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Activist
Works on Next Level of Change
By
Gregory Kane
The Sun, 15 December
1999 Ulysses Bagwell, book editor? The query will
mean nothing to most of you, of course. But it will no doubt
pique the interest of those who graduated from Baltimore City
College’s Class of 1969, which the faculty probably would have
voted the school’s looniest if such a tally had been taken.
Seventh District Congressman Elijah Cummings
is one of the shining stars of that class, as is state Del. Tony
Fulton. Bagwell now goes by the name Amin Sharif,
the result of a conversion to Islam. None of us in City’s
Class of 69 figured Sharif would go into politics. (He’s now a
correctional counselor at the Baltimore City Detention Center.)
But what we did know was that Sharif, single-handedly, made the
1968-1969 school year a helluva lot more exciting than in most
other schools.
The fall semester found Sharif elected
president of the school’s new Afro-American Club. Interviewed
in The Collegian, the school’s newspaper, Sharif
expressed the then-common notion among black militants that
there were few, if any, good white people. The sentiment did not
endear him to that segment of the City faculty who figured black
students had already committed an offense simply by showing up
at the school.
On Jan. 15, 1969, Sharif led a small but
vocal band of students out of the school.
“We’re declaring Martin Luther King’s
birthday a holiday,” he and other students announced, years
before Congress and the rest of the country caught up. But the
students spend the day goofing off. They went to Hopkins Plaza
and conducted a teach-in on King and the civil rights movement.
They didn’t consider themselves truant. They simply figured
they had taken their education outside the walls of City
College.
Later in the year, Sharif and other students
went before the school board to urge it to give students options
of taking the day off on Malcolm X’s birthday. In a close
vote, the board agreed.
When a police dog bit a black woman in West
Baltimore and took out a sizable chunk of her thigh, there was
Sharif again, among a group of activists who protested the
mauling and got arrested and charged with inciting to riot for
their trouble. Out on bail, Sharif was in a car using a bullhorn
to urge a crowd of people near Murphy Homes to protest the
injustice when police grabbed him out of the car and arrested
him again.
So we figured this Sharif guy might end up in
the Nation of Islam or the Black Panthers or get some job as a
professional rabble-rouser. But a corrections counselor and
part-time book editor?
Well, he is, Sharif showed up at The Sun
last week, dressed in a suit and tie, looking tres
Establishment, to talk about the book. With him was Rudolph
Lewis, who is co-editor of I Am New Orleans and Other Poems by
Marcus B. Christian. How does a Baltimore guy end up co-editing
a book about a New Orleans poet? That’s explained by the
friendship between Sharif and Lewis.
After Sharif graduated from City, he and
Lewis were roommates who shared a common philosophy.
“We were part of the black consciousness
movement that lasted from the 60s to the early 80s,” Lewis
explained. In the early 1980s, Sharif went abroad for a spell,
and Lewis headed to New Orleans. While there, Lewis learned of
the literary works—poems, letters, and history essays—of
Marcus Christian. Impressed by what he read, lewis obtained some
of Christian’s diaries, poems, and letters and “lugged them
around” for ten years, trying to find a publisher.
In 1987, Lewis returned to Baltimore. He
bumped into Sharif by accident. During the reunion Lewis told
Sharif about Christian’s work, and the two worked together to
find a publisher. Xavier University Press of New Orleans
published 500 copies of the book in June, which have sold out.
“We’re ultimately interested in Marcus
Christian being considered in the canon of African-American
poets, especially at black colleges and universities,” Lewis
said.
The editing duo managed to get 50 of the
2,000 poems Christian penned into the book. Christian wrote
poems about love, racism, war (a couple of poems criticizing
World War I and a few praising Ethiopians resisting the 1930s
Italian invasion) and police brutality.
Lewis and Sharif consider Christian an unsung
contributor to what Lewis insists should be called the “Negro
Renaissance”—rather than the Harlem Renaissance—of the
1920s and 1930s.
“He’s different from most of the major
figures in that he didn’t go to New York or Chicago,” Lewis
said. But Christian was in frequent communication with the likes
of W.E.B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes and “was a close friend
of Arna Bontemps.”
It took 30 years Ulysses Bagwell to make the
journey from militant firebrand to Amin Sharif
book editor and preserver of a portion of black America’s
cultural legacy. You have to figure the ghost of Marcus
Christian, who died in 1976, is most appreciative.
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posted 20 August 2005 / update 29 June 2008 |
