The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  Because I was so self-critical, especially from a black nationalist perspective, the fact of the US organization — i.e., that it was an organization and not just a bunch of undisciplined people taking up time mostly arguing with each other about what to do, or what method to use, even about things that most agreed should be done — that I was drawn to the US and Karenga. He was quick-witted, sharp-tongued, with a kind of amusing irony to his putdowns of white people, America, black people, or whatever, that I admired. Plus, there was no doubt, when you were around Karenga, as to who was the leader, even if you weren’t in his organization. And if you were, all things revolved around Maulana. He named the advocates, married them, named their children, even suggested where they should work and live. When I first came out to L.A., many of the advocates lived very close together, several in the same housing development. In fact, I thought maybe Karenga owned this one development, because not only did he live there but his principal security lived on either side, plus some of the other important people in the organization lived both downstairs on the first floor as well as on the floor above.

  It seemed to me the kind of next-higher stage of commitment and organization as compared to the Black Arts or what was going on in the Spirit House in Newark. There was a military aspect to it, a uniformity that I regarded then as indispensable to any talk of black revolution. Also, Karenga’s doctrine, some of which had been printed, summarized and ordered an approach to the revolution we sought. He had various lists, like the Nguzo Saba, but in almost any category you could think of. There were the Three Criteria of a Culture, Three Aspects of a Culture, Two Kinds of Revolution, Seven Aspects of Malcolm X, all of which were for memorization purposes. Advocates were questioned about these parts of the doctrine and were supposed to respond with the answers by rote.

  There was a heavy emphasis on karate, named Yangumi by Karenga to give it an African cast. His security was always armed. All the advocates had shaven heads, “in mourning for African people,” and the high-collared olive-drab bubbas with the US emblem and the talisimus added a kind of neo-African military quality to the organization that impressed me and I suppose a bunch of other people. It seemed that Karenga was serious. In my right-around-the-corner version of the revolution, I thought that Karenga represented some people who were truly getting ready for the revolution.

  Even the day-to-day greeting Karenga had stylized and “Africanized”: “Habari Gani” (“What’s happening?”) was the greeting and the response was “Njema” (“Fine”) or “Njema, Sante Sante” (“Fine, thank you”). The men shook hands with one hand on their arm and then pounded their right fist on their chest, something like the Roman legionnaires. Greeting women, one crossed one’s arms and embraced each cheek. When Karenga passed, advocates would pop their fist to their chest, the women “submit” — i.e., cross their arms on their breasts and bow slightly in an Afro-American adaptation of West African feudalism.

  Because, also, Karenga’s whole premise was of cultural revolution, I was pulled closer. Being a cultural worker, an artist, the emphasis on culture played to my own biases. And no doubt in a society where the “advanced forces” too often put no stress on culture and the arts at all, I thought his philosophy eminently correct. Culture and the arts can be used to help bring the people to revolutionary positions, but the culture of the black masses in the U.S. is an African American working-class culture. The “revolutionary culture” we must bring to the masses is not the precapitalist customs and social practices of Africa, but heightened expression of the lives and history, art and sociopolitical patterns of the masses of the African American people stripped of their dependence on the white racist monopoly-capitalist oppressor nation and focused on revolution. All nationalism leads to exclusivism and chauvinism, and the imposition of old social forms from earlier, less advanced periods can only lead to reaction and backwardness. But because African Americans have suffered from cultural aggression, having their culture and history attacked, their art denied or defined as “primitive,” they are naturally attracted to things African. The attraction is correct, but all cultures, as Lenin says, reflect both the ruled and the rulers of any nation. And what is the irony of black people celebrating some of the very African kings and queens who sold them into slavery in the first place?

  It is Cabral who said that the African petty bourgeoisie, because they were too often exposed only to the master’s culture and history, when they become radicalized want to identify with things African as much as possible. This was obviously my problem, and Karenga’s US was a perfect vehicle for working out the guilt of the overintegrated.

  After my trip to L.A. I remained in close contact with Karenga and very quickly I assimilated the Kawaida doctrine and began pushing it wherever I went.

  When I got back to San Francisco, a strange thing had happened. Cleaver had gotten the Panthers, ostensibly through Huey Newton, to throw the artists, many of whom were cultural nationalists of one kind or another, out of the Black House, saying that all the artists were “reactionary.” I had heard before I had gone to L.A. that Cleaver was going to Socialist Worker Party meetings and I thought this strange. We had just gone through a “get away from whitey” push in the East. That, I thought, was the root action of revolutionary motion, getting away from white people. What was with Cleaver? I didn’t understand. The idea of his being Marxist-influenced I wasn’t clear on. Some weeks later the Black Panther paper came out with an editorial warning black nationalists not to attack the Panthers’ revolutionary allies. Did they mean hippies, the flower children, or white women lawyers? There was never any clear ideological breakdown of what was going on, no clear polemics with the nationalists. There was just the summary breaking up of the Black House and the creation of an even deeper split in the movement which was to go down a few years later. But from the time of the Black House split, I always thought Cleaver was aptly named, because he was one of the important catalysts in the deadly split that soon went down in the Black Liberation movement.

  It had never occurred to me that a variation of what had gone down inside the Black Arts could happen again on a larger scale. But it did, and even worse. But at this point there was still some effort by various developing factions to work together. Sometime after the Black House ouster, the artists who had been around the Black House and the Black Communications Project agreed to do a benefit for the Panthers. That was during the period just before the Panthers tried to “draft” Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. Stokely and Rap appeared at this benefit, along with Huey, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge. I directed BSU head Jimmy Garrett’s play We Own the Night, with Willie X as the black youth revolutionary and poet/radio host, Judy Simmons as his domineering mother, whom the youth shoots when she tries to warn the police of the black revolutionaries’ plans. This last act got a roaring standing ovation from the capacity audience.

  We continued to travel all over the Bay Area with the Communications Project repertory, and some of the actors and technicians who were being drawn into the Panthers still contributed to the project. But there was talk and rumors about the widening currents of the split in the movement. We got the film equipment and were moving ahead putting the film together. When it was finished it was called Black Spring. One of its main sequences was the Panther benefit.

  All during this period in San Francisco, I had left Sylvia at home more and more. I thought it was because she didn’t want to run back and forth to the Black House after I came back from the campus, but what it was, was that I would simply go from the campus to the Black House or, after the ouster, from the campus to wherever we would be rehearsing (for a minute it was over Richardson’s Garvey bookstore). She resented this, though she would go out occasionally with Sonia Sanchez and the brother Sonia lived with at the time, Chuck, the father of her twins. Sylvia was, by this time, very pregnant. The program was drawing to a close and she was anxious to get back to Newark, afraid the baby would be born in San Francisco. We still had not finished the film and I d
idn’t want to leave until we did. So that was one basic bone of contention, though the selfishness of putting the film before the woman or the child-to-be should be obvious. Male chauvinism disguised as dedication to Art.

  We struggled about what would go down and in the end I put her on a plane, weeping under my chauvinism. When I got back to Newark a few weeks later, my first son, Obalaji Malik Ali, was a week old. He had been born while I was in San Francisco. I had let Sylvia have the baby alone.

  Ten

  A Continuing Journey

  The same motion that had been rising when we left Newark was at a higher point when I got back. The hot bubbling surface speaking of depths of frustration and unrest. The medical school issue had gotten even sharper. There were several different groups contending with the powers about this obvious ripoff, and a main coalition pulling people together to fight was agitating throughout the city. I got active in this and drew the forces around the Spirit House very active in this as well. Groups of us would go to the meetings and attack the various administration spokesmen, city or state. I also began to identify various groups and trends in the city and enter into general discussions about Newark politics. It had become obvious to me that, since Newark was at least 60 percent black, Black Power here meant that we had to control the politics of the city. I printed leaflets and stated this thesis in the issues of the Stirling St. Newspaper. When I made public appearances I would dwell on this issue, intent on raising the national consciousness of the black masses in Newark.

  Another equally incendiary issue was the question of the appointment of a secretary to the Board of Education. Wilbur Parker, a black CPA, had gotten to be the favorite of the black community for the job. He had a master’s degree and was certainly academically and technically qualified. But Addonizio resisted. He wanted to appoint one of his cronies, as usual. In this instance there was a catch. Addonizio’s man, Callahan, was only a high school graduate. His major qualification was that he was white. Like the medical school conflict, this issue was one that could tighten the jaws of all classes of blacks, whether black workers or black professionals. Both issues were attacks on the whole of the black community.

  Another factor in the general increase of tension was the constant incidents of police brutality. The Newark police whipped heads with impunity under the neo-fascist police director Dominick Spina, a “kindly” gray-haired administrator who reminded me of one of Mussolini’s murderers. I had had already, since returning home, several direct conflicts with Spina, and not just the general ones. In any public gathering where he was, I never resisted the opportunity to talk bad to and about him. I was told later, by one of Spina’s paid informers, that Spina was a member of the Klan. It seemed that the Klan in New Jersey had become progressive enough to recruit Catholics.

  We were still putting on plays and using the Spirit House for community meetings, broadening the block association and focusing much heat up at the Robert Treat school. Newark was a city of widespread and clearly understood corruption. Everybody in public office was known to be on the take, and not just from hearsay — most people had had some direct experience of it. Calvin West was one of Addonizio’s “classiest” niggers and Cal had the kind of personality that might make one spray a room with Lysol after he’d passed through it with one of his outsized cigars.

  All these things were in the bubbling. Black Power pressed these issues at a higher level. It pointed out the straight-out apartheid in the South and the neo-apartheid in the North. It raised the issue of black political self-determination and the need for self-sufficiency. The Nation of Islam preached about “doing for self” and how black people were indeed oppressed by the filthy white devil. Black nationalists talked about “the beast” getting big on black people’s flesh, and Addonizio and company were living proof of all these nationalist examples. And I’m sure the “left,” wherever it was, was also pushing in whatever ways it could. Tom Hayden and his classmates were around being “troublemakers,” which could only add yeast to the whole mixture.

  Adam Powell had gotten removed from Congress over some obvious bullshit, though white liberals would’ve told you, “We’ve formed the Urban Coalition and just appointed Thurgood Marshall as the first Negro on the Supreme Court.” But as it got warmer that summer, all talk of white liberals just added some numbers to the thermometer. All over the country black people were marching or rising up. You heard often not only of Dr. King and the Nation of Islam but of Stokely and Rap and Huey Newton and the Panthers, of CORE and SNCC and Black Power. The newspapers and television, the radio and people’s mouths, carried the word. Even the New York Times that year reported that the civil rights movement was over. I don’t remember if they remarked on the rising motion of the Black Liberation movement. There was an antiwar movement against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam that was also in motion. Even Dr. King had announced his intention to come out against the war. A current of dissent was everywhere, open rebellion was not only justified and justifiable, but examples of it were growing ubiquitous: demonstrations, marches, sit-ins, arrests, civil disobedience, clashes with the police, cities going up in smoke. There was, in Newark, an atmosphere of oppressive tension. As spring moved into summer, each day and evening held a quiet, heavy aura. It was clear the medical school was going ahead, the largest on the planet. It was clear that Callahan would get the job and not Parker. Spina’s blueshirts had run into a Muslim home near East Orange because it was reported that there were men in the building “armed.” No arms were ever produced, though the place did serve as a kind of “dojo” for martial arts training, which apparently pissed Spina off. His boys shot the place up and brutalized some people. That word was passed around swiftly and bitterly.

  We had been building a following at the Spirit House. We were rehearsing plays. Giving poetry readings. We even made a record, “Black and Beautiful,” with rhythm and blues and chants and poetry of black struggle and nationalism.

  Sylvia and I had also been struggling, in a different way. The child had come, Obalaji, and I viewed this with the mystical focus I had then. It was very significant to me that the white woman, Nellie, had not produced a boy child, only girls. It was clear I had gone in the right direction (more chauvinism). The boy was named after a young boy I’d known in Harlem with Oserjeman’s temple, a little fresh dude full of life. Obalaji (God or the King’s Warrior), Malik for Malcolm, and Ali after Muhammad Ali. But for all that, I was not ready to get married. I had not thought of it. It seemed unnecessary. Yet my son was on the scene. Sylvia and I had traveled around together, I had taken her with me on many of the poetry readings and speaking trips I went on. I had been drawn to her deep, lovely sensuality. The San Francisco business had created a tension between us I would forget more quickly than she. How selfish and subjective men can be when it comes to women. I knew I wanted Sylvia. I knew I wanted us to live together. I was full of joy that we had had a son. Yet I did not think we had to get married. It was half bohemianism, some plain-out insensitivity, but may it not have been also a kind of unconscious disregard for black women? I had offered to marry Nellie in a similar situation. Yet, with Sylvia, there I was haggling and contentious about the same kind of act. The irony is that I felt closer to Sylvia, we were more “together,” there was much more heat to our relationship, much more passion. I had even been moved to the point of telling her how much I loved her, which I could not do before with women I’d been with, even Vashti, even though I’d taken the sparkling relationship we’d had as a love relationship.

  Our explosions inside the Spirit House were in tune with the whole siege of tension that stalked the day-to-day streets of the slowly simmering town. There might have been rumors about us up and down those streets just as there were broader rumors twisting through the streets of the whole city as it heated up and hidden tension became open tension, and open tension became confrontation.

  One afternoon I heard something about a demonstration over at the precinct across from the Hayes Homes. It was
about a cabdriver who’d gotten beaten by the police the night before. When we got there, there were maybe fifty to one hundred people. It was still afternoon and most people were still working, so this was a good crowd on the line. It was thick over there. There were younger people standing across the street, watching, occasionally calling out or laughing. The picket line was being led, ostensibly, by CORE and its chairman in Newark, Bob Curvin. We talked briefly, and the couple of us who’d come over from the Spirit House got in the line. There were young people and middle-aged on the line. They chanted and walked and as we joined them it was obvious to me that it was not like a picket line at a strike or the lighter kinds of demonstrations. People talked, but there was a presence on the line and in the scattered crowd that gathered on the other side of the narrow street. It was the same precinct where we had demonstrated for a black police captain to replace one of Spina’s cronies. It was like the air itself was a container for something that was pushing against it trying to break out. People turned and looked at each other, sensing this presence. They grinned nervously or squinted up at the precinct at the mostly white police who stood outside frozen or the ones who would occasionally scowl through the windows of the precinct or move quickly by, snarling, as they got out of their police cars and went into the building.