Black-on-Black Violence: A by Product of Capitalism

By Abdul Jabbar Caliph 

Historically, the African working class movement has always had to struggle against the destructive effects of colonialism. From the very first moment that we were kidnapped and forced into slavery we have struggled to liberated ourselves and now once again we in the Pan-African International Coordinating Committee (PICC) are calling on the Pan-African Liberation Movement (PALM) to step forward and take charge in ridding ourselves of this horrible legacy that has left our communities on the brink of destruction.  

All across the nation the colonized African working class community is forced to seek cover in their own houses because of the harsh legacy of domestic colonization and being trapped in cities that are under the indirect control of Neo-colonialist. It is important that we understand that the issue of horizontal violence (Black-on-Black violence) is counter-revolutionary, that it is a part of the counterinsurgency tactics that United States government uses to wage low-intensity-warfare inside of our community.

Here in Baltimore, Maryland we realize that the majority of murders committed in this city, a city that is predominately African and working class, are the direct result of the lack of leadership displayed by the current administration, and the administrations before it. It is this mis-leadership that refuses to represent the majority of its’ citizens: the African working class. They have proven to be counterrevolutionary and aligned themselves with white capitalist who keep us divided, that rob and murder us daily. 

It is this counterrevolutionary attitude that has hindered the advancement of any serious revolutionary formation being established in this city. Many of the residents in this city have remained somewhat loyal to the very same corrupt administration that takes advantage of them daily. They think that the only way that they can make any serious advancement is by adopting the policy of the capitalist: political oppression and economical exploitation (murder and mayhem) followed by selling drugs. It is this policy that had led to the vast increase of murders inside of our communities, not just here in the state of Maryland but also throughout all out our domestically colonized communities.

Here recently we have experienced a sharp increase in the number of murders inside of our communities, incidents that would usually shock us, but that we have begun to accept as normal. They have become business as usual. No outrage, no shock, only limited responses. This is how you know that you are a colonized people when you no longer value human life especially your own. Our children are murdered and many of us sit by saying and doing nothing.

Just this past week we witnessed three murders and all people did was hold candlelight vigils. The first one was the murder of a five year old little girl by her alleged father. She was found dead in the bath tub beaten to death and sexually assaulted. The second one was the a young man, alleged to be involved in the drug game, found shot to death in Lincoln Park, a notorious dumping grounds for dead bodies. Now we discover the death of a young thirteen year old. It is this girl’s death that one would think would thing that the residents of this city would be outraged over.  

On Saturday, March 3, 2012 we learned the death of thirteen year old Monae Turnage. Killed I believe accidental by two African working class children ages twelve and thirteen firing a .22-caliber rifle in the city limits. After the death of this little girl they attempted to cover up the fact that they had killed her by moving her dead body to another location and covering her up with trash. The body was later discovered by someone in her family. Both children were locked up as juveniles and placed in a juvenile detention center on charges of juvenile involuntary manslaughter.

The kicker to this whole incident is that one of the children’s mother’s boyfriends, a Baltimore City Police Officer named John A. Ward, thirty-two year old, four-year veteran of the PIGS; a par-military colonial standing occupying army has had charges brought up against him for the allegations of trying to cover up the murder. The weapon that was used in this murder was discovered in the trunk of his personal vehicle.

This isn’t something new. The PIGS here are always involved in criminal activity. Last year the PIGS were involved in two major incidents.  The first one was in conducting drug sells in the parking lot of Northwestern Police stations parking lot. The second one was in taking kickbacks from a tow truck company. The Mayor of Baltimore City, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has called the behavior in this case “disgusting”.

The real disgusting thing is that his involvement in the case only got him a suspension and that the Mayor refused to fire him or lock him up. The real disgusting thing is in the way the case was handled, the African working class community deserves better and needs to organize itself politically in order to achieve the democratic space that they need in order to fight back. Only through this path will we be able to break free of Capitalism a rotten, oppressive and exploitive, inhuman system that drains the lives out of its victims.

Our children deserve more than candlelight vigils they deserve justice and in order to combat this colonialist legacy of horizontal violence we must begin to institute a cultural revolution which stress the need for a new moral vision inside of our domestically colonized community. This vision must encompass the revolutionary theory and practices of liberation for the African working class and the establishment of true power under the leadership of the African working class.

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Equality in Marriage: An Issue of Human Rights

By Abdul Jabbar Caliph

“We’ve got to find a way to reconcile ourselves to living in a community, one group with the other. To be successful, the struggle must be waged with resolute efforts that are kept strictly within the framework of our democratic society. This means reaching, educating and moving large enough groups of people of both races to stir the conscience of the nation.” Martin Luther King

All across the United States we are seeing a highly political charged issue being debated that will determine the future of millions of colonized subjects trapped within the decadent boarders of this country. Some have called it disgusting while others have come out in support of it. Whether you call it a civil union, domestic partnership or gay marriage it is an issue that has divide the community not just along racial lines but class lines as well.  

Here in the State of Maryland we have seen the contradictions around this issue; and we have seen how the capitalist power structure has used this issue to divide the masses of the people. This issue has and is being used to elevate a few individuals and professional political operatives to a higher political office at the expense of the masses. It is an issue that keeps the people’s attention misdirected, focused away from the real contradictions that exist in this capitalist society: the contradiction of political oppression and economical exploitation.

We in the Pan-African International Coordinating Committee (PICC) have taken the following political position on this issue. First, we recognize the fact that this a highly charged political issue that is being used to divided the masses. Second, this is not a civil rights issue but an issue of human rights, humanity’s treatment of humanity. Third, we have taken the political position of the original Black Panther Party (BPP) on this issue: as along as a comrade is doing the political work to be free from political oppression and economical exploitation then we have to respect their rights to be a part of humanity, and live the kind of lifestyle they choose. As long as that lifestyle is not harming the interest of the people involved, or the community at large, we have no right to interfere and you had better not touch them. Finally, we also realize that this issue opens the door for other forms of marriage to be accepted such as polygamy. Maryland State must recognize the fact that they cannot regulate true love or what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes.  

We realize that gay bashing can only stop when humanity decides to stand up and end capitalism as a tool of oppression, only under Socialism will gays be able to be recognized as human beings. Second, in order to win their rights of equality the LBGT community must close ranks if this is too be achieved? They are too divided among themselves right now. Third, that which passes itself off as the progressive left in this country must take a stand and stop vacillating on this issue. This community has reached out for help and they deserve an answer. We recommend that instead of waiting and looking for support on this issue that the LBGT take charge and push forward their political campaign.

The LBGT community has not awakened to the fact that the issue homosexual couples being able to marry is being used to elevate certain political officials to higher office. Even through the issue passed both the Senate and the House the bill will not be signed into law by legislators. It will go to a referendum and the people will decide the issue.

This is a tool that relives Maryland States political officials of having any real commitment to the issue, not only that but the bill can still be defeated by gathering 18,579 signatures to stop it from going to the November 6, 2012 ballot. Del. Neil Parrot, a Western Maryland Republican is believed to be heading up the opposition to this bill. He has established a websites making it easier for people to see exactly how their names are listed on the Maryland voters roll so that you can see if the petition is signed correctly. The Ujima People’s Progressive Party (UPP) is establishing such a program in order to become the first Black official independent political party in the State of Maryland.

As we have suggested to a few of our comrades in the Liberate Baltimore Coalition (LBC), the LBGT community must take the lead on this issue. They must be willing to establish and give direction within the campaign, not only must these members be willing to do this they must seek the support of the coalition in order to develop strategy and tactics (goals and objectives) that can be achieved realistically. They need to recognize the fact that this campaign is far from being over.

Malcolm X was right when he said that we have to demand Human Rights not Civil Rights. Civil Rights get passed as Amendments into law and or voted on every 10 or 20 years to see if they are still of importance. The Voters Rights Act is such an issue. Human Rights are the right that you are born with and the rights that everybody must recognize

In closing I want to encourage the people involved in the fight for human rights for the LGBT community keep their heads up and come out swinging with both fist on this issue. If they wait for someone else to take charge of this campaign, they may never get another chance.  

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The Black Power Defined

Martin Luther King Jr.

June 11, 1967

When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance only when they have accumulated the power to enforce change. The powerful never lose opportunities-they remain available to them. They powerless, on the other hand, never experience opportunity-it is always arriving at a later time. 

The nettlesome task of Negroes today is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands. We must develop, from strength, a situation in which the government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us. It would be the height of naiveté to wait passively until the administration had somehow been infused with such blessings of good will that it implored us for our programs. 

We must frankly acknowledge that in past years our creativity and imagination were not employed in learning how to develop power. We found a method in nonviolent protest that worked, and we employed it enthusiastically. We did not have leisure to probe for a deeper understanding of its laws and lines of development. Although our actions were bold and crowned with successes, they were substantially improvised and spontaneous. They attained the goals set for them but carried the blemishes of our inexperience.

This is where the civil rights movement stands today. Now we must take the next major step of examining the levers of power which Negroes must grasp to influence the course of events.
In our society power sources can always finally be traced to ideological, economic and political forces.

In the area of ideology, despite the impact of the works of a few Negro writers on a limited number of white intellectuals, all too few Negro thinkers have exerted an influence on the main currents of American thought. Nevertheless, Negroes have illuminated imperfections in the democratic structure that were formerly only dimly perceived, and have forced a concerned reexamination of the true meaning of American democracy. As a consequence of the vigorous Negro protest, the whole nation has for a decade probed more searchingly the essential nature of democracy, both economic and political. By taking to the streets and there giving practical lessons in democracy and its defaults, Negroes have decisively influenced white thought. 

Lacking sufficient access to television, publications and broad forums, Negroes have had to write their most persuasive essays with the blunt pen of marching ranks. The many white political leaders and well-meaning friends who ask Negro leadership to leave the streets may not realize that they are asking us effectively to silence ourselves. More white people learned more about the shame of America, and finally faced some aspects of it, during the years of nonviolent protest than during the century before. Nonviolent direct action will continue to be a significant source of power until it is made irrelevant by the presence of justice. 

The economic highway to power has few entry lanes for Negroes. Nothing so vividly reveals the crushing impact of discrimination and the heritage of exclusion as the limited dimensions of Negro business in the most powerful economy in the world. America’s industrial production is half of the world’s total, and within it the production of Negro business is so small that it can scarcely be measured on any definable scale.

Yet in relation to the Negro community the value of Negro business should not be underestimated. In the internal life of the Negro society it provides a degree of stability. Despite formidable obstacles it has developed a corps of men of competence and organizational discipline who constitute a talented leadership reserve, who furnish inspiration and who are a resource for the development of programs and planning. They are a strength among the weak though they are weak among the mighty.

There exist two other areas, however, where Negroes can exert substantial influence on the broader economy. As employees and consumers, Negro numbers and their strategic disposition endow them with a certain bargaining strength. 

Within the ranks of organized labor there are nearly two million Negroes, and they are concentrated in key industries. In the truck transportation, steel, auto and food industries, which are the backbone of the nation’s economic life, Negroes make up nearly twenty percent of the organized work force, although they are only ten percent of the general population. This potential strength is magnified further by the fact of their unity with millions of white workers in these occupations. As co-workers there is a basic community of interest that transcends many of the ugly divisive elements of traditional prejudice. There are undeniably points of friction, for example, in certain housing and education questions. But the severity of the abrasions is minimized by the more commanding need for cohesion in union organizations. 

The union record in relation to Negro workers is exceedingly uneven, but potential for influencing union decisions still exists. In many of the larger unions the white leadership contains some men of ideals and many more who are pragmatists. Both groups find they are benefited by a constructive relationship to their Negro membership. For those compelling reasons, Negroes, who are almost wholly a working people, cannot be casual toward the union movement. This is true even though some unions remain uncontestably hostile. 

In days to come, organized labor will increase its importance in the destinies of Negroes. Negroes pressed into the proliferating service occupations-traditionally unorganized and with low wages and long hours-need union protection, and the union movement needs their membership to maintain its relative strength in the whole society. On this new frontier Negroes may well become the pioneers that they were in the early organizing days of the thirties. 

To play our role fully as Negroes we will also have to strive for enhanced representation and influence in the labor movement. Our young people need to think of union careers as earnestly as they do of business careers and professions. They could do worse than emulate A. Phillip Randolph, who rose to the executive council of the AFL-CIO and became a symbol of the courage, compassion and integrity of an enlightened labor leader. 

Indeed, the question may be asked why we have produced only one Randolph in nearly half a century. Discrimination is not the whole answer. We allowed ourselves to accept middle-class prejudices against the labor movement. Yet this is one of those fields in which higher education is not a requirement for high office. In shunning it, we have lost an opportunity. Let us try to regain it now, at a time when the joint forces of Negroes and labor may be facing a historic task of social reform. 

The other economic leader available to the Negro is as a consumer. The Southern Christian Leadership Council has pioneered in developing mass boycott movements in a frontal attack on discrimination. In Birmingham it was not the marching alone that brought about integration of public facilities in 1963. The downtown business establishments suffered for weeks under our almost unbelievably effective boycott. The significant percentage of their sales that vanished, the ninety-eight percent of their Negro customers who stayed home, educated them forcefully to the dignity of the Negro as a consumer. 

Later we crystallized our experiences in Birmingham and elsewhere and developed a department in SCLC called Operation Breadbasket. This has as its primary aim the securing of more and better jobs for the Negro people. It calls on the Negro community to support those businesses that will give a fair share of jobs to Negroes and to withdraw its support from those businesses that have discriminatory policies. 

Operation Breadbasket is carried out mainly by clergymen. First, a team of ministers calls on the management of a business in the community to request basic facts on the company’s total number of employees, the number of Negro employees, the departments or job classifications in which all employees are located, and the salary ranges for each category. The team then returns to the steering committee to evaluate the data and to make a recommendation concerning the number of new and upgraded jobs that should be requested. Then the team transmits the request to the management to hire or upgrade a specified number of "qualifiable" Negroes within a reasonable step of real power and pressure is taken: a massive call for economic withdrawal from the company’s product and accompanying demonstrations if necessary. 

At present SCLC has Operation Breadbasket functioning in some twelve cities, and the results have been remarkable. In Atlanta, for instance, the Negroes’ earning power has been increased by more than twenty million dollars annually over the past three years through a carefully disciplined program of selective buying and negotiation by the Negro ministers. During the last eight months in Chicago, Operation Breadbasket successfully completed negotiations with three major industries: milk, soft drinks and chain grocery stores. Four of the companies involved concluded reasonable agreements only after short "don’t buy" campaigns. Seven other companies were able to make the requested changes across the conference table, without necessitating a boycott. Two other companies, after providing their employment information to the ministers, were sent letters of commendation for their healthy equal-employment practices. The net results add up to approximately eight hundred new and upgraded jobs for Negro employees, worth a little over seven million dollars in new annual income for Negro families. In Chicago we have recently added a new dimension to Operation Breadbasket. Along with requesting new job opportunities, we are now requesting that businesses with stores in the ghetto deposit the income for those establishments in Negro-owned banks, and that Negro-owned products be placed on the counters of all their stores. In this way we seek to stop the drain of resources out of the ghetto with nothing remaining there for its rehabilitation. 

The final major area of untapped power for the Negro is the political arena. Higher Negro birth rates and increasing Negro migration, along with the exodus of the white population to the suburbs, are producing the fast-gathering Negro majorities in the large cities. This changing composition of the cities has political significance. Particularly in the North, the large cities substantially determine the political destiny of the state. These states, in turn, hold the dominating electoral votes in presidential contests. The future of the Democratic Party, which rests so heavily on its coalition of urban minorities, cannot be assessed without taking into account which way the Negro vote turns. The wistful hopes of the Republican Party for large-city influence will also be decided not in the boardrooms of great corporations but in the teeming ghettos. 

The growing Negro vote in the South is another source of power. As it weakens and enfeebles the dixiecrats, by concentrating its blows against them, it undermines the congressional coalition of southern reactionaries and their northern Republican colleagues. That coalition, which has always exercised a disproportionate power in Congress by controlling its major committees, will lose its ability to frustrate measures of social advancement and to impose its perverted definition of democracy on the political thought of the nation. 

The Negro vote a present is only a partially realized strength. It can still be doubled in the South. In the North even where Negroes are registered in equal proportion to whites, they do not vote in the same proportions. Assailed by a sense of futility, Negroes resist participating in empty ritual. However, when the Negro citizen learns that united and organized pressure can achieve measurable results, he will make his influence felt. Out of this conscious act, the political power of the aroused minority will be enhanced and consolidated. 

We have many assets to facilitate organization. Negroes are almost instinctively cohesive. We band together readily, and against white hostility we have an intense and wholesome loyalty to each other. We are acutely conscious of the need, and sharply sensitive to the importance, of defending our own. Solidarity is a reality in Negro life, as it always has been among the oppressed. 

On the other hand, Negroes are capable of becoming competitive, carping and, in an expression of self-hate, suspicious and intolerant of each other. A glaring weakness in Negro life is lack of sufficient mutual confidence and trust. 

Negro leaders suffer from this interplay of solidarity and divisiveness, being either exalted excessively or grossly abused. Some of these leaders suffer from an aloofness and absence of faith in their people. The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white man’s contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man’s representative of the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him. 

I learned a lesson many years ago from a report of two men who flew to Atlanta to confer with a Negro civil rights leader at the airport. Before they could begin to talk, the porter sweeping the floor drew the local leader aside to talk about a matter that troubled him. After fifteen minutes has passed, one of the visitors said bitterly to his companion, "I am just too busy for this kind of nonsense. I haven’t come a thousand miles to sit and wait while he talks to a porter."
The other replied "When the day comes that he stops having time to talk to a porter, on that day I will not have the time to come one mile to see him." 

We need organizations that are permeated with mutual trust, incorruptibility and militancy. Without this spirit we may have numbers but they will add up to zero. We need organizations that are responsible, efficient and alert. We lack experience because ours is a history of disorganization. But we will prevail because our need for progress is stronger than the ignorance force upon us. If we realize how indispensable is responsible militant organization to our struggle, we will create it as we managed to crate underground railroads, protest groups, self-help societies and the churches that have always been our refuge, our source of hope and our source of action. 

Negroes have been slow to organize because they have been traditionally manipulated. The political powers take advantage of three major weaknesses: the manner in which our political leaders emerge; our failure so far to achieve effective political alliances; and the Negro’s general reluctances to participate fully in political life. 

The majority of Negro political leaders do not ascend to prominence on the shoulders of mass support. Although genuinely popular leaders are now emerging, most are still selected by white leadership, elevated to position, supplied with resources and inevitably subjected to white control. The mass of Negroes nurtures a healthy suspicion toward this manufactured leader, who spends little time in persuading them that he embodies personal integrity, commitment and ability and offers few programs and less service. Tragically, he is in too many respects not a fighter for a new life but a figurehead of the old one. Hence, very few Negro political leaders are impressive or illustrious to their constituents. They enjoy only limited loyalty and qualified support. 

This relationship in turn hampers the Negro leader in bargaining with genuine strength and independent firmness with white party leaders. The whites are all too well aware of his impotence and his remoteness from his constituents, and they deal with him as a powerless subordinate. He is accorded a measure of dignity and personal respect but not political power.
The Negro politician therefore fines himself in a vacuum. He has no base in either direction on which to build influence and attain leverage. 

In two national polls among Negroes to name their most respected leaders, out of the highest fifteen, only a single politician figure, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, was included and he was in the lower half of both lists. This is in marked contrast to polls in which white people choose their most popular leaders; political personalities are always high on the lists and are represented in goodly numbers. There is no Negro personality evoking affection, respect and emulation to correspond to John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Lehman, Earl Warren, and Adlai Stevenson, to name but a few. 

The circumstances in which Congressman Powell emerged into leadership and the experiences of his career are unique. It would not shed light on the larger picture to attempt to study the very individual factors that apply to him. It is fair to say no other Negro political leader is similar, either in the strengths he possesses, the power he attained or the errors he has committed. 

And so we shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect, who have moral and ethical principles we can applaud with an enthusiasm that enables us to rally support for them based on confidence and trust. We will have to demand high standards and give consistent, loyal support to those who merit it. We will have to be a reliable constituency for those who merit it. We will have to be a reliable constituency for those who prove themselves to be committed political warriors in our behalf. When our movement has partisan political personalities whose unity with their people is unshakable and whose independence is genuine, they will be treated in white political councils with the respect those who embody such power deserve. 

In addition to the development of genuinely independent and representative political leaders, we shall have to master the art of political alliances. Negroes should be natural allies of many white reform and independent political groups, yet they are more commonly organized by the old-line machine politicians. We will have to learn to refuse crumbs from the big-city machines and steadfastly demand a fair share of the loaf. When the machine politicians demur, we must be prepared to act in unity and throw our support to such independent parties or reform wings of the major parties as are prepared to take our demands seriously and fight for them vigorously. 

The art of alliance politics is more complex and more intricate than it is generally pictured. It is easy to put exciting combinations on paper. It evokes happy memories to recall that our victories in the past decade were won with a broad collation of organizations representing a wide variety of interests. But we deceive ourselves if we envision the same combination backing structural changes in the society. It did not come together for such a program and will not reassemble for it. 

A true alliance is based upon some self-interest of each component group and a common interest into which they merge. For an alliance to have permanence and loyal commitment from its various elements, each of them must have a goal from which it benefits and none must have an outlook in basic conflict with the others. 

If we employ the principle of selectivity along these lines, we will find millions of allies who in serving themselves also support us, and on such sound foundations unity and mutual trust and tangible accomplishment will flourish. 

In the changing conditions of the South, we will find alliances increasingly instrumental in political progress. For a number of years there were de facto alliances in some states in which Negroes voted to a moderate position, even though he did not articulate an appeal for Negro votes. In recent years the transformation has accelerated, and many white candidates have entered alliances publicly. As they perceived that the Negro vote was becoming a substantial and permanent factor, they could not remain aloof from it. More and more, competition will develop among white political forces for such a significant bloc of votes, and a monolithic white unity based on racism will no longer be possible. 

Racism is a tenacious evil, but it is not immutable. Millions of underprivileged whites are in the process of considering the contradiction between segregation and economic progress. White supremacy can feed their egos but not their stomachs. They will not go hungry or forgo the affluent society to remain racially ascendant. 

Governors Wallace and Maddox whose credentials as racists are impeccable, understand this, and for that reason they represent themselves as liberal populists as well. Temporarily they can carry water on both shoulders, but the ground is becoming unsteady beneath their feet. Each of them was faced in the primary last year with a new breed of white southerner who for the first time in history met with Negro organizations to solicit support and championed economic reform without racial demagogy. These new figures won significant numbers of white votes, insufficient for victory but sufficient to point the future directions of the South. 

It is true that the Negro vote has not transformed the North; but the fact that northern alliances and political action generally have been poorly executed is no reason to predict that the negative experiences will be automatically extended in the North or duplicated in the South. The northern Negro has never used direct action on a mass scale for reforms, and anyone who predicted ten years ago that the southern Negro would also neglect it would have dramatically been proved in error. 

Everything Negroes need will not like magic materialize from the use of the ballot. Yet as a lever of power, if it is given studious attention and employed with the creativity we have proved through our protest activities we possess, it will help to achieve many far-reaching changes during our lifetimes. 

The final reason for our dearth of political strength, particularly in the North, arises from the grip of an old tradition on many individual Negroes. They tend to hold themselves aloof from politics as a serious concern. They sense that they are manipulated, and their defense is a cynical disinterest. To safeguard themselves on this front from the exploitation that torments them in so many areas, they shut the door to political activity and retreat into the dark shadows of passivity. Their sense of futility is deep and in terms of their bitter experiences it is justified. They cannot perceive political action as a source of power. It will take patient and persistent effort to eradicate this mood, but the new consciousness of strength developed in a decade of stirring agitation can be utilized to channel constructive Negro activity into political life and eliminate the stagnation produced by an outdated and defensive paralysis. 

In the future we must become intensive political activists. We must be guided in this direction because we need political strength, more desperately than any other group in American society. Most of us are too poor to have adequate economic power, and many of us are too rejected by the culture to be part of any tradition of power. Necessity will draw us toward the power inherent in the creative uses of politics. 

Negroes nurture a persisting myth that the Jews of America attained social mobility and status solely because they had money. It is unwise to ignore the error for many reasons. In a negative sense it encourages anti-Semitism and overestimates money as a value. In a positive sense, the full truth reveals a useful lesson. 

Jews progressed because they possessed a tradition of education combined with social and political action. The Jewish family enthroned education and sacrificed to get it. The result was far more than abstract learning. Uniting social action with educational competences, Jews became enormously effective in political life. Those Jews who became lawyers, businessmen, writers, entertainers, union leaders and medical men did not vanish into the pursuits of their trade exclusively. They lived an active life in political circles, learning the techniques and arts of politics. 

Nor was it only the rich who were involved in social and political action. Millions of Jews for half a century remained relatively poor, but they were far from passive in social and political areas. They lived in homes in which politics was a household word. They were deeply involved in radical parties, liberal parties, and conservative parties — they formed many of the. Very few Jews sank into despair and escapism even when discrimination assailed the spirit and corroded initiative. Their life raft in the sea of discouragement was social action. 

Without overlooking the towering differences between the Negro and Jewish experiences, the lesson of Jewish mass involvement in social and political action and education is worthy of emulation. Negroes have already started on this road in creating the protest movement, but this is only a beginning. We must involve everyone we can reach, even those with inadequate education, and together acquire political sophistication by discussion, practice, and reading.
The many thousands of Negroes who have already found intellectual growth and spiritual fulfillment on this path know its creative possibilities. They are not among the legions of the lost, they are not crushed by the weight of centuries. Most heartening, among the young the spirit of challenge and determination for change is becoming an unquenchable force. 

But the scope of struggle is still too narrow and too restricted. We must turn more of our energies and focus our creativity on the useful things that translate into power. We in this generation must do the work and in doing it stimulate our children to learn and acquire higher levels of skill and technique. 

It must become a crusade so vital that civil rights organizers do not repeatedly have to make personal calls to summon support. There must be a climate of social pressure in the Negro community that scorns the Negro who will not pick up his citizenship rights and add his strength enthusiastically and voluntarily to the accumulation of power for himself and his people. The past years have blown fresh winds through ghetto stagnation, but we are on the threshold of a significant change that demands a hundredfold acceleration. By 1970 then of our larger cities will have Negro majorities if present trends continue. We can shrug off this opportunity or use it for a new vitality to deepen and enrich our family and community life. 

We must utilize the community action groups and training centers no proliferating in some slum areas to crate not merely an electorate, but a conscious, alert and informed people who know their direction and whose collective wisdom and vitality commands respect. The slave heritage can be cast into the dim past by our consciousness of our strengths and a resolute determination to use them in our daily experiences. 

Power is not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages. It is social force any group can utilize by accumulation its elements in a planned deliberate campaign to organized it under its own control.

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‘America I Am’: Omission of Resistance:

By Chenhotep Freeman

I want to tell you about the touring museum exhibition that covers more than

13,000 square feet and will visit a total of ten major (African/Black) cities during it’s

four year campaign across the U.S.  It is supported and presented by broadcaster and author Tavis Smiley and organized by the Cincinnati Museum Arts Center, and the Arts & Exhibitions International, the exhibit displays more than 200 artifacts from 1600 CE to Present day. This exhibit was inspired by a quote from the late African intellectual W.E.B. Dubois, “Would America be America without her Negro Peoples?” By the conclusion of this reading I plan to clearly answer this question, and also to expose the misleading content that comprises this campaign.

Being a proud member of the African Diaspora, when I heard about this traveling exhibition in the celebration of our ‘imprint’ on American society, like so many others I was excited. As any honest and freethinking human being should be aware of America’s history with Africans is full of lies, genocide, and fierce resistance on behalf of the Africans who were kidnapped and dehumanized by the European ‘Americans’. Although, there were still many events to be celebrated during the last 500 years of African peoples struggle to reclaim our self-determination. The modern day lavish lifestyles of American living were built and still exist on the murderous exploitation and oppression of African people. Before entering the exhibit I began to think critically about the involvement of Wal-Mart, seeing as they are notorious for their profits over any and EVERYTHING, business policy included. My next observation was during my first trip to view the exhibit when I recognized that there were NO people of African decent who were hired in order to operate this exhibit (no ticket taker, janitors, security, etc.) not a SINGLE one of US.

The entrance to the exhibit is a hall filled with the faces of many of the finest son’s and daughters of Africa covering a span of five centuries, even though there were no names to identify each individual or their great accomplishments. Some of the artifacts in the museum were accompanied by an audio description with both Tavis Smiley and Kornell West, and these description were petty-bourgeoisie explanations for the behavior of Euro-Americans and their brutality towards Africans. Now we move into the room in reverence of pre-colonial African society, a few sculptures of warriors from great African nations. The first segment of the exhibit concludes with the enslavement of the Africans that includes slave dungeon doors from Ghana and displays a map that uncovers the global triangle trade of slavery and how Europe and America robbed the African land of its human and material resources in the pursuit of profit. From there we enter the era during which the peak of the western hemispheres slave trade was lead by the United States. This room consisted of the various torture tools used against the captured Africans, at this point notice that there has been no mention of the Africans constant resistance to institution of Capitalism and its products slavery and racism.

The next body of the exhibit is where the majority of the information is compiled, which is intended to stir up a feeling of ‘American Identity’ or patriotism within the captive peoples of African decent kidnapped for centuries. Now we enter a room with the document of hypocrisy ‘Declaration of Independence’ on one wall and the over coat of Fredrick Douglass. From here we advance through a hall that displays various anti-slavery activist and artistic poetic expressions, now is the first time that any light is shed onto the fierce resistance to American imperialism. A handful of slave revolts are mentioned, and then we are taken into the era of the ‘Civil War’ and reconstruction and bombarded with images of Black soldiers fighting in the ‘American Revolutionary’ war. This is where in the exhibit we view the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th (reconstruction) amendments to the U.S. Constitution, these are misleading, these three documents are what have evolved into the American Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) as well as the welfare state that Africans in America are so well familiar with. From here until the end of the exhibit it’s as if the historical timeline of events moves into fast forward. Next we enter an adjoining room dedicated to the ‘Jim Crow’ era of modern oppression, when states passes laws to restrict Blacks (Africans in America) from sharing public spaces with Whites (Euro-Americans).

As the museum steps forward we enter the room dedicated to the impact that religion had on the Africans, and how it was used to keep the descendent of African slaves docile and subservient. Here is where we find the personal diary and Quran of El Hajj Malik (Malcom X) as well as the M.L.K. Jr. and a replica of his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ holding cell. This room also displayed a video montage of the music and influence of the Black church on the masses of suffering oppressed African children in America. On the conclusion of the section dedicated to religion there is a display of a large white hooded KKK uniform along side some chess pieces, in the same room as some of the first historically Black Colleges and Universities, this also is misleading and confusing for the viewers of the exhibit. Now we enter the final gallery, this one is dedicated to the many Africans who have dominated the entertainment industries, everything from Muhammad Ali’s Royal Rumble boxing robe, a hand written poem from Tupac Shakur, and the performance outfits from various singers. Finally, the exhibit ends with the compilation of multimedia clips that display the hijacking of Black culture in entertainment by the copycat entertainers of then and now.

In conclusion, and response to the W.E.B. Dubois question, No, America was born from the murderous enslavement of African peoples, this country would not exist if it were not for Africa (the land) and its children being kidnapped, killed and exploited. We must recognize that the exhibit was organized by various ‘black elite’ neo-colonial forces in partnership with a few monopoly capitalist enterprises. This fact uncovers the campaigns true intentions to further mislead the Africans in America to believe in the idea of a post-racial American society. I would recommend to all of my fellow peoples of African decent invest your time and money into building awareness of our constant and continuous struggle against the system of European and American (white) capital imperialism.

QUOTES:

Atlanta Civic Center

 - Atlanta

, GA

 - Sun, Sep 6, 2009

Posted 09/07/2009

by Akil

The exhibit was absolutely excellent. Tracing the African American experience from African to America was presented in a very factual and chronological way. However, I do not recall seeing any form of presentation or representation about Elijah Muhammad, Minister Louis Farrakhan and The Million Man March or Miles Davis. Why?

Atlanta Civic Center

 - Atlanta

, GA

 - Sat, Sep 5, 2009

Posted 09/06/2009

by stewkhandi

The expectation our family had upon arriving was a history lesson that would help fill in the gaps on historical things we did not know. As it turn out we knew more history than what was shown. The beginning of the exhibit was impressive. The room of the Ghana slave port castle was great. Once we left there it was down hill the rest of the way. The rooms that followed were filled with artifacts, some real ,some replicas and other that made no sense. Each room had a theme, which most of the time went off track. The most confusing being the "Music Room"? The best part of the exhibit was the ending short film. In whole it was as if the exhibit was not completely done. Too many people and contributions were left out. Especially in the fields of medicine and science.It was as if Dr. Charles Drew, Dr. Ben Carson, Benjamin Banniker, Eli Whitney and George W. Carver did not exist. We could have done better taking our children to the library. We didn't pay for the audio tour guides, and it was a good thing we didn't. People around us were having problems getting them to work properly. An audio loop for each room would have been better. Oh and by the way, WHY CAN'T YOU TAKE PICTURES!

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America Kills

by  Ron Williams


America loves

to kill

It has been killing

since it arrived here

many moons ago

Arriving on those ships

racked with poison,

disease,

Piss,

feces,

cruelty,

hate

and barbarism

It spilled the blood

of the ancestors

all over

mother nature’s floor

it spilled

until there was no more

resistance

to the theft

and rape

of the land

Then it brought

the black ones

the blue hues from

the motherland

the drummers,

the blacksmiths,

the artisans

and artists,

the mothers,

the weavers,

the spinners,

the storytellers

and put them

to the chain,

the whip

the penis,

and to death

if one nostril

flared

Then it struggled

against itself

to free itself

But it still brought

the rope,

the firing squad,

the electric chair,

then the needles

It has turned guns

upon itself

in every city,

Every suburb,

every county,

every parish

It has bombed itself

into pieces

then strung the pieces

together

and called it

progress

America

has a love affair

with killing

It will kill

with the Old Testament

in one hand

And the canon

in the other

It will kill the killers

to demonstrate that

killing is wrong

It glorifies killing

on the cathode ray tube

It makes killing

a trillion dollar industry

It puts killing

on the New York

Stock Exchange

You cannot get away

from the kill

If you’re in America

It kills you

in the ghettos and in the

barrios

It kills you

in the classroom and in the

courtroom

It kills you

in the factory

and in the coalmine

It kills you

down at the docks

and up on the

satellite towers

It kills you

If you eyeball it

America

kills the peacemakers

Remember

Medgar, and Martin

Malcolm

Remember

Emmett Till

and Fred Hampton

and Amadou Diaolo

and James Byrd

and Youssef Hawkins

and Sean Bell

they have killed

and are trying to kill

All political prisoners

Remember

George Jackson,

Jonathan Jackson,

Mumia,

Leonard,

Marshall,

the Cuban Five

Troy Davis

And it tries to kill

You

Because YOU

ARE

TROY DAVIS

Because WE

ARE

TROY DAVIS

The world

cries their innocence

And America

kills them anyway

Masturbating

over the magazines

and videotapes

of death

and destruction

drowning itself

in the elixir

of hate

and zero tolerance

As vultures

feasted on the brains of

dead indigenous

red people

as they

were completing their

Manifest Destiny

they prayed

for

No mercy

And in this

technological age

there is no mercy

in America

for it devises new ways

and pathogens

for mass destruction

Biological

Political

Economic

Environmental

Familial

and Spiritual

America

crunches numbers

on its kills

like its own

Census data

America

bathes in blood

like Elizabeth Bathory

America

nation builds

on top of indigenous

body parts

America drinks oil

and excretes

fascism

America

is the number one

gang banger

gangster rapper

Mafioso

terrorist sleeper cell

rogue nation

professional hit organization

of this

third planet

of the

solar system

America

washes itself

with bullets

and dries off

with genocide

This world

will never be free

as long as America is

locked and loaded

That is why

the innocent like

Troy Davis

die

because the prison bars

and our neighborhoods

and our communities

are shaped like

crosshairs

and in our oppression

we have become fatally

conspicuous

We need to

camouflage our existence

and Sun Tzu our tactics

and be the

Spook Who Sat By The Door

to eliminate the targets

on our backs

and turn this oppression

around

because America

has a hard-on

for our bones

it places them over mantle pieces

like antelope horns

and stuffed animal heads

within their secret society houses

and retreats

and situation rooms

We are the culmination

of the struggle

and resistance

and perseverance

and empowerment

of our ancestors

While America shouts

for more blood

more oil

more

conflict diamonds

more coal,

more

human trafficking

and more

of our silence

we shout

for solidarity

and peace and justice

and

freedom and human rights

and

all power to the people

There will

come a time

when America

will no longer Kill

and cannibalize

our people

when our ancestors

will rise up from their

resting places

and suffocate it

with its own

Manifest Destiny

because as it sows

so it shall

reap

There will

come a time

where the

United States

of America

will dissolve and dissipate

and wither

and will be reborn into

the United Workers

of America

the United families

of America

the United communities

of America

the United neighborhoods

of America

the United Peoples

of America

Those new seeds

will be sown

and we will be

the peace

we wish to seek

in the world

our generations

long thirst for Justice

quenched

our bellies of liberation

filled

our future

lain in the ground

of equality

It will be then

as we wipe dry

those Trails of Tears

and shut down

those prison cells

and welcome

our brown people

across open

borders

We will proclaim

to the world

finally

that America

loves to

LOVE

9/22/11

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