Balanta B'urassa Founders Day: Celebrating Those Who Resist, August 1, 2020 Chicago, IL

BALANTA B’RASSA, CHICAGO: THOSE WHO RESIST REMAIN

Celebrating the Balanta B’urassa History & Genealogy Society in America

Founders Day

Saturday, August 1st, 2020

Marcus Garvey Center, 330, East 37th Street, Chicago, IL

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11:00 am - Montu (traditional African Martial Arts) Presentation

All Ages, with Sansau Tchimna, Council Member, Historical African Martial Arts Association (HAMAA) - see videos below

12:00 Noon - Reparations: Re-Reading African History Using African Ancestry DNA Testing

Siphiwe Baleka, Founder and President, Balanta B’urassa History & Genealogy Society in America; former Director, African Union 6th Region Education Campaign

1:00 pm - Free Lunch

2:00 pm - Balanta B’urassa, Chicago: New Narratives in the Resistance Struggle

Presentation by: The 21st Century Pan Africanist From Chicago That You Never Heard Of: Siphiwe Baleka

On October 5, 2000, Siphiwe Baleka, a native of Chicago, presented the Ethiopia to Chicago Exhibit to the Association of African Historians (AAH) at the Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern University. The presentation was so extraordinary, that he was invited to present it again one month later, November 4, 2000 to the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC). Five years later, Nana Baffour Amankwaitia II (Dr. Asia Hilliard III) said, “I still have my copy of the excellent piece that you did. I am waiting for more of your work. . . I am not at all surprised at the work that you have pursued and know that much more is to come.”

Biography

Siphiwe Baleka was born on April 14, 1971 to Jeremiah and Yolanda Blake and given the colonized name of Anthony “Tony” Nathaniel Blake.  Jeremiah graduated from the historical black college Fisk University, where, in 1962, he participated in the Nashville civil rights movement and was met with bricks and stones. He became determined to give his son the opportunities he didn’t have. At the age of ten, Tony became an Illinois State Swimming Champion and by the time he graduated from high school, was one of the nation’s fastest swimmers. At Yale University, he became the first African American on the All -Ivy League Swim Team. In 1992, Tony failed to qualify for the 1992 Olympic Trials and fulfill his boyhood dream of becoming the first black swimmer on the United States Swim Team.

At about this same time, Tony suffered an “identity” crisis. While studying African American history at Yale, he realized that he was part of what W.E.B. DuBois called “the talented tenth” and that he had a duty to excel on behalf of the race. On the other hand, after reading the Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey and books by Franz Fanon, that though he was black and African, he had been socialized and educated by white Americans and thus, as Marcus Garvey said, required a “racial re-education” if he was going to be any use to the black race.  Having internalized this, and following the example of his heroes, Walter Rodney and Ken Saro Wiwa, Tony decided to become a scholar activist. That’s when he joined the black liberation struggle in America.

After leaving Yale during his senior year in 1993, Tony became attracted to the Rastafari Movement and began growing dreadlocks. He returned to Yale in 1995 to finish his final semester as Ras Nathaniel.

While still on campus, Ras Nathaniel felt compelled to join Union Local 34’s strike against Yale University, demanding a living wage for its mostly black workforce. He spoke at University forums, marched on the picket lines, and along with a group of students, boycotted their graduation ceremony from this prestigious University. At the same time, Ras Nathaniel was mentored by George Edwards of the New Haven Black Panther Party and began organizing and raising money for Black Panther political prisoners, and started working with the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu Jamal and the MOVE Organization.

Returning to and graduating from Yale University, Ras Nathaniel rejected opportunities to enter the corporate world and instead became an instructor and grant writer for the Nkrumah Washington Community Learning Center in the Englewood neighborhood. During this time, he became a member of N’COBRA under Republic of New Afrika legend Baba Hannibal Afrik and Sister Erline Arpo. He also worked with Aonde T.  Dansby Shaka, founder and President of the Marcus Garvey Institute and one of the last students of General Charles L James of Gary Indiana one of the original graduates of Marcus Garvey’s School of African Philosophy in 1937.

Under the tutelage of Dr. Y.N. Kly of the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities (IHRAAM) and his protégé, Irish “El Amin” Greene, a product of the National Council of Black Lawyers Community College of Law and International Diplomacy (NCBLCCLID) later re-named for Fred Hampton, Ras Nathaniel began studying the curriculum. He completed the Petition of the Nkrumah-Washington Community Learning Center On Behalf of their Members, Associates and Afro-American Population Whose International Protected Human Rights Have Been Grossly and Systematically Violated By the Anglo-American Government of the United States of America and Its Varied Institutions.  The petition was submitted under the United Nations 1503 Procedure.

In 2003, while serving as a journalist for the Rastafari Speaks newspaper published by Chicago’s very own Frontline Distribution, Ras Nathaniel. registered with the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia Ministry of Information & Culture Press and Information Department as a journalist and began working at the African Union and the Economic Commission for Africa. He is the only African American to attend both the 1st Extraordinary Summit of the Assembly of the African Union in Addis Ababa, as well as African Union Grand Debate in Ghana in 2007. As a result, Ras Nathaniel became the Director of the African Union 6th Region Education Campaign. He has appeared on South African Broadcasting Company (SABC TV), negotiated the Rastafari citizenship issues in Ethiopia, helped the Central American Black Organization to elect its representatives to the African Union at their 12th Assembly in Honduras, and gave the inaugural Marcus Garvey lecture for the Government of Barbados’ Commission for Pan African  Affairs. In 2006 he was the roommate of Dr. Kamarakafego, counselor, consultant, official and friend to Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyere, CLR James, Walter Rodney and many others while organizing the 6th Pan African Congress in Tanzania in 1969. In 2007, while organizing the Global Unity Conference in Azania, Ras Nathaniel was given the name Siphiwe Baleka by a council of Elders.

Today, Siphiwe Baleka is known as “The Fitness Guru to the Trucking Industry” and has appeared in Men’s Health magazine, Sports Illustrated, the Huffington Post, Good Morning America, CBS Evening news, NPR, CNN, and BBC. He serves as the North American Regional Director of the African Sports Ventures Group, Senior Heritage Ambassador of the United House of Ancestry, and President of the Balanta B’urassa History & Genealogy Society of America. He is instrumental in launching the Decade of Return Initiative of the Government of Guinea Bissau.

PLEASE JOIN US FOR THIS EXTRAORDINARY PRESENTATION ABOUT CHICAGO’S UNTOLD RESISTANCE MOVEMENT, PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE!

• Origin of the Pan African Movement in Chicago, 1893

• First person to repatriate to Ethiopia from Chicago in 1908

• The Chicago Origin (1913) of Marcus Garvey’s “Look to Africa for the crowning of a Black King”

• Ethiopia sends Ambassadors to Chicago in 1919 and the Rastafari movement starts in Chicago

• The Balanta influence in the Black Liberation Movement

• Using DNA to trace your history, reconnect with your people in Africa, and re-write African American History

• Getting citizenship in Africa

• Much, much more . . . .

Videos by Sansau Tchimna, Council Member

Historical African Martial Arts Association (HAMAA )

Balanta Society in America Continues Food Distribution in Guinea Bissau

The Balanta B’urassa History & Genealogy Society in America made another emergency food distribution in the Cagna, Nfaidi, Unchor and Mpass villages in Encheia, as well as in Fanhe. This follows the first distribution in Tchomon Village and the second distribution in Tande, Sintcham and Samodje villages near Ingore.

WATCH THE TGB Televisão da Guiné-Bissau COVERAGE OF THE DISTRIBUTION

Below is the Bam’Faba distribution report.

1.      Introduction

In mid-December 2019, a disease called sars/cov/19 was diagnosed in China and which was later declared by the WHO as a pandemic due to its rapid spread and the number of fatalities it caused worldwide.

In Guinea-Bissau, the first cases were recorded at the beginning of the month of March, which led to the adoption of restriction measures, namely the decree of the emergency and state by the national authorities, i.e. by his Excellency, the president of the republic as a way to prevent the rapid spread of the disease at national level.

However, the enactment of the state of emergency has put the country in a situation of serious financial crisis whose effects affect all families, especially the most vulnerable residents in the villages. Yes, it limited the circulation and access to the market for the sale of its products, as well as the total stoppage of the commercialization of the cashew campaign.

As a result, a financial sum was made available by members of the Bam-Faba Association residing in the diaspora to support families, especially the most deprived, in this period of confinement.

2.      Activities carried out

Food products have been distributed in some tabancas, considered priority areas of intervention of the association, namely:

a)              Visit and distribution in the tabanca of Cagha

Cagha is a tabanca located in the Sector of Bissora section of Encheia, in which there was an accident that killed 24 people because of the explosion of a mine supposedly places since colonial times. Because of this suffering we understand will deliver 6 bags of rice to the popular village neighbor workking for his melioria.

b)            Visit and distribution in the tabanca of Nfaidi

We delivered 6 bags of rice to the young people of the tabanca of Nfaidi, on the occasion of the voluntary work to clean the road that accessed Encheia. It was a section that is impassable, but thanks to the awareness and work of young people has improved a lot.

c)              Visit and distribution in Uncor and  Mpass

These two villages were visited by the gender distribution team on the occasion of the voluntary twig lifting and dikes in the bolanhas belonging to the two tabancas.

Therefore, 20 bags of rice were delivered with a view to accelerating and completing the work.

It should be remembered that these two tabancas were disengaged due to the conflict between the parties and that it had culminated in a brawl, in which there were many wounded, especially the younger people. 

d)             Visit and distribution of foodstuffs in Fanhe tabanca 

In Fanhe, there was also a voluntary work to close dams and therefore received 20 bags of rice for this purpose.

3.      Conclusion

The work of visits and distribution of the donations to different villages went very well, however we faced a slight delay due to the breakdown of the vehicle carrying the donations. We also found many difficulties in accessing tabancas due to the degradation of access roads, because in this rainy period most roads are almost impassable.

In all the tabancas in which we distributed people not only thanked them for the gesture, but also took the opportunity to present other difficulties, namely, lack of access routes in this case roads, schools, health centers, difficulty in sealing fields of vegetable cultivation, lack of rice and corn peeling machines, in order to relieve the workload on girls and thereby encourage the participation of girls in schools. There is also difficulty in accessing water for pastoral activity because animals, especially cows, cannot get water because the area has only salt water in the surroundings, thus not allowing the animals to be satisfied.

It is noteworthy that the work has not yet finished, so we will continue the work according to the plan previously outlined, especially for the southern part of the country.

We also find that there is a lack of awareness of the coronavirus pandemic with the tabancas or a majority only listen on the radios but without detailed information on the subject. That is why most don't wear protective masks.

All views were accompanied by an artist with songs in the Balanta ethnic group in order to facilitate awareness of the coronavirus pandemic.

In the travel plan was planned visit the bolanhas but due to the time factor it was not possible to make all these visits staying for other opportunities.

4.      Thanks

In all the tabancas we have passed during the distribution of the genres have left a strong thanks to the members of the entourage as well as the funders of this initiative, leaving the hope that there will be more initiatives of this kind, and that all continue to be in good health and happiness with their families.

Rélatorio made by Robana Nhaté, coordinator of "Bam-Faba" in the région of Oio, Républica da Guine issau.

Filled, June 25, 2020 -Robana Nhaté- Coordin

INTEGRATION (ELECTORAL POLITICS) VS. NATIONALISM (SELF DEFENSE) VS. REVOLUTION (BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY): UNDERSTANDING THE ART OF COOPTING BLACK LIBERATION

“There is still a lack of understanding of the African American nationalist tradition and the context within which it reemerged in the 1960s. Little is known or understood about the important integrationist-nationalist debate of this same period. If this generation of African American youths is to be oriented toward revolutionary options, it must deepen its understanding of the African American protest tradition and the ideological and programmatic alternatives between which they must choose. . .

The study of Malcolm X is important because he was the best critic of an era and a movement which still holds significance for us today. Malcolm asked the right questions, some of which he found answers for. We must know these questions and and answers so that we don’t ‘recreate the wheel.’

The Black Liberation movement developed in the latter 1960s in marked contrast to the integrationist Civil Rights movement. It was repressed violently by the agents of the state. Even today it represents the only significant alternative to Civil Rights integration-ism that African Americans have ever developed. This movement, for a time, energized those groups in the ghetto who are today vilified as ‘the underclass.’

Our present oppression as a people is tied to the defeat and destruction of the Black Liberation movement. It is also tied to the sanctification of Black electoral politics within the confines of the Democratic Party, the sainthood of Dr. King, and the canon of nonviolence.

This sanctification stood as an alternative to the mobilization of poor and dispossessed African Americans outside of the institutions of electoral, legislative, and executive politics which are institutionally structured to maintain powerlessness. A rejuvenated Black Liberation movement can be constructed only upon an accurate understanding of the strengths and weaknesses, the accuracies and errors of our previous major efforts at rebellion. Critically studying Malcolm X is central to this reconstruction and rebuilding effort.

With a few notable exceptions in the tradition of Malcolm X, like the National Black Independent Political Party and the National Black United Front from the period of 1979-81,

the dominant strategic motion in the Black community has come from those in the tradition not of Malcolm X but of Martin Luther King Jr. Their bankruptcy and that of Black electoral politics, from the perspective of resolving the pressing needs of the masses of ghettoized Black people, has engendered a renewed interest in Malcolm X and the Pan-African nationalist and internationalist tradition of which he was the most elegant spokesman in the latter part of the 20th-century. . . .

While many years have passed, the questions which the Black Liberation Movement addressed are still with us. The groupings in the Black community are even more distinct and opposed than in Malcolm’s time. And we should not forget that, as Malcolm X said, if you want to know a thing, you must know its origins.”

- William W. Sales, Jr., From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro American Unity

More than any man in recent years Martin Luther King is responsible for this criminal crippling of the black man in his struggle. King took an incredibly beautiful, a matchlessly challenging doctrine — redemption through love and self-sacrifice — and corrupted it through his own disbelief. Martin Luther King’s non-violence is a shallow deceit: on no less than three occasions between 1961 and 1965 King called for or condoned (as when Watts occurred) the use of troops. But he urges black people to non-violence. If he did this because he did not think we could win violently, and said so, that would be one thing; but he tells black people to be nonviolent because violence is wrong and unjustifiable. And yet he calls for armies, WHITE-RUN armies. . .

- Imari Obadele, War in America: The Malcolm X Doctrine

Excerpt: From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro American Unity

“In assessing the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), we must begin by looking again briefly at the social and movement context within which Malcolm X hoped to intervene. The OAAU was designed to respond to a particular configuration of problems and trends in the Civil Rights movement at a particular and crucial juncture in that movement’s development. In the period 1963-1965, the Civil Rights movement faced challenges from both processes of cooptation and threats of repression. I will look more closely at the basis for cooptation and how the ideology and practice of the major Civil Rights organizations played into this strategy. As well, I will examine the factors which encouraged those in power seriously to initiate repression toward the more militant wing of the movement and how the ideology and practice of the Civil Rights movement generated demoralization as opposed to resistance in the face of this challenge. . . .

COOPTATION AND REPRESSION

In Chapter Three, I explained that the ideological hegemony of the ruling elite is the basis of the false consciousness of those they rule. In the particular case of the African American, that false consciousness had a duality characterized by Dr. DuBois as double consciousness. Another way of looking at this double consciousness is that in one psyche it combined two ideological orientations, the American Dream and the etiquette of race relations. These orientations often conflicted, causing confusion and indecisiveness or inaction in Black people. On the other hand, these two ideological orientations can be seen as working in tandem to facilitate ruling-class strategies of cooptation or repression.

Cooptation was facilitated by the ideology of the American Dream. The American Dream established not only the material but also the moral superiority of Western Civilization. The United States’ ‘manifest destiny’ was to become the epitome of Western Civilization, the only real civilization. It held out the possibility to African Americans that if they could disgard their African roots and assimilate they would be materially and spiritually rewarded. The status quo, through the ‘invisible hand’ in the marketplace, automatically provided for positive social change. It was not to be tampered with by the disgruntled. Any other course of action for a domestic minority was not only irrational bur from this vantage point morally bankrupt.

The etiquette of race relations emphasized that the power discrepancies between the races were necessary if Whites were to be able to tutor Black people in the methods of Western Civilization and protect them from their own ignorance, heathenism, and savagery. Force was openly subscribed to as a method to protect the purity of the White race from the pollution of the African strain.

Through force, exploitation, and deprivation of social necessities, Black people internalized the notions of minority status, and remained isolated from and ignorant of the larger world. They came to believe that physical resistance was impossible. African Americans were conditioned to believe that the violence which maintained White superiority and Black subordination could be minimized only through conforming with a code of behavior which at every turn symbolized racial power discrepancies and Black acceptance of them.

Double consciousness, embodied in the simultaneous pursuit of the American Dream and conforming with the etiquette of race relations facilitated the success of elite strategies of cooptation and repression. The American Dream caused Black disunity. It raised the needs of the individual above those of the group in an absolute sense. As a condition of success, it required the individual to maximize their cultural and social distance from the mass of Black people. Because the pursuit of the American Dream caused Black disunity, cooptive strategies facilitated repression. Repression severely punished group cohesion and all strategies which challenged the power inequities between the races. It reinforced the resort to individualistic solutions along lines consistent with the status quo. Repression facilitated cooptation. . . .

Cooptation was based on the extension of material incentives, prestige, power and responsibility to Civil Rights leadership. To get these rewards, Black leaders either left the Civil Rights organizations themselves or adjusted their programs away from confrontation with the various forms and levels of state power. The organizational characteristics and ideology of the mainstream Civil Rights organizations predisposed them to cooptation.

In the period under consideration the major Civil Rights organizations, especially the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Dr. King had limited funds, almost no bureaucracy or chain of command, low salaries, arrears, and a too-heavy dependence on volunteers. They were dominated by clergymen who were authoritarian and male chauvinists. Little or no major decision-making was shared with the rank and file of the organization. In fact, much of SCLC was a one-man show built around the leadership and charisma of Dr. King, supported by a few clergymen. Thus, the dangers were high but the individual rewards low. Given the ideological orientation of the Civil Rights mainstream, this situation facilitated cooptation.

The Civil Rights movement defined its tasks as struggling to remove the disabilities of race so Black people could be judged on their individual merits alone. To the extent that the movement was successful, when barriers fell the tendency was for the most meritorious Black people, disproportionately middle class, to be first to take advantage of the new possibilities. These barriers themselves were defined as barriers to individual, not group advancement. Thus, success was often defined in individual terms or as a series of ‘the first in the race to . . . ‘ The abandonment of the movement organizations by middle-class leadership was often disguised as taking advantage of the possibilities for making further advances in civil rights ‘inside the system.’

Cooptation was facilitated by false consciousness in Civil Rights leadership. I would argue that the susceptibility to cooptation was an outgrowth of the limitations in the Civil Rights critique of the U.S. system and led naturally to definitions of the problem focused on individual disability and solutions to the problem focused on equal opportunity . . . . Whatever fruits of victory were achieved deprived the movement of its middle-class leadership resources. In a sense, this process snatched ‘defeat from the jaws of victory.’

Civil Rights ideology appeared to extol the ‘noblesse oblige’ embodied in DuBois’s expression ‘talented tenth.’ However, the obligations of the ‘talented tenth’ were often fulfilled symbolically in the pursuit of individual career advancement as opposed to a lifetime orientation of service to the Black Community. The NAACP and the Urban League were the first to desert the Civil Rights coalition as a result of their cooptation by 1965, both organizations prematurely felt that African Americans had won unrestricted and routine access to governmental power and by 1965 could work from the ‘inside’ through mainstream political institutions as opposed to the ‘outsiders’ vehicle of protest.

While the Right wing of the Civil Rights coalition was preparing to jump ship, the government security apparatus had resolved not to depend on processes of cooptation alone to reign in the Civil Rights movement. Kenneth O’Reilly, in his excellent book Racial Matters, identified a transition in government thinking regarding the Civil Rights movement as of 1963 . . . . He noted that:

‘By the standards of the mid- and late- 1960s, FBI surveillance of Black political activists prior to the summer of 1963 was limited and cautious because Hoover [J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI] deemed the political risks of more aggressive involvement to be too great. But beginning in the summer of 1963 there was a fundamental change in Hoover’s willingness to assume the risks of more aggressive involvement, a change that can be explained by his belief that Blacks had gone too far with their protests, and now posed an imminent threat to the established order. Bureau documents immediately before, during and after the March on Washington are filled with references to an impending ‘social revolution.’’

O’Reilly went on to indicate that President John F. Kennedy concurred in this increased surveillance and intervention in the Civil Rights movement. Hoover’s position, however, was to destroy the movement as part of his crusade against communism.. . . .The incremental and marginal nature of change fostered by U.S. democratic institutions was unable to respond effectively to the demands for rapid fundamental change coming from the insurgent ghetto dwellers moving rapidly to the movement’s center stage. However, the following characteristics of the Black community suggested that there would be relatively low and acceptable costs associated with a policy of repression.

The African American community in the United States, while large, was distinctly in the numerical minority. It was dispersed in urban areas and occupied no significant contiguous part of the country’s land mass. The internal organization and solidarity of this race in the United States was low. The African American community at that time was more a loose coalition of organizations and independent institutions which often had to construct consensus around important issues from one crisis period to the next. Racism alienated the community from the domestic White majority, especially in northern urban areas where the new demands of the movement were emerging. The Black community in this country has today- few historic and continuing links to any ancestral power centers in Africa or to sources of support in the international arena.

African Americans were economically and technologically backward. This resulted from their function as a super-abundant pool of unskilled labor. Due to technological change, the Black community was no longer as crucial to the economy as it had been in slavery and later as the rural peasantry of the South.

The characteristics described above, however, were unstable, especially given the activities of the radical wing of the movement as embodied in a leader like Malcolm X. In the 1963-65 period, repression was an option which was viable if promptly initiated but might not have been if its use had been delayed. . . . During this period, repression promised significant dividends with few if any costs.

It should be noted here that militant rhetoric was not a major factor triggering repression. Rather, the mobilization of new social forces on a mass scale created the potential for serious disruption of the normal operation of the society and its social institutions. This potential became visible as a result of the early urban rebellions of 1963 and 1964. It was not so much what leadership was telling its Black following that scared J. Edgar Hoover, but the actual disruptive potential of such a large mobilized mass of Black people, whether as nonviolent activists or as Black nationalists.

Malcolm X recognized that the Civil Rights movement had entered a period of crisis which demanded a new and different direction if it were to make the transition from a reformist, regional movement to a revolutionary international movement. . . . .

As Doug McAdam described this process:

‘Truly revolutionary goals…are rarely the object of divided elite response. Rather, movements that emphasize such goals usually mobilize a united elite opposition whose minor conflicts of interest are temporarily tabled in deference to the central threat confronting the system as a whole.’

In addition, McAdam noted that non-institutionalized tactics pose a distinct threat to elite groups because

‘…[Their use] communicates a fundamental rejection of the established institutional mechanisms for seeking redress of group grievances; substantively, it deprives elite groups of their recourse to institutional power…elite groups are likely to view non-institutional tactics as a threat to their interests.’

It is clear that McAdam was right when he asserted that a weak opponent lessens the costs and risks associated with a strategy of repression and therefore invites such repression. . . . McAdam felt that in the period of movement expansion, which he identified as 1961-66, the movement was characterized by a strong centralized organizational structure, substantial issue consensus, and a certain ‘geographic concentration’ of movement forces. He identified the disappearance of these characteristics in the latter 60s as an element in the decline of the movement. I do not believe it is that simple. . . .

The strong centralized organizational structure he refers to was clearly beset by oligarchization by 1963. The consensus on issues was narrow and excluded the agenda of new social forces entering the movement, this timidity reflected the extent to which the established leadership of the movement was coopted by its institutional allies who funded the movement and provided it with legislative support. The geographical concentration of the movement forces could also be looked at another way. As long as the Civil Rights movement was a southern movement, it was confined to areas whose problems became less and less typical of the Black population as a whole. . . . Despite the clear commitment to reform strategies, the Civil Rights movement had invited repression long before Black Power ideologies became dominant in it. . . . Repression was possible without elite consensus and without an objective commitment to revolutionary strategies on the part of the insurgents. . . .

But he was wrong when he saw the transition to the Black Power period as the beginning of movement decline. The nationalism of the Black Power period. I would argue, was a response to the significant erosion of movement dynamism in the 1963-65 period due to cooptation. Its pursuit of a revolutionary option won for the movement a prolongation of life in the period 1965-68. The inability to construct such an option after initial advances facilitated the intensified repression then directed at the movement. . . . .

Malcolm’s Critique of Nonviolence

It was the multiple impact of Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon which many movement activists feel freed them from the cul-de-sac in which the non-violence strategies of the established Civil Rights organizations had imprisoned them, during a decade of rising violence, White backlash and official repression. Malcolm X’s critique of integrationist ideology and Civil Rights leadership was the first effective challenge to the monopoly those forces had over intellectual discourse in the Black community. Malcolm X exposed the hypocrisy behind the philosophy of nonviolence as an aspect of false consciousness.

In the ‘etiquette of race relations,’ the condition of the oppressed was ameliorated, if at all, through entreaty and supplication and only by the dominant class and at its pace.

Because of Malcolm, nonviolence never again exacted the allegiance which it previously had among movement activists. The effectiveness of his critique forced more creative thinking throughout the African American community and prodded the Civil Rights leadership to rethink its most cherished precepts and acknowledge its responsibility to respond to the agenda of urban street forces.. . . .

Putting Revolution on the Agenda

Malcolm X took the concept of an African American revolution beyond rhetorical flourish. After Maclolm X, revolution was a serious topic of discussion and planning with the Black Freedom movement. The notion that Black revolution in the United States was impossible was an important part of the ideological hegemony exerted by the Anglo-Saxon-dominated elite in the United States. . . . He argued that revolution became a crucial task because African Americans could no longer delude themselves into believing that White people could be persuaded to ‘save’ Black people. With Malcolm X, the movement took up the proposition that thee was no solution to the race problem within a Eurocentric civilization. Consequently, the main task for African Americans, Africans, and those in the Third World was to formulate an alternative to the Eurocentric worldview.

The OAAU Model after Malcolm

The organizational model represented by the OAAU continued to impact on subsequent movement organizations in the Black Power period and beyond. . . . In 1972, a structure was actually put in place to validate real grassroots leadership and authorize organizational representatives to the National Black Political Convention. Convened in Gary, Indiana in 1972, the delegates articulated their assessment of the situation in words clearly borrowed from Malcolm’s analysis of U.S. society:

‘A Black political convention, indeed all truly Black politics, must begin from this truth: 'The U.S. system does not work for the masses of our people, and it cannot be made to work without radical fundamental change… [The United States is] a society built on the twin foundations of white racism and white capitalism….the only real choice for us is whether or not we will live by the truth we know, whether we will move to organize independently, move to struggle for fundamental transformation, for the creation of a new direction, towards concern for the life and meaning of Man.’

Many of the commentators on the significance of Malcolm X stand outside or or even against the struggle of Black people today. There are those who now extol Malcolm who were very much alive and active in the latter 60’s and early 70s when his ideas were embodied in the Black Power and Black Liberation movements. Many of these people fought against everything Malcolm stood for. Today some of these same people expropriate the aura of Malcolm to shield from public view their lack of a viable program for Black liberation in the United States. First, because of the repression of the Black Liberation Movement (BLM) in the 1970s and 1980s, these impostors have been able to seize the initiative from Malcolm’s true discipline and define the politics of the Black community to suit their own opportunism. . . . Second, the history of the movement from Civil Rights to the BLM has scarcely been written, let alone told. Unaware of the role that these same political opportunists played in the destruction of the BLM, the younger generation is unable to see the hypocrisy in their posturing as followers of Malcolm X.

A Black ex-political prisoner, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, says that those who now embrace Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X consistently remain silent about the scores of African American political prisoners in jails today. They refuse to see, he argues, that had Malcolm X lived he might very well have become a political prisoner. Those Black political prisoners now behind bars are there either because they faithfully tried to put Malcolm’s ideas into action or were victimized by Cointelpro as Malcolm was. Today, Black electoral political leadership, with few exceptions, refuses to make the release of Black political prisoners a part of its agenda. In addition, this same group reduces Pan-Africanism to an unholy conspiracy among the African American bourgeoisie and the most retrograde political leadership and comprador bourgeoisie in Africa, to fleece the continent of its wealth.

SNCC Pursues the ‘Ballot of the Bullet’

Malcolm’s method, the ‘ballot of bullet’ approach, was assumed by SNCC in two important electoral experiments in the period 1964-67. The first of these was the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). This was a satellite party which, working within the national Democratic Party structure, tried to reform the party’s southern Dixicrat wing. Its strategy was to demonstrate that local integrated MFDP party structures were both more democratically constituted and loyal to the national slate of candidates and the national party platform than the regular Democratic organization. On this basis it launched challenges to the credentials and seating of southern racists in the Democratic Party’s national convention and in the Congress.

The MFDP experiment was not only a challenge to the ability of the Democratic Party to reform itself, but also a challenge to the liberal conception of social change and the effectiveness of interracial coalitions of poor Blacks and liberal Whites. The MFDP and other satellite party experiments were not notably successful. The MFDP had not used Malcolm’s provisions against cooptation, party independence, and accountability only to the Black masses. It had, however, a direct link to Malcolm X through some of its leaders, including Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer.

The failure of the MFDP led SNCC to attempt a more perfect approximation of Malcolm X’s independent politics. This second experiment was the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), whose emblem was the black panther. This political party was independent of the Democratic and Republican parties. It sought to build grassroots Black political power without the need for White cooperation. In a Black Belt county where Blacks were the numerical majority but had been disenfranchised since the end of Reconstruction, the LCFO specifically endorsed self-defense and armed its organizers and militants against racist night-riders and physical intimidation. Through Black electoral power it aspired to take control of governmental and economic power in the county. The LCFO was to b the model for grassroots Black empowerment throughout the Black Belt. In its initial bid, LCFO failed. Nevertheless, the Black Panther Party idea found a lasting position in the movement, and its model of Black empowerment is clearly reflected in several national and local organizations of the Black Power period, most notably the Black Panther Party itself and the Republic of New Afrika. . . .

Leading the Black United Front

Those who ascribed to the ethnic-assimilationist model were heirs of the militant-assimilationist posture of the established Civil Rights leadership. They made their peace with Black Power by defining it as no more than the traditional strategy of European ethnic groups applied to the Black problem.

Politically, bloc voting within the Democratic Party would increase Black elected representation in the South and in U.S. cities. The resources obtained in this fashion - patronage, influence, and the control of government contracts - would be, as for European immigrants, major sources of African American empowerment. Economically, the construction of civic-minded Black middle-class business persons would be the center of gravity around which Black community development would occur. In this way, the struggle shifted from the arena of protest to the electoral arena, from tactics appropriate to those frozen out of the polity to those who now had access to the polity.

This represented an argument for extending leadership credentials to Black politicians and the Black middle class generally.

The masses of Black people were to give up the protest option and concentrate on expanding their voting power so as to increase the number of Black insiders who would then seek resources on behalf of the masses.

[Siphiwe note: this is where voting became elevated as THE tactic among black people. Until then, it was not considered a SACRED DUTY]

This tendency was responsible for greatly increasing the Black electorate and number of Black elected officials at all levels of government. It was responsible for the establishment of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Joint Center for Political Studies, and TransAfrica, the Washington-based African American lobby on African affairs. Almost all of the largest U.S. Cities have experienced the election of a Black mayor, and there is a greatly expanded African American presence in the Democratic Party. The high point of achievement for this tendency was the presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson in 1988 and the election of Ron Brown as Democratic national chairperson. [Siphiwe note: this was superseded by the election of Barack Obama in 2008]

Nationalist forces generally reflected two alternative responses to this thrust: revolutionary nationalism and cultural nationalism. Both responses united in viewing the Black predicament as a form of domestic colonialism. Their position was that racism was not an aberration but inherent in the nature of U.S. society.

In the tradition of Malcolm X, revolutionary nationalists focused on the question of the achievement of self-determination for Black people.

They saw this task as one of revolutionary dimensions which would involve the destruction of the U.S. system and its imperial manifestations abroad.

Cultural nationalists focused on the psychological damage done by racial oppression. They felt that the major impediment to Black liberation was the effect of cultural imperialism on the Black psyche. They followed Malcolm X in their desire to rehabilitate Black people spiritually by restoring to them a sense of their Africanness and the superiority of traditional African institutions and values.

These tendencies diverged on several important issues: on the question of the role of electoral politics, on the question of whether politics should be put in command of economics, on the question of culture, on the relationship of domestic and international events, and on the question of the role of violence and armed struggle in the liberation of Black people

Those forces which followed an ethnic-assimilation model placed greatest emphasis on electoral politics and eschewed a continuation of the protest tradition. Revolutionary nationalists were committed to an intensification of the protest tradition and its flowering into full-scale rebellion. In their framework, electoral politics was realistic only if independent of the major parties, with Black political representation accountable to the masses. Such an electoral politics was validated only to the extent that it increased the power of Black people in their aspirations to destroy the imperialist system.

Cultural nationalists questioned the effectiveness of electoral politics and tended to put economics in command of politics in their quest for autonomy. In this, they were followed by a segment of the militant integrationists who also felt that more emphasis should be put on the development of economic self-sufficiency than on protest politics. . . .

“By Any Means Necessary?”

As one might expect, all three tendencies diverged on the question of the relevance of violence and armed struggle to Black liberation.

Militant integrationists dismissed such tactics as foolhardy and counter-productive. Such tactics would isolate Black people from their domestic allies and consolidate an overwhelming White reaction.

Cultural nationalists viewed the violence and armed struggle as largely irrelevant to the kind of psychological redemption and withdrawal they advocated for Black people. Nevertheless, they endorsed the concept of self-defense..

Revolutionary nationalists embraced the necessity of violence and armed struggle since they saw the essence of imperialist oppression as based on institutionalized racist violence. Given the rising tide of revolution in the world and their feeling that urban guerrilla warfare represented a viable tactic, the military option was given considerable examination by revolutionary nationalists. . . . .

The ‘field Negro’ tradition so important to Malcolm’s analysis of the politics of Black liberation still lives in our youth and in their street culture. Its potential for disruption was displayed again in open rebellion in South Central, Los Angeles; Atlanta, Georgia; and other locales {Siphiwe note: and everywhere around the world now as a result of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis). Events in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Lebanon, and Somalia clearly indicate that urban guerrilla warfare allows well-entrenched and committed minorities to immobilize a society and destroy its way of life. Malcolm X was right to argue that no oppressed people can ever give up this option and retain any hope of liberation. . . .

What does the OAAU idea of Malcolm X tell us about confronting the New World Order?

It is essential that our politics not be constricted to the electoral arena alone. In that arena Black politics must work to be organizationally and programmatically independent of both parties of the ruling class.

Malcolm X taught that only under particular and exceptional conditions can lasting gains be made by Black people in the electoral arena. Our politics must be a ‘field Negro’ politics that will not hesitate to disrupt the normal operation of society whenever that becomes necessary. . . .

With a few notable exceptions in the tradition of Malcolm X, like the National Black Independent Political Party and the National Black United Front from the period of 1979-81, the dominant strategic motion in the Black community has come from those in the tradition not of Malcolm X but of Martin Luther King Jr. Their bankruptcy and that of Black electoral politics, from the perspective of resolving the pressing needs of the masses of ghettoized Black people, has engendered a renewed interest in Malcolm X and the Pan-African nationalist and internationalist tradition of which he was the most elegant spokesman in the latter part of the 20th-century. . . . While many years have passed, the questions which the Black Liberation Movement addressed are still with us. The groupings in the Black community are even more distinct and opposed than in Malcolm’s time. And we should not forget that, as Malcolm X said, if you want to know a thing, you must know its origins.”

THE FIRST HARVEST

THUS, the civil rights groups which spoke for the black guerrillas in the wake of the first three years of guerrilla warfare (1964-1966) diluted the gains which were to be won by the black man. The call for recreational facilities brought a pittance — a contemptuous response of the powerful to the powerless. Requests for fair play from the police could not be granted because white people, in control of the machinery of state, regard the police as their protection against black people — whom they know to have just grievances. Worse, civil rights groups, which joined the white power structure in emphasizing training as the solution to joblessness, were also joining the white power structure in promoting the lie that the black man’s lack of training was the cause of his unemployment. They were thus protecting for the white power structure the real and statistically demonstrable cause of the problem: the white man’s orientation toward white supremacy and his commitment to white domination.

They were, in other words, often unwittingly , preventing movement toward a real solution by moving off on a tangent.

Black people are not only kept out of regular jobs by the bias of white hiring people, they are excluded from skilled trade apprentice programs purely by the bias of white skilled trade unionists. Neither situation could be remedied by the training of blacks.

The black militants who spoke for the guerrillas were generally more on target, for they emphasized “control.” They knew the invidious work of the schools and that the white man would not change what was going on in the schools, so they demanded control of black schools. They understood the function of the police, so they demanded partial control of them — review of their actions, increases in black policemen and black command. They demanded control of the federal government’s Poverty programs, supposedly designed to end black joblessness.

Fundamentally they failed, even as the civil rights groups failed for other reasons, because they, the militants, had reached the core of what the struggle was about: CONTROL — whether white men or black would control the black man and his destiny.

They failed because they, the militants, even supported by the guerrillas, had not arrayed the impression of enough power to make the white man relinquish that control. . . . .

MISSISSIPPI

BECAUSE of powers reserved to the individual states under the United States federal constitution, the state level of government is the ideal level (as opposed to the city or county level) at which black power could be brought to bear in creation of THE NEW SOCIETY. Even with the rapid and extensive growth of federal power and control since 1932, the state still retains tremendous regulatory and initiatory powers over life within its borders. Police and national guard, taxing and banking, election machinery and courts, licensing of many sorts all remain under broad state jurisdiction. And Mississippi, primarily because of its great black population and its seaports (on the Gulf of Mexico), seems the most favorable state in which Black People might reach toward the logical conclusion of our destiny in this land, might attempt to build THE NEW SOCIETY under black control. (The founding of the Republic of New Africa has made it unnecessary for revolutionaries to seek control of the state within the U.S. federal union. Our work is the direct work of winning consent of the people to the jurisdiction of the Republic of New Africa and away from the United States.)

If black people are successful in Mississippi, a systematic attempt would be made to bring three million similarly minded black people from the North into Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, so that these states might also be brought under black control and into a five-state union with Mississippi, with ports on both the Atlantic and the Gulf — a smaller union than the old 11-state Confederacy, to be sure, but with infinitely greater prospects for success. But THE ROAD TO BLACK CONTROL in Mississippi is perilous and by no means accomplished by our mere wishing it.

For if the state of Mississippi in 1966 contained the most valuable asset for black control (a near-majority of black people), it also contained all the obstacles to black control found in the other states — and one more: open and ubiquitous white violence.

THE ANTI-BLACK BLACKS

CONCERTED efforts of white organizations like the UAW to dominate the black vote in Mississippi are not the only obstacles to black control. There is what has become known as the “TUSKEGEE SYNDROME.” This refers to the state of the black mind in Tuskegee, Alabama, where, in 1965, a black voting majority, after a campaign by leading black people in the community against black government, voted a white majority into office.

The sources of this syndrome are not hard to identify. Raised on a saturation diet of white supremacy, believing that God himself and his son too are white, great numbers of black people in America have a secret, abiding love of the white man that flows from deep recesses of the subconscious mind. It is matched by a complementary subconscious hate of black people, of self, and manifests itself in a pervasive doubt of black ability to succeed at anything. These ingrained attitudes in black people have been played upon — to the detriment of every movement for black unity and black self-help in our history — by white-dominated organizations like the NAACP, which for 50 years has held the spotlight in the fight for freedom.

These organizations teach, as gospel, that racial INTEGRATION is the only solution to our problems (they preach this to black people, not to white) and that “all-black” organizations in the fight for freedom are “segregation” and this “segregation,” like the other segregation, is bad. (ALL-BLACK churches and undertakers and barrooms are alright.)

This teaching squares easily with the black man’s sub-conscious self-doubt: many black people are easily convinced, therefore, that “anything all-black is all wrong.”

They are especially convinced and led astray in this regard because the actions of MOST — thank God, NOT ALL — leaders of black communities are designed to lead them astray. Great numbers of black teachers and professors, great numbers of college-educated black people who fill leadership positions (often because they are designated by whites) in black communities believe in their own inferiority but believe even more in the inferiority of their less well situated brothers. It is they, together with the minority of cynical, bought blacks, who are the passkey to the first and greatest barrier — black disunity — to black control in any community. Because of these people, black unity in the past has been impossible; without these people, black people would have nothing to fear from attempts of outsiders, like the UAW, to control black candidates and black politics. We would have considerably less to fear than we now do from economic or even physical attacks from whites.

While these black leaders almost always profit from their subservience to whites, and some perform for whites for no reason other than profit, most are motivated by a conviction that there is no other course. For all this, these people are no less dangerous and obstructive to the acquisition of black power in Mississippi (or elsewhere) than were they motivated purely by profit. Those motivated by profit have from the very beginning forfeited their right to existence; those motivated by conviction are due a brief solicitation, but, after that, their further existence, unreconstructed, cannot be justified.

GOD, MEN AND VIOLENCE

WHEN black men are called upon to fight in the United States Army and are sent, as they are in Viet Nam, to take the lives of foreign patriots who bear them no ill will, no cry is raised that black men should practice non-violence and refuse to go. But when black men are urged to arms to protect themselves in the race struggle in the United States, the cry of non-violence for blacks fills all the land. It will fill it again now. It does not matter. What matters is what black men themselves think. Those of us in the struggle who are atheists and agnostics, those who are animists and those who follow Islam are unfettered by the chains which a perjured teaching has placed upon those of us who are Christian.

More than any man in recent years Martin Luther King is responsible for this criminal crippling of the black man in his struggle. King took an incredibly beautiful, a matchlessly challenging doctrine — redemption through love and self-sacrifice — and corrupted it through his own disbelief. Martin Luther King’s non-violence is a shallow deceit: on no less than three occasions between 1961 and 1965 King called for or condoned (as when Watts occurred) the use of troops. But he urges black people to non-violence. If he did this because he did not think we could win violently, and said so, that would be one thing; but he tells black people to be nonviolent because violence is wrong and unjustifiable. And yet he calls for armies, WHITE-RUN armies. . .

Black Christians must remember that while Christ taught peace, forgiveness, and forbearance, his disciple Peter carried a sword and used it in Christ’s defense at Gethsemane, Christ himself spoke of legions of angels who would fight for him, and Christ himself turned to violence to drive the money-changers from the temple.

There are Christian black men in the struggle, seeking to serve God and loving mankind, who like Christ with the money-changers, have seen the uselessness of further forbearance and have therefore committed themselves to unrelenting violence against violent whites. They are men who hate violence and seek a day when men will practice war no more, but who know that at this juncture in history we are left no other course. If the white man were to be redeemed and reconciled to us by our love, he would have been reconciled before the one hundredth year, because we have loved him mightily. If the white man were to be saved by our suffering, the last ten years from Montgomery through Magnolia County and Birmingham to Chicago — the sacrifice of the actual lives and sight and health and chastity of our dearest black children, many, like those in the Birmingham bombing, not yet teenagers — this non-violent, loving, unstinting sacrifice should have saved him.

The fact is that our continued non-violence will NOT change the white man and would lead US only to extermination.

God is with us, to be sure. But the natural miracle is a rare and thoroughly intractable phenomenon; for the most part, the miracles of God are worked through the brains and arms of men. God will deliver us, but CANNOT unless we act. And if we act, with resolve, we can hack out in this American jungle of racism, exploitation and the acceptance of organized crime, one place in this hemisphere where men of good will may build the GOOD NEW SOCIETY and work for the reconstruction of the whole human world.”

READ

WHAT EVERY AFRICAN AMERICAN MUST CONSIDER BEFORE VOTING IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

Edward Eugene Onaci concludes,

“The early 1970’s marked an important decade in the political evolution of Black Power ideologies. Urban rebellion subsided as Black elected officials became mayors and congresspersons, and held many other positions previously unavailable to them due to the de jure (and de facto) racism. Further, activists incorporated the ‘Black Power’ slogan into everything from hair products to urban development programs, and even Nixon-sanctioned Black city development. African Americans from across the political spectrum strove to develop strategies to make the most of this relatively liberal political environment. They devised plans through institutional formations (such as the Congressional Black Caucus), several Black Power conferences and, the Gary Convention of 1972. Political science scholar Cedric Johnson describes

these political moves as the shift from progressive grassroots activism to elitist, stagnated, institutional political participation .“

UNDERSTANDING MY BALANTA FATHER: A NEW INTERPRETATION OF THOSE WHO RESIST IN AMERICA

John Lewis, right, a student at American Baptist Theological seminary, talks to reporters at Nashville city jail March 25, 1960, after his arrest at the downtown Moon-McGrath drugstore lunch counter. Also arrested were O.D. Hunt, left, and Dennis Gregory Foote, students at Tennessee A&I State University.(Photo: Jimmy Ellis / The Tennessean)

When my father was growing up in Gary in the 1950’s, it was one of the most segregated cities in America. The town was founded by US Steel Corp and when the steel industry was flourishing, so too was Gary. That changed, however, when growing oversees competitiveness caused U.S. Steel to lay off many workers. The subsequent “white flight” caused a city with a white population of 79% to become a city with a population of 84% black people, the highest among cities with a population of 100,000 or more. When the white people moved, surrounding suburban areas experienced rapid growth and prosperity. Meanwhile, when white people left, economic investment and money left, too, policies changed, and Gary became one of the worst, most desolate cities in America plagued by poverty and crime, and all of it painted “black”.

I was born and raised in Boulder Hill, a suburb of Montgomery, Illinois which is about 45 miles southwest of Chicago and Gary, Indiana. We were among the first black families to move there. My father came from Gary and my mother came from Chicago, and together they moved to Boulder Hill for a better life and for a good education for me and my sister. We were among the few black students in the entire school system, and thus, I was raised and socialized among white people.

As a kid, we would from time to time visit my grandmother, Lovely Blake (that’s her real name) in Gary, Indiana. This would be my first real exposure to other black people, and these visits had a profound impact on me. My reaction Gary, as a kid coming from the affluence of Boulder Hill and the neighboring town of Oswego, was shock and horror. It was very clear, white people lived in nice neighborhoods and black people did not. White people had good sports teams and black people did not. Everything white was better. Everything black sucked. To underscore this, every holiday when we went to visit my grandmother and my father’s family, they would cook chitterlings, the most foul-smelling food (pig intestines) one can imagine eating. Thus, there was a visceral “stink” to being black.

In 1975, at the age of 4, my family took a trip to Charleston, SC. My father, a former high school swimmer and diver (his father, my grandfather was a member of the US Coast Guard), was undoubtedly excited to bring his son to see the Atlantic ocean. However, when I was brought to the waters edge and touch the water where my great, great, great, great, great grandfather had arrived in America, I freaked out! I was deathly afraid of the water. So bizarre was my reaction that my father immediately resolved that I would start swimming lessons as soon as we returned home.

THAT WAS THE MOMENT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF MY GREAT, GREAT, GREAT, GREAT, GREAT BALANTA GRANDFATHER ENTERED ME.

Around this same time, when I was six years old, I, like millions of Americans watched the television adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots. One scene, in particular, scarred me forever - Kunte Kinte being whipped to accept his slave name.

In 1989, I enrolled at Yale University where I started to study African American history. I learned that most slaves took the names of their slave masters. All of a sudden, my birth name, Anthony “Tony” Blake, started to really bother me. Why did I, a black person, have a Spanish or Italian first name and an English surname when I am neither Spanish, Italian or English? Why, now that I am “free”, did I continue to use the foreign names of slave-owners? This was part of my identity crisis that started back in 1977 when I watched the movie Roots.

This new consciousness, however, also caused me to ask questions about my father who was a college student during the 1960’s Civil Rights and Black Power era. Why had he never talked to me about this? In my mind, I was wondering, why wasn’t my father a member of the Black Panther Party? How come he didn’t fight for our freedom? A part of me looked at my father as an Uncle Tom and a part of me was ashamed. He was the reason I was surrounded by white people as a kid and why I ended up at Yale University. My newly emerging black consciousness and black pride couldn’t reconcile this. I needed to understand my father’s story . . .

FROM GARY TO FISK

My grandfather, Jeremiah Nathaniel Blake, was born September 21, 1922 in Providence, Rhode Island. His father, Jacob S. Blake, moved to Gary, Indiana sometime thereafter according to the 1930 Census. In 1945, Jacob Blake moved to San Francisco, while Jeremiah Blake stayed in Gary. That same year, 1945, Jeremiah Blake had a son, Jeremiah Nathaniel Blake, Jr. - my father. Five years later, on January 10, 1950, Jeremiah Nathaniel Blake Sr. died. My father and his sister Ramona, were raised alone by Lovelee Blake. Her main priority was keeping Jeremiah Jr. out of trouble.

During the Korean War, the Selective Service began the policy of granting deferments to college students with an academic ranking in the top half of their class. Between 1954-1964, from the end of the Korean War until the escalation in Vietnam, the “peacetime” draft inducted more than 1.4 million American men, an average of more than 120,000 per year. My father often told me, “most of his friends were either being drafted and sent to war or were getting hooked on drugs. I didn’t want to end up like that.”

In 1962, my father left Gary, Indiana to enroll at Fisk University in Nashville, TN. At that time, Fisk University was the cradle of the revolutionary resistance to racism in America.

According to the Complete Coverage: The Civil Rights Movement in Nashville,

“WHEN PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA TOOK THE OATH OF OFFICE FOR THE FIRST TIME, CONGRESSMAN JOHN LEWIS WAS THERE. ON A COMMEMORATIVE ENVELOPE HE SIGNED FOR LEWIS THAT DAY, OBAMA WROTE "BECAUSE OF YOU, JOHN." THAT’S BECAUSE LEWIS, AS A YOUNG MAN, WAS PART OF A UNIQUE GROUP OF NASHVILLE COLLEGE STUDENTS WHO SET OUT TO CHANGE THE WORLD. THEY SUCCEEDED BECAUSE THEY HAD RIGHT ON THEIR SIDE, AND ALSO BECAUSE THEY HAD THE COURAGE IT TOOK TO STAY THE COURSE EVEN WHEN THEIR LIVES WERE ON THE LINE.

The seeds of revolution were planted in a church fellowship hall, in dorm rooms and in a rented house along Jefferson Street.

They were nurtured in a pivotal emergency meeting at First Baptist Church Capitol Hill, with all who were there convinced that the very idea of America was up for grabs.

When the revolutionaries were ready, they attacked. But they didn’t fire guns, pull knives or throw punches.

They sat at lunch counters. They rode buses. They marched.

And they bled.

More than 50 years ago, a group of Nashville college students joined forces with local preachers to create a nonviolent army that went to war with the segregated South.

While similar groups did the same kind of work in other cities, the Nashville students had the first and most wide-ranging success in the decade when Jim Crow was routed. They stayed at it with such resolve that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., on a visit to Fisk University in the midst of the students’ efforts, said he came not to inspire but to be inspired.

And later, when violence threatened to break them, the students defied the adults who advised them and kept going. They rode buses into police-sanctioned assaults in Alabama, knowing they might die - a decision made during that crucial First Baptist meeting, after one of them, John Lewis, posed two simple questions.

“If not us, then who?” he asked. “If not now, then when?”

The students would go on to play key roles in the civil rights movement’s biggest victories.

“The Nashville students dramatically expanded the notion of what a movement was on two or three occasions,” said historian Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “America in the King Years.”

The students were - and are - complicated human beings. Many would go on to achieve spectacular successes, while others met spectacular failure. But most would come to view the protests as the most important undertaking of their lives.

‘This is the cradle’

The students came together under the Rev. James Lawson, a graduate divinity student who moved to Nashville after King “literally begged him to move south,” Branch said.

In the fall of 1959, Lawson started holding workshops on nonviolent action. Students from Fisk and Tennessee State universities, Meharry Medical College and American Baptist Theological Seminary gathered at Clark Memorial United Methodist Church on 14th Avenue North.

“Clark was the birthplace of the civil rights movement in Nashville,” said Matthew Walker Jr., who participated in Lawson’s workshops and the sit-ins as a Fisk student. “This is the cradle.”

As Lawson stood or sat on one side of the fellowship hall and the students sat in rows of chairs, they talked about Jesus, Gandhi and Thoreau. Or they would role-play a sit-in, with some students pretending to ignore those who stood behind them, yelling slurs and blowing smoke in their faces.

The goal was clear: to desegregate the lunch counters in downtown department stores and five-and-dimes, where black customers could shop but couldn’t buy a hamburger.

Lawson taught the students to react to violence by turning the other cheek and taking the blows. In a workshop captured on film, he urged them to imagine responding to their attackers in a “creatively loving fashion.”

“It wasn’t always easy, believe me,” said Walker, who lost his lower front teeth in a beating at the Greyhound bus station lunch counter but came back to join the Freedom Rides.

And yet the students were meticulous about their own conduct. Two student leaders from American Baptist, Lewis and Bernard Lafayette, passed out a list of rules: Don’t laugh out loud. Don’t block entrances to stores. Be friendly and courteous. Always face the counter.

They dressed like they were going to church. Often they went to jail.

The sit-ins begin

The Nashville sit-ins began on Feb. 13, 1960, nearly two weeks after four North Carolina A&T students spontaneously sat in at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, N.C. Lawson didn’t think the Nashville movement was ready, but his young charges wouldn’t wait.

“They finally ran out from under him,” Branch said.

Emerging from First Baptist, they would wind their way past the old National Life Building, walk down Union Street and south on Fifth Avenue, home to three department stores: Kress, McLellan’s and Woolworth’s. They also sat in at nearby Cain-Sloan, Harveys, Grant’s, Walgreens and the Moon-McGrath drugstore.

On the first two weekends, waitresses refused to serve the students, so they sat at the counters and quietly did their homework.

On the third Saturday, Feb. 27, the police moved in. Some of the students were assaulted by white shoppers. More than 80 students were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, while police left the attackers alone.

That began a nearly two-month standoff between the mostly black protesters - who kept coming and coming - and the white business owners. The students were spat on, gassed with insecticide and had beverages and condiments dumped on them.

Black residents began to boycott the downtown stores, punishing white merchants during the Easter season.

The tension exploded on April 19, when a bomb tore through the home of Z. Alexander Looby, a leading black civil rights lawyer who lived near the Meharry campus. Looby and his family somehow escaped unharmed, but the students and preachers had seen enough. They sent Mayor Ben West a telegram and started walking.

Led by Fisk junior Diane Nash and minister C.T. Vivian, thousands marched, three by three, to City Hall. After West met them on the plaza, Vivian delivered a blistering indictment. Then Nash quietly lowered the boom.

After getting West to acknowledge the evils of discrimination, she pressed him.

“Then, mayor, do you recommend that the lunch counters be desegregated?”

“Yes,” West replied.

Three weeks later, black students and residents ate at the lunch counters, and Nashville became the first city in the South to desegregate. By then the sit-ins had spread across the South, and students in other cities realized that victory was possible.

Movement spreads

But the Nashville students didn’t stop there. They “stood in” outside movie theaters. They protested outside restaurants. And in the spring of 1961, they moved to the forefront of a national campaign.

The Freedom Rides, designed to require enforcement of a new federal rule desegregating interstate bus facilities, appeared to be over after riders had been savagely attacked in Rock Hill, S.C.; Anniston, Ala.; and Birmingham. Federal officials had gotten the battered riders to New Orleans when they learned that the students had other plans.

Back in Nashville, after a meeting at First Baptist, the students decided to keep the Freedom Rides alive. Though the adults who advised them said they would get themselves killed, the students said they couldn’t let violence separate them from freedom. Several of them were beaten badly in Montgomery on May 20.

That was the first of 13 Freedom Rides to originate in Nashville, according to Raymond Arsenault’s book about the rides. Operating out of a Jefferson Street house, Nash and Tennessee State graduate Leo Lillard cashed money orders and bought tickets for students on their way to Jackson, Miss. They intended to fill the jails. . . .”

It is was into this environment that my father entered Fisk University in 1962. Recently, when I asked my father about his involvement in the movement in Nashville at Fisk he said,

“I remember Diane Nash (movement leader) and John Lewis. I went to a couple of the marches then in my sophomore year. We were met with bricks and stones. I wanted to go down to Mississippi to visit a friend and my friend said, ‘we can’t go out to eat’ because of the segregated restaurants. I was just appalled . . . .Then my mother called me after seeing some news about what was happening in Nashville and she asked me if I was involved. I lied and said ‘no’.”

The students at Fisk became even more revolutionary by 1964. According to William Sales, Jr., FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO BLACK LIBERATION: MALCOLM X AND THE ORGANIZATION OF AFRO AMERICAN UNITY

“Akbar Muhammed Ahmed (aka Max Stanford) has documented how very close Malcolm X was to a nationalist wing which had developed within the southern student movement. It was composed of students in and out of SNCC who were more oriented to the ideas of Malcolm X and the self-defense philosophy of Robert Williams. Its center was the Afro-American Student Movement (ASM) at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. These students wanted to introduce into the southern Civil Rights movement an explicit self-defense component coupled with a politics of Black empowerment based on nationalist values. At the urging of leaders of the National Liberation Front (the immediate precursor of RAM) student nationalists convened the first Afro-American Student Conference on Black Nationalism at Fisk University from May 1 to 4, 1964. The conference state that Black radicals were the vanguard of revolution in this country, supported Malcolm X’s efforts to take the case of Afro-Americans to the United Nations, called for a Black cultural revolution, and discussed Pan-Africanism. The conferences 13 Points for Implementation included several points that reflected the Basic Aims and Objectives of the OAAU.”

That conference took place during the spring semester of my father’s sophomore year at Fisk, and there was a follow-up National Afro American Student Youth Conference from October 30- November 1, 1964 so I asked him if he remembered it.

“I remember it but I didn’t attend. That was the year I pledged with the Kappas, and because I was the shortest, I led the line.I just didn’t have the consciousness back then and I was concentrating on not failing out of school and pledging Kappas.”

https://www.crmvet.org/docs/641030_student_conf.pdf

While I was disappointed to hear that my father was at the center of the Black revolutionary movement but was not participating, I could understand somewhat. When I was at Yale, I was focused on swimming and making the United States Olympic Swimming trials, so I was not politically active and didn’t participate in any events at the African American House on campus.

But I still couldn’t understand my father and some of his choices until I learned about Fisk President Charles Johnson. According to Marybeth Gasman in Instilling an Ethic of Leadership at Fisk University in the 1950s,

“In many cases, student activism on college campuses stems from alienation – alienation of one generation from another, alienation of students from administration. The atmosphere in Nashville, Tennessee, at Fisk University during the early 1950s included neither of these ingredients. Most students admired their professors and respected the University president. In the case of Fisk, activism grew out of a shared sense of values and demonstrated leadership – as well as a response to outside oppression. This leadership and these values were passed on to students by Fisk’s charismatic president, Charles S. Johnson . . .

A historically black college, Fisk was founded in 1866 and had a rich tradition of providing liberal arts education to its students. Its first black president, Charles S. Johnson, created a milieu at the University that gave young blacks the benefits of integration. At Fisk, prominent artists and intellectuals of all races came together to nurture students and encourage scholarship. Not only was the campus integrated in terms of its faculty and guest speakers, but also it boasted a diverse student body. According to one of these students, Jane Fort, ‘the campus burst with intellectual activity: the faculty was full of well-trained professors, the best in their fields... During my years, we heard from and had an opportunity to meet and interact with such notables as W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes and so many others that we may have taken it all too much for granted’.

A nationally and internationally connected figure, Charles S. Johnson used his status as a researcher and adviser to several United States presidents, philanthropists, and the United Nations, to bring acclaim to the campus, and to attract prominent scholars to it. He came to Fisk in 1928, schooled in the Chicago style of sociology. His career and interactions were much more far-reaching than those of earlier Fisk presidents, thus playing a significant role in the changes taking place at Fisk. Johnson shared with other black leaders a sense of outrage over the injustices of segregation; however, his approach was liberal, not radical. His circle of friends included people of all races and he showed his advocacy of cooperation across racial lines. Johnson believed that by leading a first-rate historically black college in the South — a university whose academic program attained a level equivalent to many prominent white institutions — he was demolishing the notion that blacks were intellectually inferior. He was supportive of and demanded integration on the Fisk campus. He believed that Fisk would be an incubator for changes that might eventually happen throughout the country. In this sense, Johnson was an activist. Although Johnson had had many national and international experiences, it was his early years that had the greatest impact on his values and his method of ‘sidelines activism.’ . . . Johnson value[d] and [made a] life-long commitment to equality and the understanding people of all races.

Often ahead of his time, Johnson was heavily criticized and mistrusted by many black leaders and white southerners alike. . . .

One of his goals for academic and social preparation at Fisk was to build students up in ‘terms of their own strength and identity’. Johnson was fond of saying,

‘This is where we come to give these kids the strength that they are going to need to confront the rest of the world.’

[Siphiwe note: my father often told me he wanted to give me the opportunity to compete with anyone in the world which has translated to my desire to become a world champion as a masters swimmer even until today]

Much different from the challenge found in the Civil Rights movement — to prepare students for civil disobedience — Johnson’s focus was on ‘nurturing and incubating’ students: giving them academic tools, self-worth, and confidence. Johnson would say, ‘there are many different ways to make change’.

Making change, moving forward, and seizing opportunities were cornerstones of Johnson’s approach.

[Siphiwe note: my father definitely took the ‘nurturing and incubating’ approach with me, especially after my parent’s divorce and he raised me alone]

Fisk was the stage on which Johnson sought to make change. He saw Fisk and the education it provided to students as a way to instill values, challenge the status quo, and develop minds. . . . At Fisk, Johnson promoted his method of activism — activism through scholarship and leadership. . . .

Fisk was one of those places in Nashville where all people could get together and mingle without concern. . . This was consistent with Johnson’s overall effort to ‘renounce the philosophies of escape, and pin [his] faith in the power of life experiences.’ . . . On a daily basis, students were learning to reject the status quo through their scholarship and the campus environment. According to student Vivian Norton, ‘The Fisk campus was an international microcosm. There were regular and exchange students from all over the U.S. and the world. This taught all of us that the world has all kinds of people in it; we needed to be able to interact in important ways – differences in skin color were irrelevant. We lived in dorms with roommates of different colors, religions, and national origins’. The Fisk environment familiarized an integrated style of living and emboldened students to challenge the norms in the local community. . . .

The influence of the outside forces, brought to campus by Charles S. Johnson, encouraged the Fisk students to confront the absurdity of segregation in other ways as well. They would ‘go downtown and if [they] saw a colored fountain, [they] would say hey ‘this is a colored fountain and you can buy colored water.’’ Thus, the presence of outsiders encouraged the Fisk students to show contempt and mockery for a system that they had been raised to fear. Like Johnson years earlier, they ‘developed a new self-consciousness that burned’. . . .Students learned that academics could be activists by sharing research with practitioners and those on the front lines.

Charles S. Johnson was able to captivate the minds of the Fisk students and encourage them to be active in the pursuit of equality. Although he knew that direct protest and confrontation were valid and useful ways to make change, he showed students that there were multiple ways to be an activist. According to Johnson, ‘We are well enough aware of the disposition among many of the young to toss away moral codes along with the discovered fallacies and empty rituals and superstitions of outworn dogma’. Through an understanding of both scholarly issues and outside forces, Fisk students were able to sift through the “dogma” but also retain the moral foundations instilled and modeled by Charles S. Johnson. Johnson believed that scholarship and demonstrated leadership could ‘chip away at a problem’ by exposing it to the public. Fisk students were encouraged to change these conditions with their written words and spoken voice. Johnson continually returned to the words attributed to him by the Fisk alumni,

‘Don’t show your anger in your writing; make others angry with your writing.’

Certainly I see now that my father was a product of Fisk University and Charles Johnson’s style of sideline activism. Armed with a degree in mathematics, the courage to confront the world, a respect for all humanity, and preparation for integration, my father set out on the mission to change society through what my father constantly taught me: personal excellence.

It is within this framework that I can now understand my father’s decision to accept one of the earliest affirmative action opportunities offered by Northern Illinois Gas Company and the eventual relocation to the all-white Boulder Hill where I was born and raised. Such a transition didn’t happen completely smoothly, however. My father’s first attempts to move into white neighborhoods were met with restrictive covenants and outright white hostility. Undaunted and determined, my father did exactly as Charles Johnson taught - confront the absurdity of segregation , ‘renounce the philosophies of escape, and pin [his] faith in the power of life experiences,’ and ‘make change, move forward, and seize opportunities.’

Jeremiah Nathaniel Blake

Fisk University Class of 1966 celebrating the 150 year anniversary of the founding of Fisk and the 50th anniversary of the Class of 1966

On June 7, 1970, C. Eric Lincoln published an article in the New York Times entitled Voices of Fisk ‘70 —, stating,

“NASHVILLE, Tenn. THE Revolution has visited Fisk University in Nashville, as it has most other American colleges. But with a difference. Perhaps Fisk itself is different, as it perceives itself to be. Founded in 1866, the school is alma mater to generations of influential blacks, among them the late W. E. B. Du Bois, probably the most celebrated scholar Black Amer ica has produced; Congressman William Dawson of Chicago; A. Maceo Walker, millionaire Memphis banker and insurance company president; John Hope Franklin, chairman of the department of history at the University of Chicago, and Frank Yerby, best‐selling novelist. While Fisk has a scattering of white students, the school has always considered itself to represent the aristocracy of “Negro” education, and the “Fisk tradition,” though contested by other good schools like Morehouse in Atlanta, still suggests to many black house holds the best education available at a black college.

The Fisk graduate, class of '70, sees his situation as unique in a society torn between change and the status quo ante. He has learned the ambivalence and the anxieties of the black intellectual long before be coming one. It is as though his whole college career were a cleverly masked preparation for somehow surviving in a society so fraught with con traditions as to require some special psychological armor, or some chameleon versatility, “to make it.” The Fisk student accepts and rejects the Fisk pattern for success and adjustment. He wants to make it in the world, but he does not like the kind of world that is offered to him His ambivalence and frustration produce attitudes and behavior which are clearly inconsistent, and which are symptomatic of his longing for a respectable place in the society and his fear that he may succumb to values he can not wholly accept.”

Interestingly, a year after I was born, the black liberation struggle returned to Gary, Indiana which hosted the National Black Political Convention in 1972.

THE BLACK AGENDA

The Gary Declaration: Black Politics at the Crossroads

Introduction

The Black Agenda is addressed primarily to Black people in America. It rises naturally out of the bloody decades and centuries of our people’s struggle on these shores. It flows from the most recent surgings of our own cultural and political consciousness. It is our attempt to define some of the essential changes which must take place in this land as we and our children move to self-determination and true independence.

The Black Agenda assumes that no truly basic change for our benefit takes place in Black or white America unless we Black people organize to initiate that change. It assumes that we must have some essential agreement on overall goals, even though we may differ on many specific strategies.

Therefore, this is an initial statement of goals and directions for our own generation, some first definitions of crucial issues around which Black people must organize and move in 1972 and beyond. Anyone who claims to be serious about the survival and liberation of Black people must be serious about the implementation of the Black Agenda.

What Time Is It?

We come to Gary in an hour of great crisis and tremendous promise for Black America. While the white nation hovers on the brink of chaos, while its politicians offer no hope of real change, we stand on the edge of history and are faced with an amazing and frightening choice: We may choose in 1972 to slip back into the decadent white politics of American life, or we may press forward, moving relentlessly from Gary to the creation of our own Black life. The choice is large, but the time is very short.

Let there be no mistake. We come to Gary in a time of unrelieved crisis for our people. From every rural community in Alabama to the high-rise compounds of Chicago, we bring to this Convention the agonies of the masses of our people. From the sprawling Black cities of Watts and Nairobi in the West to the decay of Harlem and Roxbury in the East, the testimony we bear is the same. We are the witnesses to social disaster.

Our cities are crime-haunted dying grounds. Huge sectors of our youth — and countless others — face permanent unemployment. Those of us who work find our paychecks able to purchase less and less. Neither the courts nor the prisons contribute to anything resembling justice or reformation. The schools are unable — or unwilling — to educate our children for the real world of our struggles. Meanwhile, the officially approved epidemic of drugs threatens to wipe out the minds and strength of our best young warriors.

Economic, cultural, and spiritual depression stalk Black America, and the price for survival often appears to be more than we are able to pay. On every side, in every area of our lives, the American institutions in which we have placed our trust are unable to cope with the crises they have created by their single-minded dedication to profits for some and white supremacy above all.

Beyond These Shores

And beyond these shores there is more of the same. For while we are pressed down under all the dying weight of a bloated, inwardly decaying white civilization, many of our brothers in Africa and the rest of the Third World have fallen prey to the same powers of exploitation and deceit. Wherever America faces the unorganized, politically powerless forces of the non-white world, its goal is domination by any means necessary — as if to hide from itself the crumbling of its own systems of life and work.

But Americans cannot hide. They can run to China and the moon and to the edges of consciousness, but they cannot hide. The crises we face as Black people are the crises of the entire society. They go deep, to the very bones and marrow, to the essential nature of America’s economic, political, and cultural systems. They are the natural end-product of a society built on the twin foundations of white racism and white capitalism.

So, let it be clear to us now: The desperation of our people, the agonies of our cities, the desolation of our countryside, the pollution of the air and the water — these things will not be significantly affected by new faces in the old places in Washington D.C. This is the truth we must face here in Gary if we are to join our people everywhere in the movement forward toward liberation.

White Realities, Black Choice
A Black political convention, indeed all truly Black politics must begin from this truth: The American system does not work for the masses of our people, and it cannot be made to work without radical fundamental change. (Indeed this system does not really work in favor of the humanity of anyone in America.)

In light of such realities, we come to Gary and are confronted with a choice. Will we believe the truth that history presses into our face — or will we, too, try to hide? Will the small favors some of us have received blind us to the larger sufferings of our people, or open our eyes to the testimony of our history in America?

For more than a century we have followed the path of political dependence on white men and their systems. From the Liberty Party in the decades before the Civil War to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, we trusted in white men and white politics as our deliverers. Sixty years ago, W.E.B. DuBois said he would give the Democrats their “last chance” to prove their sincere commitment to equality for Black people — and he was given white riots and official segregation in peace and in war.

Nevertheless, some twenty years later we became Democrats in the name of Franklin Roosevelt, then supported his successor Harry Truman, and even tried a “non-partisan” Republican General of the Army named Eisenhower. We were wooed like many others by the superficial liberalism of John F. Kennedy and the make-believe populism of Lyndon Johnson. Let there be no more of that.

Both Parties Have Betrayed Us

Here at Gary, let us never forget that while the times and the names and the parties have continually changed, one truth has faced us insistently, never changing: Both parties have betrayed us whenever their interests conflicted with ours (which was most of the time), and whenever our forces were unorganized and dependent, quiescent and compliant. Nor should this be surprising, for by now we must know that the American political system, like all other white institutions in America, was designed to operate for the benefit of the white race: It was never meant to do anything else.

That is the truth that we must face at Gary. If white “liberalism” could have solved our problems, then Lincoln and Roosevelt and Kennedy would have done so. But they did not solve ours nor the rest of the nation’s. If America’s problems could have been solved by forceful, politically skilled and aggressive individuals, then Lyndon Johnson would have retained the presidency. If the true “American Way” of unbridled monopoly capitalism, combined with a ruthless military imperialism could do it, then Nixon would not be running around the world, or making speeches comparing his nation’s decadence to that of Greece and Rome.

If we have never faced it before, let us face it at Gary. The profound crisis of Black people and the disaster of America are not simply caused by men nor will they be solved by men alone. These crises are the crises of basically flawed economics and politics, and or cultural degradation. None of the Democratic candidates and none of the Republican candidates — regardless of their vague promises to us or to their white constituencies — can solve our problems or the problems of this country without radically changing the systems by which it operates.

The Politics of Social Transformation

So we come to Gary confronted with a choice. But it is not the old convention question of which candidate shall we support, the pointless question of who is to preside over a decaying and unsalvageable system. No, if we come to Gary out of the realities of the Black communities of this land, then the only real choice for us is whether or not we will live by the truth we know, whether we will move to organize independently, move to struggle for fundamental transformation, for the creation of new directions, towards a concern for the life and the meaning of Man. Social transformation or social destruction, those are our only real choices.

If we have come to Gary on behalf of our people in America, in the rest of this hemisphere, and in the Homeland — if we have come for our own best ambitions — then a new Black Politics must come to birth. If we are serious, the Black Politics of Gary must accept major responsibility for creating both the atmosphere and the program for fundamental, far-ranging change in America. Such responsibility is ours because it is our people who are most deeply hurt and ravaged by the present systems of society. That responsibility for leading the change is ours because we live in a society where few other men really believe in the responsibility of a truly human society for anyone anywhere.

We Are The Vanguard

The challenge is thrown to us here in Gary. It is the challenge to consolidate and organize our own Black role as the vanguard in the struggle for a new society. To accept that challenge is to move independent Black politics. There can be no equivocation on that issue. History leaves us no other choice. White politics has not and cannot bring the changes we need.

We come to Gary and are faced with a challenge. The challenge is to transform ourselves from favor-seeking vassals and loud-talking, “militant” pawns, and to take up the role that the organized masses of our people have attempted to play ever since we came to these shores. That of harbingers of true justice and humanity, leaders in the struggle for liberation.

A major part of the challenge we must accept is that of redefining the functions and operations of all levels of American government, for the existing governing structures — from Washington to the smallest county — are obsolescent. That is part of the reason why nothing works and why corruption rages throughout public life. For white politics seeks not to serve but to dominate and manipulate.

We will have joined the true movement of history if at Gary we grasp the opportunity to press Man forward as the first consideration of politics. Here at Gary we are faithful to the best hopes of our fathers and our people if we move for nothing less than a politics which places community before individualism, love before sexual exploitation, a living environment before profits, peace before war, justice before unjust “order”, and morality before expediency.

This is the society we need, but we delude ourselves here at Gary if we think that change can be achieved without organizing the power, the determined national Black power, which is necessary to insist upon such change, to create such change, to seize change.

Towards A Black Agenda

So when we turn to a Black Agenda for the seventies, we move in the truth of history, in the reality of the moment. We move recognizing that no one else is going to represent our interests but ourselves. The society we seek cannot come unless Black people organize to advance its coming. We lift up a Black Agenda recognizing that white America moves towards the abyss created by its own racist arrogance, misplaced priorities, rampant materialism, and ethical bankruptcy. Therefore, we are certain that the Agenda we now press for in Gary is not only for the future of Black humanity, but is probably the only way the rest of America can save itself from the harvest of its criminal past.

So, Brothers and Sisters of our developing Black nation, we now stand at Gary as people whose time has come. From every corner of Black America, from all liberation movements of the Third World, from the graves of our fathers and the coming world of our children, we are faced with a challenge and a call:

Though the moment is perilous we must not despair. We must seize the time, for the time is ours.

We begin here and how in Gary. We begin with an independent Black political movement, an independent Black Political Agenda, and independent Black spirit. Nothing less will do. We must build for our people. We must build for our world. We stand on the edge of history. We cannot turn back.

REPORT: BALANTA SOCIETY IN AMERICA AND BAM'FABA DISTRIBUTE FOOD IN SINTCHAM, TANDE AND SAMODJE VILLAGES IN NORTHERN GUINEA BISSAU

Watch the TGB Televisão da Guiné-Bissau coverage of the distribution.

Today, June 3, the Balanta B’urassa History and Genealogy Society in America (BBHAGSIA) made it’s second food distribution in Guinea Bissau. On May 17th, 750 kgs of rice, 15 buckets, 2 boxes of bleach and 2 boxes of soap were distributed to 76 households in Tchokmon. Of which, 250 kg of rice and 05 buckets were sent to the community of Bairro Militar, a total of 35 households. Previously, BBHAGSIA also helped the Tadja Fomi ngo deliver food basket for 400 beneficiary families averaging 9 people per family for a total of 3,703 people.

BBHAGSIA are working with the Bam’Faba Council in Guinea Bissau to get emergency food aid to Balanta rural villages. Bam’Faba has is organizing 9 regional coordinators and 39 sector coordinators throughout Guinea Bissau to work on a development plan for Balanta families.

Today, Bam’Faba council members traveled north of Bissau to the Ingore area to distribute food. Next week, the council plans to distribute food in the southern region of Tombali with the next transfer of $1,000 from the BBHAGSIA.

BAM’FABA REPORT OF THE SECOND PHASE OF FOOD DISTRIBUTION

(translated from Portugues)

The current health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the unprecedented    economic  consequences of which ; especially  for the  most  vulnerable populations veis  who  are  confronted  by  exceptional  shortages of products  of  the first  need. Faced with  this  fragile  situation, the  BAM-FABA  organization is far from indifferent;   decided to  take  some   emergency  actions  with   communities  populated by the  Balantas. Bam -FABA's  actions   go through  the distribution   of  foodstuffs in order to try  to  minimize  the  precariousness  experienced at this  time  by  our  brothers.. géneros

Similarly  to  what  had    previously  been  done  in Tchokmon  in  Semelhança the Bissorã sector,  BAM-FABA  was able  to assist  the  brothers  of  three  villages, namely Sintcham, Samodje and Tande,  this sector  time.   all  located  in the  section  of  Ingoré  sector  of  Bigene  region of Cacheu. However,  the  aid  was summed  exclusively    in  rice acquisition arroz  whose  details  will be  quoted  later  in  the  following paragraphs. .

The BAM-FABA  team composed of President  Mário Cissé  and  Secretary  Sufri Afonso  Balanta,  departed  Bissau at  11:10am  along  with two  members  of  Guinea-Bissau o Television;  arrived  in  Ingoré  at  13:05  where they joined with  the  Quintino Medi in charge of the regional  Cacheu. From  13:05  to  14:00,  24  bags  of  rice  of 50Kg   each  capacity  were purchased.  From  das  14h4h  the  team  went to tabanca de  Sintcham where the  delivery of donations  began  at  14h30mn.

In sintcham  we were greeted by the escola  inhabitants   at  the school of tabanca  where  7 bags  of  rice were  donated.  During the delivery act   entrega  that  did not  exceed  20  minutes, Quintino Medi  began  the  act by first  presenting  the  distribution team as well  as  donations. Taking advantage  oflicar  the  goal of donation that  is to help  through    BAM-FABA the  brothers of Sintcham to  meet  some  of  their  needs. Next  to speak  was the  cumité   (respresponsável  de tabanca) who  used the word,  thanking  the  humanitarian gesture  made  and  uttering a few  words  of  blessing to BAM-FABA. Finally,  it was the  intervention  of  a  woman  who  was  pleased with the  gesture  and  thanking  BAM-FABAf or what she had  done..

Then we  continue our  walk  to  Samodje  where  we arrived  at  15h18mn.   Where  we were  received by the popular and  were  also  donated  7 bags  of  rice  of 50kg. Quintino Medi  used   the word  explaining  the  reason for  the  gift..  Then  it was the  cumité  de tabanca and  a  woman  who  thanked  BAM-FABA for the donations reassuring  us  tranquilizando  that the  distribution  of  them will be  equitable  without  forgetting  the  insistrates  of the incéndio and at the same time the  cumité took advantage of us to let  us  know  the BAM-FABA other  difficulties  that the tabanca  faces  such  as  the  lack  of  a  decent school,   lack  of a  health center . The  delivery act   entrega  ended  at  3:43 p.m..

Finally we went  to tabanca de  Tandé  where  we arrived  at  17:02 and   were  received in an impressive  way by the people of Tande. In  Tandé,  10  bags  of 50kg rice  were  given.  Quintino  explained the reason for    produção   arroz  Bam-faba's  intervention, whose  donation is intended to  help  in  the construction  of   dikes against invasion  of  salt water  in  the bolanhas  that makes local rice production  impossible. . It all  ended  at 5:30 p.m.

Finally,   President  Mário  Cissé  explained  the  objectives of the  creation  of the organization and its performance on  the ground

For this   distribution phase,  BAM-FABA  had  received  1,000 USDs  equivalent  to  570,000xof..    Posto the amount  left in the  BAM-FABA account  for its  maintenance  (20,000xof),,  and  the   logística expenses  (see  table  below) it was  possible to buy 24 bags of rice of 50Kg. The  unit value  of  each  bag  is  16,400fc, which  implies  a total value  of  393,600fc for    the purchase  of 24  bags.

NB : The total amount of expenses (550.000xof) + 20,000xof of   Bam-faba account maintenance, which corresponds to the value of 570,000xof equivalent to 1,000USD. manutenção

                                                                                   Mario Cissé, Sufri Balanta, Quintino Medi Done 03/06/2020

Watch the TGB Televisão da Guiné-Bissau coverage of the distribution.

EXPLAINING TO MY COLORLESS (WHITE) FRIENDS THE SOLUTION TO THE AMERICAN PROBLEM AND ENDING THE CIVIL WAR THAT WAS ESCALATED BY THE MURDER OF GEORGE FLOYD

"[Slavery] is one of the greatest crimes in history . . . . many of the issues that still trouble America have their roots in slavery".

- President George W. Bush, while visiting Senegal on July 8, 2003,

My father once told me, “If you want to solve a problem, you must go to the origin. Otherwise, whatever you do, the problem will continue to grow and rear its ugly head.”

America is in a new stage of the ongoing Civil War that previously escalated in 1967. The vast majority of the colorless (white) people who I talk to want two things: 1) peace/non-violence and 2) more dialogue. This, they believe, is the proper way of solving the situation that has escalated since the murder by torture of George Floyd by the Police officers whose job it is to serve and protect and keep the peace. Since the the 1960’s, we have been warning America,

“NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE”.

So you can’t say that this was a surprise to anyone except for people who refused to listen and understand. Every effort has already been made to protest peacefully, and every effort was met with resistance, not acceptance and action. Rather than discussing this, I am simply going to outline, very clearly, what must be done now to end the Civil War in America.

1. Recognize the origin of the problem.

2. Take Responsibility for the Crime Against Humanity

3. Pay Reparations

4. Conduct a United Nations Sponsored Plebiscite for African American Self Determination

5. Support the immediate formation of Black Community Protection Forces

Recognize the origin of the problem is that America was created by committing a genocide of indigenous and African heritage people, a crime against the humanity of African heritage people (trans-Atlantic kidnapping, trafficking and enslavement), and a riot and insurrection by a factious group of disturbers of the peace called the Sons of Liberty who attacked British police at the Battle of Golden Hill On January 19, 1770. This eventually led to the Boston massacre and the American Revolution against the British government led by colonial insurrectionists.Thus, the first action in the solution is the public acknowledgement of this narrative and a rejection of the established "patriotic” narrative taught in American society and schools.

America must then take responsibility for the Crime Against Humanity. Here I remind you of some of the efforts that have already been made to hold America accountable and why there is no need for any more dialogue:

September 2, 1924 - The Universal Negro Improvement Association submits its Petition of Four Million Negroes of the United States of America to His Excellency the President of the United States Praying for a Friendly and Sympathetic Consideration of the Plan of Founding a Nation in Africa for the Negro People, and to Encourage Them in Assisting to Develop Already Independent Negro Nations as a Means of Helping to Solve the Conflicting Problems of Race

1946 - The National Negro Congress submits its Petition to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations Stating The Facts on The Oppression of the American Negro.

October 23, 1947 - W.E.B. DuBois submits AN APPEAL TO THE WORLD!: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress. Fearing that the double standard would be exposed, President Truman’s State Department worked relentlessly to undermine the emerging human rights infrastructure at the U.N. In internal documents, the State Department admitted that it was worried about the creation of an international forum where it would be too tempting to raise the “Negro problem.”

December, 1951 - William Patterson and Paul Robeson submit We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of The United States against the Negro People . The petition detailed, among other things, 152 incidents of killings of unarmed Black men and women by police and lunch mobs between 1945 and 1951.

April 3, 1964 - Malcolm X gives his famous, “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech stating, “Human rights are something you are born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth. And any time anyone violates your human rights, you can tak them to the world court.” Thus, Malcolm X revealed his intention to utilize the United Nations. On May 21, 1964, Malcolm X stated,

“The American black man needed to recognize that he had a strong, airtight case to take the United States before the United Nations on a formal accusation of ‘denial of human rights’ - and that if Angola and South Africa were precedent cases, then there would be no easy way that the U.S. could escape being censured, right on its own home ground.”

On November 29, 1964, Malcolm X stated,

“You and I must take this government before a world forum and show the world that this government has absolutely failed in its duty toward us.”

Finally, Malcolm X mentioned the United Nations topic for the last time on February 16, 1965, just days before his death. stating,

“as long as you call it civil rights your only allies can be the people in the next community, many of who are responsible for your grievance. But when you call it human rights it becomes international. And then you can take your troubles to the World Court. You can take them before the world. And anybody anywhere on this earth can become your ally.” A few days later, Malcolm X was killed.

1977 - The New Afrikan Prisoners Organization (NAPO) petition to the United Nations.

December 11, 1978 - The National Conference of Black Lawyers, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and the Commission on Racial Justice for the United Church of Christ submit a petition to the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities.

November 5, 1979 - The National Black Human Rights Coalition organized a march of 5,000 people at the United Nations under the banner “Black People Charge Genocide” and “Human Rights is the Right to Self Determination.”

1994 - Mr. Silis Muhammad delivered Petition for Reparations to the UN under 1503 Procedure – to the UN Working Group on Communications on behalf of African Americans. This was followed up in 1997, 1998, 199 and 2000 with written and oral statements urging the Commission on Human Rights to assist African Americans in their effort to recover from official U.S. policies of enslavement.

May 1997 - As a response to revelations that the CIA was involved in the explosion of crack/cocaine in African American communities, the National Black United Front launched a historic Genocide Petition Campaign Against the United States Government and traveled to the United Nations Human Rights Center in Geneva, Switzerland to present the petition with over 200,000 signatures to Mr. Ralph Zacklin, Officer in Charge of High Commission of Human Rights, Centre for Human Rights. Also, this same Petition/Declaration was submitted to the High Commission of Human Rights in New York on May 27, 1997.

September 3, 2001 - World Conference Against Racism - 18,810 delegates from 170 countries, 16 heads of state, 58 foreign ministers, 44 ministers, 7,000 non-governmental representatives, and 1,300 journalists attending the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR)

declared that "slavery, and the slave trade, including the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, were appalling tragedies in the history of humanity not only because of their abhorrent barbarism but also in terms of their magnitude, organized nature [and] especially their negation of the essence of the victims . . . [and] that slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity..."

At the conference, on September 2, 2001, in a meeting with United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney presented Robinson with two documents as evidence of the US governments violations of both US and international law and, in particular, specific violation of the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The first document given to Robinson was a confidential Memorandum 46, written by National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski on March 17, 1978 and it details the federal government's plan to destroy functioning black leadership in the United States. This document provides a critical insight into the federal government's concern at the apparent growing influence of the African American political movement. The second document is a report entitled "Human Rights in the United States [The Unfinished Story - Current Political Prisoners - Victims of COINTELPRO]" and it was compiled by the Human Rights Research Fund, headed by Kathleen Cleaver. This document provides an overview of the counterintelligence program which, from the 1950s to the 1980s, was run in the United States against political activists and targeted organizations.

Rather than face these charges, the United States Government's delegation to WCAR walked out of the conference. Days later, the World Trade Center in New York was destroyed.

November 22, 2010 - The National Conference of Black Lawyers and the Malcolm X Center for Self Determination submit a report on Political Repression – Political Prisoners to the United Nations Universal Periodic Review, Ninth Session of the Working Group on the UPR Human Rights Council. The report was endorsed by the following 34 organizations and 53 individuals:
Harold Rogers, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists; Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright; Association Americana de Jurists (American Association of Jurists); Bob Brown, All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (GC); Ramona Ortega, Cidadao Global; Jane Frankin, Author; National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression; Professor Robert Starks, Jacob Caruthers Center for Inner-City Studies*; Rev. Paul Jakes, Christian Council on Urban Affairs; Sali Vickie Casanova, Black People Against Police Torture: Steve Saltzman, Civil Rights Attorney; Lawrence Kennon, Civil Rights Attorney; Black People Against Police Torture; Susan Gzesh, Human Rights Educator; Dr. Yvonne King, Educator; Atty. Efia Nwangaza; Alderman Lionel J. Baptiste, Attorney; Cliff Kelley, WVON Talk Show Host*;Calvin Cook, Black United Fund Illinois*; Family And friends of Dr. Mutulu Shakur: The Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee; AbdudDharr M.K. Abdullah, National Islamic Solidarity Front; Claude Marks, Director, Freedom Archives; People’s Law Office-Chicago, Illinois; Peter and Barbara Clark, Leonard Peltier Defense Committee-Support Group Coordinators; Jeffrey Segal, Attorney at Law, Louisville, Ky; Kamm Howard, Chicago Chapter, National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, N’COBRA; Judith Mirkinson, San Francisco Women In Black; Leah Pemberton: Yusufu Mosley, Campaign In Support of C# Prisoners; Hondo T’Chikwa, Spears & Shield Publications; Rasheda Weaver, Community Activitist; Standish E. Willis, Civil Rights Attorney, Chicago, Illinois; Alice and Edward “Buzz” Palmer, educators; Alice Kim, A Movement Re-Imagining Change (ARC); Anne Lamb, NYC Jericho Movement; Chicago Committee To Defend The Bill of Rights; Dorothy Burge, Educator, Chicago; Baba Jahahara Amen-RA Alkebulan-Ma’at, Past National Co-Chair of National Coalition of Blacks for Reparation in America (N’COBRA), Oakland, California; Patricia Hill, African-American Police League and Chicago Human Rights Council; Prof. Soffiyah Elijah, Harvard Law School, advisor to the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights; Henry English, Black United Fund of Illinois*; Prexy Nesbitt, Educator; Bill Ware; Randolph Stone, University of Chicago School of Law, Clinical Professor, Mandell Clinic; Josh Khaleed London, Shut-Up Prison Ministry; Emile Schepers, Ph.D., Great Falls Virginia; Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, Berkeley, CA; Jeffrey “Free” Luers, Earth First! Prisoner Support Project, Portland, Oregon; Prof. Raoul Contreras, Chair, Indiana Univ. NW, Minority Studies Dept*; Indiana U Social Justice Student Group*; Malcolm X Grassroots Movement for Self Determination; Larry Holmes, Activist NYC; Bonnie Kerness, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)*; Bruce A. Dixon, Journalist; Black Agenda Report; King Downing, Director, Human Rts-Racial Justice Center; Nahal Zamani and Annette Dickerson, Center for Constitutional Rights; Thandisizwe Chimurenga, Journalist; Dr. Kwame Kalamara, Educator; Hugh Esco, Georgia Green Party; Kevin Gray, author

Thus, the “problem” has meticulously been documented and presented to the international community, through the highest channels, of “the problem”. Meanwhile since the Black Studies Movement in the 1960’s, hundreds of thousands of books and articles written by African American professors, have discussed in detail, and added to the works produced by colorless (white) scholars to produce a national body of “knowledge of the problem.” The American public was recently educated about “the problem” by the New York Times 1619 Project. Again, we don’t need to discuss “the problem” anymore.

America must pay Reparations for the Crime Against African Heritage Peoples’ Humanity. In the book, The Wealth of Races: The Present Value of Benefits from Past Injustices edited by Richard F. America, William Darity, Jr writes:

"The later 1960s and early 1970s - a period of great social activism and ferment in the United States -witnessed a surge in calls from black Americans for reparations. . . . The rationale was twofold. First was a 'moral justification deriving .... from the debt owed to Blacks for the centuries of unpaid slave labor which build so much of the early American economy, and from the discriminatory wage and employment patterns to which Blacks were subjected after emancipation.' Second was a justification based on 'national self-interest' . [Robert S. Browne, director and founder of the Black Economic Research Center] perception that such 'gross inequalities' in the distribution of wealth would only further aggravate social tensions between black and whites.

Apparently, neither justification subsequently has proved COMPELLING for American legislators. No scheme of reparations of the type Browne advocated [wealth transfers] ever has been adopted in the United States."

What's important to understand, then, is that it is not for lack of knowing the history and legacy of the slave trade nor any lack of calculating the debt owed that has prevented reparations. In fact, the National Economic Association, the professional organization of black economists, from 1981 to 1985, addressed all of the issues and calculated the costs.

Ransom and Such (1990) calculated that the profits of the slave system from 1806 to 1860 compounded to 1983 came to $3.4 billion. The present value of that sum compounded to the present at an annual interest rate of 5 percent is $9.12 billion.

Larry Neal (1990) derived an estimate of $1.4 trillion based on the gap between the wage an enslaved African would have received had he or shebeen a free laborer and what was spent on slave maintenance by slave-owners between 1620 and 1840. Again, compounding the interest to the present at 5 percent interest yields a total close to $4 trillion by the end of 2004.

James Marketti (1990) utilized a concept of income diverted from enslaved Africans during the course of slavery in the United States to arrive at a figure of $2.1 trillion by 1983.The present value after compounding the interest is $6 trillion. If you use the "40 acres and a mule" from General Sherman's Special Orders No. 15 for a family of four, then, a conservative estimate of the price of land in 1865 is $10 per acre. A conservative estimate of the total number of ex-slaves at the time of emancipation is 4 million which would yield 40 million acres of land valued at $400 million should have been distributed to the ex-slaves in 1865. The present value of that sum of money compounded from 1865 at 6% would amount to $1.3 trillion. If there are approximately 30 million descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States today, the estimate based on 40 acres yields an allocation of slightly more than $400,000 per recipient.

Chachere and Udinskly (1990) estimate that the gains to whites from labor market discrimination during the period 1929-1969 to be $1.6 trillion.

By the year 2000, Joe R. Feagin in his paper Documenting the Costs of Slavery, Segregation and Contemporary Discrimination concluded that "Clearly, the sum total of the worth of all the black labor stolen by whites through the means of slavery, segregation, and contemporary discrimination...taking into account lost interest over time and putting it in today's dollars, is perhaps in the range of $5 to $24 trillion."

Now, according to Walter Olson in his article, "So Long, Slavery Reparations" published in the LA Times in 2008,

"Just a few years ago, at roughly the turn of the millennium, slavery reparations seemed the coming thing. A New York Times article in June 2001 reported that the movement to obtain compensation for slaves’ descendants had “taken on substantial force” and was “gaining steam” both in the nation’s universities and in the black community.

All the major black organizations had signed on, including the NAACP, the Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Randall Robinson’s book, “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks,” had hit the bestseller lists in 2000. Many state and local Democratic politicians started to talk up the idea.

Then: nothing. Today, reparations seem to have completely disappeared from the national agenda. Few mention them anymore. What happened? . . . .

In late 2000, a new project called the Reparations Assessment Group began making preparations for lawsuits. The dollar sums mentioned were staggering. Harper’s magazine estimated that it could require $97 trillion to pay for the hours of uncompensated work done during the slavery era, which would require extracting, on average, about $300,000 from every American of non-slave descent. So confident were reparationists of success that they began to map out how the court-ordered funds would be spent. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, broke this momentum with an abrupt jolt. It wasn’t just that for quite a few months thereafter Americans of all races preferred to discuss issues unrelated to reparations; it was also that some of the persistent themes that ran through those days, such as national unity, individual heroism, mutual dependence and the implications of mortality were at cross-purposes with the reparations narrative. According to LexisNexis, U.S. newspapers and wire services ran nearly 2,600 stories including the words “slavery” and “reparations” in the year leading up to 9/11. Since then, the yearly average has been less than 1,000."

In January of 1989, Michigan Representative John Conyers introduced

H.R. 40 - A Bill To Acknowledge The Fundamental Injustice, Cruelty, Brutality, And Inhumanity Of Slavery In The United States And The 13 American Colonies Between 1619 And 1865 And To Establish A Commission To Examine The Institution Of Slavery, Subsequently De Jure And De Facto Racial And Economic Discrimination Against African-Americans, And The Impact Of These Forces On Living African-Americans, To Make Recommendations To The Congress On Appropriate Remedies, And For Other Purposes; To The Committee On The Judiciary

The bill has been introduced every year since then but has never been passed.

HERE IS THE MOST RECENT AND MOST ACCURATE REPARATIONS CALCULATION

“We compare the 2018 per capita Black–White wealth gap of about US$352,250 with portions of the estimated total cost of slavery and discrimination to African American descendants of the enslaved. For the period of slavery in the United States, we arrive at estimates of about US$12 to US$13 trillion in 2018 dollars using Darity’s land-based and Marketti’s price-based estimation methods, respectively. Estimates using Craemer’s wage-based method tend to be higher ranging from US$18.6 trillion at 3% interest to US$6.2 quadrillion at 6% interest. The value of lost freedom (LF) based on Japanese American World War II internment reparations is estimated at 3% interest to amount to US$35 trillion and at 6% to US$16 quadrillion. Further research is required to estimate the cost of lost opportunities (LC) and pain and suffering (PS). Further research is also required to estimate the costs of colonial slavery, as well as racial discrimination following the abolition of slavery in the United States to African American descendants of the enslaved. Whether the full cost of slavery and discrimination should be compensated, or only a portion, and at what interest rate remain to be determined by negotiations between the federal government and the descendant community.”

America mus accept a United Nations Sponsored Plebiscite for African American Self Determination. This is really the heart of the matter. At the moment that the former slaves were Emancipated in 1865, they became “free”. What this meant is that the African, his freedom now acknowledged by persons who theretofore had wrongfully and illegally (under international law) held him in slavery by force, was entitled as a free man to decide for himself what he wanted to do -- whether he wished to be an American citizen or follow some other course. Following the Thirteenth Amendment, four natural options were the basic right of the African. As outlined by Imari Abubakari Obadele,

First, he did, of course, have a right, if he wished it, to be an American citizen.

Second, he had a right to return to Africa or (third) go to another country -- if he could arrange his acceptance.

Finally, he had a right (based on a claim to land superior to the European's, sub- ordinate to the Indian's) to set up an independent nation of his own.

Thus, the Fourteenth Amendment is incorrectly read when its Section One is deemed to be a grant of citizenship: it can only be an offer. . . . Indeed, Section Five of the Fourteenth Amendment makes clear that Congress could pass whatever law was necessary to make real the offer of Section One. (Section Five says, 'The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.)

The first 'appropriate legislation' required at that moment -- and still required - was that which would make possible for the now free African an informed free choice, an informed acceptance or rejection of the citizenship offer.

Towering above all other juridical requirements that faced the African in America and the American following the Thirteenth Amendment was the requirement to make real the opportunity for choice, for self-determination. How was such an opportunity to evolve? Obviously, the African was entitled to full and accurate information as to his status and the principles of international law appropriate to his situation. This was all the more important because the African had been victim of a long-term intense slavery policy aimed at assuring his illiteracy, dehumanizing him as a group and depersonalizing him as an individual.

The United States government still has the obligation under Section Five of the Fourteenth Amendment to ‘enforce' Section One (the offer of citizenship) in the only way it could be rightfully 'enforced' -- by authorizing US participation in a plebiscite. By, in other words, a reference to our own will, our self-determined acceptance or rejection of the offer of citizenship. There are further important ramifications. A genuine plebiscite implies that if people vote against US citizenship, the means must be provided to facilitate whatever decision they do make. Thus, persons who vote to return to Africa or to emigrate elsewhere must have the means to do so. . . .

Now then, we repeat: an obvious and important ramification of the plebiscite is that there must exist the capability of putting its decisions into effect. If the decision is for US citizenship, then that citizenship must be unconditional. If it is for emigration to a country outside Africa, those persons making this choice must have transportation resources and reparations in terms of other benefits, principally money, to make such emigration possible and give it a reasonable chance of success. If the decision is for a return to some country in Africa, the person must have those same reparations as persons emigrating to countries outside Africa PLUS those additional reparations necessary to restore enough of the African personality for the individual to have a reasonable chance of success in integrating into African society in the motherland. If, finally, the decision is for an independent new African nation on this soil, then the reparations must be those agreed upon between the United States government and the new African government. Reparations must be at least sufficient to assure the new nation a reasonable chance of solving the great problems imposed upon us by the Americans in our status as a colonized people."

As already noted above, the Reparations needed amount to about $97 trillion. In the past, the principle objection to Reparations has been the question, “How will we pay for it?” But as the COVID-19 experience has shown, the United States government will come up with trillions of dollars when it feels strongly enough that it is in the nation’s interest to do so.

And this is why property damage and disruption to peace, and an escalation of the conflict, is happening right now in America.

EVERY EFFORT HAS BEEN MADE TO MAKE AMERICA AND AMERICANS CARE ENOUGH TO PROVIDE JUSTICE TO BLACK PEOPLE AND IT HASN’T WORKED. ALL OUR ARGUMENTS, PLEAS, PEACEFUL PROTESTS, AND PETITIONS HAVE BEEN IGNORED. SINCE WE DON’T HAVE AN ARMY OR THE CAPACITY TO ENGAGE IN A MILITARY CONFLICT TO DEFEND OUR INTERESTS, OUR ONLY RECOURSE NOW IS TO DESTROY ENOUGH PROPERTY TO THE POINT WHERE AMERICANS WILL FEEL STRONGLY ENOUGH TO PAY THE TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN REPARATIONS AND CONDUCT THE UN SPONSORED PLEBISCITE FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN SELF-DETERMINATION.

Now, why is the UN Sponsored Plebiscite for African American Self Determination THE SOLUTION?????

Simply because it is the only method for giving all black people in America what is owed to them while at the same time giving the colorless (white) Americans what they want: peace and dialogue.

Black people have been denied the opportunity to make their free choice and utilize reparations to set up a society of their choice, be it in America, Africa, or their own nation.. Since the 1830’s, there has been no consensus within the black community as to what path to pursue. At the African Peoples Commission held in 1998 under the theme “Building on the Tradition: Lessons of African American Conventions and Congress for the Black Radical Congress”,

“So, the continuously arising central question manifested itself again in 1975: What is the relationship of African Americans to the United States? Is this the land where we should struggle and attempt to transform after investing so many years? Or is this land beyond our abilities to reform, and therefore we should look for another place to live? Or is there some alternative?”

That question has never properly been settled because at the moment of Emancipation, the legal mechanism to settle the question - the plebiscite - was never conducted. Thus, to this day, you still have some blacks that believe in the American dream, some blacks who want to return to their ancestral homeland in Africa, and some blacks who want the same opportunity as any other people in the world to establish their own government and exercise national self-determination. THIS IS NEVER GOING TO CHANGE. SO IT IS ESSENTIAL TO SATISFY ALL OF THEM.

So the intelligent thing to do is to identify the people who believe in America, share its values, and want to stay and help build America and enable them to do so with equality and justice. Likewise, those who want to return to Africa and those who want their own nation, are never going to give that up and will always struggle to get what they believe is owed to them and is their right. So if America doesn’t give it to them, they will try to find a way to take it and make it happen. These are not the kind of Black people America wants so JUSTICE should be served for them so that they can exit America peacefully. Most Americans will have no problem with black people voluntarily returning to Africa (although they will object to paying for it), but it is the last one that is going to cause the most controversy.

In the aftermath of the 1967 rebellions, the Republic of New Afrika was established and sought to establish a land base for its government in nation in the area where black people where the majority population - the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. This effort, however, for various reasons, was not supported by black or white Americans. Given the complete frustration and hopelessness of African Americans in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by torture at the hands of the police, a significant segment of the black community has said enough and wants out of America, having concluded that justice cannot be obtained from within America. The objection, however, will come from white people forced to move from this territory. To this, the remedy is simple: the United States must compensate its own citizens who are forced to relocate as the cost of providing justice and reparations for the crime against the humanity of African heritage people.

However, the biggest objection will come from the United States Government that cares more about its national interest than rectifying the crimes against humanity and providing Justice. The United States Government will be loathe to peacefully cede some of its territory which it gained by conquest.

This is where the solution is depended on colorless (white) people’s willingness to combat white supremacy - the concept and its application that ensures that the interests of white people are more valuable and above justice for black people.

The problem now is not that we don’t know what the solution is. The problem now is whether or not colorless (white) people have the will to pursue justice, even when it requires sacrifice on their part. That’s really what the problem is…. As long as the United States Government compensates its citizens for their relocation, the sacrifice is only the pain of being forced from the homes and communities which they have become attached to. But isn’t that really the cost the must be paid for forcibly removing African heritage people from their homes, families and communities in the first place? How is it deemed acceptable and justifiable in the latter’s case but not in the former’s???

Edward Eugene Onaci concludes in SELF-DETERMINATION MEANS DETERMINING SELF: LIFESTYLE POLITICS AND THE REPUBLIC OF NEW AFRIKA, 1968-1989,

“Since the 1968 Black Government Conference, the RNA has worked hard to research and make the case for reparations. In 1972, the RNA released its “Anti-Depression Program,” a plan designed “To End Poverty, Dependence, Cultural Malnutrition, and Crime” and to “Promote Inter-Racial Peace.” Specifically, the program posits three legislative requests and delineates how their fulfillment would help solve some of U.S. society’s problems. The requests are as follows:

I. An Act authorizing the peaceful cession of land and sovereignty to the Republic of New Africa in areas where blacks vote for independence.

II. An Act authorizing payment of three hundred billion dollars ($300,000,000,000) in reparations for slavery and unjust war against the black nation to the Republic of New Africa.

III. An Act authorizing negotiations between a commission of the United States and a Commission of the Republic of New Africa to determine kind, dates, and other details of paying reparations.

The drafters of these acts were convinced that, if carried out, these measures would solve the overwhelming majority of problems the authors identified, namely un- and underemployment, economic and political dependence, poverty, inadequate health, subpar education, poor selfesteem, and unhealthy social relationships amongst Black people and between them and others, especially White Americans.

The program’s drafters establish an intimate connection between these problems and the Black Nation’s colonial relationship with the United States. Therefore, the authors contend addressing these issues by enacting the “Anti-Depression Program’s” three juridical proposals would result in the “removal of the [United Stands] hands” from Black people’s self-determination. In underscoring the necessity of abolishing white interference, the plan’s composers divulge, “And this may be, for whites, the most difficult part. Whites, so used to us as ‘our Negroes,’ must remove their hands from our culture, our economies, our schools, our government, our persons.” By calling for a “removal of hands,” the architects of this program reinforce their previous calls for independence as the solution to Black people’s problems while simultaneously attempting to hold White Americans responsible for their infractions against the U.S. Black population.”

Finally, in the meantime, while the effort to pursue the above is taking place, the immediate need of the black community is the ability to protect itself from police violence. The immediate solution to this is also simple: establish Black Community Protection Units and I have previously outlined the instructions on what the black community needs to be doing now completely independent of the colorless (white) community. The colorless (white) community - those who are demanding justice and and end to police violence - must explain to their fellow citizens why they need not fear the establishment of Black Community Protection Units whose only purpose is to arrive at the scene at the same time as police when there is the possibility for episodes of police violence as we just witness in Minneapolis. If there’s a counter force strong enough to act as a deterrent to police misconduct, then the police will not engage in misconduct.

As the last word on this, consider now the most distinguished human being of the the 20th century. On October 4, 1963, His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of Judah addressed the United Nations and said,

“Yet, this is the ultimatum presented to us: secure the conditions whereby men will entrust their security to a larger entity, or risk annihilation; persuade men that their salvation rests in the subordination of national and local interests to the interests of humanity, or endanger man's future. These are the objectives, yesterday unobtainable, today essential, which we must labor to achieve.

Until this is accomplished, mankind's future remains hazardous and permanent peace a matter for speculation. . . . .The goal of the equality of man which we seek is the antithesis of the exploitation of one people by another with which the pages of history and in particular those written of the African and Asian continents, speak at such length. Exploitation, thus viewed, has many faces. But whatever guise it assumes, this evil is to be shunned where it does not exist and crushed where it does. . . .

that until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned;

that until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation;

that until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes;

that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race;

that until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained. . . .