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Books by James
Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs
Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century
/
The
American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's
Notebook
Living for Change: An Autobiography
/
Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nation's Future
Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party /
Racism and the Class Struggle
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Crime Among Our People
[or a revolutionary
proposal for regenerating Community]
By Grace Lee Boggs The escalating violence in Detroit
makes this statement as timely now as when it was first
published in June 1972 by NOAR (National Organization
for an American Revolution). We sold tens of thousands
of copies at 10c. Today it sells on the Web for $15.00.
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* *
Black people hustling, fighting,
killing other black people – it’s on all our minds. We
are afraid to walk our streets, few of us go out after
dark except in a car. We hesitate to leave our homes for
fear that when we return, our few possessions will be
gone. We dare not stop to talk on the streets with one
another - because we are subject to being robbed or
mugged by a black person or groups of blacks – day or
night.
No one in the black neighborhood feels safe. Robbing,
breaking in, snatching purses, stealing out of cars,
garages and homes (often moving all the furniture out in
broad daylight), selling property stolen in a
neighborhood; youthful bandits roving around the clock
in twos and threes, spotting places, things to steal –
all this is now a commonplace.
Everyone in the neighborhood knows this, sees it day
after day. Some people try to give the bandits a feeling
of support in what they are doing. Others encourage the
criminals by asking “What do you have for sale today?”
With an eager eye out for a bargain, they buy loot
stolen from a neighbor and thus subsidize criminal
activities against themselves.
In every block no less than one, more often three dope
houses sell their poison like a corner drug store, often
exchanging drugs for stolen radios, hi-fis, TV sets for
which the owner has often made only one payment. No one
pays any attention when drugs are openly sold on the
streets. Few are shocked when as many as seven people
are executed at one stroke in a drug war.
WHAT HAS HAPPENED?
How did all this become so normal and natural When did
it begin? How long can we tolerate it and keep our sense
of humanity? Do we really oppose crime any more? And if
we do, is there anything we can actually do about it in
our neighborhoods – or must we just give up?
Black people fighting, killing each other is nothing
new. Crime and banditry are a common occurrence among
all oppressed peoples, especially in periods of
transition. But crime at the present level and rate of
increase in black neighborhoods is unlike anything that
has ever existed among blacks.
1967 was the turning point all over the U.S.A. Blacks in
the cities rebelled – city after city. From these
rebellions came the idea that violence of any kind was
legitimate as long as it was against “the man’s” system.
Thus the looting (which is characteristic of all
rebellions) was equated with Revolution and became
legitimized as a badge of militancy and blackness. From
this point onward, crimes of every nature have become
rampant.
As white merchants and other whites fled the city, the
chance for black youth to take out their rebellion in
conflict with whites faded away. For a period black
youth fought white youth in the schools. Then, as more
schools became predominantly black, black students
turned against each other – BLACK ON BLACK.
Prior to the rebellions and for a brief period
immediately after, black neighborhoods had a real sense
of hope and community closeness. After the rebellions
older people felt that younger ones had stood up against
oppression in a way that they had been unable to.
Younger ones felt that in standing up against the
system, they were carrying on and taking to a higher
level the struggles by blacks in the past.
But as crimes increased and the black community appeared
to be unable to do more than cry “Free the prisoners,”
what had been the black community began to turn into
little more than a geographical area where blacks live,
to rob and be robbed, to steal and be stolen from, to
fear and be feared.
CRISIS OF BLACK POWER MOVEMENT
The failure of the Black Power Movement to provide
revolutionary direction and perspective for our real
problems, coupled with the Opportunism, Adventurism and
Personality Cultism of Black Power leaders, has had a
great influence upon the increase in crime. No
revolutionary organization, based on revolutionary
political principles and concrete programs of struggle,
has come forward to give our people an idea of the
struggle they must organize in order to achieve Black
Power. For a brief period the Black Panther Party
provided a channel for the militant feelings of black
youth. But since its decline, the mass energies aroused
by the rebellions have found no political outlets. Hence
these energies are now turned inward – upon blacks in
the neighborhoods.
The Black Power Movement did not define what Black Power
must mean in terms of responsibilities for governing our
communities. Hence the Black Power Movement has drifted
into Cultism and Commercialism. If “everything black is
beautiful”, if “Anything Black goes”, then why shouldn’t
blacks, in the name of blackness, hustle anything and
everything – from Soul Music to Soul Religion, from Soul
Food to Soul Clothes? Thus Black Power has been
transformed into an excuse for anybody to make a fast
buck. Middle class blacks get their rake-off at the top
from white liberals. Dropouts “operate” at the bottom –
among other blacks.
Most obviously affected have been our unskilled black
youth who are occasionally employed by seasonal work,
but who are constantly being made expendable by
technology. Even if they work a few weeks, they are soon
thrown back on the streets, to live by their wits. Many
end up stealing even from their own families or selling
drugs to other youth, thus making a “living” by
destroying the lives of others.
Drugs and the use of drugs are a big reason for crime,
but not the basic cause. The very nature of crime is
changing as the capitalist system declines. Today,
unlike the Depression of the 30s, when someone robs a
house, he doesn’t raid the refrigerator or rush off to
buy food with the stolen money. Crime itself has become
a way of life. The only consideration is “fast money” –
no matter how you get it. From junkies to pimps, people
use the excuse that black people must “do their own
thing” to “survive” in “the man’s” system, justifying
the worst kind of crime in the name of the black
struggle.
Having failed to give programmatic direction and
revolutionary leadership in struggles to resolve the
real grievances of black people, most Black Power
militants and radicals make excuses for crime in our
communities. So groups view the crimes of blacks against
blacks as caused by external factors only, blaming the
system for all crimes, ignoring the real concern among
blacks about crime, talking only about “survival” from
inevitable genocide. Others are jubilant that blacks
have become militant or are afraid to question the
widespread anti-social behavior of blacks, deluding
themselves that by putting a political face on this
behavior, they will “psyche” the system into taking the
responsibility for providing jobs, better homes and
schools, recreation and other reforms. Still others say
that since the system is so bad, only a revolution can
change things – and meanwhile “there is nothing we can
do.”
WE CAN’ T DEPEND UPON THE SYSTEM
We know that the system has systematically oppressed us
from the day that the first slave ship landed in Africa.
We know that racism has been the ideology by which
capitalism justified killing off the Indians and
enslaving blacks. We know that the racist-capitalist
system has degraded us for 400 years, robbing us of the
fruit of our labors, depriving us of education, lynching
us in the name of Christian virtues, rendering us
powerless and now more and more useless – except to buy
the fancy junk that pours off its production lines.
We recognize that the system causes crime and even
flourishes on crime, using crime to make more jobs for
social workers, wardens, jailers, policemen, probation
officers, counselors, judges, lawyers. But we will not
accept crime because the system accepts it. We know that
the system fosters crime. THAT IS WHY WE CANNOT DEPEND
ON THE SYSTEM TO STOP IT.
As people who are dedicated to changing the system in
order to advance black people and all Humanity, we
believe that it is our duty – and that of all people who
claim to be struggling to free black people – to assume
the leadership to break out of the vicious circle by
which the oppressed are taking out their despair and
frustration on each other.
WHAT MUST WE DO NOW?
FIRST, all those who claim that they are giving
revolutionary leadership must accept the responsibility
for projecting new standards for human behavior. These
standards must make unmistakably clear that crimes like
robbing, raping and vandalizing are unforgivable in any
society and against any people. We must make clear that
TRUST, DISCIPLINE, RESPECT, COURAGE, DEPENDABILITY and
ACCOUNTABILITY TO COMMUNITY are absolutely essential to
any people and especially to oppressed people who are
fighting to get rid of their oppression. Such standards
will give us a political idea of who is a friend of the
revolution and who is an enemy. They will provide us
with a basis for distinguishing between criminal acts
and political acts. They will enable each of us to fight
the capitalist corruption which is within us all. They
are the first step in the long hard struggle before us
to recreate our communities.
SECOND, we must project a vision of a new society, a new
system, in which there will be no need for jails and
prisons because the society will provide opportunities
for everyone of us – men, women and children – to carry
on meaningful productive activities and to make
meaningful political decisions, and thus to develop into
new, socially responsible and better human beings.
THIRD, we have to engage in programs of action to rid
ourselves of the corrupt values and practices which are
the result of the present system and which make us
accomplices in our own self-destruction.
We can begin by practicing the principle of “Value
People More than Things.” This means we have to make
choices and we have to stick by them.
1. Everyone of us, in every community, should refuse to
buy the stolen or “hot” goods which seem so tempting but
which really mean that we are subsidizing crime and
accepting stealing as a way of life. Each of us should
pledge this for our own selves, and then make joint
pledges with our families, relatives, friends,
neighbors, classmates, co-workers, club and church
members, etc. – holding each other responsible for these
pledges. Thus, in our practice, we can educate our
communities, including the criminal elements, to
understand that we are not going to tolerate inhuman
anti-social behavior any longer.
2. TEACH-INS SHOULD BE HELD in our schools and churches,
on the causes and effects of crime in our communities,
culminating in joint pledges not to associate with
anyone who continues to practice looting, stealing,
pimping or other inhuman, anti-social behavior.
3. We should criticize any section of the black movement
which takes advantage of blackness to blackmail anyone
or to commercialize on blackness. We should be equally
critical of anyone who takes a liberal or sympathetic
attitude to anyone of any race who rips off, steals,
mugs, vandalizes, pimps or rapes a woman of any race, or
who pushes drugs or sells “hot goods” in any community.
4. Finally, wherever we are, among friends, at work, in
school, at church, we must make clear our conviction
that it is the duty of the oppressed to carry on united,
purposeful struggles against all forms of oppression,
and that we are ready to explore with anyone those
programs that will enable all of us, young and old
together, to struggle against oppression and for the
power and the sense of community that we as black people
must have to give human dignity and value to our lives,
now and in the future.
We call upon all people, in every city and town, and
particularly in black areas, to support, encourage and
work with all groups, individuals and organizations to
put these principles into action.
Source:
Michigan Citizen, May 14-20, 2006
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Other
Related Information:
James & Grace Lee Boggs Collection;
History Is A Weapon James
Boggs (1919-1993) was a militant African American
activist, perhaps best known for authoring,
The
American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's
Notebook in 1963. He was married for forty years
until his death in 1993 to Chinese American socialist
and feminist activist, Grace Lee Boggs. He was also an
auto worker at Chrysler from 1940 until 1968. Boggs was
active in the far left organization, Correspondence
Publishing Committee led by C.L.R. James from around the
time it left the Trotskyist movement in the early 1950s
until Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs led a split in 1962,
breaking with C.L.R. James. . . . James Boggs expressed
the reasons for the 1962 split in his 1963 book,
The
American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's
Notebook. posted 14 May 2006
Living for Change: An Autobiography by Grace Lee Boggs
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 |
Grace Lee Boggs is an activist, writer,
and speaker whose sixty years of political involvement encompass
the major U.S. social movements of this century: Labor,
Civil Rights, Black Power, Asian American, Women's and
Environmental Justice. Born in Providence, R.I. of Chinese immigrant
parents in l915, Grace received her B.A. from Barnard College in
l935 and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in l940.
In the l940s and l950s she worked with West
Indian Marxist historian C.L.R.James and in l953 she came
to Detroit where she married James Boggs, African American
labor activist, writer and strategist. Working together in
grassroots groups and projects, they were partners for over 40
years until James' death in July l993. |
Their
book,
Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century,
was published by Monthly Review Press in l974. In l992, with James Boggs and others, she
founded DETROIT SUMMER, a multi-cultural, intergenerational
youth program to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the
ground up which completed its ninth season in June 2000.
Currently she is active in the Detroit Agricultural Network, the
Committee for the Political Resurrection of Detroit, writes for
the weekly Michigan Citizen, and does a monthly
commentary on WORT (Madison, Wisconsin).
Her
Living for Change: An Autobiography published
by the University of Minnesota Press in March l998, now in its second printing, is widely used in university
classes on social movements and autobiography writing. -- http://www.boggscenter.org/
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Zippety Doo Dah, Zippety-Ay: How Satisfactch'll Is Education
Today? Toward a New Song of the South
Dr. Joyce E. King on Black Education
and New Paradigms
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music website >
http://www.kalamu.com/bol/
writing website >
http://wordup.posterous.com/
daily blog >
http://kalamu.posterous.com
twitter >
http://twitter.com/neogriot
facebook >
http://www.facebook.com/kalamu.salaam
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The State of African Education
(April 200)
Attack On Africans Writing Their Own History Part 1 of 7
Dr Asa
Hilliard III speaks on the assault of academia on Africans writing and
accounting for their own history.
Dr Hilliard is A teacher,
psychologist, and historian.
Part 2 of 7
/
Part
3 of 7 /
Part 4 of 7
/
Part 5 of 7 /
Part 6 of 7 /
Part 7 of 7
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|
Basil Davidson
obituary—By Victoria Brittain—9 July 2010—Davidson [(9
November 1914 – 9 July 2010) a
British
historian, writer and
Africanist] was enthused early on by the end of British
colonialism and the prospects of pan-Africanism in the
1960s, and he wrote copiously and with warmth about newly
independent
Ghana and its leader, Kwame Nkrumah. He went to work for
a year at the University of Accra in 1964. Later he threw
himself into the reporting of the African liberation wars in
the Portuguese colonies, particularly in Angola,
Mozambique, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. . . . In the
1980s, with most of the African liberation wars now
won—except for South Africa's— Davidson turned much of his
attention to more theoretical questions about the future of
the nation state in Africa. He remained a passionate
advocate of pan-Africanism. In 1988 he made a long and
dangerous journey into Eritrea, writing a persuasive defence
of the nationalists' right to independence from
Ethiopia, and an equally eloquent attack on the
revolutionary leader Colonel Mengistu and the regime that
had overthrown Haile Selassie.
Guardian |
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Basil Davidson's "Africa Series"
Different
But Equal /
Mastering A Continent /
Caravans
of Gold /
The King and the City /
The Bible and The Gun
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West Africa Before the Colonial Era: A
History to 1850
By
Basil Davidson
This
book is excellent as an introduction to West
African history. It begins with a brief
overview of region's history from earliest
times but the focus of the book is on the
thousand years between the 9th and the 19th
centuries A.D.
Comprehensive overviews of the political
histories of both well and little known West
African states and cities are recounted.
These include the histories of the empires
of Ghana, Mali, Songhay, Kanem-Bornu, Oyo,
Benin, Dahomey and Asante. Accounts of
several other smaller states are also
detailed such as the Hausa city states, the
Wollof kingdom, the Bambara states, the
Niger Delta trading states, the Fulani
states of Futa Jallon and Futa Toro, the
important cities of Timbuktu, Jenne and Gao
and several others. |
Apart from these
political histories, Davidson also provides an insight
into the social fabric of West Africa, especially at the
dawn of the 17th century. He describes economic features
(like trade items, routes, currencies etc), religion,
arts and learning in the region, social stratification
and dominant trends. These provide the reader with a
real "feel" of the society at that time. Like all of
Davidson's writings on this subject matter, this book
dispels the myth that Africa had no history or
civilization before contact with Europe. It is clear,
concise and very easy to read.
D. E. Chukwumerije
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African Slave Trade: Precolonial History,
1450-1850
By Basil Davidson
The best general acount
of the Atlantic slave trade. It is the story
of one of the most enormous crimes in all
human history. Basil Davidson states that by
examining three important areas of Africa in
the history of slavery 'against a general
background of their time and circumstance'
he was taking 'a fresh look at the oversea
slave trade, the steady year-by-year export
of African laborr to the West Indies and the
Americas that marked the greatest and most
fateful migration—forced migration—in the
history of man. This book is about the
course and consequences of this long
African-European connection that endured
from the fifteenth century to the
nineteenth. It makes an answer to three
vital questions: What kind of contact was
this with Europe and America? How did the
experience affect Africa? Why did it end in
colonial invasion and conquest? |
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John Henrik Clarke—A Great and Mighty Walk
This
video chronicles the life and times of the
noted African-American historian, scholar
and Pan-African activist John Henrik Clarke
(1915-1998). Both a biography of Clarke
himself and an overview of 5,000 years of
African history, the film offers a
provocative look at the past through the
eyes of a leading proponent of an
Afrocentric view of history. From ancient
Egypt and Africa’s other great empires,
Clarke moves through Mediterranean
borrowings, the Atlantic slave trade,
European colonization, the development of
the Pan-African movement, and present-day
African-American history. |
 |
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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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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update 5 August 2010 |
