by Amiri Baraka
Addonizio and company were not prepared either, as they should have been. Perhaps their Negroes were telling them that all was well, it would all pass. But neither the racists and gangsters that ran the city nor their colored gun bearers realized how isolated they all had become. Nor did they realize how deep the ties we had run into the community had been sunk. There were those among them who realized that I was not an “outside agitator,” but the self-styled prodigal returned. They didn’t realize that the self-styling was a mass line, that that very prodigality held interest because I had come back with some information, some national ties, and the brutality of my reception had ignited an unquenchable fury of black patriotism, however warped by cultural nationalism. I was only one part of an entire mass movement for political democracy, Black Power. But I became one focus of Addonizio and company’s attacks, because they thought my checkered past and “criminality” — i.e., being arrested in the rebellions — would turn the masses off. It acted exactly the opposite. Every knock was a boost. They were simply letting the people know what I and the rest of us stood for. Addonizio and company and the bourgeois press were our best press agents and advertising aides.
Tying Gibson and the rest of the Community’s Choice team to images of my personal militance and rebelliousness helped the campaign immeasurably. It was not just a personal electoral campaign, it was a movement, the advanced and the middle forces, the progressive and the average, all mobilized to oppose black people’s enemies and their reactionary colored house servants.
CFUN organized the New Ark Fund, which was a fundraising organization, also an excitement-raising mechanism. We brought in the biggest names in the country in support of the campaign. Isaac Hayes with his chains and shades, James Brown, Leontyne Price, Bill Cosby, Dustin Hoffman, Beau Bridges, the Staple Singers, Stevie Wonder came in and rode around on the back of a truck all day, singing and pushing the program. Manhattan borough president, Percy Sutton, walked through the streets passing out leaflets. Even Adam Clayton Powell came in and mesmerized a packed house at Bethany Baptist Church. Chuck Jackson, the Supremes. There was an endless line of speakers, entertainers, performers, politicians, militants that we brought in. We also did team advertising: posters, leaflets, billboards, and our regular newspaper, all dedicated to the Community’s Choice.
Bill Cherry, who later became Richard Pryor’s and Richard Roundtree’s manager for a time, came in, working then for a black ad agency, Uniworld. It was he who made the New Ark Fund tick as far as bringing in the celebrities and the slick, eye-catching graphics. I thought an appropriate logo for the campaign would be a rainbow, so we designed buttons and posters with the bright rainbow band, with the names of each of the candidates in the different colors of the spectrum.
From the beginning, Kenneth Gibson was a rather peculiar candidate. He was shockingly unsophisticated, a little fat man with a close haircut and cuffs on his pants. When I took him out to Chicago to appear with Jesse Jackson at his Saturday morning Operation Breadbasket session, Jesse cracked on him, privately and publicly, about his close-cut hair, in an era of prominent Afros, and his high-water pants.
You got the feeling talking to him that you might not be making sense, that he might be misunderstanding. You could not feel much of that warmth that comes from the mutual appreciation of patriotism and struggle. He was bland and his ideas were deadly conventional. But I thought somehow we could change him, that the movement which he was riding would penetrate and transform him. I thought he had some loyalty and feeling for black people. He was so dull I could not see that beneath that bland exterior there was a truly dull mind, a mind so dull that it had not yet even aspired to embrace the collective energy of black struggle except in the most opportunistic and low-level careerist way.
But the campaign itself was a juggernaut that plowed into the masses’ feelings and used those feelings as fuel. As far as we were concerned, Addonizio was just a minor obstruction, though the focus of our blasts. The specter of Black Power was haunting the proceedings and that specter grew larger and more real, it grew before our eyes, towering over everyone in the town.
Addonizio was indicted just before the election, along with some of his pratboys. That sealed his fate as far as I was concerned. Our campaign was popular and it had taken on national scope. Every weekend busloads of students came in and walked the streets. The Old Ward heelers and party hacks could not match these resources with their nickel-and-dime boughtand-paid-for loyalties. Earl Harris came up with a slogan we put out on mimeograph sheets a few days before the election. Earl came from that part of the Newark black political spectrum who were in such a position and would recognize that kind of nationalism: “Take the Man’s Money, But Vote for a Brother!” was his slogan.
The backward political intelligence had said, sure, there’s more Nigras in the town but you’ll never get them registered. Many of our celebrities came in pushing voter registration. We made voter registration hip and exciting. We used fat-bellied Imperiale fondling his gun-penis on a poster with a slogan: “Register and Vote or This Will Be Your Mayor!”
We used the Life magazine photo of the killer cop (name: Capone) standing over the dead black child in the street during the rebellion, murderous weapon still smoking in his hand. “Register & Vote! Never Let This Happen Again!” It was a moral and survival issue we raised. Either you would register and vote or you were some kind of traitorous maniac.
Not only did students and others come in every week to register people, put up literature, canvass, and talk to the people. CFUN grew, even its inner, highly organized cultural nationalist cadre, by leaps and bounds. There were students and middle-class youth in the city, plus working-class youth from the inner city and even other towns.
Newark was a focus for all of Afro-America, certainly the more politically conscious aspect of the black nation. There was no way that such a juggernaut could be stopped. Yet right up until election day there were still public doubters and very public Toms. There was a group of black preachers who backed Addonizio. One of them, B. F. Johnson, whose grandson later became a city councilman, came out with a statement, as part of the “Ministers for Addonizio,” that made it seem that God and Jesus wanted black people to vote for Hughie the crook. We put out leaflets — “What Does Jesus Have to Do with Addonizio?” — and picketed the man’s church, passing the leaflets out to his faithful. Many of the people smiled their blessings at us, nodding knowledgeably. Even one of the old deacons expressed his support for the campaign, until old B.F. sent a loyalist deacon out to run us away. But the damage was done. That word spread everywhere, that we would go up against the biggest churches and the biggest preachers and cut their shit to the wind.
Other churches and ministers were with us. We spoke or Gibson and the other candidates spoke from their pulpits and the old ladies waved their fans hard enough to raise airplanes off the church floor.
On election day everything was at the ready. We had brought in some electoral specialists like Tony Harrison from Alabama, who functioned out of the League of Cities, until he finally went back home and won a few elections himself. Larry Coggins, an old Progressive Labor fellow traveler Gibson brought in. Coggins was very sharp, albeit oiled to the gills most times. He knew electoral politics cold; unfortunately any real connection with a genuine left perspective was long gone except as a possible justification for interracial banging.
Because of the team, we could have people at all the polling sites, both challengers and literature passers. We had radio cars, walkie-talkies, huge maps in every headquarters, groups of young pullers to go into the flagging areas and get the people out. We had security forces riding radio cars in each ward, checking on the polling places. We had a steady flow of information, from hour to hour, about what polls were doing what. We knew where our strong points were. We had to get the South and Central Wards out in majority numbers. We had to take the West, and do well in the North and East, even if they went to Addonizio (which they would).
Naturally enough, Addonizio tried the usual gangster racist tricks. Polling places in black areas got “strangely” jammed up. But we had prepared beforehand. We had notified the state and federal attorneys general that this is what would happen and requested observers and federal marshals on the scene.
Addonizio even got some renegade Muslims to ride around in blue suits with Italian flags in their lapels and try to intimidate people at the polls. But we had some absolutely hard niggers on hand that would have chewed they heads off. The black police had been contacted long ago, through our ties inside the Bronze Shields, a black police organization. They served as Gibson’s personal security. Death threats had been made on him, ostensibly by the renegade Muslims out of Newark’s Temple No. 25, the same mosque which produced Malcolm’s assassins.
But it looked good, close, but good from the beginning, and as the day wore on it looked like we were not only holding our own, getting the votes we absolutely had to get, but as if we were edging away. As it grew later and later in the day, word was received that Imperiale and his goons had gone wild in the North Ward. They had thrown all caution to the winds and come out in knots to harass the late black voters now that twilight was moving down.
I called our security forces together, plus a whole roomful of volunteers who had come back from their puller work for the last-hour drive which means so much in an election. I talked to the group of them, about 150 people or so. I poured out our fears of what Imperiale and company were up to. They were trying, as they had all day in a number of illegal ways, to steal the election. Now they were trying straight-out force, open and uncompromising. When I finished, the people flew out of the Hekalu (Temple), as 502 High Street, CFUN headquarters, was called. Trucks and radio cars (some cabs appropriated for the election day work) flew up toward the North Ward. The young people and our own security met Imperiale and his goons out in the streets that last hour. They rode around confronting the knots and groups of goons and forced them to back off. Many of the young brothers had waited all day for something like this to happen, so they could get their thing off, let out all the pent-up frustration. They raged through the streets looking for racists. But it was too late anyway for Imperiale to do anything, the polls were closing. We were getting the first count, and it looked good. The next hour, as people began to come back, a little subdued from the tension and the expectation, but still talking and confident, more numbers began to come in. In another hour it got clearer. We saw the different candidates. The radio and television were on in the Hekalu, groups of us sat around and talked and waited, ooohed and aaahed, fretted and laughed. There were television sets everywhere, on each floor, one in my office.
The commentators talked shit, saying you couldn’t tell yet, but as it got later, you could tell. And suddenly, even they couldn’t bullshit about what had happened any longer. Gibson had won! And Harris and James and Westbrook. Tucker and Pinckney had not. Nor Aneses and Oliver. But we didn’t believe it; how could that be true? They were all the Community’s Choice. We knew that the ballot stuffers and machine jammers had got over in those four cases. We had felt “sweep” all the time. The sweep had been frustrated, but the biggest part, the mayor’s spot, had changed hands.
Jesse Jackson had come to town the day before, with his Operation Breadbasket band. They had helped hype people up and pull people out. Now Jesse was in the Hekalu, “502” our enemies called it. The building where all the wild shit emanated. There was much screaming and jumping up and down. People kept flowing into the Hekalu. Not only the workers and visiting students and our own people, but well-wishers and friends. Even some people who had heard the news and simply wanted to “get near the magic” (as Gylan Kain might say).
Jesse and company wanted it quiet so they could hear the TV, but we knew already who had won. People all over the building were whooping and hollering. But finally we got people quiet so Jesse could speak (and some people were drugged by this). Jesse came on like it was His Work (and I don’t mean De Lawd), that he had known it all the time and had sent instructions regularly to keep us in it. And there was more to come.
Gibson was having a celebration downtown at the Mosque, a big dance hall on Broad Street. As the Hekalu Umoja (Unity) got overflowing and the final show of victory was coming in, we decided to go downtown too. But before we emptied out the Hekalu, there was a sight on the television that made people jump up and down with pure, unrefined nigger glee. Imperiale and some of his people were shown fighting with the cameramen. They had taken exception to some things CBS had said, so now we watched as Imperiale and company, in complete disarray, started punching and cursing out the cameramen and reporters. They had “sold out white people.” The rage, the running-around frustration and confusion was a heartwarming sight, especially to people who themselves were usually in that situation.
As we rolled down the streets, people were everywhere. People literally danced and whirled around, screaming and hugging each other. It was pure joy, running unabated. We had won! We had won! We had beat their ass in their own court. We had whipped their motherfucking ass! It was sweet sweet, sweeter than words can carry.
People walked and ran right down the middle of Broad Street. There was a bus parked in the middle of the street, right in front of the Mosque. The bus driver was out with the rest of the people dancing and hugging. Some people got up on top of the bus and danced back and forth. There was a dynamism loose and roaring in the street. That is the way it must be with revolutionary victories. Our joy literally knew no bounds. And those of us in CFUN swelled up big as houses, we were so proud and filled with a righteous sense of our own strength and power. Hey, we had won! We had kicked those crackers’ ass!
Inside the Mosque, there were mountains of people, hugging and screaming. The victorious candidates were there as well as the losers. The losers were grim, but at the same time all of us believed that the whites had stolen the victories from them. We talked about taking up that fight, at the top of our voices. A thousand conversations going on at the scream level.
Finally, Gibson and the other candidates were ready. Jesse and I were also up front. And Jesse gave the same speech he had given up at the Hekalu. He had let Gibson speak at Breadbasket at my urging, and he had come in with his troops during the last days, and all that was good and real. But Jesse went off into this paean to himself that defied belief. We looked at each other and coughed and laughed. Jesse was being Jesse, and although he always styled himself “the Country Preacher,” don’t believe that for a second. Jesse Jackson is a City Preacher, very City, if you read me. As slick as the big, unpaid-for Cadillacs you see sprinkling the ghetto.
That aura of glorious victory and an unlimited future stayed with us. The next days were filled with our self-appreciating. People called from all over the country and there were interviews every couple minutes. Gibson had won, but now, it appeared, there was to be a runoff in a month, and for the other candidates too. The media held out that Addonizio would take the runoffs, but we knew that was stupid. We had tasted the victory already, the rest of it was formality.
But during this period there was a developing dimension to what had gone down that began to present itself. Gibson was so busy now that he couldn’t get to the Sunday meetings, or he couldn’t get to all of them. He made most of them right after the first election. But occasionally a representative of his, usually Elton Hill, would come. And this seemed cool to us, we could understand.
The runoff came and Gibson and our candidates who had won the first election skunked Addonizio. (That made it certain that Hughie would soon be in the slam. A year or so later he was sentenced to ten years for corruption.)
But now Gibson found it impossible to make the Sunday meetings. He was mayor now. He had to set up his cabinet. We had discussed this with him, but now he met with us less. Once he got into the mayor’s office these meetings were switched to his office, once a week. Baba suggested that something was funny with Ken, that he was acting weird.
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p; Prudential Insurance at first had opposed us, of course. They had put up the fire chief, Caulfield, as opposition. They had first gone with a refined Italian senator, as well, hedging their bets. But the senator struck out quickly. After the runoff, they had a change of mind. Even before this, they had given up some money for voter registration. We had got Howard Samuels, the rich Jewish New York gubernatorial candidate, to come over and support voter registration and used his image to get close enough to Pru for some voter registration moneys and even some money for the convention. Hey, wasn’t that the Spirit of Good America, voter registration and public participation in the electoral process? They gave us no chance. But Baba said he had heard that they began rubbing up against Gibson after the first election, giving him a little taste. Now, after the wipe-out, they had crept even closer and Gibson was easing away from us. But I hoped not.
Actually, this would have been the time to take Gibson for a long ride and threaten to blow his head off if he pulled any funny Negro shit. But we didn’t, and I have to take the weight for this. Certainly I was counseled to do this by my elders, who really knew how the shit worked.
Still, for the time being, everything was on an upbeat. We were getting ready to run the city. A black-run city—what we had said, what we had thought was the practical approach to Black Power. We had done it; now the heavy work had begun.