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Books by Marvin X
Love and War: Poems /
In the Crazy House Called America /
Woman: Man's Best Friend /
Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality
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Black
Bourgeoisie Defend
Their Own in Chicago
Tragedy
By Marvin X
As we can see in the New
York Times article below, there is more concern for the club
owner than the 21 victims who perished at the Chicago southside
din of iniquity. The National Public Radio stated the same, that
civil rites leader Jesse Jackson, Jr., has shown more concern for
his friend, club owner Dwain J. Kyles, than for the 21 victims of
a tragic stampede.
Apparently they were
nothing and their lives represent nothing to Jackson and his
bourgeoisie comrades. NPR noted that Mayor Daly has silenced black
preachers with development loans, muzzled black bourgeoisie with
appointments and bought the grass roots with city jobs. NPR
concluded there was no one to speak for the 21 dead young people
or the poor class they represent. Apparently, Farrakhan doesn't
live in Chicago. Or is he part of the problem?
The incident in Chicago reminds me of how Jim Jones was supported
and defended by the San Francisco Black bourgeoisie down to the
last drop of poison Kool Aide he administered to the 900 poor
black people in Jonestown, Guyana.
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Jesse
Jackson, a Club Owner and Lasting Ties
By
Jodi Wilgoren
New York Times
CHICAGO, Feb. 19 -- There was the Rev. Jesse Jackson in the
early-morning chaos, consoling relatives of the 21 people killed
in a nightclub stampede and vowing to help them seek justice in
court.
A few hours later, at a West Side police station, there was Mr.
Jackson again, praying with the club's owner, Dwain J. Kyles, a
man he has known practically since the day Mr. Kyles was born.
This was not their first tragedy together: The night the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Mr. Jackson and Mr. Kyles's
father, the Rev. Samuel Kyles, had been escorting him to a
soul-food dinner at the Kyleses' Memphis home.
Monday morning's nightclub disaster, and the finger-pointing
following it, have put Mr. Jackson, this city's most prominent
African-American leader, in a strange spot. As always, he is
supporting the victims, consulting his old friend Johnnie L.
Cochran Jr. about legal options and coordinating funeral
arrangements. But he is also supporting Mr. Kyles, who denies the
city's contention that the club was operating illegally. And he is
trying to explain his own earlier efforts to help the troubled
club survive.
Mr. Kyles's South Loop business -- an upscale restaurant, Epitome,
and a second-story after-hours hip-hop spot, E2 -- was not just
another liquor licensee battling with city officials over building
codes. As Chicago's largest black-owned entertainment
establishment, it was host to all manner of social and political
events for the African-American elite, and was also a magnet for
the rowdy younger set.
Nor is Mr. Kyles just another business owner. A leader of civil
rights protest when he attended high school in Memphis, he later
became a lawyer, worked for Harold Washington, Chicago's only
black mayor, and for a Tennessee congressman, Representative
Harold E. Ford Sr., and toiled with Mr. Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH
Coalition on issues like minority contracting.
Mr. Kyles's former wife, with whom he currently lives, is Mr.
Jackson's former assistant. Mr. Jackson's son, Representative
Jesse L. Jackson Jr., is among the politicians to whom Mr. Kyles
has donated in the past decade. The younger Mr. Jackson issued a
statement this week describing Mr. Kyles as "a childhood
friend" and "an upstanding example of a young
professional person in our community." On Monday morning, it
was the elder Mr. Jackson who called Mr. Kyles's father, known as
Billy, to tell him of the nightmare at the club.
"They were kind of extended family," explained Frank
Watkins, who spent 27 years working for Mr. Jackson and is now
Congressman Jackson's press secretary.
"Because the Reverend and Billy Kyles were such good friends,
obviously there were welcome arms whenever he came around,"
Mr. Watkins said of Dwain Kyles. "He was clearly seen as part
of the civil rights families, so to speak."
Today, back at his club for the first time since Monday's melee,
Mr. Kyles, 48, fell apart, sobbing as he tried to offer
condolences before television cameras. Asked on Tuesday when Mr.
Kyles might be available for an interview, his lawyer, Andre
Grant, said, "Never."
Families of several of the victims have already filed lawsuits
against the club, and the city took steps today to revoke all its
licenses. In court documents, city lawyers said Epitome and E2 had
served alcohol to minors on several occasions, illegally opened
during a liquor-license suspension in January and failed to report
assaults there.
The city also says the liquor license should be taken away
because, it maintains, Calvin Hollins Jr., a convicted felon, is
running the club, though Mr. Grant has described Mr. Hollins as
just a consultant.
Mara S. Georges, Chicago's corporation counsel, said this
afternoon that the city was considering changing its policy so
that the police would be notified of court orders like the one
that should have barred anyone from entering the second-story
nightclub. Ms. Georges also produced transcripts of court
proceedings showing that Mr. Kyles was present when the order was
described as covering "the mezzanine, the second floor and
the V.I.P. rooms." Mr. Grant has said that the court order
prohibited use only of the V.I.P. skyboxes above E2's dance floor,
not the entire second-floor club.
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Charles Johnson on the meaning of Obama
The Seattle novelist and expert on
Martin Luther King Jr. believes that Obama's election is a
sea-change moment for America and the world. "So we have evolved
in terms of our understanding that excellence is colorblind."—
28 April 2009
Robin Lindley—You’ve described
Obama’s rise as evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Charles Johnson: It
speaks more to evolution in terms of the public attitude of the
American people than Obama himself. He did not run as a
challenging black candidate [but] on the promise of somebody who
would bridge the divisions in American society. He doesn’t
belong to the generation of Jesse Jackson and others. . . .
Obama gave that talk on Fathers’ Day last year at a church in
Chicago about better parenting and black responsibility. He was
basically taking a page from the playbook of Bill Cosby, and
Jesse Jackson was furious with him and got caught on the air
saying he wanted to cut [Obama’s] nuts off for talking down to
Ns, and he used the N word. So we [need] more honesty and not
illusions.
One of the things that has to be addressed
seriously is the dysteleological behavior in black male culture.
At a community college in the South three young black women
asked me “Mr. Johnson, what’s wrong with these young black men?”
I said, “I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t know what
the solution is.” They were so frustrated.
Robin Lindley What were these young
women seeing in young black men?
Charles Johnson:
They were seeing guys who just want to get over and get laid.
They were seeing guys who do drugs or sell drugs. They were
seeing guys who didn’t have their values, like valuing an
education. They wanted guys they could feel good about, but they
didn’t have that, which is sad.
I have talked about that in
many essays, and people don’t want you to talk about it. King
would talk about it, and people would say, “You’re airing dirty
laundry. Don’t talk about that. Talk about what the white man is
doing to us. Talk about the external problem, not this internal
problem.” King said, “You have to have a battle waged on two
fronts. One is the external battle to get rid of the things that
keep black people down, segregation and [those issues], and one
is the internal battle to raise our own standards.” He said,
“You don’t win this war unless you have the battle on these two
fronts because one supports the other.”—Crosscut
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Sharpton and Jackson Endorse War on Terror—A Black Agenda Radio commentary
by Glen Ford—Jesse Jackson said that the killing of bin Laden was a “huge
psychological victory.” By this he clearly meant a psychological victory for
Barack Obama, who put the hit out on bin Laden,just as he has placed American
citizens on assassination lists with no recourse to due process. President Obama
badly needed that psychological victory, since unemployment went up last month
and now looms as the rock on which his presidency might shatter. . . .
Jackson either needs to hand in his anti-war credentials right now, or find a
good mouth doctor that will stop him from encouraging those who would increase
the $1.2 trillion national security budget that is pushing human needs programs
into the Valley of Death. Does Rev. Jackson think Obama deserves a “huge
psychological boost” for having
killed almost one thousand innocent civilian men, women and children in
Pakistan last year with his drones, and is guaranteed to kill even more this
year?
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Rev.
Al Sharpton shows that he is as crude and vulgar as his mentor Don King.
Sharpton compliments Obama for being “cool under fire”—as if the world is
attacking the White House, rather than the other way around. Obama, says
Sharpton, “can see the bigger picture.” It does not bother Sharpton that Obama’s
bigger picture means bigger wars. Which is alright with Sharpton, as long as he
gets a bigger check.— BlackAgendaReport
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The Shadows of Youth
The Remarkable Journey of the Civil
Rights Generation
By Andrew B. Lewis
With deep admiration and rigorous
scholarship, historian Lewis (Gonna
Sit at the Welcome Table)
revisits the ragtag band of young men
and women who formed the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Impatient with what they considered the
overly cautious and accommodating pace
of the NAACP and
Martin
Luther King Jr., the black college
students and their white allies,
inspired by Gandhi's principles of
nonviolence and moral integrity, risked
their lives to challenge a deeply
entrenched system. Fanning out over the
Jim Crow South, SNCC organized sit-ins,
voter registration drives, Freedom
Schools and protest marches. Despite
early successes, the movement
disintegrated in the late 1960s,
succeeded by the militant Black Power
movement. The highly readable history
follows the later careers of the
principal leaders. Some, like
Stokely Carmichael and
H. Rap
Brown, became bitter and
disillusioned. Others, including
Marion Barry,
Julian Bond and
John Lewis, tempered their idealism
and moved from protest to politics,
assuming positions of leadership within
the very institutions they had
challenged. According to the author, No
organization contributed more to the
civil rights movement than SNCC, and
with his eloquent book, he offers a
deserved tribute.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Michelle Alexander: US Prisons, The New Jim Crow
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Judge Mathis Weighs in on the execution of Troy Davis
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
By
Michelle
Alexander
The
mass incarceration of people of color through the War on
Drugs is a big part of the reason that a black child
born today is less likely to be raised by both parents
than a black child born during slavery. The absence of
black fathers from families across America is not simply
a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time
watching Sports Center. Hundreds of thousands of black
men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away
for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed
by whites. Most people seem to
imagine that the drug war—which has swept millions of
poor people of color behind bars—has been aimed at
rooting out drug kingpins or violent drug offenders.
Nothing could be further from the truth. This war has
been focused overwhelmingly on low-level drug offenses,
like marijuana possession—the very crimes that happen
with equal frequency in middle class white communities.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 29 October 2006 / updated 12
July 2008 |
