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Why Are We Afraid Of Our Living History?
By Pastor Mmoja Ajabu
Just what is it? Atlanta is supposed to be the citadel of the
civil rights struggle, yet the living history of the era are
beat down like they are crack head criminals on the corner.
Mukasa (Willie Ricks) called last night. From our conversation I
understand that Mukasa was on the Morehouse Campus because he
was invited by a professor to speak to the professor's class.
Years ago Mukasa had been barred from
Morehouse's campus for trying to mobilize the students to be a
part of our struggle for our people's freedom. However, due to
the legitimate invitation he decided to ignore the citation he
had received many years ago that barred him from the campus and
honor the request of the professor. When the cops saw him they
confronted him and violently escorted him off the campus. Elaine
Brown, former Commander for the Black Panther Party, informs me
that this same Officer C. Cox had in years past escorted her off
of Morehouse's campus because she was passing out political
flyers. There appears to be a pattern by Officer Cox to prevent
Black Civil Rights leaders from educating the youth that attend
Morehouse College about the struggle. Why are we afraid of our
history?
More concisely, why is Officer Cox so bent on
our youth staying uninformed? Both Elaine and Mukasa have laid
their lives on the line so Morehouse can continue to exist. In
my opinion, the fear of our history is bigger than Morehouse.
Police were sent to serve a warrant in the middle of the night
on Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown).
A Black woman was in charge of the Fulton
County Sheriff Department. This woman probably owes her ability
to be Sheriff in part to the efforts of Jamil Al-Amin, Mukasa,
Elaine Brown, and a host of others who lives are now premature
memories because of their efforts in our struggle. It was these
people who were at the forefront getting beat in the head,
sometimes until dead, because they were registering Black people
to vote.
How do the Black people who have benefited
from these he-roes and she-roes now turn around and beat them
down, run them off of campuses, even put them in jail under the
threat of death? Black people, we cannot be afraid of our
history! Our history is what will help us to understand what to
do now so we have a better future. Mukasa, Elaine, Jamil, etc. must be allowed on historically black campus to
teach our children our history straight from the mouths of those
who were there when the history was being made.
Mukasa has informed me that there will be a
demonstration at Morehouse to heighten this contradiction. Since
we are right at the time when the school will let out for
Christmas break we are planning the demonstration for January
around Dr. King's birthday when the students will be back in
school. Until then continue to call the President of Morehouse
and express your outrage at the treatment Mukasa has experienced
at the hands of Morehouse police, especially Officer C. Cox. We
must embrace our history, not be afraid of it. It is very
important for our children to know our history so they will know
themselves. Our struggle continues.
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Who Is Mukasa Dada?
1. Civil Rights Leader, Elder, Father, Organizer, Orator
2. Field Secretary of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC)
3. "The fiery orator of SNCC" - Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. in his 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here
4. "Willie Ricks must rank as one of those unknown heroes
who captured the mood of history. In calling for Black Power, he
caught the essence of the spirit, moving Black people in the
United States and around the world who were poor, Black, and
without power" - James Forman of SNCC
5. Popularized of the chant, "Black Power"
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WHAT YOU SHOULD DO NOW
1. Call Morehouse Police: 1-404-215-2666
Call Morehouse President, Dr. Massey: 1-404-215-2645
Call Morehouse Public Relations: 1-404-614-3788
2. Fax Letters to Morehouse #1: 1-404-659-6536
Fax Letters to Morehouse #2: 1-404-215-2729
3. Mail Letters To Dr. Walter E. Massey Morehouse College 830
Westview Drive, S.W.
Atlanta, GA 30314
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Goals:
* Fire involved officers (officer C. Cox and others)
* Public written apology
* All charges dropped
* Restitution for Mukasa Dada and his family for medical services
andhumiliation
Outcomes:
* Police Department notified that acts of brutality must be
punished.
* Public awareness of police brutality will be heightened.
* Public will know that police often use false arrest to hide
their own criminal intent.
* Mukasa Dada will receive financial restitution.
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Mukasa Ricks is one of the greatest of
all activists produced by the turbulent 1960s in the Southern
portion of the United States. His activities have carried him all
over this country and throughout the African World in an effort to
eliminate the misery and suffering that peoples of African descent
have been subjected to ever since the slave trade depopulated
Africa of million of its sons and daughters.
As the Field Secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC), Ricks organized countless sit-ins, marches,
demonstrations, and boycotts—all of which ere instrumental in
destroying the overt forms of Jim Crow and racial oppression that
were so prevalent in the United States less than thirty years ago.
Mukasa Ricks was introduced to the Civil Rights Movement in 1960
in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the age of 17. For two years he was
active in Chattanooga while working with the local NAACP chapter
in the sit-in movement. Quickly he became a hero in the African
American community and as a result, persons in the white community
made attempts on his life and the lives of his family members.
Cars were burned in their yard and their neighbors were harassed.
In 1961, Ricks was contacted by the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC) to help voter registration in Chattanooga.
Speaking the language of the rural African American community, he
became on e of the South’s most powerful organizer’s. Ricks
continued organizing in Chattanooga until he was asked to come to
Georgia by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
in 1962. As a result he became a part of SNCC’s first Direct
Action Program in Albany, Georgia where he first began to build a
long-term working relationship with Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ricks continued organizing for SNCC in Georgia, and then in
Alabama, Mississippi and throughout the South. While organizing in
Mississippi in 1964, he helped to build the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party (MFDP) along with Fannie Lou Hamer and others.
Subsequently, Ricks returned to Alabama and helped to organize the
Lowndes County Freedom Organization. This organization became
known as the Black Panther Party and was the first group inside
the movement to defend themselves with guns.
By this time, Ricks, who was speaking on the same platforms with
Dr. King and other important figures, had become one of the
leading organizers and speakers for SNCC in particular and the
movement in general. Having participated in hundreds of sit-ins,
stand-ins, demonstrations, pickets and marches, Ricks paid the
price by being jailed, beaten, bitten by dogs and shot. While
organizing once in Americus, Georgia, he was shot at by the police
which resulted in him being gazed and left with a scare he still
has today.
In January of 1966, Mukasa was a key organizer in Tuskegee,
Alabama where Sammy Young Jr. was shot in the head with a shotgun
for using a “White Only” toilet. During this same year, SNCC
put Ricks in charge of organizing students under what was called
Campus Traveler’s Program.
Ricks also traveled extensively with Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely
Carmichael) and spoke in the same platforms with him wherever he
spoke. In fact, when Ture stepped down as the Chairman of SNCC,
Ricks was the leading candidate to replace him but chose to work
more quietly in the background. Consequently, when H. Rap Brown
was selected as the Chairman of SNCC, Ricks was appointed to
travel with Brown in order to show him the ropes.
In February of 1968, when over sixty-nine students were shot in
the Orangeburg massacre at South Carolina State College, Ricks was
one of the key organizers.
Rick’s organizing activities were so effective that the state of
Georgia declared him to be one of the ten most dangerous persons
in the state in 1973. As a result the police were requested not to
approach his house by themselves but, instead, to signal “39”
which meant “Police in Stress, Need Help.” It has been
documented that they were given orders to shoot to kill!
Ricks has remained active ever since he first stated out in
Chattanooga in 1960. He is one of the most committed activists and
charismatic speakers around. The experiences he shares and the
message he gives is powerful and needs to be heard by all.
Sources: AssataShakur.org
/
http://spaces.msn.com/members/sabrinazodiac/Blog
posted 8 December 2005
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Fannie Lou
Hamer's speech at the 1964 DNC
/
Ella Baker: The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement
Steps: Sunni /
Sunni Patterson we know this place /
"Niggas" don't make it....
Sunni
Patterson on 2cent TV /
Sunni
Patterson Live at The Signature
Sunni
Patterson at the 2010 US Social Forum /
Sunni
Patterson /
Sunni
Patterson What You Fightin For?
More than a poet, more than a singer,
more than an emcee—it's not just what she says, it's how she says it.
Emerging from the musical womb that is New Orleans, artist and visionary
Sunni Patterson combines the heritage and tradition of her Native town with
an enlightened modern worldview to create music and poetry that is timeless
in its groove. Sunni has been a featured performer at the many of Nation's
premier spoken word venues, including HBO's Def Poetry Jam. She has also
had the privilege of speaking at the Panafest in Ghana, West Africa.
|
Wild Women Don’t Have the
Blues
By Ida Cox
I hear these women raving 'bout their
monkey men
About their fighting husbands and their
no good friends
These poor women sit around all day and
moan
Wondering why their wandering papas
don't come home
But wild women don't worry, wild women
don't have the blues.
Now when you've got a man, don't ever be
on the square
'Cause if you do he'll have a woman
everywhere
I never was known to treat no one man
right
I keep 'em working hard both day and
night
because wild women don't worry, wild
women don't have no blues.
I've got a disposition and a way of my
own
When my man starts kicking I let him
find another home
I get full of good liquor, walk the
streets all night
Go home and put my man out if he don't
act right
Wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have no blues
You never get nothing by being an angel
child
You better change your ways and get real
wild
I wanna tell you something, I wouldn't
tell you no lie
Wild women are the only kind that ever
get by
Wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have no blues.
Born
Ida
Prather,25 February 1896 in Toccoa,
Habersham County, Georgia, United
States. Died 10 November 1967 (aged 71)
Genres Jazz, Blues Instruments Vocalist. |
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Guarding the Flame of Life
/
Strange Fruit Lynching Report
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A thousand voices / agonizing in
deep / water with no / relief in sight --
"Exodus" Artwork by Charles Siler, N'awlins
Survivor |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
Remember Gil Scott- Heron |
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February 2012
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