Books by Amiri Baraka

Tales of the Out & the Gone  / The Essence of Reparations / Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems  / Blues People

 Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka / Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones / Black Music

*   *   *   *   *

CDs by James Brown

Live at the Apollo  /  Messing with the Blues / 20 All-time Greatest Hits /  Star Time  / 50th Anniversary Collection / Foundations of Funk

The PayBack  /  Say It Live and Loud

*   *   *   *   *

James Brown, Amiri Baraka, & James Forman

Climbing Malcolm’s Ladder

Black Rhetoric in a Post-Modern Age

By Rudolph Lewis 

James Brown Opens the Door

There was no vitally conscious time when James Brown, the “Godfather of Soul,” was not moving and suggestive of the potentialities of work, sexuality, and creativity. I heard him first on a jukebox in the backwoods of southern Virginia, Mr. Parham’s Place down by Sansi Swamp, we slow dancing body sweating close sinking down in “Bewildered” and “Try Me.” Them was days of teenage anxiety, clumsy fingers, and mumbling lips.

When twelve, I experienced James Brown on stage, in the flesh, at Baltimore’s Royal Theater, he ending his show with “Please, Please, Please.” At the afternoon matinee,  in the blue red darkness and on the white spotlighted stage, James Brown did the cape routine (my first time experience): James ruffled collapsing to his knees, moaning, pleading sweating screaming, — all spontaneously, it seemed. James and his retainer performed the dynamic routine with exact precision and spontaneity at the 8 o’clock show. 

I was astonished. It was a non-literary (performance) critique on the black rhetorical methods found in Negro preaching and black religious ecstasy.

By 1968, being hip with Stokely and Black Power, folk music and Coltrane, the speeches of Malcolm and Martin, I saw James Brown a world below, yesterday’s news, as some have said. But James was now, the Flames were still alive. The Number One Soul Brother proved, however, that he was more adaptable than Amiri Baraka, Eldridge Cleaver, and Kwame Toure combined, when he released his own version of “Black & Proud.” 

In Washington, D.C. Brown held up his hand and the riot slithered into the darkness. Like he was a mighty man, like a Malcolm.  Nixon and Humphrey embraced and boosted Brown as a new black leader, exemplary of hard work and black capitalism.

Politics cries out continually for sophistication, and deception. And there ain’t nothing sophisticated and unnatural about James Brown, the master of showmanship and musical innovator. He remains an extraordinary interpreter of Negro sentiment, rhythms, and moods. Forty years later, his music is as contemporary and moving as it was in 1960. His foibles and his run-ins with the law, for most of us, matter little. James Brown is Man at his creative best, and his musical creations an enduring cultural legacy, so that one may speak of a "James Brown Era."

It is Brown’s driving relentless rhythm, his danceable “funk,” his verbal discordance, his dancing and screaming, sliding and pedaling across the stage, his long processed hair flying—all a responsive rhetorical commentary (giving back) on black life that makes him a cultural icon, second only, probably to Martin King, who also mastered the tenor and temperament of Negro timing. This appeal to the best embracing passions of the Negro is what sustains my interest in the social phenomena of James Brown and his music, whatever criticisms I may entertain of him as a businessman and political theorist. But the Godfather endures.

In a recent NYTimes book review “'I Feel Good': The Godfather of Everything” Ishmael Reed brings our attention to the Godfather’s second autobiography I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life of Soul. His first, The Godfather of Soul, was published in 1986. I looked for an “as told to” as with some slave narratives or like “Lady Day.” James Brown  might be a writer, like Louis Armstrong, whose writings are simple and perceptively sharp. JB’s thought may indeed be as dazzling as his feet.

For those of us who grew up in the 60s in the lonely backwoods of the segregated South we need only the records and CDs of JB's music to know the man and his significance. His rhythms and moods, film clips, and our memories only are vessels sufficient to capture the impact of his artistry in emotionally sustaining several generations. Ishmael has said “writin is fightin.” For James Brown, meshing/clashing rhythms, making the feet, the hips move, dazzling the imagination—a hardworking and sincere performance was/is fightin, the good fight. I can live with that, and so will those who love his work.

Brown’s influence on contemporary music entertainment is only one aspect of Ishmael’s review. Ishmael raises the perennial question of what is “success” for the black artist—writer, musician, visual artist—and concludes: “Attracting white paying customers to your books, theater or music, of course, meant success. The other route was to be cited by a white musician or critic as having influenced a white musician.” Investors making big returns on black work and resources ain't news.

Nevertheless, it is phenomenal indeed that semi-literate Negro peasants terrorized under Jim Crow could develop an infectious music form and content that foster “international good will toward the United States.” This cultural influence, however, could occur only in conjunction with the sway of the global US economic and military penetration into every dark corner on the planet with the latest information technology. In this market-oriented world of efficiency, black talent gains privileges and benefits even if their cultural forms originated among the marginal. Like hip-hop.

Baraka, Malcolm, & Marx

Another curious writing appeared in Crisis, by Amiri Baraka, an insightful black cultural critic, titled “From Parks to Marxism: A Political Evolution” (December 1998). Baraka’s essay exudes that rally-the-troops style. He, passionate as James Brown, recalls past victories and sacrifices and encourages his readers poetically to draw on their great reservoir of energy and resentment. He is militantly convinced “it is time for another political upsurge by the Afro-American people, and indeed by the great masses of all the people in the U.S. who are not home watching the stock market for their daily swig of our blood.” His is a rhetoric that recalls the rhetorical excesses of the 60s and 70s.

In this deceptive essay of political struggle and cultural remembrance, nowhere is there any discussion of Marxism. Or even the history of Marxism among U.S. blacks. The only “political evolution” that can be described in Baraka’s creative prose is a movement from the non-violent resistance rhetoric of Rosa Parks to the caustic rhetoric of Malcolm X (with his emphasis on armed struggle). There is also the movement from the agrarian South to the urbanized North, from the backwoods tenant farmer to ghetto thug, criminal, and jazz aficianado.

In 1965 Harlem, with the fratricidal public assassination of Malcolm X, the rhetoric of violence seemingly came to its natural end and found its appropriate target. But it did not end in the ballroom of Malcolm’s death. Malcolm’s rhetoric was revived in that of Stokely, Cleaver, Baraka, and Karenga and a ton of small-fry imitators who wanted their militancy on evening news. These were the young black gods of revolutionary struggle.

Are we to think that Baraka is as ignorant as James Brown, in matters of black politics? Without a doubt Baraka uses much more militant rhetoric than James Brown (a man of and by and for the people), who would never speak of Wall Street Journal readers as investors taking “their daily swig of blood.” Baraka’s violent imagination registers nowhere in the corpus of James Brown’s music. Hip-hop like its attendant computerized war games of course has its gothic, medieval blood images.

In some sense, Baraka makes an old-school/new school argument in a North/South context. Malcolm the Harlemite is his God, a harbinger of End Time, in Islamic robes. Martin King a Georgia Baptist cut his revolutionary teeth in Montgomery and established his fame in Birmingham against Bull Connor. For Baraka, King’s rhetoric was infused with “classical Afro-American Christian mythology,” with its tactical use of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and Gandhi’s “Non Violent Resistance”:

That kind of religious mythology was fine for the illiterate Southern Negro. But the hip hard-edged black of the North needed a different kind of rhetoric. Baraka argues that Malcolm’s militant self-defense stance, his Pan-African and socialist sentiments elevated the struggle and probably would have advanced the struggle quicker if it had not been for a cultural (folk) tradition that advanced the messianic view that freedom came with “the Coming of the Lord.”

This cultural (religious) perspective of the southern Negro (the Negro folk) contrasts greatly with that of the urban, cosmopolitan Negro. Baraka explains:

We all can appreciate juvenile rebellion (punks and thugs) in the city. I too watched the Bowery Boys, they can have their cultural and political usefulness. But can a liberation philosophy or theory rise out of the mire of such ignorance and violence. They like their peasant forbears are natural molds for petty bourgeois sentiments and dreams. Observe the last several decades of hip-hop's sustainability.

But Frantz Fanon became a bible to U.S. black militants. Though within the United States, black communities were colonized and policed by racist police forces; these black ghettos were colonies like Algeria or Ghana or Nigeria. James Forman claimed proudly that his “ideological thinking” was honed on the “writings of Frantz Fanon”: “As a people we must try to make him [Frantz Fanon] and his ideas a popular hero to black people in the United States and the world around.” And the Panthers wave Chairman Mao’s Red Book. The urgent times were a pungent political stew, very heady indeed.

For Baraka, too, it is atheistic communism, that gets him singing, with its myth of the proletariat and the proletariat revolution, the myth of the people redefined in Marxist  classes: the bourgeois, the petty bourgeois, and the proletariat (the masses). In this scheme, the poor will get to "heaven on earth," led by an advance political party of poets (and other misfits), intellectuals, professionals, and other political operatives.  This was how Bolsheviks seize state power and all wealth in the name of the proletariat, until the proletariat becomes conscious of itself and its destiny. That was the story in Russia. In China, this process of socialization may take centuries, if at all. Power reluctantly shifts.

I heard Stokely Fall 1967 in Murphy Auditorium at Morgan State College. His daring speech was spellbinding. I had never heard a black man speak about white people in public as Stokely mocked them. His arrogant rhetoric thrilled an audience that felt his revolutionary resentment. The inspiring session ended in shouts of Black Power! Black Power! Black Power! And the pumping of raised fists. I was an immediate convert, on the sidelines until I joined Baltimore SNCC and set up a SNCC office at 432 E. North Avenue. It evolved into Black Liberation Press (BLP), led by Walter Lively, a Trotskyite, with a black corps of volunteer students. BLP printed James Forman and other writers.

The previous summer I read Ellison,  Baldwin, and Wright, guided by a Pratt librarian, a Hampton graduate. It was from this Black woman I got my first coherent view of the black struggle and the growing black anti-war fervor. It was Stokely, however, that personified for me unashamedly militant black manhood. Walter Lively and his Jewish socialist friends at Johns Hopkins taught me about the socialist struggle in Europe and especially the Russian Revolution. They were anti-Stalinists and their  hero was Leon Trotsky, romantically assassinated in Mexico by Soviet agents. And there was also the New Era Bookstore at the corner of Park and Mulberry, run by an old CPA member.

In short I was within the heartbeat and general flow of the “ideological thinking” of the time: a Baltimore cauldron of black nationalist ideas (The Soul School, the Nation of Islam, SNCC, Panthers, Moorish Science Temple, and more hybrid ideologies); and the socialists (Communists, SDSers, Du Bois and Pan-African Socialists, Nkrumah and  Nyerere). And there was also Baraka's Black Mass, which was about as rational as a Black Marxist. It was a great political, social, and cultural bazaar.

In its transitional stage from civil rights to a revolutionary organization, SNCC fell apart financially, with its expulsion of Jewish and white intellectuals and its support of the PLO. Worst, its chairman, Rap Brown, was on the run. Everyone knew that SNCC was dead. What was next? How could the struggle for liberation and black consciousness be moved forward?

James Forman, Fanon, & Revolution

Negroes in 1969 were integrating schools, employment, and public accommodations. Organizing unions among black women, as did Local 1199. To attract the TV cameras, militant fantasies grew larger and larger like a hot-air balloon. The “revolutionary” was the cultural hero, in some quarters. World Revolution, the musical theme. The black struggle, according to SNCC strategist James Forman, had to be internationalized. 

There was an urge among a few to find the most militant, cutting edge of “ideological thinking.” James Forman was the Man, the black political theorist. I recommend highly The Political Thought of James Forman (1970), edited by the Staff of Black Star Publishing, and printed by Walter Lively's group, Black Liberation Press. In brief form, Forman’s diary note titled “Ten Year Plan” summarizes the apex of Forman’s revolutionary views. Actually, Forman looks ten years back and ten years ahead. By 1969 he had developed a revolutionary black political theory, combining black racialism, Leninism, and the abolition of capitalism.

Forman was reluctant to call himself a Pan Africanist. Forman was as alert as Richard Wright in the 50s when he was on the continent:

So Forman is a long way from Marcus Garvey's imperial African view. But Forman also distances his African politics from that of Du Bois, whose politics rested its hopes on the commitment and sacrifice of an educated elite. (Read Du Bois Speaks to Africa.) Like the Oakland Panthers, and other Fanon influenced revolutionaries, Forman believed that urban thugs and gangsters (the core of the riots) of northern and western cities were unconscious revolutionaries (the black lumpen proletariat) and that with the proper political training and education they would “understand that we have both a class and a racial fight and that it is not simply a question of race.”

After King was gunned down in Memphis, a mood of conspiracy hovered (like LA smog) over all of black thinking, and ghetto politics. With King removed from the scene, black militants heightened the tone of their rhetoric. For some, Armageddon was here! The black working poor had a revolutionary responsibility being in the "Eye of the Beast." As the “black vanguard force” it was their destiny to lead American workers in the seizure of “state power . . . acquired and won by armed struggle.” Forman boosts and applauds his own rhetoric while he knows prophetically that the “seventies will be one of serious repression for us, black people in the United States.”

The Romance of the Lumpen.  “Freedom Comes Out the Barrel of a Gun.” And other theories and acts played militantly well in FBI surveillance conspiracies, as well in the homes and minds of the Silent Majority, heavily arming itself. As Askia Touré points out, white America came down on the new black revolutionaries like a ton of bricks: “FBI’s COINTELPRO on Black radical groups, coupled with the 'recession' and Drug Plagues in the Inner Cities, during the Reagan era . . . crushed the Movement.”

Few have considered the insanity of Forman’s “theory of the black vanguard leading the fight for world socialism in the United States.” He was naively confident “based upon certain experiences that there are and will be whites who will clearly understand” that black people are a “colony” within the geographic boundaries of an imperial power and that the black revolutionary workers party should rule the US government as a natural right and as a guarantor of the rights of the black and poor. This bastardization of Marx, Lenin, Du Bois marks the highpoint of Pan-African revolutionary thinking in America.

The offices of black radicals and the streets of ghetto America were abandoned by young black middle-class militants, scattering like roaches under the searchlights of white repression. They escaped the criminal gun play among brothers--for union organizing or black studies in the academy or public service in poverty programs. “Black empowerment” was substituted for “Black Power.”  Expanding the privileges and rights of black professionals and businessman elevated above that of social justice for the black poor. Defending Social Security and Medicare more responsible than idle theories of socialist revolution.

We mocked James Brown for his photo-op with Richard Nixon. But we find it rather presidential when Kweisi Mfume, like Booker T. with Teddy, photo-ops with George “The Second Coming” Bush, who spurned the NAACP during his first term. Not odd at all, Kweisi protested in the Baltimore Times. In short, we have not “evolved” as Baraka suggests, but rather we got more of the same, at least from the view of poor workers, as it was after the victories of the Civil War and Reconstruction, when the voices of Opportunism and Moderation dominated and terrorized, and crushed the calls for Revolution, and free land.

In a U.S. society with several African American billionaires (e.g. Oprah and Bill Cosby) and a slew of millionaires (sports and other entertainers), the myth of the revolutionary black poor collapsed. In such an arid clime, a political theory that emphasizes the liberation of the poor is impossible. Bill Cosby, stamped and approved by the respectable, lacks any confidence in the seriousness of the black poor.

I thank the Lord we still got James Brown, who keeps on going back to take us to the bridge, his rhythms driving us toward our deepest and blackest hopes and desires.

posted 26 February 2005