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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 /
Home: Social Essays
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Cold, Hurt, and Sorrow: Streets of
Despair
By Leroi Jones
These streets stretch from one end of America to the
other and connect like a maze from which very few can
fully escape. Despair sits on this country in most
places like a charm, but there is a special gray death
that loiters in the streets of an urban Negro slum. And
the men who walk those streets, tracing and retracing
their steps to some hopeless job or a pitiful rooming
house or apartment or furnished room, sometimes stagger
under the weight of that gray, humiliated because it is
not even “real.”
Sometimes walking along among the ruined shacks and
lives of the worst Harlem slum, there is a feeling that
just around the next corner you’ll find yourself in
South Chicago or South Philadelphia, maybe even Newark’s
Third Ward. In these places life, and its possibility,
has been distorted almost identically. And the
distortion is as old as its sources: the fear,
frustration, and hatred that Negroes have always been
heir to in America. It is just that in the cities, which
were once the black man’s twentieth century “Jordan,”
promise is a dying bitch with rotting eyes. And the
stink of her dying is a deadly killing fume.
The
blues singers know all this. They knew before they got
to the cities. “I’d rather drink muddy water, sleep in a
hollow log, than be in New York City treated like a
dirty dog.” And then they arrived, in those various
cities, it was much worse than even they had imagined.
The city blues singers are still running all that down.
Specifically, it’s what a man once named for me
unnatural adversity. It is social, it is economic, it is
cultural and historical. Some of its products are
emotional and psychological; some are even artistic, as
if Negroes suffered better than anyone else. But it’s
hard enough to be a human being under any circumstances,
but when there is an entire civilization determined to
stop you from being one, things get a little more
desperately complicated. What do you do then?
You
can stand in doorways late nights and hit people in the
head. You can go to church Saturday nights and Sundays
and three or four times during the week. You can stick a
needle in your arm four or five times a day, and bolster
the economy. You can buy charms and herbs and roots, or
wear your hat backwards to keep things from getting
worse. You can drink till screaming is not loud enough,
and the coldest night is all right to sleep outside in.
You can buy a big car . . . if the deal goes down.
There’s so much, then, you can do, to yourself, or to
somebody else. Another man sings, “I’m drinkin’ t.n.t.,
I’m smokin’ dynamite, I hope some screwball starts a
fight.”
One
can never talk about Harlem in purely social terms,
though there are ghetto facts that make any honest man
shudder. It is the tone, the quality of suffering each
man knows as his own that finally must be important, but
this is the most difficult thing to get to. (There are
about twenty young people from one small Southern town,
all friends, all living within the same few blocks of
the black city, all of whom are junkies, communally
hooked. What kind of statistic is that? And what
can you say when you read it?)
The
old folks kept singing, there will be a better day . . .
or, the sun’s gonna shine in my back door some day . . .
or, I’ve had my fun if I don’t get well no more. What
did they want? What would that sun turn out to be?
Hope is a delicate suffering. Its waste products vary,
but most of them are meaningful. And as a cat named Mean
William once said, can you be glad, if you’ve never been
sad?
From
Home: Social Essays
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Street Protest
By Leroi Jones
There have been
black men trying to get other black men to protest and
rise against the weight of America’s oppression since
those first clipper ships bringing them in in chains.
There have been black men willing even to die, and not
for an abstract freedom they teach you in grammar school
which belongs largely to dead patriots masquerading as
Indians, but for the simple need to say exactly what
they think, and explain exactly what they think America
is. But any black American who ever tried to say
something factual about the black man’s life in America,
even in the uncomplicated circumstances of slavery, was
either killed or, as the slave ship grew more
sophisticated and gave a few Negroes radios or air
conditioning in the hold, driven crazy or driven away
for daring to protest.
But to a large
extent America convinced itself that the black man
didn’t mind being a slave. (You remember those grinning
woogies strumming on the cotton bales? The
happy-go-lucky image of Harlem is an extension of this.)
Although the records of slave revolts are too numerous
to support such a faked conclusion, and men like Caesar,
Gabriel, Denmark, Nat Turner, and so many others were
not killed for strumming banjos.
Before the Negro
came North at the beginning of the century there was not
much room for any protest except one that would have to
begin at violence. But the North offered at least a
little more room to swing, buoyed up as it was, and is,
by a kindly Liberal/Missionary syndrome that will let
you say almost anything you want, as long as you don’t
threaten to do anything. (The missionary types
would tell the more repressive Americans, “Such protest
is good for business.”)
But ever since the
early years of this century there have been a great many
formal Negro protest groups thriving in the North: not
only the large, more respectable groups like the NAACP,
but the quickly organized and usually quickly disbanded
protest groups, who have no clearly outlined “program”
and of course no wealthy supporters and therefore very
little influence—except that they represent all the
people with no influence.
Some men take it
upon themselves, even alone, to make some noise about
the filth they see. In Harlem such men are easy to hear;
their persistence makes them available. They don’t even
need a soapbox and an American flag, or a place on the
stand in front of Michaux’s House of Proper Propaganda
on Seventh Avenue just above 125th Street.
They just stand out somewhere and talk loud, and a few
people stand and listen.
At an NAACP-Church
rally recently, in front of the
Hotel Theresa, where the large, money-financed, more
organized “protests” take place, a single speaker took
up a stand directly across the street from the main
rally and tried to shout the electronic equipment down
with a rolled-up magazine. There were about one hundred
cops watching the main rally and about two watching the
loner.
There are some
protest speakers who wear African robes and sandals, and
study African history. And now, as Africa rises, there
are some who speak of “teaching the children about their
heritage,” though they ought to know also that that
heritage is one that is cruelly local.
Since the twenties
there have been all kinds of local betterment leaders
and social prophets in Harlem.
Marcus Garvey was both, and even before he began his
back to Africa movement and the
Universal Negro Improvement Association, he was
shouting at people on Lennox Avenue to get themselves
together and get themselves together and get the white
man off their backs. The sentiment is still strong in
Harlem, and leaflets and speakers urging Negroes to “Buy
Black” are still ubiquitous. And now, young
clean-headed, clean-suited boys wave their copies of
Muhammad Speaks, spreading the word of
Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X.
Any weekend will
find some speakers out, singly or encouraged—especially
if the weather’s good. There is always a picket line
getting ready to form or a neophyte protest group, and
there are always reasons why they should form. There are
even some speakers with personal uniforms to specify
their utopias. But an open and very public understanding
of what all these protests are about has come to Harlem,
just as it has come to negroes throughout the rest of
the country, whose local Harlems are equally impossible,
equally repressive. In many cases, the men on the
platforms are just repeating what they hear. From
people’s mouths, and people’s horns.
From
Home: Social Essays
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 |
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.
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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)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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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
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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