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Mau Mau in Brief
The scriptwriters really
had to develop the white characters. They were unevenly
developed as seen through the eyes of Haley's ancestors, who
knew only what they perceived. This point of view extended even
to what was going on throughout the country as a whole. Haley
did it through black eyes by surmising that Bell had the ability
to read and write, which she kept secret. But she did secretly
read the newspapers that Dr. Reynolds left around the house. And
so she knew what was being written in the newspapers about the
slave revolts and slavery. She didn't tell even Kunta Kinte
until after they were married, and she found out that he could
read Arabic and could show her what is name looked like in
Arabic. Roots Impact
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Mao’s position on white revolutionaries was more
practically based in his fight against Western imperialism. He supported
anyone who fought on the domestic front against the United
States of America--the strongest anti-revolutionary force and the
greatest imperialist power in the world. Whites who proposed
revolutionary change in America, for Mao, came under the united
front strategy of : "The enemies of my enemy are my
friends." Mao and the Chinese Revolution had trouble with a white, Russian Revolution that constantly fought
Peking for world-wide control of the "international"
Communist movement.
If revolutionaries as legendary as Malcolm X
and Mao had their suspicions about white revolutionaries, then
why was Cleaver so eager to embrace them? Retrospective
on Soul on Ice
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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.
From Parks to
Marxism
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McKay
always evinces a sensitive identification with his
people, both in their sufferings as well as in their
joys. Proud of his race, the wrongs they suffer hurts
him. But in his early work there is no strident racial
protest except for two poems "Jim at Sixteen" and
"Strokes of Tamarind Switch." "Jim at Sixteen" shows
the raw wound McKay’s tight handcuffs make on the wrist
of the arrested lad. But with patience, he kept saying
that he knew he could not help it, confessing how sad
and ashamed he felt even though it was accidental.
"Strokes of Tamarind" is written in reaction to a
judicial flogging he had witnessed; "I could not bear
to see him – my own flesh – stretched out over the
bench, so I went away to the Post Office near by." The
boy who had cried during the flogging broke down later
while talking to McKay who was so moved that he gave him
tickets for his train journey. Such gentleness of
spirit for a policeman is softness, unmanliness, and
sentimentality. But this brings about the finer verse
based on an instinctive feeling of sympathy for a
suffering people, and no less for an individual.
Black Consciousness Poet
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Later, I returned to Harlem, in ' 68; and
Comrade Ernie Allen, co-editor of Soulbook, and I
participated in Part II of the BAM, by organizing the
"Loft" movement on 125th St. Our Loft was called
"The Black Mind," and we joined in with the Original
Last Poets (of whom I became a mentor), whose Loft was named the
"East Wind."
These lofts, in conjunction with Barbara Ann
Teer's National Black Theater Workshop, the Studio Museum in
Harlem, led by our Black Dialogue editor, and comrade, Ed
Spriggs and with Robert McBeth and Ed Bullin's New Lafayette
Theater, and Ernie McClintock's theater, became the major
institutions which led the Second Phase of the Harlem BAM
(roughly '68 to '74) which was in continuous contact w/Imamu
Baraka's Spirit House in New Ark. Baraka's "Spirit
House Movers" often performed @ our Loft-theaters, and
visited the New Lafayette Theatre.
Rudy
Interviews Askia Touré
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There is perhaps more
discomfort now in the fact that a large percentage of
the twelve million undocumented are poor and brown and
from the developing world. For years, people like Pat
Buchanan have bemoaned the fact that there was no
melting taking place in the pot. They consider
un-American what they see as the immigrant’s backward
glance at their sometimes poverty stricken and
politically heated homelands.
Monies sent back are
equated with taxes not being paid. Newborn babies are
health care thieves. And since good fences make good
neighbors, especially when only one neighbor can afford
to build or would seemingly benefit from the fence,
images of barbed-wire topped walls with armed Minutemen
on the other side dance around in wistfully nativist
heads. Out of the Shadows
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