by Amiri Baraka
I spent maybe a week in Trenton. Before that I had spent a few days at Caldwell, up near Morristown, in another joint, in an open-bay jail with a couple hundred prisoners. Caldwell had been like going back to grammar school, I saw so many old familiar faces. Trenton was like going back in time as well. All the missing dudes I’d wondered what had happened to were down there in that old 19th-century jail that stayed about 50 degrees all the time. I got a cell where I had to step down about half a foot. It was so narrow that only the single bunk really fit into it and it was very dark. I made a prayer rug out of newspaper and made regular Salat while I was there and it gave me great comfort. It is easy to see why someone in prison could cling to Islam. The sense of being supported by a higher power than the one that is downing you. It is the appeal of all religions — one is “protected” by a higher power. But not quite enough.
I met the writer Nathan “Bubbie” Heard in Trenton. He was in there doing a stretch for armed robbery. I guess he was working on his famous novel Howard Street. He knew me and befriended me immediately. Between Bubbie and Billy Allen, the black-sheep brother of my old track buddy Arthur Allen (New Jersey All State high jump and high hurdles during my high school days), I got a heavy reception from the prisoners. They brought boxes of cookies, tea, instant coffee, canned meats and sardines, and candy to me in the cell. Another brother came up to me in the mess hall and told me he had read the newspapers about my trial. He praised the statements I’d made. A couple others threw their fists up in the Black Power salute.
Bubbie hipped me to a plan the guards had, probably passed on to them by the FBI. They were going to come to me, demand that I shave off my beard, and if I didn’t do it, they would drop me into solitary. So when they came, sure enough, about four of them, telling me I had to be shaved and have my hair cut, I said, simply, “OK,” and they looked at each other, obviously nonplussed, shaved my face, cut down my mop, and split without another word.
The always low temperature and dim cells were that way, I guess, to keep you demoralized. And they succeeded. But those prisons house some real warriors and even a few scholars. The fact that big-city prisons are 75 percent black and Latino makes you know that their real function is as institutions of oppression for the poor and minorities.
I was out after about a week, on appeal. I had reached Ray Brown, the white-looking black criminal lawyer from Jersey City. He filed the appeal and took up the case. Before that I had received an offer from Bill Kunstler, through someone, that he would take the case, but being a nationalist, I refused. A well-known black star had agreed to let my wife and father come to his penthouse hotel suite and tell him about the case. While they talked to the diminutive musical star, an Italian-looking dude sat in the suite listening. Finally, he asked my wife and father, “You want me to call some of the wise guys over there to take care of it?” But they, very wisely, refused. What would I owe for such a favor? I can imagine to whom it would be owed. Apparently, the diminutive black musical star owed them several favors.
The appeal was won on the basis of Judge Kapp’s demented reading of my poem in court as part of his justification for the stiff sentence. He had also charged the jury by telling them that “the boys in blue,” the police, who were the state’s principal witnesses against us, “would never lie.” So we got a new trial. But this time, the sleeping ugly from Jersey City was not with the team. Ray Brown came on as my attorney; Booker and Love were retained to try the case again, as part of the new team.
If he were really white, Ray Brown would be one of the most famous attorneys in the U.S. He is obviously one of the best. A learned and curious man, Brown had such mastery of the courtroom proceedings that I was relaxed enough to write a play while the trial went on (The Sidney Poet Heroical). He kept the prosecutor, a grim crew-cut carabiniere named Zazzali, so off stride and frustrated that at one point Zazzali was chastised by the judge for flying off the handle. “If you do that again, Mr. Zazzali, I’ll report you to your superior.”
Plus, every time Zazzali passed the table where I sat I would boo him under my breath, but loud enough for him to hear. His face stayed hot-poker red throughout the proceedings.
Ray Brown’s summation to the jury was incredible. He took Mark Antony’s speech to the crowd in Julius Caesar (“Friends, Romans, countrymen”) and using the refrain Antony laid on Brutus to discredit him (“And Brutus is an honorable man “), laid waste to the state’s arguments. Brown would say, “And we are supposed to believe the police, because they are honorable men …” taking them all the way out to lunch and back. At the end of the summation you could see some of the jury wanted to applaud.
This was the denouement, and the verdict of acquittal seemed to me a matter of course. But the high point of the case was when Rabbit, the brother we had picked up off the street and taken to the hospital, was found by means of leaflets we circulated through the community. He breezed into the courtroom, talking shit, the same way he had that night, raised up his pant leg and pointed to the bullet hole. We were not shooting at people, we were taking people to the hospital. Brown won it going away!
The group that met on Sundays decided to call itself The United Brothers. It was still expanding and the meetings were regular and we all looked forward to the incisive informal discussions and the growing amount of planning that went on. There were also some brothers and sisters from East Orange and Montclair who knew something of Karenga’s organization, US. They had formed a group and styled themselves after the US people and regarded Karenga as their leader. They were called the Black Community Defense and Development (BCD). Two men headed up the group, a dark-skinned, big-eyed brother named Balozi Zayd Muhammad, and a karate expert, Mfundishi Maasi. They also began to attend the meetings of the circle.
Karenga’s influence was increasing on me personally. He came East a couple times, planning the 1968 Black Power Conference, which was to be held in Philadelphia. I was coordinator of the Arts Workshop at that conference. I began to move more and more under the sway of cultural nationalism, Karenga’s brand. The two influences, orthodox Islam and the African-derived cultural nationalism, had to clash, and they did. The Sunnis were not very advanced politically. They said that blacks were really “Arabs,” that the true Arab was black. “Arab” means black, but they were very derogatory about Africa and things African. Also, they were constantly counseling me against my “militance,” saying that my speeches needed to be toned down. Kamiel’s advice to me when I was on trial was that I should stand with my feet placed at a 45-degree angle and then put my hands on top of my head, since that was “a Masonic distress signal.” He said the judge would then recognize that I was a Mason in distress and cut me loose.
What really put distance between us was that I found out that Kamiel was in regular contact with Spina as well as the sheriff’s office. He would file regular reports, and parts of his regular reports were on the “fantastic” doings at the Spirit House. And what he had in his reports was fantastic on the real side. But it made good reading. How did I find out? Kamiel cheerfully volunteered this information. It paid good money!
When Dr. King was murdered in ’68, rebellions broke out in the major cities. Newark, too. Again, we walked all night, but this time the people did not want to tear up inside their own community; groups of people marched down Clinton Avenue toward the downtown area to light it up. The police massed at the bottom of the hill, shotguns raised. We told people to cool it. Kamiel introduced me to a balding black dude with a walkie-talkie strapped to his belt who was carrying a shoulder holster. We wanted some assurances that the police would not shoot into the crowds. Kamiel implied that the balding man with the walkie-talkie was attached to the sheriff’s office but was really a fed. Kamiel and I went with this man to an apartment building directly across from City Hall. There was a white man in a room on one of the floors wearing a shoulder holster. I was told this was some kind of nerve center for the feds to monitor the crowd’s actions. At one point, the balding man said
to me, “Well, you have to admit one thing about America. It’s been a fascinating experiment!” My blood ran cold, this Negro was an actual creation. Someone or something had created him and what I was hearing was obviously tapes running through his brain track.
Later, this same balding man with the shoulder holster was present at the first meeting called by the Black Panthers to start a Newark chapter. But this time he was one of the recruiters. He was supposed to be a Panther!
It was during this period that Kamiel introduced me to Anthony Imperiale, the Newark racist from the Italian North Ward. Imperiale had made headlines talking about the tank and the guns he had. He’d said, “If the Black Panther comes, the white hunter will be waiting!” He’d also called Dr. King “Martin Luther Coon.” Imperiale had risen to infamy as the white counter for black rebellion. If I had gotten some notoriety from the rebellions, so had Imperiale.
It was Kamiel who organized the appearance of the two of us on a television program. The angle of the show was to denounce the left in Newark. I saw it as an opportunity to denounce the young whites who were playing revolution in Newark. I was a black nationalist and saw nothing wrong with denouncing Tom Hayden and the others. It was rumored in the black community that these dudes were setting the rash of fires that broke out during that period. Old buildings in the black community. These actions were supposed to trigger more rebellions. We wanted Hayden and his classmates out of the community. We thought they were “white boys pimping off black struggle,” so we put them down on the TV program while Imperiale and some police official from D.C. went out on the left in general. I thought white Marxists were just some more white people using black people to do their struggling for them. But in retrospect, to be on such a television program was asinine.
Kamiel, as our security chief, even thought up the gimmick of a “hot line” between Imperiale and me, supposedly to keep community tensions down. The phone was installed. I guess, on reflection, it probably was nothing but a listening device right in the center of the house. I never used it.
It was Karenga who, on one of his visits, suggested that we formally bring together the United Brothers, BCD, and the Spirit House forces. (The acting group was named by me the Spirit House Movers. I got the Movers’ name from a bar down on Shipman Street, Daniel’s, where we always went when we were down in Arthur’s Cellar or after rehearsals. There was a moving company down the street, and the workers drank in Daniel’s all the time too.) Karenga suggested the name Committee for a Unified Newark. We shortened it somewhat to Committee for Unified Newark (CFUN). So this larger united-front organization brought together middle-class blacks interested in electoral politics (United Brothers); younger blacks influenced by Ron Karenga’s Kawaida doctrine (BCD as well as us in the Spirit House); and mostly young black artists who were part of the Black Arts movement (Spirit House).
CFUN’s first project was to hold a Black Convention in ’68 and then run candidates out of that convention for City Council. (The last day of that unsuccessful “Peace & Power” campaign is recorded in a film made by Jim Hinton called The New Ark.) Karenga came to town especially to help with the campaign. It was he who named the campaign “Peace & Power,” hoping to capitalize on the peace movement that was one aspect of the anti-Vietnam War protests, as well as the Black Power movement. The visual symbols were a red ankh (peace) and a black fist (power).
Our first candidates lost and the loss brought us all down, but it was good experience. We learned a lot in that campaign and got ready soon after to go again. Nineteen seventy was the mayoral election and all the councilmen’s terms would be up. Our weekly circle meetings took on even more intensity, since now we had gotten our feet wet and knew what to expect.
Karenga’s influence came to dominate the entire CFUN, which alienated a few of the older political brothers in the United Brothers, all of whom would certainly not become Karenga cultural nationalists.
During this period I got deeply involved with Kawaida. Although, as Karenga was to complain in a note to himself, the things we did were never absolute copies of his Los Angeles operation. He wrote that I was a “revisionist.” But many of us now, and certainly all of the younger people in CFUN, began to wear African clothes. Dashikis for the men, bubbas and lappas and geles for the women. The united front, which still remains the fundamental weapon of struggle for the oppressed black nation, was eroded in one sense by the gradual domination by cultural nationalism in CFUN, though for a while our numbers steadily increased.
I learned the voluminous pages of Karenga’s Kawaida doctrine, the Nguzo Saba, the five of this and seven of that and three of the other we had to memorize. We learned the basic Swahili vocabulary that identified the organization. But I had no intention of shaving my head. The L.A. people wore the olive-drab dashiki; in the East we wore the normal multicolored West African dashiki.
The doctrine was organized so it dealt, presumably, with every part of life. And even though I was heavily influenced by Karenga and Kawaida, there were certain parts of his doctrine which made no sense to me, so I did not impose them on the Newark people. This was especially true of the parts of the doctrine dealing with women. The heavy male chauvinism that I already suffered from was now formally added to. Karenga’s doctrine gave male chauvinism a revolutionary legitimacy. The doctrine said there was no such thing as equality between men and women, “they were complementary.” This was a typical Karenga manipulation of words. When brothers went by, the women were supposed to “salimu” or “submit,” crossing their arms on their breasts and bowing slightly. We changed this so that they did this only for the organization’s officers.
Karenga also had wild stuff in his doctrine about how women ought to dress and how their clothing should always be “suggestive.” He said they should show flesh to intrigue men and not be covered up so much. I could never adjust to Karenga’s thing with women either on paper or in the flesh. He was always making “sexy” remarks to women, calling them “freaks” and commenting loudly on their physical attributes. In L.A., Karenga even sanctioned “polygamy” and was rumored, himself, to have pulled many of the women in the L.A. organization.
What stopped us from getting too far out in Kawaida was my wife, Amina, who not only waged a constant struggle against my personal and organizational male chauvinism, but secretly in her way was constantly undermining Karenga’s influence, figuring, I guess, that I would not come up with as much nuttiness disguised as revolution as he, though I did my share. (This is the reason that the work of uninformed “observers” like Michelle Wallace, who was by her own admission in private school or away in Paris during this period of the Black Liberation movement, shows up so shabbily. To suggest, as Wallace does in her Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, that the black women inside the various organizations of the Black Liberation movement did nothing but acquiesce to our male chauvinism during the ’60s is simply white feminist chauvinism. The sisters in the organizations I was in fought us tooth and nail about our chauvinism in much more forcible and effective ways than the middle-class sistren at Ms. magazine could ever begin to imagine.)
All the black women in those militant black organizations deserve the highest praise. Not only did they stand with us shoulder to shoulder against black people’s enemies, they also had to go toe to toe with us, battling day after day against our insufferable male chauvinism. And then later, when there was a lull in the movement, those women who were away in some school getting Ph.D.s or off in Europe soaking up “culture” or in some bohemian place learning how to make narcissistic art can return and get to be big deals running on about what the movement really was about. What bullshit! But predictable bullshit.
The US organization started out as community activists but gradually they became more and more just cultural nationalists putting out an abstract doctrine of “blackness.” I myself became one of the chief proselytizers of Kawaida. Actually, if it were not for CFUN and the later Congress of Afrikan Peoples (CAP), the Kawaida doctrin
e, the Seven Principles, and the holiday Kwanzaa would never have been as widely known as they are. Certainly it was not through any kind of community organizing on Karenga’s part, though he did have a dramatic, humorous, very charismatic way of speaking and carrying himself. And his doctrine did carry orderly methods of approaching community organizing and they sometimes worked. I wrote a couple of pamphlets explaining Karenga’s doctrine which were well circulated. And because he did push tight organization and military-like rank and discipline, the US cadre did seem much more “together” than most of the other militants, especially around things like the Black Power Conferences. During those years Kawaida was very influential, and it became even more influential through CFUN and CAP.
The people functioning in CFUN as cultural nationalists began to think of themselves as US organization members on the East Coast. Balozi and Mfundishi pushed a general US line as well, though Balozi had a great store of “homespunism” that he pushed equally hard. Mfundishi was really the strong silent type and was content to walk around and be worshiped in silence. Mfundishi had about him that arrogance that only men skilled in the martial arts, especially those of other nationalities pretending to be Orientals, could have. But he was especially skilled in martial arts, a sensei, or teacher.
One event will show how skilled and dangerous Mfundishi was. He was walking with me one afternoon on the way from the CFUN building. (We had moved into an abandoned Red Feather building just down the block from the Spirit House. All we had to do was pay maintenance costs and fuel, since the city had taken it over. We painted the interior red, black, and green, put large posters and photographs of Afro-American and African leaders on the walls. It was three stories — downstairs for our weekly programs, called Soul Sessions, like Karenga’s on the Coast, the second floor for our administrative offices and my own office, and the third floor for other officers in the organization’s offices and the training area.) We had to go to the Hall of Records for something. We had crossed the street and were walking up the diagonal path which leads past the courthouse and on up across High Street to the building.