Black Bird Press News & Review

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Marvin X- "Black History is World History" (poem written in the 80's)@Fr...

Saturday, September 9, 2017

Marvin X reads "Dope" by Amiri Baraka

v

IT MUST BE GOD/ALLAH, A POEM FOR AB

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAllah
It must be God/Allah
It must be God/Allah
can't be the devil/shaitan
Hurricane Harvey Irene Jose
must be God/Allah
can't be the devil
devil ain't that strong
must be God Allah
Mexico rocked
Texas floatin like Ivory soap
beggin fa money
Texans didn't vote for Hurricane Sandy money
beggin fa billions for Texas
must be God/Allah
He humble the proud
arrogant boastful
can't be the devil
can't be George Soros
can't be Hillary and funky Bill
can't be Obama drama
can't be statues of Gen. Lee
can't be confederate flag
got Florida people running for their lives
can't be stand your ground Florida
STAND YO ASS IN THE GROUND NOW FLORIDA
can't be Trayvon Martin revenge
can't be the kkk nazis white supremacist
is it black kkk black nazis
democratic party sycophants
care more about party than black people
they beyond black blacks
THEY bbb
YES siree
Must be God/Allah
cleaning his house
draining the swamp
removing manure
can't be the devil/shaitan
must be God/Allah
can't be North Korea
not Kim
North Korea ain't mad at nigguhs
say he won't nuke nigguhs
if they pull they pants up
promise he won't nuke nigguhs
JUST PULL THEY PANTS UP
can't be Kim
must be God/Allah
coming fa the devil/shaitan
coming fa the devil's behind
you wit da devil
go down wit da devil
oooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaagod/allah/
must be God/Allah
can't be the devil
can't be trump
can't be putin
can't be saudi arabia israel egypt persian gulf
can't be iran bringing home the 12 imam
can't be jesus anybody but Jesus
what he say bout earthquakes in diverse places
what he say bout wars and rumors of wars
what JC say bout famine drought
parents against children
children against parents
WIVES AGAINST HUSBANDS
HUSBANDS AGAINST WIVES
can't be Jesus
jesus saves
jesus wouldn't hurt nobody
make nobody homeless
jobless
drugged loaded
jesus wouldn't poison food air water
rob the poor kill the innocent
imprison the righteous
who do dat
the devil shaitan
God don't like ugly
God say joy joy joy to the world
happiness after difficulty
don't worry be happy
Must be God/Allah say
raise yo hands high
storm is over now
storm is over now
storm is over now.
Alhamdulilah
Alhamdulilah
Alhamdulilah..........
--Marvin X/El Muhajir
9/917
Press Release

For Immediate Release

Poet-playwright-educator-activist Marvin X in Concert at the Black Repertory Group Theatre, Saturday, September 30, 7:30 PM.

The Black Repertory Group Theatre is honored to present world renowned writer, poet-playwright Marvin X in Concert on Saturday, September 30, 7:30 PM. The BRGT is located at 3201 Adeline Street, Berkeley. Donation $20.00. For reservations, please call 510-200-4164. Special guests include Blues man Fillmore Slim who just released his autobiography Blues Man Mack; also the multi-talented Phavia Kujuchagulia, singer/writer Rasheedah Mwongozi and Afro-beat singer/musician Piwai.

This event is a benefit for the Movement Newspaper, Voice of the Black Arts Movement. Marvin X is a co-founder along with Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Toure, Last Poets, Barbara Ann Teer,
Haki Madhubuti, et al. The Black Arts Movement is the most radical artistic and literary movement in American history. It is known as the sister of the Black Power movement (Larry Neal), although Marvin X calls it the mother since many of the Black Power fighters were indoctrinated in the Black Arts Movement, e.g., Huey P. Newton said, "Marvin X was my teacher! Many of our comrades came through his Black Arts Theatre: Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Emory Douglas, Samuel Napier, Judy Juanita, Ellendar Barnes, et al."

Marvin X is the author of thirty books, including plays. His one-act Flowers for the Trashman is a BAM classic, written (and produced by the Drama Department) while he was an undergrad at San Francisco State College/University, 1965, where he obtained his B.A. and M.A. in English/Creative Writing, 1974-75. He taught at San Francisco State U, Fresno State U, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Mills College, University of Nevada, Reno, Laney and Merritt Colleges.

Most recently, Marvin X co-founded Oakland's Black Arts Movement Business District, downtown Oakland, along the 14th Street corridor. The BAMBD was approved by the Oakland City Council on January 19, 2016. On the corner of 14th and Broadway, Marvin X teaches at his Academy of da Corner. Ishmael Reed says, "If you want to learn about motivation and inspiration, don't spend all that money going to seminars and workshops, just go stand at 14th and Broadway and watch Marvin X at work. He's Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland!" Bob Holman calls him, "The USA's Rumi, the wisdom of Saadi, the ecstasy of Hafeez!"

Rudolph Lewis says, "Marvin X is a master teacher in many fields of thought; one of America's great story tellers. I'd put him ahead of Mark Twain!"

Fahizah Alim notes, "His writing is orgasmic!"

San Francisco poet laureate emeritus, devorah major exclaims, "His poetry reading put me in swoon!"

Islamic literature professor Dr. Mohja Kahf proclaims, "The starting point for the genre known as Muslim American literature is Marvin X!"

FYI, Marvin X grew up on 7th and Campbell in West Oakland where his parents operated a florist shop. His first writings appeared in the Children's Section of the Oakland Tribune, Aunt Elsie. Prior to Oakland, his parents published The Fresno Voice, a black newspaper in Fresno, along with their real estate business during the mid-40s and late 50s. Most blacks bought their first home through his parents. His father was a Race Man, no doubt associated with Marcus Garvey. According to Marvin's childhood friend, Paul Cobb, Publisher of the Post News Group, he recalls Garveyite meetings at his grandfather's house attended by Marvin's father, Owendell Jackmon I.

Marvin X in the Light

photo Alicia Mason

Marvin X, last teaching assignment in American academia, Reedley Community College, 1981. Marvin retired with a 97% student retention record.
photo Fresno Bee Newspaper

Press Release

For Immediate Release

Poet-playwright-educator-activist Marvin X in Concert at the Black Repertory Group Theatre, Saturday, September 30, 7:30 PM.

The Black Repertory Group Theatre is honored to present world renowned writer, poet-playwright Marvin X in Concert on Saturday, September 30, 7:30 PM. The BRGT is located at 3201 Adeline Street, Berkeley. Donation $20.00. For reservations, please call 510-200-4164. Special guests include Blues man Fillmore Slim who just released his autobiography Blues Man Mack; also the multi-talented Phavia Kujuchagulia, singer/writer Rasheedah Mwongozi and Afro-beat singer/musician Piwai.

This event is a benefit for the Movement Newspaper, Voice of the Black Arts Movement. Marvin X is a co-founder along with Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Toure, Last Poets, Barbara Ann Teer,
Haki Madhubuti, et al. The Black Arts Movement is the most radical artistic and literary movement in American history. It is known as the sister of the Black Power movement (Larry Neal), although Marvin X calls it the mother since many of the Black Power fighters were indoctrinated in the Black Arts Movement, e.g., Huey P. Newton said, "Marvin X was my teacher! Many of our comrades came through his Black Arts Theatre: Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Emory Douglas, Samuel Napier, Judy Juanita, Ellendar Barnes, et al."

Marvin X is the author of thirty books, including plays. His one-act Flowers for the Trashman is a BAM classic, written (and produced by the Drama Department) while he was an undergrad at San Francisco State College/University, 1965, where he obtained his B.A. and M.A. in English/Creative Writing, 1974-75. He taught at San Francisco State U, Fresno State U, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Mills College, University of Nevada, Reno, Laney and Merritt Colleges.

Most recently, Marvin X co-founded Oakland's Black Arts Movement Business District, downtown Oakland, along the 14th Street corridor. The BAMBD was approved by the Oakland City Council on January 19, 2016. On the corner of 14th and Broadway, Marvin X teaches at his Academy of da Corner. Ishmael Reed says, "If you want to learn about motivation and inspiration, don't spend all that money going to seminars and workshops, just go stand at 14th and Broadway and watch Marvin X at work. He's Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland!" Bob Holman calls him, "The USA's Rumi, the wisdom of Saadi, the ecstasy of Hafeez!"

Rudolph Lewis says, "Marvin X is a master teacher in many fields of thought; one of America's great story tellers. I'd put him ahead of Mark Twain!"

Fahizah Alim notes, "His writing is orgasmic!"

San Francisco poet laureate emeritus, devorah major exclaims, "His poetry reading put me in swoon!"

Islamic literature professor Dr. Mohja Kahf proclaims, "The starting point for the genre known as Muslim American literature is Marvin X!"

BIO of Marvin X

Born May 29, 1944, Fowler, California, nine miles south of Fresno. His parents, Owendell and Marian M. Jackmon, published The Fresno Voice, a black newspaper in Fresno, along with their real estate business during the mid-40s and late 50s.

Marvin recalls living with his grandparents in the West Fresno projects when he heard a young man running through the projects shouting the Korean War is over. Marvin was relieved even in his childhood world of being deaf, dumb and blind.

Due to red-linning, most blacks bought their first home through his parents. His father was a Race Man, no doubt associated with Marcus Garvey, also a member of the NAACP. Marvin recalls, "
The most often repeated word in my house was NAACP or N double ACP. Yes, I am blessed to have had conscious parents."

Marvin's West Oakland childhood friend, Paul Cobb, Publisher of the Post News Group, recalls Garveyite meetings at his grandfather's house attended by Marvin's father, Owendell Jackmon I.
Thus, Paul's grandfather, father and Paul were Garveyites, along with others in the West Oakland Black culture and economic district along the Seventh Street corridor.

But as per comprehending the personality known as Marvin X, we must turn to his mother, Marian Murrill Jackmon, born in Fowler, Ca., nine miles south of Fresno in the land of raisins, where Marvin X was born as well, May 29, 1944. A war baby, he'd just came out his mother's womb when America dropped bombs on Japan. He remembers his uncles coming back from WWII and Korea. He remembers going to the drive-in theater and watching the news reel of Palestinians fleeing across recall Sunmaid? His maternal ancestors were pioneers to the central valley. When his maternal great-grandfather died at 99 in 1941, the Fresno Bee Newspaper published a long obituary on him as a black man respected by blacks and whites. But let us turn to his mother who knew he was her star child out of nine other children. Several of his siblings knew it, but he didn't. His mother was a disciple of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, thus there was no medicine cabinet in Marvin's house, especially when his mom became a single mother and met another man with which she had three more children, Gail, Suzy and Tommy, along with the six children she had with Jackmon.

Let us again stress, to understand Marvin X, we must know he was a product of Marian Murrill Jackmon, who was a spiritual woman along with her real estate business that she developed to great success when she returned to Fresno as a single mother of nine children and two grand, a woman who worked seven days per week and never took a vacation except a vacation to be with her children and to search out her lost child, Marvin X, after he got lost and turned out on drugs.

Marvin's concept of truth comes from his Mother's Christian Science, "The truth will set you free. There is no disease except negative thinking. Mind over matter
Marvin X grew up in, and even when he joined the Nation of Islam, his Mother's teachings of know the truth were not far away, along with the due for self economic teachings.

Press Release: Marvin X in Concert

IT MUST BE GOD/ALLAH, A POEM FOR AB

Marvin X in the Light

photo Alicia Mason

Marvin X, last teaching assignment in American academia, Reedley Community College, 1981. Marvin retired with a 97% student retention record.
photo Fresno Bee Newspaper

Sunday, September 3, 2017

Black Bird Press News & Review: Is Burn, Baby, Burn, Marvin X's Greatest poem, written shortly after the Watts Rebellion, 1965?

Thursday, August 31, 2017

drama in the bambd: ayodele's growing home at the flight deck

Ayodele's drama begins with poetry, call it a choreo poem in the tradition of For Colored Girls...." And the poetry is beautiful from the mouth of a poet known as Wordslanger, aka Dr. Ayodele Nzinga. Sad and glad to say, we can appreciate poetry in drama more than in the rap genre that destroys poetry with an over emphasis on rhyming that is mostly meaningless nursery rhymes. But Ayo's poetry advances the theme and this is good.

But, before the poetic beginning, we see a video by Wolfhawk Jaguar. It is based on the Yoruba tradition and it tries to suggest the nature of the myth-ritual that is about to happen. The video shows warriors in the Yoruba tradition and we hear the cast as chorus in a call and response to the Yoruba warriors, thus suggesting a connection between the narrative about to begin and the myth-ritual dance drama we witness in the video.

The play begins in a ritual healing circle of peers, formerly incarcerated men who come to share their testimonies. Dr. Nzinga, writer, director, producer, actress, plays the role of the clinician, guiding the lost and found to their healing destiny.

Again, the poetry is beautiful, meaningful, delightful, but then we transcend to the essential narrative of men talking together, a most unique experience but the ultimate choice of men at the end of their existential existence. Their very bodies and space are of questionable value. If they do not care, for sure, nobody else cares, especially since they are commodities on the stock market, they are constitutional slaves under the 13th Amendment. Yes, they are chattel real, personal property of the State!

Throughout the drama, the brothers come into the circle, check in, share and unravel the conundrums of their lives. Philosophical questions are pondered: what is life, what is home, what is identity, what is being, what is murder and death, what is revenge, what is pain and suffering, what is a mother's love, what is brother love?

After a life time of drama on and off stage, Ayodele constructs this most meaningful tragi-comedy of pain, suffering and ultimately joy. It is tragi-comedy for sure when the young man doesn't shoot the brother pleading for his gun that the man wants to use in a revenge murder.

When Ayodele took us to the video drama, it was overkill. We were still coming down from the central drama so ending the play with the video was unnecessary and a total distraction that sucked our energy away from the dramatic narrative.

Again, the writing was beautiful and powerful. Stanley Hunt's acting is outstanding. One could not distinguish the actors from the recently incarcerated in the cast. They were all believable.

--Marvin X

Black August, 2017

Saturday, August 26, 2017

how about erecting monuments to the heroes of black reconstruction?

JUSTICE INITIATIVE

How About Erecting Monuments to the
Heroes of Reconstruction?

RICHARD VALELLY

August 23, 2017

American Prospect

Portside
Justice Initiative International

Americans should build this pivotal post-Civil War era into the new politics of historical memory.

From left to right, Senator Hiram Revels of Mississippi, Representatives Benjamin Turner of Alabama, Robert DeLarge of South Carolina, Josiah Walls of Florida, Jefferson Long of Georgia, Joseph Rainey and Robert B. Elliot of South Carolina

(Public Domain Image - Library of Congress)

Honoring our Leaders!!!

There is an obvious place to start: Congress and the 16 (yes, 16) African American members from that era who served in both the House and Senate. Not a single bust of any one of them can be found in the U.S. Capitol. That should change. They were literally the world's first black parliamentarians. It is a disgrace that the world's most powerful legislature has ignored their service.

Another possibility is for the Supreme Court of South Carolina to memorialize its first African American justice, Jonathan Jasper Wright, who wrote some 90 opinions during his seven-year tenure on that court. At the time, the South Carolina Supreme Court was the only state supreme court to have an African American member.

Given the sheer number of Confederate memorials, there is bound to be another shocking flashpoint of the kind that rocked Charlottesville and the nation. Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee have vanished from Baltimore and New Orleans. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who authored the truly infamous part of the Dred Scott decision, is gone from Annapolis. So many have come down-or are up for possible removal-that The New York Times posted an interactive map to chart them all.

But there is an alternative politics of memory that Americans can also practice, and it might help to keep fascists out of public squares and do something concrete, literally at the same time: honor Reconstruction. Remembering Reconstruction ought not to shunt aside the politics of Confederate memorials. Yet remembering this pivotal era certainly deserves to be built into the new national politics of memory.

The sesquicentennial of Reconstruction is September 1, 2017. Under the First Military Reconstruction Act of March 1867, a Republican-controlled Congress, having become justifiably concerned about profound legal and extra-legal threats to the statutory civil rights of black Southerners, gave the U.S. Army an administrative deadline of September 1 to directly register all black and white adult males in 10 of the 11 ex-Confederate states (Tennessee, the 11th, already had a biracial electorate.) Echoing the Freedom Summer of the civil rights movement, University of Chicago historian Julie Saville has called the summer of 1867 "Registration Summer."

These elections set in motion deliberations in 1868 about the proper design and structure of new state governments that were designed to be radically more democratic than any of the South's previous incarnations.

In the fall of 1867, this new biracial electorate elected delegates to state constitutional conventions. These elections set in motion deliberations in 1868 about the proper design and structure of new state governments that were designed to be radically more democratic than any of the South's previous incarnations. Those state governments were also expected to formally support the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which established African American citizenship and more broadly a new, expansive view of civil rights.

Americans have been arguing about Reconstruction ever since. Like the republic founded in 1787 in Philadelphia, Registration Summer produced a deeply imperfect political system. The ratification of the 14th Amendment expressly kept all women from voting. Native Americans and Chinese Americans in California soon discovered that the new constitutional amendments-the 13th, 14th, and 15th-did not quite include them (at least not without arduous litigation in the federal courts).

The sesquicentennial of Reconstruction will clock past one anniversary after another, including the insurrection of the Ku Klux Klan against state and local governments run by black officials and white Republican allies; the militant defense of democracy by the Grant administration; and little-known post-Reconstruction anniversaries like the black Exoduster movement to Kansas and black migrations to Oklahoma territory and Liberia. As Americans ponder these milestones, debates over the meanings of these events are certain to follow.

Finding a middle ground will be difficult. The protagonists of the Civil War have always seemed noble. That war seems to have been fought over higher ideals than Americans see in today's petty political squabbles. As polls show, this is one reason why many Americans remain uneasy about the removal of Confederate monuments.

Reconstruction's teeming cast of characters, who were busy at party politics, setting and collecting taxes, and executing public contracts, never quite measure up. Moreover, it has taken three-quarters of a century to come to grips with the basic democratic nature of the period. Writing during the Great Depression, W.E.B. Du Bois carefully showed how deeply weird the then-dominant literature on Reconstruction was-he did this at the close of his 1935 masterpiece, Black Reconstruction. The standard view was that it was all a terrible mistake. Du Bois argued, rightly, that it was much more of a triumph than most educated whites understood. In colleges and graduate programs all around the country, people were buying into a racist caricature.

Thanks to that work's enduring impact, and to the careful work of Du Bois's great successors, historians John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward, and of theirstudents and successors like Eric Foner, Du Bois's alternative view-that Reconstruction was a great democratic expansion-has become largely accepted.

The post-bellum system of crop liens (the credit arrangements sorting out who got paid when crops were sold) were fair, labor unions emerged for the first time, the courts were impartial, and police forces were integrated.

There was robust party competition at all levels, from local to state to national electoral politics. The post-bellum system of crop liens (the credit arrangements sorting out who got paid when crops were sold) were fair, labor unions emerged for the first time, the courts were impartial, and police forces were integrated.

Public education came to the South: The University of South Carolina Law School was desegregated and the New Orleans school system was desegregated for a brief period. A nascent system of black higher education emerged. Literacy rates among African Americans rose sharply, as did property ownership. A vibrant two-party press flourished. Religious liberty surged as African Americans quickly built a vast system of churches and church schools.

Contrary to the oft-asserted statement that Reconstruction was a time of white disenfranchisement, both white and black voters voted at very high rates. The disenfranchisement of major ex-Confederate officeholders was lifted by Congress. This, too, was good for American democracy. But many Americans wonder: If Reconstruction was so great, why did it fall apart so suddenly? However, the premise of the question is wrong.

The post-Reconstruction decades after the 1877 Compromise were much more democratic than is widely known. They certainly featured white-on-black electoral violence, which was also rampant during Reconstruction. There were anti-black electoral fraud and several steps toward legal black disenfranchisement. Yet these years also featured a major biracial party insurgency in Virginia, such as the little-known but important biracial Readjuster movement, and a similar movement about 15 years later in North Carolina in the 1890s. African Americans continued to vote at remarkably high rates during the post-Reconstruction decades and before the onset of black disenfranchisement.

Historians sometimes suggest that post-Reconstruction politics was a charade and point to the violent overthrow of the biracial Populist-Republican fusion government of North Carolina at the end of the 19th century. The idea here is that those who really had political power took the gloves off everywhere in the South and smashed their opposition when they decided that it was finally time to end any prospect of biracial government.

But the North Carolina putsch hardly shows that disenfranchisement swept all at once through the South. Instead, formal legal disenfranchisement was an extended and uncertain process of policy diffusion and change that began in Florida in 1889 and ended in Georgia in 1907, or in Oklahoma in 1910, depending on which definition of the South one uses. The disenfranchisers hardly knew in advance that they would eventually sweep most of these state and local governments away; there was a repeated and strenuous effort to disenfranchise African Americans in Maryland that utterly failed.

Nowhere else in the 19th-century world, in Europe or Latin America, did people who had been in slavery or serfdom shift so rapidly and transformatively into equal and full political, indeed constitution-amending, citizenship.

The most important point is that from 1867 up to the creation of a single-party/single-race rule in the South, the United States was unique: It was the world's only biracial democratic republic. No other post-emancipation society anywhere ever had a comparable experience-not Cuba or any of the Caribbean slave societies, Brazil, or Russia. Nowhere else in the 19th-century world, in Europe or Latin America, did people who had been in slavery or serfdom shift so rapidly and transformatively into equal and full political, indeed constitution-amending, citizenship. Nowhere else did a myriad of officeholders and national legislators-men who had either themselves been recently enslaved or who, though free-born, had lived and worked previously under a fiercely unequal system-come to play prominent roles in legislation, local courts, and state and local administration.

With Reconstruction, Americans invented a new kind of regime, unique among 19th-century nations. It was profoundly and massively redistributive in a way that the world had never seen up to that point, for it sealed the emancipation of human property and reversed the de-facto re-enslavement of 1866 by the white supremacist governments that President Andrew Johnson created by proclamation during his "presidential Reconstruction."

Thanks to the long civil rights movement, and to bipartisan action in the 1950s, 1960s, and after, America reinvented the biracial republic in new form, now more multiethnic and, thanks to the impact of the 19th Amendment, much more gender-neutral than the first one. During those decades, Americans grew to see Reconstruction very differently than they did during the heyday of Jim Crow, when Reconstruction was instead widely execrated among whites as a policy disaster.

As the campaign to bring down Confederate monuments shows, many Americans have grown to see the early 20th-century heyday of Confederate commemoration differently. That commemoration was meant to celebrate the final suppression of Reconstruction's democratic revolution. Commentators regularly point this out. But the next question in the conversation hasn't happened: You never hear someone on television asking, "Why don't we commemorate Reconstruction?"

There are, in fact, many commemorative possibilities. Americans hardly have to mount plaques or build statues for all of them-indeed, so many people merit commemoration that there would be a glut of tributes. But there were thousands of African American office-holders and there were countless events. They are all rich with meaning for understanding a democratic world that in many ways is still lost to us. Recovering and remembering them would certainly help Americans to see their own democracy with new eyes.