|
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
Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical
Music
/
Home: Social Essays
* *
* * *
Books by Manning Marable
From the Grassroots /
Blackwater
/
Black Radical Democrat
/
How Capitalism Underdeveloped
Black America /
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
Race, Reform and Rebellion /
Beyond Black and White /
Let Nobody Turn Us Around /
The Great Wells of Democracy /
Living Black History
* *
* * *
Manning Marable's Malcolm X Book
By
Amiri Baraka
On Mar
30 I waited for a car that
Manning Marable
was supposed
to send to pick me up at my house so that we could meet
later that day in his office at
Columbia University
because he wanted to interview me as part of an oral
history project. I had met with him two weeks before to
discuss how Columbia would handle my papers, that is
when we scheduled this last project. But the car never
came. I called another driver I knew, a friend of mine
and we drove to Columbia, but Marable was not there. It
seemed no one at the Africana studies department knew
where he was. Finally some word got to me that Manning
had gone back into the hospital. I went back home, the
next day I got the news on the internet that he had
died.
The
strangeness of that missed appointment was weird enough,
but the fact that
his last work on Malcolm X was to be
released two days later made the whole ending of our
living relationship a frustrating incomplete denouement.
Initially, a friend of mine gave me a copy of the book
at a happy discount. Taking it on one of my frequent
trips out of town, I began to read. I gave that first
copy to my wife when I returned because she had also, as
many other people had, been clamoring to read it. As
well as asking me relentlessly had I read it. I bought
another copy of the book at the Chicago airport, and I
guess started to get into the book seriously.
I have
known Manning for a number of years. Actually I met him
while he was still teaching in Colorado. I even worked
under him, when I taught briefly at Columbia University,
when he was chairman of the Africana Studies Dept. at
Columbia. As well, I have appreciated one of his books,
the Du Bois (Black Radical Democrat) work and at least
appreciated the theme of
How Capitalism Underdeveloped
Black America, as well as the entire stance of his
acknowledgement of the important aspects of American
(Black American) history which had to be grasped.
But as
recently as a few weeks ago, ironically I had written
him a letter about his journal Souls about an
essay that quoted a man* who had been accused of
participating in the assassination, making some
demeaning remarks about Malcolm. My letter questioned
the “intelligence” of including the quote since it
offered nothing significant to the piece. This was not
just loose criticism; I really wanted to know just what
purpose the inclusion served. ( *This man Thomas 15X is
the same one quoted by Marable as saying that it was the
Nation of Islam that burned Malcolm’s house down.)
But
with the publication of what some have called “his
magnum opus”
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention It is
not just Marable’s inclusion of tidbits of presumed
sexual scandal that should interest readers, that I
question, but more fundamentally, what was the
consciousness that created this work?
First
of all I don’t think we can just bull’s-eye the writer’s
intentions, we must include Marable’s consciousness as
the overall shaper of his intentions, as well as his
method. Originally from Ohio, Marable was a freshman in
college in 1969; he did not graduate until 1971. He has
been attached to Academic institutions since 1974,
Smith, Tuskegee, Univ. of San Francisco, Cornell,
Colgate, Purdue, Ohio State, University of Colorado,
Columbia. It is no denigration of his life to say that
Manning was an academic, a well principled one, but an
academic nevertheless.
But
Marable did have a political aspect to his life, which I
understood and why I think he was a very principled
academic. He did understand that the “purely” academic
was fabrication of the essentially unengaged. That
whatever you might do, there was a conscious political
stance that your political consciousness had to assume,
even if you refused to take it. So his “membership” in
the 1970’s
National Political Assembly chaired by
Richard Hatcher, Mayor of Gary, Indiana,
Rep. Charles
Diggs, the congressman from Detroit and myself as
chairman of the
Congress of African Peoples, signified
that he was aware and a partisan of that attempt to
raise and institutionalize Black political consciousness
as a way to organize Black people nationally to struggle
for Black political power.
In 1974
Marable joined the
Democratic Socialists of America
[DSA], and
for a time was even a Vice Chairman of that organization
which is called “Left” but is not a Marxist and
certainly not a Marxist-Leninist organization. It is one
of those organizations like the group that split from
Lenin’s 2nd International which he called
socialists in word but chauvinists in reality. So that
it is important that we recognize the specific political
base upon which Manning’s “observations” may be judged.
He is not simply “observing”. He is making judgments.
So
that, for instance, for Marable to consistently,
throughout his book, call the
Nation of Islam
[NOI] a “sect”
is a judgment not an observation. The NOI certainly has
and had more influence on society than DSA, certainly on
Black people.The meaning as a small breakaway group of
a religious order only used now to connote a “jocular or
illiterate” character (according to the OUD) is
spurious.
|
photo (l to R) Carmichael, Baraka, and
Rap Brown |
But
then in relationship to revolutionary Marxism or
Marxism–Leninism, DSA certainly fits the
description.My
point being that Marable must be judged by what he says
not by what others say he “intended.” The best thing
about the book, of course, is that it raises Malcolm X
to the height of our conversation again, and this is a
very good thing in this Obama election period. (Post
racial it ain’t!)The
very profile of Malcolm’s life, the outline of his life
of struggle needs to be spread across the world again,
if only to re-awaken the fiercest “blackness” in us to
fight this newly packaged “same ol’ same ol’” emergence
of white supremacy and racism.
Whatever Marable is saying or pointing out, in the end,
is to convince us of the superiority of
social democracy
which he refers to as “the Left,” which is anything from DSA to the
Trotskyists. The characterization of
Bayard
Rustin’s “superior” reasoning in a
debate with Malcolm
or the response of James Farmer to Malcolm’s bringing a
“body guard” to Farmer’s house, “Do you think I want to
kill you?” tries to render Malcolm some paranoid case
when indeed there were people plotting very actively to
kill him.
Ultimately, it is Marable’s own political line that
renders the book weakened by his consistent attempts to
“reduce” Malcolm’s known qualities and status
with many largely unsubstantiated injections, many
described by Marable himself as “rumors.” Is there, for
instance, any real evidence of Malcolm’s or Betty’s
sexual trysts. People who knew
Charles Kenyatta, for
example, in Harlem, will quickly recall a vainglorious
fool & liar. Could much of this rumor material actually
have come from Marable’s “official” sources, the FBI,
CIA, BOSS, NYPD, as well as those in the NOI who hated
him. About Malcolm, a sentence like Marable’s “That
evening Sharon 6X may have joined him in his hotel” is
inexcusable.
When I
wrote the FBI asking them to release surveillance
materials they had gathered on me, at first the director
even denied such papers existed. It was
Allen Ginsberg’s
lawyer that finally got an admission that such papers
existed, and that I could get them for ten cents a page.
But when I got the papers, it was my wife, Amina, who
said how do we know that the information they haven’t
crossed out is stuff they want us to see and so confuse
us about what was really going on.
I would
submit that is exactly what those agencies would do in
this case! To assume because you are given “access” to
certain information, that that information is not
“cooked,” as people around law enforcement say, is to
labor in deep naiveté as to whom you are dealing with!
Marable
never made any pretensions about being a
“revolutionary.” His hookup with the DSA is open
acknowledgment that he rejected Lenin’s prescription for
a revolutionary organization, or party of the advanced,
or such concepts as “The Dictatorship of the
Proletariat.” In fact the DSA says they are not a party,
aligning themselves very clearly with Lenin’s opponents
in the 2nd International.
Such
people, social democrats, are open opponents of
revolution, so that at base Marable was opposed to the
political logic of Malcolm’s efforts to make
revolution. Marable is even more dismissive of the
Nation of Islam which he brands a “cult” a “sect”
dismissing the fact that even as a religious
organization, the NOI had a distinct political message,
and that it was this message, I think, more than the
direct attraction of Islam, that drew the thousands to
it.
If
Marable was giving a deeper understanding of
Elijah
Muhammad’s call for Five States in the South, he would
have mentioned the relationship of this concept to
Lenin’s formulation of an Afro American Nation in
the black belt South (called that because that is
the largest single concentration of Afro Americans in
the US). It was not simply some Negro fantasy.
If
Marable actually understood the political legitimacy of
Malcolm’s Black Nationalism and how Malcolm’s constant
exposure to the revolutionary aspects of the Civil
Rights movement and the more militant Black Liberation
Movement shaped his thinking and made his whole
presentation more overtly political and that this was
not only negative to the core of the NOI bureaucracy but
certainly to the FBI, &c. They have even written
Malcolm X was much safer to them in the Nation than as a
loose cannon roaming the planet outside of it. They
understood that what Malcolm was saying, even in
“The Ballot or the Bullet”
was dangerous stuff. That his admission that all
white people might not be the Devil was not morphing
into a Dr. King replica but an understanding, as he said
at Oxford University, that when Black people made their
revolution there would be some white people joining
them.
The
meeting with the Klan was not Malcolm’s idea, certainly
it was
Elijah
Muhammad’s as it had been
Marcus Garvey’s
idea before him.
Malcolm’s Black Nationalism became more
deliberately a Revolutionary Nationalism, such as
Mao Tse Tsung (or
Cabral or
Nkrumah) spoke of, necessary to
rally the nation’s forces together to make lst a
national revolution to overthrow foreign domination and
followed by a revolution to destroy capitalism.
Importantly, Marable does draw a clearer picture of
Malcolm’s childhood and early days, especially
indicating the Garvey influence his parents taught him
and how that would make him open to what Elijah Muhammad
taught. Unlike the obscure flashbacks of Spike Lee’s
version of Malcolm’s early days. Though Marable
ascribes some wholly political “defiance” to the conked
hair and zoot suits of the 40’s rather than
understanding that there was also a deep organic
cultural expression that is always evident in Black
life. It is not just a formal reaction to white society.
African pants are similarly draped. Access to
straightening combs or conkolene are a product of the
period, and certainly if any straight hair is gonna be
imitated, there was some here before the Latinos.
The
“antibourgeois” attitude of the Black youth culture is
organic and an expression of the gestalt of black life
in the US and Marable seems not to wholly understand it.
For instance his take on BeBop as the music of “the
hepcats (sic) who broke mostly sharply from swing,
developing a black oriented sound at the margins of
musical taste and commercialism.” BeBop was a
revolutionary music, dismissing Tin Pan Alley
commercialism and raising the blues and improvisation
again as principal to black music.
The
essential “disconnection “ in the book is Marable’s
failure to understand the revolutionary aspects of Black
Nationalism, as a struggle for “ Self Determination,
Self Respect and Self Defense.” A struggle for equal
democratic rights expressed on the sidewalks of an
oppressor nation by an oppressed Afro American
nationality.
What
the book does is try to remove Malcolm from the context
and character of an Afro American revolutionary and
“make him more human,” by dismantling that portrait by
redrawing him with the rumors, assumptions,
speculations, questionable guesses and the
intentionally twisted seeing of the state and his
enemies.
Was
Captain Joseph (who later changed his name to
Yusuf
Shah) close to Malcolm? He appeared on television
calling Malcolm “Benedict Arnold” and told Spike Lee
that I had come up to the Mosque and stood up to
question Malcolm and Malcolm told me to “sit down until
you get rid of that white woman.” I met Malcolm only
once, the month before he was murdered. This was in
Muhammad
Babu’s room at the Waldorf Astoria. Babu had
just finished leading the revolution in Zanzibar, and
would later become Minister of Economics for Tanzania(
which was Zanzibar and Tanganyika).
At that
meeting Malcolm responded to my demeaning of the NAACP
by saying I should be trying, instead, to join the
NAACP, to make a point about Black people needing a
“United Front.” That idea was not an attempt at “trying
to become respectable,” to paraphrase Marable, Malcolm
had come to realize that no sectarianism could make the
revolution we needed. Interestingly,
Stokely Carmichael
also called for the building of a Black United Front,
and
Martin Luther King, when he visited my house in
Newark, a week before he was murdered, called for the
same political strategy. It was such a front that was a
major part of the national democratic coalition that
elected Obama.
As for
Yusuf Shah, when
Spike Lee repeated Shah’s wild
allegations about me in his book How I Made The Movie
X [By
Any Means Necessary], I asked a college friend of mine, who had become
my part time lawyer, Hudson Reed, to file a suit against
Shah demanding he be questioned in court for any
“exculpatory” evidence relating to the murder of Malcolm
X, particularly as to the involvement of himself and
organized crime. A short time later,
Shah, who had moved
to Massachusetts, died in his sleep. Marable reports
that Captain Joseph/Yusuf Shah’s FBI file was “empty”!
It is
Marable’s misunderstanding of the revolutionary aspect
of
Black Nationalism that challenges the portrait not
only of Malcolm but of the period and it’s organizations
as well. He treats the split between Malcolm X and the NOI much like he assumes the police did. (Though this is
patently false.) As a struggle between “two warring
black gangs,” a sect splitting from the main.
So that
there is much more from Marable framing Malcolm’s murder
as directed by the NOI, rather than the state. Marable’s
general portrait of Malcolm is as doomed and confused
individual about whom he could say that “Malcolm
extensively read history but he was not a historian.” As
if the academic title “HISTORIAN” conferred a more
scientific understanding of history than any grassroots’
scholar might have. Simple class bias.
To say
of the NOI that it was not a radical organization
obscures the Black Nationalist confrontation with the
white racist oppressor nation. Marable thinks that the
Trots of the SWP [Socialist
Workers Party] or the members of the CP [Communist
Party] or the
Committees of Correspondence are more radical. That
means he has not even understood Lenin’s directive as
pointed out in Stalin’s
Foundations of Leninism,
in "The National Question,"
|
. . .
The revolutionary character of a
national movement under the conditions
of imperialist oppression does not
necessarily presuppose the existence of
proletarian elements in the movement,
the existence of a revolutionary or a
republican programme of the movement,
the existence of a democratic basis of the movement. The
struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the
independence of Afghanistan is objectively a
revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist view of
the Emir and his associates, for it weakens,
disintegrates and undermines imperialism; whereas the
struggle waged by such ‘desperate’ democrats and
‘socialists’, ‘revolutionaries’ and republicans . . .
was a reactionary struggle. …Lenin was right in saying
that the national movement of the oppressed countries
should be appraised not from the point of view of formal
democracy but from the point of view of the actual
results, as shown by the general balance sheet of
struggle against imperialism.—Foundations of Leninism,
p.77. |
Marable thinks that
the Trots like the SWP or the soi disant Marxists
in CPUSA or the
Committees of Correspondence (a
breakaway from the CPUSA) or the DSA are more radical
than the NOI or Malcolm X. Perhaps on paper. But not in
the real world of the Harlem streets. Malcolm came out
the NOI, Dr. King from the reformist
SCLC. But both men
were more objectively revolutionary on those Harlem
streets or in those southern marches than any of the
social democratic formations and the social democrats
ought to face this.
Marable
spends most of his time trying to make the NOI Malcolm’s
murderers. Information from FBI, BOSS, CIA, NYPD, would
tend to push this view, for obvious reasons. In this
vein Marable says that Malcolm’s Africa trips “made his
murder all the more necessary from an institutional
standpoint.” That Malcolm’s actions “had been all too
provocative” to
Elijah
Muhammad and the NOI. But what
about the Imperialist U.S. state and its agencies of
detection and murder? They would be more provoked and
better able to end such provocation. If there’s a
well-known murderer of Malcolm X still running loose as
Marable and others have pointed out, how is it he
remains free and we must presume that those agencies of
the state know this as well as Marable and the others!
|
But
even as he keeps hammering away that it was the Nation
of Islam, he still says contradictorily “The fatwa, or
death warrant, may or may not have been signed by Elijah
Muhammad, there is no way of knowing.” Many of
Marable’s claims fall under the same category.
He even
quotes Malcolm after he was refused entrance into France
that he had been making a “serious mistake” by focusing
attention on the NOI Chicago headquarters “thinking all
my problems were coming from Chicago and they’re not.”
Asked then from where, Malcolm said “From Washington.”
Marable
also tells us that even today the FBI refuses to release
its reports on Malcolm’s assassination. Yet he will
quote one of those agencies without question. Of Betty
Shabazz’ death Marable says flatly, of Malcolm’s
daughter Qubilah . . . ”her disturbed twelve-year old
son set fire one night to his grandmother’s apartment.”
How does he know this? Is an official government
“information” release that impressive? There are many
doubts about that murder; shouldn’t some of them have
been investigated?
Some of
the characterizations in the book are simply incorrect
and suffer from only knowing about the movement on
paper.
|
 |
Marable saying about Stokely Carmichael, after
splitting with “pacifist” Bob Moses and SNCC that he
would subsequently join the Black Panthers” is such an
example. Carmichael didn’t join the Panthers; he
was “drafted” along with Rap Brown.
Marable
says in effect that Malcolm misunderstood
Martin Luther King’s influence on Black people. He didn’t
misunderstand that influence: he was trying to provide an
alternative to it. Though ultimately I believe both
leaders later conclusion that a United Front would be
the most formidable instrument to achieve equal rights
and self-determination for the Afro American people, I
would have liked to see Malcolm and Martin in the same
organization, and for that matter Garvey & Du Bois. They
could argue all day and all night and in the end some of
us might not agree on the majority’s decision, but like
the Congress of the United States we’d have to say, “I
don’t even agree with that . . . but that’s what we
voted to do”!
Interestingly, on the back of the book are three
academics who represent the same social democratic
thought as Prof Marable.
[Skip] Gates who disparages Africa,
looks for racism in Cuba not Cambridge and says the
Harvard Yard is his nation.
My
friend
Cornell West who in response to me calling out at
the Left Forum, “Where are the socialists, where are the
communists” shouts “I’m a Christian!” And
Michael Eric
Dyson who wrote a book on Dr. King calling it the “True
Dr. King” somewhat like Marable’s approach to
Malcolm. But who and what else in the paper “Garden of
Even” of “Post Racial America.” So it is necessary that
we rid ourselves of the real leaders of our struggle, in
favor of Academics who want to tell us we were following
flawed leaders with flawed ideas. We don’t need equal
rights and self-determination, an appointment to an Ivy
League school will do just fine.
4 May 2011
* * * * *
* *
* * *
Public Memorial
Service for Dr. Manning Marable
Thursday, May
26, 2011 - 5:30pm - 7:00pm
Columbia
University Roone Arledge Auditorium at Lerner Hall
The public is
invited to attend a Memorial Service for Dr. Manning
Marable on
Thursday May 26, 2011 at 5:30pm
on the Morningside Campus of Columbia University
Roone Alredge Auditorium, Lerner Hall (115th Street
& Broadway)
* *
* * *
Dr.
Manning Marable
(May 13, 1950 - April 1, 2011)
Scholar, Activist, Mentor
By Russell
Rickford
Prof. Manning Marable, an ebullient teacher and
institution-builder who embodied the reciprocal
possibilities of scholarship-activism, and a Du
Boisian intellectual who sought in the black past
lessons for the radical transformation of American
democracy, died on April 1, 2011 at the age of 60.
 |
Dr.
Marable was a prolific scholar whose
labor in the arenas of history,
political science and social criticism
inspired popular and academic audiences.
He was a “race man” in the best sense of
the tradition—“our grand radical
democratic intellectual,” in the words
of philosopher Cornel West. His
wellspring of love for black folk
nourished a passion for democracy and a
vision of Africana studies as a crusade
for the material and spiritual
liberation of all oppressed people.
Marable’s deep knowledge of the African
Diaspora made him a force in the field
of black history; his courage and
progressive politics made him a treasure
for “the grassroots.”
For
Dr. Marable, “living black history” was
more pilgrimage than principle. His
journey began on May 13, 1950 in Dayton,
Ohio. |
Born to James and June Morehead Marable, schoolteachers who enforced a
regimen of U.S. and world history books,
the young bibliophile soon discovered
the gift of historical imagination.
Acutely conscious of race matters, he
was further politicized by the April
1968 assassination of Martin Luther
King, Jr.
He was among the first mourners to arrive at the
Atlanta church that hosted King’s funeral. (He
covered the event for Dayton’s black newspaper.) A
high school senior at the time, he perched on the
steps of Ebenezer Baptist in the predawn shadows to
await the masses.A precocious
student, he completed his bachelor’s in 1971 at
Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana (while leading
the black student union) and went on to earn his
master’s (1972) and Ph.D. (1976) in history at,
respectively, University of Wisconsin, Madison and
University of Maryland, College Park. Between the
mid-1970s and early 1990s, Dr. Marable served on the
faculty of Tuskegee Institute, University of San
Francisco, Cornell University, Fisk University,
Colgate University, Purdue University, Ohio State
University, and University of Colorado, Boulder.
As a scholar
who traversed the disciplines of history, political
science and sociology, Dr. Marable grounded his work
in the black American experience while exploring the
larger African Diaspora, traveling to Kenya,
Tanzania, Cuba, South Africa and Brazil. He
developed political and academic contacts throughout
the black world, seeing the remaking of racialized
societies as the primary task of the engaged
intellectual. Armed with the theories of
Du Bois,
C. L. R. James and
Antonio Gramsci, he mastered political economy,
emphasizing material solutions to social inequality
and exposing the interlocking shackles of race and
class.
During the
first half of his career, Dr. Marable headed the
Race Relations Institute at Fisk, the Africana and
Latin American Studies Program at Colgate, and the
Department of Black Studies at Ohio State. However,
it was his directorship of
Columbia
University’s Institute for Research in
African-American Studies, which he founded in
1993, that marked his most significant personal and
political transitions.
Facing the
sudden acceleration of
sarcoidosis, an illness he had battled for
years, and increasingly devoted to the socially
redemptive power of political ideas, he crafted the
Institute in the image of
Du Bois’s Atlanta University project. Under Dr.
Marable’s stewardship, the Institute married
scholarship and social transformation, launching
initiatives to bolster the case for African-American
reparations, fight the specter of racialized mass
imprisonment, and reclaim the radical vectors of
Malcolm X’s legacy. Meanwhile, Dr. Marable
cultivated two generations of scholars, activists
and students, discovering in each individual a
unique genius for advancing the cause he lovingly
described: empowering the black masses to reclaim
their agency and “return to their own history.”
Dr. Marable
wrote prodigiously. The legal pads he dispatched in
longhand became the masonry of a scholarly edifice
that included more than 30 books and edited volumes,
as well as hundreds of articles in academic and
popular journals.
From the Grassroots,
Blackwater,
How Capitalism Underdeveloped
Black America,
Race, Reform and Rebellion,
Beyond Black and White,
Let Nobody Turn Us Around (with Leith
Mullings),
The Great Wells of Democracy,
Living Black History, and now, Malcolm X,
anchor the shelves of countless students and
circulate endlessly in prison yards, their covers
curled and shabby, their wisdom pristine. Committed
to class-conscious analysis rendered in
straightforward prose, Dr. Marable also produced
and distributed free of charge, a public affairs
column—“From the Grassroots” (later “Along the Color
Line”)—that for three decades reached a vast
readership through the black press, reinvigorating
Du Bois’s legacy of political commentary and
agitation.
Much of Dr.
Marable’s energy was spent building—and not merely
interpreting—the movement for racial justice. As he
observed, “It is only when we stand against the
current, confronting the powerful forces of
prejudice and inequality, that the tools of
scholarship become meaningful.” Some of his most
rewarding experiences came through his involvement
with the Institute of the Black World in the 1970s
(an association that enabled him to chauffeur—and
thus interrogate and debate—the great Pan Africanist
historian Walter Rodney). He participated in the
National
Black Political Assembly, the
National Black Independent Political Party and
the
Democratic Socialists of America
in the 1980s and the
Committees of Correspondence
in the 1990s. His long record of leadership on the
left included his role as co-founder of the
Black Radical Congress in 1998 and his
participation in the
2001 United Nations World Conference on Racism in
Durban, South Africa.
From Jamaica to
Cuba to Sing Sing Prison, Dr. Marable lectured. He
made frequent media appearances on programs like
Democracy Now! He served as founding editor of
Souls, a journal of black history, politics
and culture. He established Columbia’s Center
for Contemporary Black History. He created archives
and digital resources for teachers and researchers.
He served on the board of the
Association for the
Study of African-American Life and History. He
received many commendations, including the 2005
National Council for Black Studies Ida B. Wells—Cheikh
Anta Diop Award for Outstanding Scholarship and
Leadership in African-American Studies, as well as
two honorary degrees: John Jay College of the City
University of New York (2006); and State University
of New York, New Paltz (2000).
Dr. Marable was
a generous mentor. A Marxist feminist who was also a
“Malcolmite”; a black history savant with pop
culture tastes (“You can’t handle the truth!” was
one of his stock phrases); a dissident social
scientist who remained faithful to the political
promise of the hip-hop generation, he brandished
these identities with passion and grace, convincing
his pupils that they, too, could achieve a more
perfect whole. Ultimately, that eclecticism
reinforced his vision of what social history and
critical theory might accomplish: the construction
of a liberation movement that shatters social
barriers based on color, class and gender.
Dr. Marable is
survived by his wife, the anthropologist Leith
Mullings; his three children, Malaika Marable
Serrano, Sojourner Marable Grimmett, and Joshua
Manning Marable; two stepchildren, Alia Tyner and
Michael Tyner; a sister, Madonna Marable; his
mother, June Morehead Marable; three grandchildren
and an extended family in New York, Ohio and
Tuskegee.
Donations can
be made to The Manning Marable Memorial Social
Justice Fund which will provide grants and awards to
organizations and individuals that reflect an honor
Dr. Marable’s commitment to the struggle for
justice. Checks can be made out to The Manning
Marable Social Justice Fund and sent to:
The Manning Marable Memorial
Social Justice Fund
c/o The Adco Foundation
328 8th Avenue
Suite 404
New York, NY 10001
Attention: Dana Ain Davis
Source:
IRAS
* *
* * *
Responses to Baraka's Manning Review
Dear Rudy,
Thanks for sharing Baraka's review essay with us.
Among those of us who still believe a truth is a
possibility, there are so many territories to
investigate: Warren's wolf-ticket regarding the
end of
African-American Literature, Marable's "reinvention"
of Malcolm, President Obama's audacious management
of his presidency. These are small parts of the
total territory for our minds to engage, because
local issues such as miseducation of young people,
random and not-so-random racial resentments,
literacy, and forms of economic insanity (or deep
uncertainty)—I truly can't process all these
interrelated mindscapes at once. The provocations
send my blood pressure upward. I am very fortunate
in having weekly conversations with
Kalamu , conversations that help me to deal
with more items than I could independently.
I am still trying to clear my work space of overdue
projects and haven't tackled Marable's book yet.
Being an academic or a person who teaches in
academic settings, I find Baraka's swipe at
academics as a class a bit unsettling. Not all of us
hop into bed with academic ideologies. I am not
perhaps a genuine "black
nationalist," but I do tend to invest in the
black rootedness I can derive from
David Walker and Richard Wright.
I do use small bits of Marxist analysis and
perspectives in my work, but I refuse to trust
Marx,
Lenin, or
Mao more than I trust vernacular revolutionary
thinkers (including
Baraka himself). I think
revolutions are subtle not overt and dramatic. They
occur without our being fully cognizant of them, and
they seem never to destroy all the paradigms we
lived by before we gain awareness of their having
taken place.
Thus, until I am able to make my own critique of
Marable's book, I can only take what Baraka says
with grains of pepper and salt.—Peace,
Jerry
* *
*
Thanks, Rudy. I've read it
rather hastily and think that he makes some valid
points, but also think it's very curious that
Baraka, a former Marxist, takes Marable to task for
his social democratic consciousness (i. e., his
ideology), which Baraka thinks affects his (Marable's)
perspective.— Miriam
* *
*
Miriam, I think
you have grasped the gist of Baraka's critique.
Nevertheless, I am rather ignorant of Marxist
ideologies. But Baraka, as I understand it, is
making a distinction between social democrat and
communist (socialist) revolutionary: Manning is the
former and he views himself the latter.
As far as I know Baraka remains a "Communist." But
he has been doing Marxist analyses in racial
contexts since the 60s (maybe influenced by his
Cuban sojourn), before he later declared himself
a "cultural nationalist" (following
Karenga) and for sometime now a Communist,
whatever that means. I suspect that it makes one
more radical than other arm-chair theorists on
revolution. He seems however to be in the rather
Stalinist-Maoist mould as a counter to
Trotskyism (socialist revolution cannot be
sustained in one country kind of ideology), which I
suspect he views as defeatist and thus
counter-revolutionary. I have never been attracted
by Stalin and Mao and thus I rather gravitated to
the more romantic
Trotsky, who as I recall was on Stalin's hit
list and was eventually assassinated in Mexico.
I have been reading recently Jones'
Home: Social Essays, which contains a piece
in which he argues against the "individualism" of
Peter Abrahams, a well-known Pan-Africanist and
James Baldwin, which he concludes that if they were
able to become white the struggle would come to a
close immediately. Sometimes I am up and sometimes I
am down when it comes to Baraka and politics. As an
ideological thinker I find him wanting. As one who
has a gut poetic insight into that social-is, he is
quite excellent, wonderful, and rewarding. I
suppose we all in this light would be viewed as
petty-bourgeois reformers, or, that other dirty
word—individualists.
That is the grate, I assume, of
Baraka's socialist criticism.— Loving
you madly, Rudy
* *
*
I don't know
(or care) enough about political ideology to make
nice, polite distinctions between
Marxism/Leninism/Trotskyism/Maoism/Communism
(Russian-style)/Socialism (Cuban-style), ad
infinitum, ad nauseum. Indeed, Baraka criticizes
Marable for being an academic, and then he (Baraka)
engages in academic mind games himself. Baraka has
put on and taken off so many different ideological
coats in his life-time, and I suspect that Marable
has too. To live is to grow, to evolve
intellectually, as Malcolm certainly did, to his
credit. The Black Nationalists that I know are
pissed that Marable has desecrated, in their view,
this image of Malcolm as the ballot-or-bullets
radical; the womanists/feminists are upset about the
subservience of women in the NOI, and Marable adds
fuel to that fire: the Nation is outraged because
Marable has called some of them out: the Leftists
are concerned because of Marable's reliance on
questionable government documents; and so it goes.
Acklyn maintains that Marable isn't responsible for
the book's slant; he was too sick to finish the
book, which was probably completed by his "partner"
or Whites who wanted to cut Malcolm down a notch or
two. Baraka is certainly right when he maintains
that the whole debate has brought Malcolm front and
center again, and that's a good thing.
Point two, I'm
sick and tired of radicals criticizing academics as
some kind of elitist, ivory tower, uncommitted
cop-outs. Acklyn was an academic who has been in the
front line all of his life; so much so, that he was
almost beaten to death. Ron Walter was an academic
activist to the core. I was an academic who
led students in a boycott of the president's office,
organized a boycott of the city schools, went to
jail, was maced and threatened. In fact, most of the
Black academics I know have been firebrands, at
least the ones I hung out with. We have to get over
these stereotypes we have that divide us as a
people.—Miriam
* *
*
No matter what
else you could say about Baraka he has always been
in the mix and exceptionally brilliant even when on
the occasion or two when he was wrong, usually
because he was running a bit ahead of the pack. Your
comments are learned though reflecting your youth
and they take me back to 1965 when I first met
Baraka, then still LeRoi Jones, in person at the
Three Days of Soul Festival, or maybe Three Days of
Blues—because
what stands out from the day I attended was the glee
of several young black males behind me tickled so
much by what they thought was the backwardness of
downhome blues—held in Washington, D.C.
After Jones’s
presentation I walked down to the front of the stage
and introduced myself. He knew me already knew from
Negro Digest
and the like. He’d mentioned me in
Blues People, I believe, or some similar
book, but I’m 90 per cent sure that was the one as
it wasn’t Home, which seems to have come out by
then. It could have been
Black Music,
but I don’t see any such book listed in Wikipedia.
He was already quite famous; indeed he appeared to
arrive early on as a jazz critic, the most prominent
and pretty much the only black writing then in
Downbeat and doing jazz music jacket covers.
I was having trouble getting a publisher for my
Negro Digest
article turned book, The
Black Anglo Saxons. He wrote down and gave
me the name and address of his newly ex-wife, who
was New York literary agent, but she promptly wrote
back that my work did not interest her; perhaps it
was also too nationalistic and/or she had had enough
of us at that point.
I am glad you are reading the
pre-Sixties and inviting other young intellectuals
to do likewise. Nobody can do that without reading
LeRoi Jones. Baraka can speak for himself (LOL).— Nathan
* *
*
To Rudolph Lewis
Amiri Baraka’s review of Manning Marable’s
Malcolm X:
A Life of Reinvention
(Viking, 2011)
Berlin, Germany, Sunday, May
8, 2011
Baraka’s review
of Marable on Malcolm X demonstrates all the
strengths and all the weaknesses of Baraka’s
striking, but erratic genius. It is a very curious
blend of hero worship and self-aggrandizement. I do
not consider Malcolm X to have been any more
important as a thinker than Baraka, himself. He is
greater in death than in life. If Baraka had
managed to get himself assassinated in 1965, who
knows? Baraka might today occupy a status higher
than that of Malcolm. In fact, I am almost certain
that he would have.
As an
intellectual, Baraka demonstrates a more impressive
mastery of revolutionary socialist thought and
activity than Malcolm ever did. There are very few
talking heads or college professors with superior
knowledge. Certainly Baraka’s knowledge of matters
relating to Marxist-Leninist doctrine is superior to
my own. Over my career, I have exerted my own
intellectual and emotional powers to their
fullest. I am not ashamed to admit that my
productivity does not match that of some others.
The fact that people like Marable and Baraka and
Cornel are able to read and study as much as they
do, while functioning as “public intellectuals”
impresses me greatly. If I ever had the creative
and/or intellectual powers to accomplish such feats
as they have, I have lacked the stamina and the
emotional resources.
Baraka for all
his presupposed black-centeredness, seems obsessed
with Lenin, quoting him extensively, and at one
point he validates Five-State Black-Belt Nationalism
with the following words: “Lenin’s formulation of
an Afro American Nation in the black belt South
(called that because that is the largest single
concentration of Afro Americans in the US). It was
not simply some Negro fantasy.” This phraseology
is self-revealing and unfortunate. Is “negro
fantasy,” suddenly endowed with validity if it can
be attributed to Lenin? In any case I always
associated the scheme with Stalin, but I yield to
Baraka’s expertise in this as in other matters.
I have been a
humble college professor, a poor academic, although
somewhat suspect as an historian. My MA is in
British Literature and my Ph.D. in American
Studies. In fact, I now lay myself open to the
charge of dilettantism, for I am occupying my final
years with a chase after a jack-o-lantern, called
European studies, which has involved passing a
paltry French examination, and improving my still
imperfect German. The goal has been simply to
complete a project in European arts and letters that
I began at the age of fourteen. I was young and
naive when I began. Now, although I am old enough
to know better, I still pursue the jack-o-lantern,
because my mother would have wished me to do so.
Marable, for
whatever reason—not necessarily any that Baraka has
named—has chosen to write a book about Malcolm that
deviates dramatically from the hagiography of Alex
Haley. Albert Ellery Bergh, editor in the 1907
edition of
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, said:
“men of every variety of political opinion, however
far asunder, find confirmation of their doctrine in
him.” This is one of the dangers of hero
worship. Everyone wants a piece of the True Cross,
and everyone claims to have one.
For my part, I
steer clear of such controversies, and that is why I
have no desire to become involved in controversies
over Malcolm. Thomas Jefferson is problem enough
for me. If I can simply force a few people to admit
that Jefferson was a third-rate philosopher, and
that democracy, whether Jeffersonian or otherwise is
a flawed concept, I shall be satisfied.
Of course, it
is naive of me to think I can have any effect at
all, but my project is enough to keep an old man
harmlessly occupied during his few remaining years
on this increasingly radioactive dying planet.—Wilson J. Moses
*
* * * *
Malcolm X
artifacts unearthed—Police docs and more found among
belongs of 'Shorty' Jarvis—1 February
2012—Documents outlining the crime that landed
Malcolm X in prison in the 1940s are among some
1,000 recently unearthed items purchased jointly by
the civil rights leader's foundation and an
independent collector of African-American artifacts.
The documents and other artifacts belonged to late
musician Malcolm "Shorty" Jarvis, who served in
prison with Malcolm X and was one of his closest
friends. Jarvis' 1976 pardon paper also is part of
the collection, which was recently discovered by
accident. The items had been in a Connecticut
storage unit that had gone into default, and were
initially auctioned off to a buyer who had no idea
what he was bidding on. The Omaha, Nebraska-based
Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, which oversees the
Malcolm X Center located at his birthplace, will
house and display the just-arrived archives. It
split the cost with Black History 101 Mobile Museum,
based in Detroit—the birthplace of the Nation of
Islam.—Mobile Museum founder and curator Khalid
el-Hakim declined to identify the original buyer or
the price the two organizations paid for the trove.
Still, even after splitting the cost, he said it's
the largest acquisition to date for his mobile
museum, which includes Jim Crow-era artifacts, a Ku
Klux Klan hood and signed documents by Malcolm X and
Rosa Parks. . . . The collection also reveals an
enduring connection between the two Malcolms after
their incarceration, Malcolm X's conversion to Islam
and his rise to prominence. There's a 72-page
scrapbook of Malcolm X's life that was maintained by
Jarvis until after his friend's 1965 assassination.
One of the civil rights era's most controversial and
compelling figures, Malcolm X rose to fame as the
chief spokesman of the Nation of Islam, a movement
started in Detroit more than 80 years ago. He
proclaimed the black Muslim organization's message
at the time: racial separatism as a road to
self-actualization and urged blacks to claim civil
rights "by any means necessary" and referred to
whites as "devils."—TheGrio
posted 8 May 2011
* *
* * *
Manning Marable Refuels Debate on Life and Legacy of
Malcolm X
With Amiri
Baraka, Herb Boyd, and Michael Eric Dyson
* *
* * *
 |
Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world. |
Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.
Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
Pulitzer Prize for History 2012 Winner—For a
distinguished and appropriately documented book on
the history of the United States, Ten thousand
dollars ($10,000). Awarded to Malcolm X: A Life
of Reinvention, by the late Manning Marable
(Viking), an exploration of the legendary life and
provocative views of one of the most significant
African-Americans in U.S. history, a work that
separates fact from fiction and blends the heroic
and tragic. (Moved by the Board from the Biography
category.)—Pulitzer
*
* * * *
|
Ghosts in Our Blood
With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean
By Jan R.
Carew
Carew, an
activist, scholar, and journalist, met Malcolm X
during his last trip abroad only a few weeks before
he was killed in 1965. It made such an impression on
Carew that he felt compelled to search out Malcolm's
family and friends in order to flesh out the family
history. He interviewed Wilfred (Malcolm's older
brother) and a Grenadian friend of Malcolm's mother
named Tanta Bess. Comparing his family's experiences
with that of Malcolm X, he gives the most complete
picture yet of Malcolm's mother. Carew also offers a
tantalizing glimpse of Malcolm X's transforming
himself into El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, a man less
blinded by his own racial prejudices yet as
committed to the betterment of his race as ever.
Just before his death, Malcolm X became convinced
that a U.S. agency was involved with those trying to
kill him, and Carew here reveals the evidence
Malcolm X gave him to support these beliefs. The
mystery of Malcolm's death remains unresolved, and
we are once again filled with regret that he was cut
down before he could fulfill the promise of his
later days. —Library
Journal |
 |
* * *
* *
* * *
* *
 |
Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical
Music
By
Amiri Baraka
For
almost half a century,
Amiri Baraka
has ranked among the most important
commentators on African American music and
culture. In this brilliant assemblage of his
writings on music, the first such collection
in nearly twenty years, Baraka blends
autobiography, history, musical analysis,
and political commentary to recall the
sounds, people, times, and places he's
encountered. As in his earlier classics,
Blues People and
Black Music, Baraka offers essays on
the famous--Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles
Davis, John Coltrane--and on those whose
names are known mainly by jazz
aficionados--Alan Shorter, Jon Jang, and
Malachi Thompson. Baraka's literary style,
with its deep roots in poetry, makes
palpable his love and respect for his jazz
musician friends. His energy and enthusiasm
show us again how much Coltrane, Albert
Ayler, and the others he lovingly considers
mattered. |
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice . . .—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
* *
* * *
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)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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