by Amiri Baraka
My view was that Newark should be a model for the country, for the black movement, of how to gain practical Black Power. In the Continuations Committee meetings of the Black Power Conference, I had advanced this. I wrote a paper called “The Beginnings of National Movement” and another called “The Strategy and Tactics of a Pan-African Nationalist Party,” in which these ideas were advanced.
It was also my idea and some other people’s that the Black Power Conference, with its informal structure, had to give way to an organization, a national, even Pan-African organization, whose function would be to struggle for Black Power wherever black people were in the world. This was finally accepted in the BPC Continuations meetings. The 1970 Black Power Conference would be held in Atlanta, on the campus of Atlanta University, and its main focus would be the formation of the Congress of Afrikan Peoples. CAP was conceived as a party as well as a united front, which reflected the fuzziness of some of our thinking, although the essence of what we came up with was sound. The African American Nation still needs a national black united front, a liberation front, like the struggling nations and peoples of the Third World have raised to fight colonialism and imperialism in general.
The meeting was in September, Labor Day. That same weekend, the Black Panther Party held its Constitutional Convention in Washington, D.C. The Panthers drew about 10,000 people, we drew about 4,000, so that there were maybe 14,000 people meeting that weekend trying to transform an oppressive U.S. society.
But now we ran into open conflict with Karenga. Because of the siege situation in L.A., Karenga made none of the Continuations Committee meetings leading up to the CAP conference in Atlanta. I had sent him information, and occasionally he would send a rep, but as things got worse in L.A., he could not even send anyone. Actually we were supposed to be his representatives.
However, since Karenga had not been at the meetings and had not been able to impose his personal stamp on what had developed, he now suddenly opposed having the conference. First he had someone call me and tell me this, that all those plans for having a conference in Atlanta had to be scrapped. I couldn’t or didn’t want to understand this. I told his caller that I needed some clarification. What did this mean? Couldn’t I talk to Maulana myself? A few days later one of the advocates called me from L.A. and then someone got on the phone. He sounded drowsy, as if he were drifting through deep space and conversation was a tremendous effort he could not consistently sustain. “Baaaaa-raaaaa-kaaaaa” — his saying of my name took seconds. He began trying to tell me something about “not disobeying him.” He seemed to be repeating this over and over again, from somewhere high up over the rainbow. It was Karenga. He sounded drunk or high. It was astonishing.
I kept saying that the 1970 meeting was very important. That we had already mobilized people. People were ready all over the country. I didn’t see how we could just drop the idea. Why? What was the reason? What he was saying seemed arbitrary and certainly disjointed. There was no sense to it. He was saying something about how we didn’t need to hold the conference. He mentioned the Panthers. But we were pulling out the whole spectrum of the black community, from one ocean to the other. We were pulling together a true united-front meeting. The Panthers couldn’t stop us. They were having their own meeting anyway, there was no reason for them to hassle us, nor we to hassle them.
What I didn’t count on was the extent of Karenga’s bizarrerie. He had mumbled in a later conversation that he was going to “send some people” to the conference. After the first conversation, I had felt totally disconnected from him. Now I knew that was real, we had no more connection of any positive nature. He was threatening us. If we went on with the CAP conference he would send people to disrupt it.
As the time for the conference got closer, I called our people together and announced that the alliance between CFUN and US was no longer. Ex-advocates from L.A. had been coming back East for a while now with various horror stories about the organization’s degeneration. So the straight-out directive that we were no longer allies was not as shocking as it would have been a year or so before.
I had met with Balozi and Mfundishi to discuss the Atlanta conference, since CAP was going to be a national front, with entire organizations as members on one level. Even though we couldn’t be in the same organization, certainly we could be in the same united front. We contacted various organizations across the country, mobilizing people for the conference. We had been developing closer ties with organizations with a similar Pan-African nationalist ideology. There were some folks in the Bronx who had a community organization that Shorty had joined; also, Les Campbell, later Jitu Weusi, a friend of Sonny Carson’s, had organized a cultural center in Brooklyn called The East. We had begun to communicate on a limited basis, particularly through Carson in the Continuations Committee meetings.
The security for the Atlanta meeting would be the CFUN Simba and Saidi, the BCD brothers who had gone off with Balozi and Mfundishi, and some of the ex-US advocates who’d split from L.A. and come out to the East Coast. Balozi and Mfundishi perhaps had never forgiven Maulana for taking sides with me. Balozi had come to some of the Continuations Committee meetings as well, so he felt the Atlanta conference should go on too.
The conference itself was a historic meeting very much like the conventions held during the early part of the 19th century, the black convention movement, which provided a lot of the fuel for the abolitionist movement, black and white. All of the Black Power Conferences must be compared to those early-19th-century conventions. They had the same objective: Black Liberation!
Ken Gibson, Jesse Jackson, Roy Innis of CORE, Richard Hatcher (himself newly elected as mayor of Gary, Indiana), Whitney Young of the Urban League, Minister Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, Julian Bond (head of the Atlanta host committee), the ambassadors from Guinea and Tanzania, representatives from many of the African liberation movements, Imari Obadele from the Republic of New Africa, Howard Fuller (later Owusu Sadaukai) of Malcolm X University in Greensboro (who read a message from Stokely Carmichael), Max Stanford (now Muhammad Ahmed) of RAM, an NAACP national officer all appeared, made major speeches, and participated in the conference. But almost from the outset, Karenga’s people did appear. There were six or seven of them, all dressed identically, all carrying the characteristic attaché cases in which we used to carry our heat around before the airlines put up the metal detectors. When we saw them we knew what those cases meant. Word was got to me immediately about the six, mostly new, people who had appeared and who were now marching ominously around the campus which was the conference site trying silently to intimidate people.
Their leader had asked to see me and some of the brothers didn’t want to allow it. But it seemed to me that the best thing to do was to take them all the way out, as far as they wanted to go, peaceably, and to make plans for dealing with them in other ways if they wanted to take it there. The US brother told me that Maulana wanted to speak to me. He would call and then I could speak to him. All right, call him.
Karenga got on the phone and said some of the same things. They really seemed out now, because the conference was going on. There was no turning back. Karenga’s shrill little voice raced up and down in his wearying attempt to make what he was saying sound rational. After we talked, the tactical leader stood looking at me. I said, “OK, we’ve talked. Is there anything else?” He turned and went out.
The security heads came together to discuss this problem. What were these Karenga dudes really going to do? Threats aside, what would they really attempt? George Armstrong, who had once been head of Karenga’s security forces, as Weusi, said he thought we should take the attache cases away from the L.A. brothers. Mfundishi seemed to be going along with this, but I squashed this as hard as I could. Trying to take those cases away from them would mean instant confrontation, possibly shooting, maybe an end to the conference in wild chaos. Wasn’t that what Karenga wanted? No, we would cool it. We would tail them, but let them go anywhere they wanted to go in the con
ference the public was. They could participate like anybody else. Let ’em in any of the workshops they wanted to go in. They were our guests. They were emissaries from Maulana Karenga, certainly they were welcome. But we would tail them.
A couple more times the brother who seemed to be in charge of the “killer squad” said Maulana had requested that I talk to him on the phone. We talked again, but the third time I was unavailable. Karenga was just saving face over the phone now. There were no incidents except one young brother roused the troops in the middle of the night by shooting himself in the foot while on security. This was the joke of the conference and lightened the mood as our combined units of Simba and Saidi, their blood tingling because of the possibility of confrontation, marched back and forth to their posts or drilled so that all could see we had a strong and disciplined security force. I had learned that from Karenga—a show of force often precludes having to use it. Karenga had learned it from Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military master.
I was directing the Political Action Workshop of the conference, and the most important thing to come out of that workshop was the call for a Liberation Front of black people that should include even the Panthers and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, two left organizations that the nationalists usually would not work with. We were also supposed to go on organizing a “cadre organization” of Pan-African nationalists to continue to build the united front structure formalized in this meeting.
One of the most important points to come out of this workshop was that we should call, by 1972, a National Black Political Convention, not only to flesh out the united front structure but also to choose candidates to run in the major elections and to give black people a unified voice in dealing with the presidential election.
There was one famous photo in Jet of the conference in which Hayward Henry, who was elected chairman of CAP, is shown holding up Minister Farrakhan’s hand along with Whitney Young’s hand to symbolize the unity found at the conference. Farrakhan had delivered a crowd-pleasing address, in a style that made some people think perhaps he should pay royalties to Malcolm’s family. As it was, Betty Shabazz, who also spoke at the conference, left in stony silence when Farrakhan and his party appeared. Many people were surprised that Whitney Young (called “Whitey” Young by many of the nationalists) even showed, especially since there were a couple people on the program who had been locked up just a few years before, having been framed by the FBI for planning to assassinate Young. Roy Wilkins, who was also one of the targets for this bullshit FBI assassination plot, did not show.
Hayward Henry was a young Unitarian minister who headed up the Black Affairs Council of the Unitarian Church. The white churches had begun to set up such groups in their midst as blacks in white churches demanded that these churches share some of their vast resources with the black community. Henry, along with Richard Traylor and Law Gothard, had come in with some money to help with voter registration in Newark, and we had gotten rather close. Later Henry set up a chapter of CAP in Boston and Traylor set one up in Philadelphia.
Not only was the conference a success, but what had happened also was the meeting and identification of kindred forces in the Black Liberation movement. We had brought hundreds of black organizations together and some who seriously thought along the same lines that we did. We were trying to evolve an ideology that could deal with black nationalism as well as African liberation. It was Pan-Afrikan Nationalism. (A “k” in “Afrika” because one of our theorists, Brother Ruwa Chiri, who belonged to an organization called UFOMI—United Africans for One Motherland Indivisible—put out a newsletter explaining that “c” did not exist in African languages.) But we were also heavily indebted to Karenga’s Kawaida, which remained an underlying structure we related to. We could not work with him, but we were still committed to Kawaida and its multiple lists and the Nguzo Saba and Kwanzaa.
Back in Newark, our thrust now was toward the creation of a national organization. We were CFUN, one chapter of the Congress of Afrikan Peoples. We had also met brothers and sisters who had organizations in Pittsburgh, Gary, South Bend, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Detroit, Camden, and Cleveland who wanted to hook up with the cadre structure of CAP.
Gibson had spoken in Atlanta, and his appearance, even though he wasn’t much of a speaker, had been electric. The national black community of political activists honored him, honored CFUN and me for the job we had done in the election victory. It was this victory that raised CFUN’s stature among the organizations. We had done some practical work and won it.
At home, Gibson’s drifting continued. Our meetings were now at his office. Gradually, they became less and less regular. A couple times we had to speak to him and get reassurances from him that he wasn’t trying anything. But the whole thing seemed more and more like it was getting fucked up. We were supposed to plan this shit together, the people who had put out the muscle and vision to get his ass in. But he was pulling a disappearing act right before our eyes.
One thing went down before the first year was out to make me clear on what was happening. I had put together a comprehensive cultural program for the city. What it called for, generally, was a consolidation of the cultural resources of the city, to expand the city’s education capacity and transform the city into a cultural center. We did not have a lot of money but we could transform the city, I reasoned, by intensive cultural activity, even bring in some revenue and give the grim-visaged town a new image.
Gibson appeared to like the program. He formed a cultural committee to deal with the plan’s implementation. The committee was designed to bring the different interests together in the city who were interested in culture and the arts or education. Prudential had a representative at that first meeting, Al DeRogatis, the old New York Giants football player, now community affairs specialist for the Prudential Life Insurance Company, the largest life insurance company in the world, whose main headquarters was in Newark. Prudential, hooked up with the Rockefeller interests through the Prudential-Manufacturers Hanover Trust group, of course, owns New Jersey, legislature and all. DeRogatis, who was one of the Giants’ game announcers at one point, was the kind of community affairs specialist who sat with the president of Prudential in his top-floor offices near the huge boardroom with raisable stained-glass windows and a view of their own communities way up in the mountains overlooking our grimy black town. On the outside of the boardroom were large paintings of the board members. It seemed as if there had been some major breakthroughs, as there were at least one Italian and one Jew on the wall among the smiling Anglos. DeRogatis was security as well as community affairs.
Before our first meeting of the cultural committee was over, DeRogatis had said to all in the room that he could not be in a meeting in which I was a participant. This was Prudential’s position. But it was not even a real confrontation. It was a fait accompli. Gibson and the Prus had obviously talked about this before. But I thought it was a simple confrontation—that it was even good that it had come out so soon and could be gotten out of the way. Prudential was obviously one of our enemies and we would have to fight them. But that was the last cultural committee meeting Gibson was to call. Because of Prudential’s displeasure with me, Gibson scrapped the committee. At first, when such things happened, I thought Gibson was simply ball-less, but as it went on, the pattern was clear he had been “purchased,” as Baba had suggested.
Each week, after a while, there was some new affront, some new confrontation between the old team and Gibson. The city tax on out-of-city workers, who had most of the jobs in the city, since Newark is an insurance and commercial and banking center and most blacks are not brought into these businesses in any number approaching their actual existence in the society, Gibson gave some lip service to, but quickly got silent when Prudential let it be known that they were opposed to the tax. All the promises and issues to come out of the Black and Puerto Rican Convention Gibson slid away from. And before the second year of his term was up he had attacked us openly, though in a s
lightly indirect way.
CFUN had managed to get some influence over the local antipoverty agency, the United Community Corporation. Even before the election, we were swarming all over their public meetings, attacking UCC’s administration along with Addonizio. After the election we moved quickly to grab some real control over key sectors of the agency. This allowed us to put people in positions of power in the agency, including the president, David Barrett (Mtetezi), the trustees, and, finally, even the assistant director of the agency.
An open confrontation came when Gibson secretly backed a coalition of our enemies, who had been his enemies, too, before the election. His henchman, Clarence Coggins, put the attack together, trying to mobilize people to join the UCC so they could vote for Coalition Six to replace our people on the board of trustees, thereby limiting or totally eliminating our influence. But we outmobilized, outorganized, and beat them cold. George Richardson again figured in this traitorous business, and again he got his ass beat!
Now word was running around the city that Gibson was trying to cut himself loose from our baleful influence completely. Gibson thought, and he said this again and again, through the years, that he was the mayor. To him, this meant that he had to do everything himself, answerable only to his own mind and conscience (and the Prugeoisie). What limitations to impose upon a person. Even if Ken Gibson were intelligent, he could not do this. Not being intelligent made it difficult for him even to conceive of certain possibilities. For instance, not long after he got elected, Gibson painted the gold dome on the City Hall yellow. I guess he couldn’t wallpaper it; for one sector of the lower middle class, cheap gloss paint is the answer to all problems.
It was his civil servant’s mentality, that heaven is a place where GS-1000s go, that ultimately restricted him to mediocrity. He could not really conceive of black people having to make their own way, of self-determination and self-sufficiency. A government check is the only way we’ll make it. So he gradually moved from being some kind of spokesperson for an independent black community to being a messenger to black people for the federal government’s shenanigans.