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

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From Parks to Marxism

 A Political Evolution

By Amiri Baraka

In 1955 I was 21 years old and had been in the U.S. Air Force a year, where I had gone after being tossed out of Howard University.

The Montgomery bus boycott was heightened in my mind by the Jet cover of Emmett Till (which I’ve always felt was the opening salvo of the ’50 Civil Rights Movement).  The boycott began to hoist the image of resistance to what I’d known all my life as “racial oppression.”

I’d been prepped for understanding by my parents and grandparents, who constantly spoke of the regressive, racially pathological south.  They took me to South Carolina almost every summer throughout my youth.  I had seen and experienced the ugliness and petty terror of segregated trains.  One time, the white conductor would not let Black people close the windows in the segregated coach where we sat.  I was half-amazed at the dumb unnecessisariness of it all.  The why of it.  Cinders and soot poured in on all our clothes, and we brushed with a stiff resentment at each stroke.

I’d seen the segregated movies and bathrooms and restaurants.  In Alabama, where my mother’s family came from, we visited the very site of my grandfather’s two grocery stores and funeral parlor, which all burned to the ground, Klan style, and my grandfather and family threatened with terror and murder.

I’d looked at the funny-looking, droopy-faced, red storekeeper and friends, imaging, in adolescent vagueness, what idiotic ideas must be inside them, ugly as they were.  And what I’d remembered of what my folks had told me.

They said, these squint-eyed micro-rulers, that I talked “too plain.’  I’d almost fallen into as punishment.  I was reading the advertising aloud.  That was, I guess, like, ignorance of my place that made me read aloud, like I could really learn.

The south, for me, was always a mysterious terror our history and lives and families would connect us with—on & on.  Racism, a general context of my life, was emanating, like news of lynchings, from “down home.”  There was always such news, and ugly movie spooks to make us ashamed (even if they were funny) and so to create a code of resistance we could hear later from some of the publicly humiliated.  But as the complete awareness of all racism’s meaning and “my place” in that got clear, it would, as even today, shape me in absolute conscious resistance to all of it.

Yet the boycott was “distant.”  I was stationed in Puerto Rico; but my and our local struggles in our specific America—myself now absolutely under the state’s command—was like a current that touched me with its meaning.  For me, the boycott as it registered, was an expected presence we knew emotionally would come.  And the Civil Rights movement was in ourselves in the way we were seeing or approaching “America” and its old oppression of Black people.

Rosa Parks was a name that rang for me like an ancestor’s name, the way we read the headlines and radio and the grapevine of youth, opening where the beat of life beats strongest, as animator of our human development.  We were gonna be in the movement.

We always knew the crazy tales our people told about the vicious madness of White Supremacy, enforced by Uncle Sam Gestapo Good Old Boy Cracker Nazis, Spawn of the “Soul Thieves” (Fred said) who bought our bodies to work for them free, forever, so they could be rich and rule the world.  Sunday School and one people and friends and brains had told us clearly to recognize:  Heathens, jealous Crackers the old folks called them.  Racists.  Lynchers.  The spiritual KKK in America’s soul.

We are its Blood, ourselves.  Sucked out of our homes by our African selves as captors, then sold to vampire-like European and American slaves traders.  They are the meaning of Halloween.  The Skull and Crossbones is their only flag.

So Rosa Parks was a recruiter for the people, an example, a breath of humanity drawn into us by our lives and mind.  Dr. King’s appearance, the SCLC, the boycott’s example of Black self-determination, political and economic strength as well, was an instruction in a new era’s expression.  Rosa Parks’ act, the organization and leadership, campaign development, success and impact, were the opening of the activist phase as the phoenix-like explosive re-emergence of “the movement.”

There was now—along with our historic despising of and resistance to what we had been taught since babes—an open, organized attack on Evil.  On this real devil, in his Heaven-Hell.  There was now organized “Self Assertion,” as Du Bois said, as well as Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and Gandhi’s “Non-Violent Resistance.”

When Dr. King’s house was bombed in Montgomery in 1957, crowds of Black people rallied spontaneously in front of the house, many with rifles and shotguns.  The question of Self Defense was raised as an exact response to its obvious need in real life!  National leadership was thrust by the media upon Dr. King when he commanded the crowd’s deepest and most immediate emotions into a Black Christian alternative, “If any blood be shed … let it be ours!”  Newsweek and Time carried these words and a part of America confirmed King’s vision.

The church, the voice of southern Black religion and its professional class, would assert its leadership, and Christianity would reassert its leadership, and Christianity now would be the clothes democracy would need.  If we were Righteous, we would Overcome, as the Bible and Jesus promised.

It was classical Afro-American mythology, such as Du Bois characterized the slaves’ ontology connecting Africa with American chattel slavery and the slaves to an ancient ye syncretized philosophy.  We “were to suffer and be degraded, and then afterwards, by Divine edict, raised to manhood and power” (Du Bois:  Black Reconstruction).  For the masses of slaves, slavery ended because of “the Coming of the Lord.”

Such a cultural form was tradition and the emotion of our lives and memory, but we younger Blacks, out of school or the service or in the factories and warehouses docks, knew being “righteous” or “good” had never worked, except if you could fight.  (That’s why we called ourselves “Bad!”) You couldn’t be where we lived and let nobody insult you, your family, put you down too tough or get nuts on you.  So the Christian essence of “the movement” was lost to us, either in the world of the church or; as we saw it, other fictions.

We would not turn any other cheek.  White people could get their whatname beat.  I knew that.  Their cruelty was nearly always a constant.  Their real meaning was as Bosses, Owners, Storekeepers, Police, Pain-in-the-behind little racist dudes we’d clashed with, particularly in the north, at school or in the streets, or had to talk tough to.  “What?  I’ll whip yo’ mammyjammin white—” That had already come out of many of our generation’s mouth, absolutely sincerely, hope to die.

So, SCLC, SNCC, Robert Williams, Malcolm, Stokely, Rap,  Fannie Lou, the Panthers, CAP, CORE, Young Lords, Welfare Rights Organization, Nation of Islam, Urban League, NAACP, churches, Freedom Riders, “Move On Over Or We’ll Move On Over You!”— there was a part of us in all of them.  Some of us sang for all of us.  The Black Panther of Alabama.  Voter Registration Summers.  Freedom Marches.  They were part of our whole self-identification, even though we would work up passionate disclaimers on some of the details.

Robert Williams in Monroe, N.C., emerged as the wave, for us, after Rosa Parks’ “giving the word,” and Dr. King’s victorious leadership in Montgomery.  When Williams said, “Meet violence with violence” and ambushed the local Klan, took their guns and took off their hoods, that was a new paradigm for many of us young people—emphasized to the quick when Roy Wilkins bumrushed Williams out of the local NAACP leadership the next day!  But then The Deacons for Self Defense in Boogaloosa, Louisiana, followed with more armed defiance of the Klan and James Brown made that name a dance:  The Boogaloo!

We absorbed the machine-gun rapidity of heavy transforming events and personalities and struggles, Selma, Birmingham, Blown-up churches, what’s the difference between Bull Connor and Hitler, this was the nature of our incendiary learning.  White Citizen’s Council:  what’s the difference between them and the U.S. Senate, we shrugged, both shaped by white supremacy, by what we later understood as the national oppression of the Afro American people?  Medgar Evers, KKK (over and over), Lynchings (again and again), Mississippi (“Mississippi, Goddamn” our Nina belted!), Governor Wallace, Ross Barnett, the fool Eisenhower (“You can’t legislate the minds of the people,” he said, “Oh,,” we said, “then what mus’ we do?”)

Little Rock (Remember the little girl on the bench surrounded by heathens?), blown-up Black children in blown-up Black churches, by known Klan killers the FBI could have stopped.  Now they blowing them up again!!!  So what mus’ we do?

And then the next wave, spearheaded by Malcolm X and his fiery accusation of a “white America” that we recognized and were having a bloody public refresher course on.  Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, SELF DEFENSE!  BLACK POWER!  We were inside the newsreel in a breathless sweep of struggle and education and commitment.

Every day we inhaled Hoover, The Panthers, The beatings.  We beheld a Nazi America!  Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner murdered like escapees from Auschwitz, Water hoses, Dogs.  Violent maniac racists with the green light to do anything to us and get away with it.  Despicable ignorant!  Heathens.  Murderers.  Powerful!  Frauds who make a living lying.  Average ignorant white people.  Liberals.

These were not just events, but teachings, forum, battles, inductions into the deep heartlessness of this land and the empty doggishness of too many of those who claimed prominence and power.  We shuddered in outrage at the murders now of students as the student movement expanded across the country, the murders of Black students at Jackson State, Orangeburg, Texas Southern, and of white students at Kent State!  The 1960 Greensboro Black student sit-in had set it all off, and we grew even more aggressive in our will to resist this historic domestic oppression.

“Chickens Coming Home To Roost!” called Malcolm, sure enough.  The split in the Nation of Islam.  A lot of us would go with Malcolm El Hajj Malik Shabazz, the OAU, the journey to Africa and the historic Third World Front, the Bandang Conference.

All the faces and confrontations, the roar of resistant philosophies, diverse, some even antagonistic, were still against the American slave-master beast.  Elijah Muhammad, Black Nationalism Black Power Conferences, Panther’s Constitutional Convention, Congress of African People meeting in Atlanta, both the same weekend in 1970—all part of the same rush that sprang out with Malcolm’s first national appearance and the great explosion of the Cuban Revolution!

Nkrumah!  Africa!  Lumumba, Toure.  The National Black Assembly, Gary, Indiana; Africa Liberation Support Committee; Voting Rights; Civil Rights Bill; Vietnam; South Africa.  Stokes elected Mayor of Cleveland, Hatcher in Gary, Gibson in Newark; the Black vote!  The movement swept the whole of the U.S. in revolutionary democratic struggle.  It mirrored the same anti-colonial revolutionary democratic struggle that raged around the world.

That Afro American struggle, like those others, was and will be based on the exercise of the first expression of self-determination!  Nasser, Nyerere, Machal, Cabral, Pan African Congress, MPLA, ANC, TANU, PDG, PAIGC—those names carried confirmation that our struggle was part of a worldwide struggle against oppression, monopoly capitalism, imperialism, with apartheid and racism merely handy tools.

JFK assassinated, then Malcolm and King and Kennedy.

We called LBJ and Nixon names every day we saw their names or  pictures.  Amidst the murderous swirl of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement, which Dr. King correctly drew our struggle into, and the Days of Rage, Fred Hampton and Ralph Featherstone and Bobby Hutton were we? … yeh … this is the United States, not 1933 Berlin! the murders, herds of political prisoners, beatings, trials, demonstrations, protests, conferences, meetings meetings meetings, confrontations, resistance.

By the last year of the ’60s, Stokeley had called for “Black Power,” after Adam Powell’s sharp directive that Black people “seek audacious power” at the first Black Power conference he had convened, in D.C.—before “White America” got Adam, too and in true slave-master style, threw him out of Congress!

When the Black Power Conference came to Newark in 1967, I was in solitary confinement in a Newark jail as a result of the Newark Rebellion.  By then Watts ’65, Detroit and Newark ’67, and then hundreds of cities went up in flames.  Not only the cries of “Black Power!” but ultimately the urban rebellions in every major city in the country were the logical—if at first seemingly contradictory—outgrowth of Rosa Parks’ heroic act of resistance.

It was a mind-altering bombardment of revelation for those of us growing to political maturity during these times.  Between 1963 and 1969, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were blown away, in ways the convince many of us that it was done by anti-democratic forces affiliated with the U.S. government itself, direct agents of the most reactionary section of finance capital.

Today, contemplation of history shows us almost in exact replay of the Civil War and proposed Reconstruction.  Many of the democratic advances and reforms gained through the ’50 and ’60 Civil Rights/Black Liberation Movement have been but swept away.  The most bitter irony is that after every advance we thought would permanently transform this society is diluted, eliminated, or otherwise trashed, there are still mouths to the lie than now the U.S. is a people’s democracy.  

Even uglier is that too often it is one of the knee-grows who benefited most of the movement who becomes spokesperson in charge of covering this outrage.  Those who have sold their souls “for a mess of pottage” (and a few because they are psychologically and/or morally warped) are now employed as Heels.  This is the “Sisyphus Syndrome” Du Bois talked about, still in operation, where collectively Black people push the huge boulder of our national oppression up “the racial mountain” (Langston Hughes’s phrase), only to have it rolled back down on our heads by “the Gods.”

All that is to say, surely 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.  Let us speed the needed reorganization and recommitment.  In Rosa Parks’ name, as well as Dr. King and Malcolm X’s.  Like we used to sing on those marches, “Ain’t gon’ let nobody turn me around!”  I know you remember! -- Newark 1997–’98

Source: Crisis,  December 1998                             

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posted 9 November 2007