to his credit, doesn’t fall for it. Rising Star takes the future president’s 1995 book Dreams From My Father Dreams and some of Obama’s later autobiographical reflections to task for: inventing a deep racial identity drama that never occurred during Obama’s early years in Hawaii, Indonesia, and Occidental College; incorrectly portraying Obama as a “difference-maker” on his high school basketball team; deceptively claiming that Obama had been an angry “thug” during high school; deleting the Community Party background of the Black “old poet” (“Frank,” as in longtime Communist Party activist Frank Davis) who gave Obama advice as a teenager in Honolulu; inaccurately claiming that Obama have received a “full scholarship” to Occidental; misrepresenting himself as a leader in the movement against South African apartheid at Occidental; exaggerating Obama’s involvement in anti-apartheid activism at Columbia University; covering up  evidence of Obama’s enrollment in a Columbia course taught by a Marxist academic; absurdly mispresenting the nature of Obama’s work for the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) at the City University of New York; concocting a mythical and supposedly life-changing dialogue with a  “black security guard” on Obama’s first trip from New York City to begin community organizing work on the far South Side of Chicago;  falsely claiming that Obama  converted to Christianity during his early years in Chicago; largely writing Obama’s white mother out of his autobiography, which spilled far more ink on a father (Barack Obama. Sr.) who played little role in his life; painting a “decidedly uncharitable portrait” of Obama’s loving white maternal grandfather (Stanley Dunham) who did so much to raise him; suggesting that Obama’s maternal white grandmother was a racist; unduly downplaying Obama’s supreme enjoyment of his years at Harvard Law School; and coldly condensing his three top pre-marital girlfriends (more on them below) “into a single woman whose appearance in the book was fleeting indeed.” Garrow judges Dreams “a work of historical fiction,” not a serious autobiography or memoir.
The Revenge of Sheila Jager: “His Deep-Seated Need to be Loved and Admired”

Rising Star might almost deserve the sub-title “The Revenge of Sheila Jager.” Like Garrow’s giant and classic 1986 biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rising Star gets very, very personal. Garrow reports the complaints of Obama’s three former girlfriends – Alex McNair, Genevieve Cook, and Sheila Jager. Each one recalls an Obama that was ultimately inaccessible and hopelessly self-involved.  Ms. Jager, a partly white Asian-American University of Chicago anthropology graduate student when she met Obama, garners singular attention. She fell into a prolonged and ardent affair with then community organizer Obama during the late 1980s. But her long and tumultuous relationship with him was doomed by the color of her skin. Obama shared the passion but decided he could not marry her because his political ambitions in Chicago required a Black spouse.
Garrow recounts an ugly scene in the summer of 1987. A loud and long dispute developed one day at the Wisconsin summer home of a friend. From the morning onwards, a witness recalled, “they were back and forth, having sex, screaming yelling, having sex, screaming yelling.… That whole afternoon, they went back and forth between having sex and fighting,” with Jager yelling: “That’s wrong! That’s wrong! That’s not a reason.”
Near the end of his colossal volume, Garrow says that “no one alive brought deeper insight into the tragedy of Barack Obama than Sheila Jager.” He reproduces numerous quotations from Jager, now an Oberlin College anthropology professor.  As a young woman, she was frustrated by young Obama’s lack of “courage.” Writing to Garrow in August of 2013, Jager saw that cowardice in his excessively “pragmatic,” disengaged, and “compromising” presidency:

“the seeds of his future failings were always present in Chicago.  He made a series of calculated decisions when he began to map out his political life at the time and they involved some deep compromises.  There is a familiar echo in the language he uses now to talk about the compromises he’s always forced to make and the way he explained his future to me back then, saying in effect I ‘wish’ I could do this, but ‘pragmatism and the reality of the world has forced me to do that.’  From the bailout out to NSA to Egypt, it is always the same. The problem is that ‘pragmatism’ can very much look like what works best for the moment.  Hence, the constant criticism that there is no strategic vision behind his decisions. Perhaps this pragmatism and need to just ‘get along in the world’ (by accepting the world as it is instead of trying to change it) stems from his deep-seated need to be loved and admired which has ultimately led him on the path to conformism and not down the path of greatness which I had hoped for him.” (1065)

The italics are Garrow’s.  He added emphasis to the entire passage.
Or Maybe He Really Believed All that “Vacuous to Repressive Neoliberal” and “Pragmatism” Stuff
Garrow’s mammoth biography is a tour de force when it comes to personal critique, professional appraisal, and epic research and documentation. His mastery of the smallest details in Obama’s life and career and his ability to place those facts within a narrative that keeps the reader’s attention (no small feat at 1078 pages!) is remarkable.  Rising Star falls short, however, on ideological appraisal. In early 1996, the brilliant left Black political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. captured the stark moral and political limits of what would become the state and then national Obama phenomenon and indeed the Obama presidency.  Writing of an unnamed Obama, Reed observed that:

“In Chicago…we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program – the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance.”

Garrow very incompletely quotes Reed’s reflection only to dismiss it as “an academic’s way of calling Barack an Uncle Tom.”  That is an unfortunate judgement. Reed’s assessment was richly born-out by Obama’s subsequent political career.  Like his politcio-ideological soul-brothers Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (and perhaps now Emmanuel Macron), Obama’s public life has been a wretched monument to the dark power of the neoliberal corporate-financial and imperial agendas behind the progressive pretense of façade of telegenic and silver-tongued professional class politicos.
Reed’s prescient verdict more than 12 years before Obama became president brings more insight to the Obama tragedy than Jager’s reflection five years into Obama’s presidency. Obama’s nauseating taste for supposedly (and deceptively) non-ideological “get things done” “pragmatism,” “compromise,” and “playing it safe” – for “accepting the world as it is instead of trying to change it” (Jager) – was not simply or merely a personality quirk or psychological flaw. It was also and far more significantly a longstanding way for “liberal” Democratic presidents and other politicos to appear “tough-minded” and stoutly determined to “getting things done” while they subordinate the fake-populist and progressive-sounding values they mouth to get elected to the harsh “deep state” facts of U.S. ruling class, imperial, and “national security” power. A “pragmatic,” supposedly non-ideological concern for policy effectiveness – “what can be accomplished in the real world” – has long given “liberal” presidents a manly way to justify governing in accord with the wishes of the nation’s ruling class and power elite.
Garrow and Jager might want to look at a forgotten political science classic, Bruce Miroff’s  Pragmatic Illusions: The Presidential Politics of John F. Kennedy [1976].) After detailing the supposedly progressive Kennedy’s cool-headed, Harvard-minted, and “best and brightest” service to the nation’s reigning corporate, imperial, and racial hierarchies, Miroff explained that:

“Most modern presidents have claimed the title of ‘pragmatist’ for themselves.  Richard Nixon was just as concerned as John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to announce that he was not wedded to dogma, and that his administration would follow a realistic and flexible course. It has chiefly been the liberal presidents, however, who have captured the pragmatic label…For liberal presidents – and for those who have advised them – the essential mark of pragmatism is its ‘tough-mindedness.’ Pragmatism is equated with strength and intellectual and moral strength that can accept a world stripped of illusions and can take the facts unadorned.  Committed to liberal objectives, yet free from liberal sentimentality, the pragmatic liberal sees himself as grappling with brute and unpleasant facts of political reality in order to humanize and soften those facts…The great enemy for pragmatic liberals is ideology…An illusory objectivity is one of the pillars of pragmatic ‘tough-mindedness.’ The second pillar is readiness for power.  Pragmatists are interested in what works; their prime criterion of value is success…[and] as a believer in concrete results, the pragmatist is ineluctably drawn to power.  For it is power that gets things done most easily, that makes things work most successfully.” (Pragmatic Illusions, 283-84, emphasis added).

The classic neoliberal Bill Clinton embraced the pragmatic and non-ideological “get things done” façade for state capitalist and imperialist policy. So did the pioneering neoliberal Jimmy Carter and the great corporate liberals Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kenney and Franklin Roosevelt. Was this really or mainly because they were psychologically wounded?  The deeper and more relevant reality is that they functioned atop a Superpower nation-state rule by unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money, empire, and white supremacism. They were educated, socialized, seduced and indoctrinated – to understand in their bones that those de facto dictatorships must remain intact (Roosevelt boasted of having saved the profits system) and that liberal “reform” must always bend to the will of reigning institutions and doctrines of concentrated wealth, class, race, and power. Some or all of them may well have to believe and internalize the purportedly non-ideological ideology of wealth- and power-serving pragmatism. And Obama was either a true believer or one who cynically chose to impersonate one as the ticket to power quite early on.
A Fully Minted Neoliberal Early On

The irony here is that one can consult Rising Star to determine the basic underlying accuracy of Reed’s acerbic description. My foremost revelation from Rising Star is that Obama was fully formed as a fake-progressive neoliberal-capitalist actor well before he ever received his first big money campaign contribution.  He’s headed down the same ideological path as the Clintons even before Bill Clinton walks into the Oval Office.  Obama’s years in the corporate-funded foundation world, the great ruling and professional class finishing schools Columbia University Harvard Law, and the great neoliberal University of Chicago’s elite Law School were more than sufficient to mint him as a brilliant if “vacuous to repressive neoliberal.”
During his years at Harvard Law, Garrow notes, Obama took said the following at a Turner Broadcasting African American Summit for the 1990s:

“Whenever we blame society for everything, or blame white racism for everything, then inevitably we’re giving away our own power…if we can get start getting beyond some of these old divisions [of race, place, and class] and look at the possibilities of crafting pragmatic, practical strategies that are going to focus on what’s  going to make it work and less about whether it fits into one ideological mold or another.”

These were classic neoliberal and ruling class themes.
Along with a healthy dose of market economics, this was the heavily ideological if nominally anti-ideological essence of much of Obama’s intellectual work at Harvard Law, where he and his good friend the former economist Rob Fisher were drawn to the courses of a libertarian professor and wrote oxymoronically about the progressive and democratic potential of “market forces.”  Like other ruling class and professional class educational and ideological institutions of “higher education,” Harvard Law was and remains a great schoolhouse of precisely the kind of “pragmatism” which knows that no policies and visions can work that don’t bow to the holy power of the finance-led corporate and imperial state, ruling in the name of the market among other things.
Again, and again across Garrow’s many hundreds of pages on Obama’s community organizing and legislative career one hears about the future president’s classically neoliberal efforts to address poverty and joblessness by increasing the market value of poor and jobless folks’ “human capital” and “skill sets.”  Never does one learn of any serious call on his part for the radical and democratic redistribution of wealth and power and the advance of a people’s political economy based on solidarity and the common good, not the profits of the investor class.
The main things Obama needed to add on to fulfill his “destiny” after Harvard Law were a political career in elected office, a great moment of national celebrity (his spectacular Keynote Address to the Democratic National Convention in August of 2004), elite financial sponsorship (including record-setting Wall Street backing in 2007 and 2008), and proper appreciation and articulation of U.S.-imperial Council on Foreign Relations ideology.  All of this and more, including no small good fortune (including the awfulness of the George W. Bush administration and the 2007-08 Hillary Clinton campaign), followed and brought us to the great neoliberal “disappointment” that was the Obama presidency.
Curious Deletions: MacFaquhar, Marxists, and the Ruling Class Sponsors

There are some interesting deletions in Rising Star. It is odd that the meticulous Garrow never quotes a remarkable essay published by The New Yorker in the spring of 2007. In early May of that year, six months after Obama had declared his candidacy for the White House, the New Yorker’s  Larissa MacFarquhar penned a memorable portrait of Obama titled “The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?” “In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly,” MacFarquhar wrote after extensive interviews with the candidate, “Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean…It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good” (emphasis added).
MacFarquhar cited as an example of this reactionary sentiment Obama’s reluctance to embrace single-payer health insurance on the Canadian model, which he told her would “so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.” Obama told MacFarquhar that “we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that’s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.”
So what if large popular majorities in the U.S. had long favored the single-payer model? So what if single payer would let people keep the doctors of their choice, only throwing away the protection pay off to the private insurance mafia? So what if “the legacy systems” Obama defended included corporate insurance and pharmaceutical oligopolies that regularly threw millions of American lives by the wayside of market calculation, causing enormous disruptive harm and death for the populace?
Was this personal weakness and cowardice? The deeper reality is that Obama’s “deeply conservative” beliefs reflected an either calculated or heartfelt allegiance to neoliberal “free market” ideals and related pragmatic and “realistic” ruling- and elite professional-class values inculcated and absorbed at Harvard Law, in the corporate-captive foundation world, and through his many contacts in the elite business sector and the foreign policy establishment as he rose in the American System. Along with a bottomless commitment to the long American imperial project, those power-serving beliefs were written all over Obama’s conservative late 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope (Obama’s second book and his second book mainly about himself – see my critical review of it on Black Agenda Report in early 2007  here), whose right-wing and imperial content Garrow ignores.  They also raised their head in the famous 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote Address (see my critical reflection on that oration at the time here) that did so much to make Obama an overnight national and even global celebrity – another document whose right-leaning ideological nature escapes Garrow’s attention.
Like Obama’s neoliberal and imperial ideology, the many left activists and writers (this reviewer included) who saw through Obama’s progressive pretense and warned others about it early on are basically missing in Rising Star.  The list of Left commentators left out is long.  It includes Bruce Dixon, Glen Ford, John Pilger, Noam Chomsky. Alexander Cockburn, Margaret Kimberly, Jeffrey St. Clair, Roger Hodge, Pam Martens, Ajamu Baraka, Doug Henwood, Juan Santos, Marc Lamont Hill, John R. MacArthur, and a host of others (Please see the sub-section titled “Insistent Left Warnings” on pages 176-177 in the sixth chapter, titled “We Were Warned,” of my 2010 book The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power [Paradigm, 2014], my second carefully researched Obama book not to make it into Garrow’s endnotes or bibliography).
Also largely missing – the other side of the coin of omission, so to speak – in Garrow’s sprawling acount is the elite corporate and financial class that made record-setting contributions to Obama’s rise with an understanding that Obama was very much on their side. How write a 1000-page plus account of Obama’s rise to power without at least once mentioning that august and unparalleled ruling class figure Robert Rubin, whose nod of approval was critical to Obama’s ascendancy? As Greg Palast noted, Rubin “opened the doors to finance industry vaults for Obama. Extraordinarily for a Democrat, Obama in 2008 raised three times as much from bankers as his Republican opponent.”
Rubin would also serve as a top informal Obama adviser and placed a number of his protégés in high-ranking positions in the Obama administration. Rubin’s Obama appointees included Timothy Geithner (Obama’s first treasury secretary), Peter Orszag (Obama’s first Office of Management and Budget director), and Larry Summers (first chief economic adviser).
Just as odd as his ignoring of MacFarquhar’s May 2007 essay is Garrow’s inattention to a remarkable report from Ken Silverstein’s six months before. “It’s not always clear what Obama’s financial backers want,” the progressive journalist Ken Silverstein noted in a Harpers’ Magazine report titled “Obama, Inc.” in November of 2006, “but it seems safe to conclude that his campaign contributors are not interested merely in clean government and political reform…On condition of anonymity,” Silverstein added, “one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a ‘player.’ The lobbyist added: ‘What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?’” Obama’s allegiance to the American business elite was evident from the get go. It was well understood by the K Street insiders that Silverstein interviewed in the fall of 2006.
His “dollar value” to Wall Street would become abundantly clear in early 2009, when he told a frightened group of Wall Street executives that “I’m not here to go after you. I’m protecting you…I’m going to shield you from congressional and public anger.” For the banking elite, who had destroyed untold millions of jobs, there was, as Garrow’s fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Ron Sukind wrote, “Nothing to worry about. Whereas [President Franklin Delano] Roosevelt had [during the Great Depression] pushed for tough, viciously opposed reforms of Wall Street and famously said ‘I welcome their hate,’ Obama was saying ‘How can I help?’” As one leading banker told Suskind, “The sense of everyone after the meeting was relief. The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t – he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob.”
On Love and Admiration
As noted above, professor Jager told Garrow that the limits of Obama’s presidency stemmed from his longstanding “need to be loved and admired.” But surely that need would have been met to no small degree had Obama (like Roosevelt in 1935 and 1936) governed in at least partial accord with the progressive-sounding rhetoric he campaigned on in 2007 and 2008. Beyond the social, democratic, security and environmental benefits that would have been experienced by millions of Americans and world citizens under an actually progressive Obama presidency, such policy would have been good politics for both Obama and the Democratic Party. It might well have pre-empted the Tea Party rebellion and kept the orange-haired beast Donald Trump – a dodgy neo-fascistic legacy of Obama and the Clintons’ ruling- and professional-class Ivy League elitism – out of the White House.  The bigger problem here was Obama’s love and admiration for the nation’s reigning wealth and power elite – or, perhaps, his reasonable calculation that the powers that be held a monopoly on the means of bestowing public love and admiration. Non-conformism to the ruling class carries no small cost in a media and politics culture owned by that class.
The Biggest Omission: Empire

The most glaring thing missing in Rising Star is any understanding of U.S, Senator and presidential candidate Obama’s imperial world view. His brazenly “American exceptionalist” and imperial mindset, straight out of the Council on Foreign Relations, was written all over Obama’s foreign policy speeches and writings (including large sections of The Audacity of Hope) in 2006, 2007, and 2008. I wrote about this at length in the fourth chapter (titled “How Antiwar? Obama, Iraq, and the Audacity of Empire”) in my 2008 book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics.
This significant omission but it is unsurprising given Garrow’s own apparent enmeshment in the American imperial mindset.  Rising Star’s long epilogue includes John McCain-like criticisms of Obama for failing to launch military strikes on Syria and for being too allergic to “the use, or even the threat of force” in global affairs. Garrow even offers a lengthy critical quote on the need for “the next president” to be more “resolute” from the former leading imperialist defense secretary Robert Gates, who Garrow strangely describes as “the weightiest and most widely respected voice of all.”
“Problems Out There with the Situation of African-Americans in Society”
Obama first became something of a celebrity when he became the first Black editor of the Harvard Law Review in February of 1990.  “I wouldn’t want people to see my election,” Obama told the Associated Press, “as a symbol that there aren’t problems out there with the situation of African-Americans in society” (Garrow, Rising Star, p. 392). Note the carefully calibrated nature of Obama’s public commentary already at the age of 28: “problems out there with the situation of African-Americans in society” could just as easily refer to alleged Black personal and cultural failure (a persistent white-pleasing theme in the rising star’s political rhetoric) as it could to cultural and/or institutional and societal racism.  Note also that while Obama’s election and re-election to the U.S. presidency brought few if any tangible material and policy gains to Black America (whose already terrible economic situation deteriorated significantly during his time in office), it functioned as something like the last nail in the coffin of many whites’ stark reluctance to acknowledge that the nation’s still deeply embedded racism any longer poses real barriers to Black advancement and equality in the U.S. “Are you kidding me?” I’ve heard countless whites say, “we elected a Black president! Stop talking about racism!” Never mind the persistence of deeply embedded racial inequality and oppression at the heart of the nation’s labor and housing markets, credit and investment systems, legal and criminal justice systems, its military and police state, and its educational and media systems – and the dogged tenacity of personal and cultural race prejudice among a considerable part of the white populace.  In that and other ways, the tragedy of the Obama years has been greatest of all for those at the bottom of the nation’s steep social and economic wells.
King v. Obama
If I could ask Garrow one question beyond the personal matter of why my own heavily researched and annotated study of (and Left warning on) “rising star” Obama (Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics [Paradigm-Routledge, 2008]) is so egregiously missing in his bibliography and endnotes, it is this: what does Garrow think his previous epic biography subject Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. (who politely refused progressives’ effort to enlist him as a presidential candidate and whose bust sat behind Obama in the Oval Office), would have thought of the career of Garrow’s new epic biography subject, Barack Obama?
As Garrow knows, King in his final years inveighed eloquently against what he called “the triple evils that are interrelated,” essentially capitalism, racism, and militarism-imperialism. King came to the end of his martyred life with the belief that the real faults in American life lay not so much in “men” as in the oppressive institutions and social structures that reigned over them.  He wrote that “the radical reconstruction of society itself” was “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters. He had no interest, of course, in running for the White House of all things.
Obama took a very different path, one that enlisted him in service both to narcissistic self and to each of the very triple evils (and other ones as well) that King dedicated his life to resisting.
The Obama-King contrast continues into Obama’s post-presidential years.  As Garrow showed in Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King. Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (William Morrow, 1986), the great Civil Rights leader and democratic socialist Dr. King sternly refused to cash in on his fame.  Now that he out of the White House, Obama, by contrast, is cashing in. He’s raking in millions from the publishing industry and Wall Street and he’s back to his old “hobnobbing” ways with the rich and famous.
The reverend would be 88 years old if he had been blessed with longevity.  My guess is that he would be less than pleased at the life and career of the nation’s first technically Black president.

Hip Hop Conscious Rap Must be a critical component of the BAM 27 City Tour

Bay Area hip hop organizers, promoters and producers share a joyful moment with Marvin X, godfather of conscious hip hop, at the Berkeley Black Repertory Theatre. Marvin has agreed to work with the conscious hip hop community to revolutionize hip hop poetry and pass the baton to the next generation of artistic freedom fighters!

Stay tuned for battlerap#4

"When you listen to Tupac Shakur, E-40, Too Short, Master P or any other rappers out of the Bay Area of Cali, think of Marvin X. He laid the foundation and gave us the language to express black male urban experiences in a lyrical way!"--James G. Spady, Philadelphia New Observer

As we move toward implementing the Black Arts Movement 27 City Tour suggested by Ancestor Amiri Baraka and being organized by BAM co-founder Marvin X, it is crystal clear we are passing the baton to the next generation of North American African artistic and cultural workers, or in the words of Ancestor Paul Robeson, "Artistic freedom fighters!" The Black Arts Movement and the Black Liberation Movement are indivisible, inseparable, thus unconquerable, a mighty fist in the face of oppression by global and American white supremacy, which are one!




Fidel Castro has told us, "The weapon of today is not guns but consciousness!" The mission of the BAM 27 City Tour is to spread consciousness throughout this land and beyond, to revolutionize North American African youth culture, transcending the toxicity of reactionary rap promoted by the white supremacy propaganda machine to destroy the minds, hearts and souls of North American Africans and all those youth around the world who identify with our art and culture, which is the vanguard of global youth culture. If North American African youth fart, global youth culture farts! If we shit, global youth culture has a bowel movement!

As elders, our job is to infuse the present generation of North American African youth artists and cultural workers with the necessary knowledge to rekindle the flame of revolution and radical art and culture, so they will not settle for the reactionary, toxic art and culture promoted by the white supremacy propaganda machine vie record companies, promoters and agents of their industry of menticide.

Thus, the BAM 27 City Tour will include a critical component of conscious hip hop artists, educators and cultural workers, qualified to spread the message that revolution is, in the words of Ancestor John Henrik Clarke, not a sprint but a long distance run.


Eldridge Cleaver and the US delegation in North Vietnam, meeting with General Giap who defeated the US in Vietnam.


Most importantly, we must advance the notion that we are all leaders, we are all the central command, as the socalled Viet Cong announced when the Americans said they were going into Cambodia to destroy the Viet Cong central command. For every youth the American death machine destroys, maims, paralyzes, traumatizes, neutralizes, punkanizes, imprisonizes, druganizes, we shall present a new leadership of cold, sober youth to continue our liberation movement until victory!

--Marvin X
6/3/17

 BAM co-founders Ancestor Amiri Baraka and Elder Marvin X

 BAM co-founders Askia Toure' and Marvin X

 The West Oakland Crew at Lil' Bobby Hutton Park, West Oakland

 Angela Davis, Marvin X and Sonia Sanchez

 Harlem, NY reception for Marvin X at the home of Rashida Ismaili

 Mrs. Amina Baraka

Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou dancing their way to Black Arts Movement Heaven!

 
 Marvin X, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, and poet Prosperity Carter. Mayor Schaaf said she will use her influence with US Mayors to promote the BAM 27 City Tour.

 Panel on Black Arts Movement and Women at Laney College

 Marvin X and Nefertiti, oldest daughter who demanded her dad pass the baton.

 Amina and Amiri Baraka. We think the babe in Amina's arms is Ras Baraka, now Mayor of Newark, New Jersey.

 BAM Poets Choir and Arkestra at the University of California, Merced, BAM 50th Anniversary Conference.

 Bruce George of Def Poetry Jam, the next generation of BAM

 Master Teacher Marvin X and his student, multi-talented poet, writer Prosperity Carter

 Dr. Cornel West supports the BAM 27 City Tour. 

Marvin X and Fred Hampton, Jr. Black Panther Cub, who was in his mother's womb when the Chicago police assassinated his father in bed with his pregnant mother.

Phavia Kujichagulia, proud mother of daugthter, Taiwo. "Yes, I brainwashed my daughter to cleanse her mind of all white supremacy bullshit!"

Marvin X trying to save the babies as Marvin Gaye sang about. 

Part One: Games Nigguhs Play

Games Nigguhs Play


Parents of Marvin X, Owendell and Marian Murrill Jackmon; he was 40, she was 20 when they married.

Mama told me to leave nigguhs alone, you don't need them nigguhs Marvin, them nigguhs need you. They just using you  Marvin. Don't let them use you, use the mind God gave you, Boy! And Daddy said, "Boy, you so smart you outsmarted yourself! You should be a billionaire, but you fucked up. I told you, whatever you wanna be, be the best. You was a dope fiend, but you wasn't even a good dope fiend. If you gonna be a dope fiend, be the best dope fiend in the world. You let that shit control you, you didn't control it. I never let nothing control me! (Dad was lying here because he had a gambling habit that controlled him. And Mama, she was addicted to nigguhs too, she helped nigguhs until her dying days, and the worst nigguhs were her own ungrateful bastard children, Marvin X included, even though he was her Star child, and all his siblings knew it except him! He had no idea how much his mother loved him and respected him and knew he was going to do great things in the world. But his siblings knew, especially his sister Donna, the greatest storyteller in the family. Her "lies" would put Marvin X to shame!


She  told her boss, "Sir, I can't come into work today because my brother is in his private plane flying to Seattle and we have lost track of him somewhere around Lake Tahoe." RIP Big D!

Poor son, his Mom knew far more about him than he would ever know about himself. She told him he didn't need a wife: according to her, he needed a maid, secretary and Mistress, but not a wife. As a man, she would never consider him for a husband. She saw her son was lost in his imagination and sexuality, especially when he lived on her 2 and 1/2 acre property that included three houses, including a studio apartment where he came to write when taking refuge from the wicked city, and from which he would go into the big house to cry on his mother's knees after abusing his wives. She told him he would never have any good luck as long as he abused women, especially the mother's of his children.

She told him, "Son, please don't have those women hollering and screaming in the night because I can hear them! Tell them to not make all that noise."

Mama wondered why her son came home from being with a woman for several days, and came into her house starving to death. He told her, "Mama, we just didn't eat, Mama, we just made love!"
Mama just shook her head. After all, her son may have gotten his passion from her. She had nine children and raised them as a single mother, and raised two grandchildren as her own. They thought she was their mother and my six sisters were their sisters.

We grew up in the projects of West Fresno until Mom became a successful real estate broker, the first black woman real estate broker in town. During the 40s, she and my father had a successful real estate business, plus they published a Black Newspaper, The Fresno Voice, until my father violated his fiduciary relationship by gambling with the people's money and lost his real estate license, and this when my parents moved to Oakland and became florists on 7th Street in Harlem of the West. But mom and dad separated and she returned to Fresno to open up her real estate business on her own.

Most Blacks, old and young, will tell you they bought their first house from my parents, especially after the war when we suffered redlining and my parents were able to help them acquire housing.

Mom and Dad were Race Man and Woman, i.e., conscious and dedicated to our people. Dad told me he saw Marcus Garvey in Los Angeles. I am sure he was addicted to the Garvey movement, especially after my childhood friend Paul Cobb told me my dad was in meetings with his grandfather and father who were Garveyites in West Oakland. Paul says he is a Garveyite and I am too! Africa for the Africans, those and home and those abroad! One God, One Aim, One Destiny!


The "People" have requested Marvin X write and perform a play about Marcus Garvey.

 In New York, actor Ganno Grills performed the role of Marvin X in Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam. Amiri Baraka's play The Toilet  was part of the New Federal Theatre's production by Woody King.

 Nefertiti, Marvin's oldest daughter, demanded dad pass the baton to her. She is now the Executive Director of Six Square, the Austin, Texas Black Arts and Cultural District, also Associate Publisher of her dad's newspaper, The Movement, Voice of the Black Arts Movement International.

 Marvin X in a poetic moment with Oakland's Mayor Libby Schaaf

Professor Marvin X with students at the University of California, Merced, Professor Kim Macmillan's class on theatre. Students invited him to hear them read his play Flowers for the Trashman, a classic of the Black Arts Movement.

Transcending the left/right paradigm

Hal Lindsey, Born Again prophet

Eldridge Cleaver transcended the left/right paradigm. He experienced every ideology on the spectrum. Marvin X traveled with him.  It was an educational experience for Marvin X. See his book Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality and his memoir of Eldridge Cleaver My Friend the Devil. And most especially his drama One Day in the Life, including the scene of his last meeting with Huey P. Newton in a West Oakland Crack House.

 Debbie and Pat Boone

 Charles Colson said the prisons would produce Muslim terrorists. I wonder why? Amiri Baraka said, "In the end, the Negro will be the terrorist!"

 On the right, Rev. Robert Schuller at his Crystal Cathedral. Marvin X went there with Eldridge twice.

 

Jim and Tammy Baker. Eldridge gave his testimony twice at their PTL Club in Charlotte, North Carolin, accompanied by Marvin X. Marvin was shocked when a white chauffeur picked them up at the airport. He was shocked again when he saw the Christian women in long dresses and the men hugged him on both cheeks in Muslim style. 

 Marvin X says, you never know how people are until you live with them. I experienced the love between Eldridge and Kathleen from the beginning of their relationship, and later when we all lived together with their children in Atherton. Their children asked Eldridge, "If you a Christian, why you beat Mama?"

Eldridge and Marvin outside the house where Eldridge and Lil' Bobby Hutton had their shoot out with the Oakland Police. Bobby was murdered in cold blood.

photo Muhammad Kareem

Maestro Marvin X at Laney College Theatre (his former classroom, 1981), reading from his play One Day in the life, his scene of his last meeting with Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, in a West Oakland Crack House.

Life is not about the left and right on the political spectrum, life is about right and wrong, i.e., one can be right but wrong and left but wrong. Sun Ra said, "Marvin you so right, you wrong!" I will say, "You so left you wrong!" Supposedly, politics is about power to the people, yet we often become so dogmatic in our ideological leanings, we say to hell with people power, we must stand our ground in our strident political stance, even to the point of ignoring the suffering of our people.

Yes, there are North American Africans so loyal to the Democratic party that they will ignore our misery to maintain their membership in the Democratic party. I am horrified when I see our people living in tent cities throughout the Bay Area, especially here in Oakland, yet Democratic necros will do nothing to assuage their wretched condition, especially if relief must come from reaching out to the Republican administration to demand low-income housing funds.

We were recently invited to meet with Dr. Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Affairs, but the Democratic necros refused to even consider meeting with him to maintain their loyalty to their Democratic massas. The Christian necro ministers declined to seek low income housing funds from the Trump Administration even though gentrification is depleting their congregations.  As their members make their way to tent cities and migrate to central valley towns from Sacramento to Fresno and beyond, apparently the necro ministers sermonize that Jesus will find a way!

We have learned Wall Street investors now own 40% of single housing units in Oakland, another reason for Oakland's rapidly depleting available units, especially after the investors made mass purchases during the subprime loan scams that tricked North American Africans and many other Americans of their basic wealth.

We heard a lecture by Van Jones who bemoaned that Oakland used to be a majority Black city but has become the bedroom of Silicon Valley. He joked that Oakland should build a wall to keep Silicon Valley out!

In the midst of gentrification, the idea of a Black Arts Movement Business District is becoming a joke, not to mention a Black cultural district for deep East Oakland. Where are we going to be, in museums along the route, with guided tours of Where We Used to Be? And this is true for Berkeley and most certainly for San Francisco.

The Fillmore has been long gone and Hunters Point is on the way. Shall we mention our beloved Harlem with whites walking around like they own the place--alas, they do! Brooklyn is not escaping the ethnic cleansing of America's cities. Some necros are happy that gentrification is upgrading their neighborhoods from the wretchedness of rats, roaches, drugs and endless crime in the street. Of course they are not concerned about crime in the suites!

Where are those necro leaders, those sycophants of the Democratic party, many of whom were on the Redevelopment boards that began necro removal decades ago. At least former San Francisco Mayor Joe Alioto publically apologized for destroying the cultural and economic vitality of the Fillmore. We've heard no apology from the necro removal necros.

Of course nobody wants to hear Trump claim we are victims of the Democratic party. Supposedly, North American Africans should join the reactionary parade for his downfall and champion the second resurrection of the Clinton crime family, even though we think Trump won fair and square, after all, he appealed to the long suffering white nationalist sentiments in Euro-Americans. Being a black nationalist, I have no fear of white nationalists. I don't give a damn if they fly the Confederate flag, I want to see us fly the Red, Black and Green.

I must say I've had experience with the white left and right, especially after assisting my controversial friend Eldridge Cleaver when he returned from exile as a right winger because he told me the left wing sent an emissary to Paris with the message he was not wanted back in America because of the hell he caused in the left. He was told to learn French and of course Cleaver would have none of this, he wanted to come home by any means necessary. He concocted a fantastic story of seeing Jesus in the moon and sold it to the right wing Born Again Christians.

Traveling with him was a great learning experience for me, allowing me great insight of white, conservative Christian America. I can say with surety, I know the white Christian mentality. I know how they feel about Black Christian preachers and believers. If Black preachers didn't graduate from Fuller Theological Seminary or a reasonable facsimile, they were not respected. About they found Jesus one Tuesday night, didn't wash, at least not until at a white Born Again dinner after Cleaver gave his testimony, they turned to me with the question, "Marvin, when did you find the Lord?" Being an actor from the Black Arts Theatre, I quickly replied, "One Tuesday night!" The dinner guests were satisfied and turned to other matters.

As Cleaver's chief aide, my first assignment was to fire all the Jews controlling him, e.g., his booking agent, publicist, secretary, etc. Of course, in doing so I discovered the tight knit Jewish family from coast to coast. As soon as I fired a Jew in San Francisco, the news hit New York the next second.

More importantly, I learned the Christians blamed the Jews for killing Jesus but feigned deep love for Israel, yet they hated the Jews for getting their savior assassinated or crucified. They would give up their pseudo love for Israel in a heartbeat or let's say for a barrel of oil!

The word went out that the Black Muslims had taken over Cleaver's ministry although the white Christians were still in control. Traveling as Cleaver's secretary, driver, bodyguard, photographer and ultimately organizer of his ministry The Eldridge Cleaver Crusades, I did indeed hire Black Muslims to assist him since Christian Blacks were mortally afraid that white man was going to kill him for lying about seeing Jesus in the moon on his balcony one night in Southern France.

He fronted me and my Muslim recruits off as his heathen converts and this cooled out the Christians since they were bankrolling his ministry. I met or was in communication with all the Born Again superstars: Charles Colson of Watergate fame or infamy, Pat and Debbie Boone, Jim and Tammy Baker, Jerry Falwell, Hal Lindsey, Billy Graham, Rev. Robert Schuller at his Hour of Power, et al.

I wouldn't close my eyes praying with these devils! One reason Cleaver hired me was to stop the white Christians from robbing him. After giving his testimony on Jerry Falwell's Old Time Gospel Hour in Lynchburg, VA, they claimed $37,000.00 in donations were received but they wanted Cleaver to give them the power of attorney so they could cash the checks, thus depriving Cleaver of addresses so he could appeal to those who donated and thus begin to establish his own ministry which was his desire after he realized they had their agenda for him which was not his agenda. We had to send a man to Lynchburg to get the money.

Now the white Christians didn't know what to do with me. Although he was twice my size at the time, they wanted to know if I was his bodyguard. I claimed I was his assistant and photographer, which I was, although he pimped my brain on many matters. When he asked me to be his photographer, I told him I wanted the Rolls Royce of cameras, Leicaflex, and he immediately went to a camera shop and bought what I wanted. But when the white Christians saw me with the Leicaflex, they became so jealous and envious I put masking tape over the name!

Now I was his bodyguard too: he gave me a 45 automatic pistol I carried in my camera bag. The Christians didn't trust him, nor did he trust them. Leaving Canada, the USA authorities searched us, then again when we arrived at Seattle airport, and again when we arrived in San Francisco. Truth is that Cleaver probably had more guns as a Born Again Christian than when he was a Black Panther. The USA didn't  know if he was still a Communist and didn't want to take any chances. They usually had a white Christian accompany us as he toured the Born Again circuit. Cleaver began to be disillusioned when he saw they had more secret meetings than Communists, especially when he was the subject!

My assignment became to establish his independent ministry, which I began to do. I had long wanted him to give his testimony at Black churches but he refused. We worked seven days a week, sometimes never seeing Black people.

When he demanded I live with the family so we could communicate better, I moved with them to Atherton, a rich white suburb near Stanford University. His wife Kathleen said to me, "Marvin, the girls used to call for you, but they don't call anymore!" No woman wants a man working seven days a week. I didn't have time to cash my check or get my clothes out the cleaners. Cleaver was a hard working Virgo and I was a Gemini with moon in Virgo, plus the son of a workaholic mother who never took a vacation in her life, while raising nine children and two grandchildren by herself as a real estate broker and lay disciple of Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science.

I pressed him to give his testimony at a Black church. Finally, after much persistence from Bishop  Ernestine Reems of Oakland, I got him to give his "moon shot" or "Golden Shower" at her church in East Oakland. When we arrived for a preview of her venue, she immediately showed us the ceiling with gunshots from the previous occupants, the Nation of Islam, who departed in disgust after failure to pay rent.

His sojourn in the Black churches were not a happy affair. There is simply no comparison of the Black and White Church. In 1976, the Black churches were

no match for the opulent White churches, like the Jim and Tammy Baker plantation in Charlotte, North Carolina, or Rev. Schuller's Crystal Cathedral. It was like going from the massa's house to the slave hut! In the hut, they worked Cleaver from can't see to can't see, then when I went to count the money with the preacher, it was funny money. The slave hut had no air conditioning. On one occasion in a gym in Chico, CA., Cleaver almost fainted because of the heat.

After seven months, I departed from Cleaver and his Christian ministry. Again, it was an educational experience no college or seminary could have taught me. And I knew well conservative Christian America's thinking. Their white supremacy mentality has made them sick and us as well, unless, of course, we understand Rev. Cone's narrative of the Cross and the Lynching Tree!

Firstly, we should have no fear of the White Christian, right wing nationalists. We should engage them for mutual benefit, as Van Jones said recently. We endured the Crack epidemic, now they need us to help them recover from their addiction to opiates, religion included. As Rev. Cone taught us, "They can never understand Christianity until they come to terms with the cross and the lynching tree!"

We can meet with them for mutual good. Neither political party, Democratic or Republican gives a damn about the National Agenda of North Americans, be sure about this and don't drink the Kool Aide of either party. No matter whose in power, stick to our agenda, our national aspirations, and don't be moved!

I appreciate Van Jones for his conversations with Newt Gingrich, a genius of the right. Either we talk with our enemies or we kill them or they kill us. Ralph Nader has a book on the need to transcend the left/right paradigm. I have not read it, but I get the gist!

The best thing I've heard President Trump say is to use common sense. Only thing, Dr. Julia Hare said, "Common sense is not too common these days!" At least Donald Trump is a businessman with whom we might be able to do business. Yes, let's make a deal! My Mother was a business woman. When a girlfriend came by my house on the way to high school and wanted to used my mother's phone, Mama asked her if it was a business call because Mom was a business woman and my girl couldn't use the phone if her call wasn't about business. In the spirit of my mother, if it ain't bout business, get off the goddamn phone talkin' bout where you at? It's not about are you left or right, rather, are you on the side of truth, righteousness, freedom, justice and equality!
--Marvin X
5/31/17