by Amiri Baraka
We clashed now repeatedly and more and more openly. Our Sunday meetings became a thing of the past. But meanwhile we tried to work with him. We knew we could still benefit in some ways by the association, so we still tried to relate to him as we could.
CAP grew steadily, with new cities coming in nationally, where we had developed cadres—Chicago (through Don Lee, the poet, who was now Haki Madhubuti), Delaware, Philadelphia, Boston, Albany. Even the San Diego chapter of US had broken away from Karenga and become a chapter of the Congress of Afrikan Peoples.
Our main work nationally, aside from building the cadre organizations of Pan-Afrikan Nationals heavily influenced by Kawaida, was to put together the convention called for by the Atlanta mandate. I traveled around the country meeting with different organizations. There was much political activity, and not just in the Black Liberation movement; now, as the 1972 presidential elections drew closer, a wide spectrum of people were busy getting ready to take part in those elections.
We had now gained a good entree with black electoral figures, because of the Gibson election. Electoral politics had become an obvious arena for the struggle for Black Power. We met with the black congressmen and congresswomen, who had now put together the concept of the Congressional Black Caucus. One meeting we had in D.C. with representatives of the caucus—Owusu Sadaukai, a national NAACP rep, a rep from the Urban League and the Urban Coalition, plus some of the old Black Power Conference Continuations Committee people—put the conceptualization of the National Black Political Convention squarely on the agenda. The caucus itself had a gathering a few months later, at which Shirley Chisholm declared her “presidential aspirations.” She attacked the male caucus members for not supporting her. I raised the Black Convention as the only viable way to proceed. If the black masses at a national convention wanted her, then let the convention declare that and then let black people come out and not only vote for Shirley Chisholm for president of the U.S. but convince others to do so as well! I later discovered that Ms. Chisholm’s candidacy was just an attempt to get a front position at Mr. McGovern’s pay window, that it was not serious at all. (In fact, the whole motion of black politicians toward the 1972 elections and the relationship of their real aspirations to the needs of the black masses I put in an article first published by Black World, the old Negro Digest, called “Miami Before and After.” Hoyt Fuller, the editor, changed the title to “Toward the Creation of Institutions for All African People.” See Jesse Jackson and Black People [Chicago: Third World Press, 1995].)
In the end there was no clear place the politicians could turn but the Black Convention and seem as relevant to the movement as they wanted to seem in 1971. The endorsement by the Congressional Black Caucus of the National Black Political Convention brought it together as the most forceful demonstration of mass motion toward the realization of Black Power of that period. Gary, Indiana, was selected because it had a black mayor (one who was more progressive than our own K.G.) and because Gary was in the middle of the country, just outside Chicago.
Some nine thousand people came to Gary, and since it was all black, the convention represented a far larger concentration of the black masses than even the Panther Constitutional Conference, which also gathered many whites and other oppressed nationalities besides African Americans.
In this period CAP had become a relatively powerful, well-disciplined national organization, with chapters in some eighteen cities. I was its political empowerment chairman as well as program chairman. The strong, well-organized base in Newark gave me a great deal to say in CAP affairs, and the Newark cadre was generally considered the most advanced group of cadres in the national organization.
A triumvirate was elected to pull the convention together. We wanted to draw all sectors of the black nation together. So that Mayor Hatcher, Congressman Charles Diggs of Detroit, and I were chosen as the three coconvenors. The sight of some nine-thousand-plus black people together in and outside the huge arena in Gary was deeply stirring. We had put up signs alphabetically throughout the hall so that the different state delegates would be seated just as in the Democratic and Republican conventions. We had also worked out a formula for how many delegates could be represented from each state according to the number of blacks in that state. Gibson thought that he should be chairman of the Jersey delegation, but the delegates elected me, which burned him up. But more and more people were beginning to find out just how jive Newark’s first black mayor was becoming.
A very fine film was made of the entire convention by black filmmaker William Greaves. It is narrated by Sidney Poitier and shows Harry Belafonte, Isaac Hayes, Bobby Seale, who spoke one evening, Jesse Jackson, hosts of black politicians, Richard Roundtree of Shaft fame, and the thousands of black people intensely participating in a sincere effort to transform their lives and the society.
The NAACP issued a statement, from the national office, telling white folks it wanted no part of this all-black proceeding, even before the convention started. But the masses were there, bodily and in spirit. When it was over, we put together a fairly progressive document known as the Black Agenda. This was composed of resolutions voted by the convention, and this document was supposed to be used on a national or local level to present to candidates so that they would know black people’s concerns. I was even appointed to go down to Miami to the Democratic convention to make sure that any of the politicians who wanted the black vote had to agree to the issues presented in the National Black Agenda. But once in Miami, the majority of the black politicians who were talking much militant shit in Gary reverted to character and were simply scrambling to get on some candidate’s payroll. Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Ken Gibson, most of the Congressional Black Caucus were whoring like nobody’s business. I wrote about this in the Black World article, which in turn made many of those folks very angry. Charles Evers was such a bold-faced “ho” it was embarrassing, switching from candidate to candidate, with his hand out and his butt cocked for ready access. In a few minutes he switched from Humphrey to Chisholm to McGovern. Whenever I raised the question of the Black Agenda, such an idea was openly scoffed at. Hey, that was just for show. Shirley Chisholm refused to come to the Black Convention, where she could easily have won the black nomination and mobilized the black masses, if that’s what she had really wanted to do. And then there was the charade about which black was closer to the biggest white. Ken Gibson came out into a conference of well-known black political types telling us that McGovern’s choice of a running mate was the mayor of Boston, only to have McGovern, almost immediately after Gibson’s statement, on a television playing in the same room announce that it was Congressman Eagleton. Ken did get the privilege of nominating Eagleton, which was considered hot stuff by the Washington black politicos, but lo and behold it’s shown that Eagleton is a mental case so Gibson’s great nomination came to naught.
But the Black Convention was a high moment in my life. Several times I had to chair the huge meeting, keeping a balance and the procedure flowing at the same time. It was the kind of challenge that made the adrenaline rush through your head and your whole body tingle. There was even a bomb scare while I was presiding (probably by the FBI) and I had to evacuate the huge building without causing too much alarm.
Coleman Young, later the mayor of Detroit, got some kind of note at the National Black Convention when he led a walkout of Michigan delegates. I was dumbfounded and demanded to know what was going on. It turned out that one group of blacks was going to push a resolution calling for separate black trade unions. Young was a UAW political cadre, so he was trying to avoid blowing his own gig.
There was much infighting and confrontations between different groups. Just like in the Congress of the U.S. In truth, that was our model for the National Black Political Assembly, the mechanism we created to elect delegates to the convention. We wanted to create a focused national group dealing with black concerns, the members of which would be elected every two years. We wanted a Congress for the black nation
to act on our concerns as if we were a nation with political power.
Owusu Sadaukai stopped me in the hallway and said he had been told that CAP was going to attack him if he or his people did not vote as we wanted. This was science fiction, I told him, but I wondered who would put that out. Probably, again, Hoover’s Heathens. If anything, we wanted to get closer to Sadaukai and the Malcolm X Liberation University he headed because we respected what they were doing, despite our differences of interpretation about Pan-Africanism.
Roy Innis and his CORE people provided the most tension and nutty confrontations. Innis thought what he had to do was come out to the convention and straight-out “bogart” everybody with some big fat gun-toting gorillas. But as bad as he must’ve thought he was, I wasn’t too worried because we had people with the same equipment, more of it and better training.
Innis wanted to push an “antibusing” plank through the convention, but finally there was a compromise of language on the resolution that actually passed. Most of the black masses are not interested in busing, they want to know why they can’t get quality education right in their neighborhoods.
That busing resolution and the last one that hit the floor the final night of the convention, which called for “the dismantling of the state of Israel,” caused the most controversy. The last resolution was widely blamed on me by the press, but in truth I had known nothing at all about it or its origins. It had come from Reverend Douglas of the Black United Front of D.C.
The shock waves caused by the Black Convention swept all across the country. We had raised up another level, we were not just militant, we were organizing. At the end of the convention, Mayor Hatcher was elected chairman of the National Black Political Assembly, which became a forum for continuing the work of the convention, and Congressman Diggs, president of the national convention itself. I was named secretary-general. The task with the most work but, at the same time, the job that would give us the most hand in organizing the Assembly and bringing in new forces. We wanted to make sure that the Assembly went on and reached out even further.
During this same period another very important formation in the Black Liberation movement was organized. Owusu Sadaukai had gone to Mozambique and had talked with many of the liberation fighters. They had told him that the best thing African Americans could do to help their struggle would be to send dollar and materiel support but, most important, to wage struggle over here in the U.S. against the U.S. imperialist superpower.
When Owusu returned he began to contact people about forming an organization in the U.S. which would focus on supporting the African liberation movements and mobilizing people to struggle over here. And so work began on organizing what was known first as the African Liberation Day Support Committee, later as the African Liberation Support Committee.
From the beginning CAP was in the forefront of efforts to build the ALSC. The first focus was to mobilize people to march in D.C. in May 1972 on what had been designated African Liberation Day by the Organization of African Unity. There was some negativity between the organizers of ALSC and people in Guyana and even Stokely Carmichael because some people had a very partisan understanding of struggle and thought that if such and such wasn’t being organized under their direction and according to the ideological designs of their group then it shouldn’t be supported. But we went past that. CAP sent a person down to D.C. to help with the organizing and national mobilization. Just as we had done with the Black Convention, bringing together a broad united front.
That first ALSC demo saw more than fifty thousand people march in D.C. and another ten thousand march in San Francisco. Black nationalists and Pan-Africanists, workers, students, elected officials, all participated in the mobilization and program. We marched and also stopped in front of the Portuguese, Rhodesian, and South African embassies to denounce them. We grouped at the foot of the Washington Monument, with miles and miles of black folks stretched out in all directions away from the monument. The Panthers’ Elaine Brown spoke, surrounded by a crew of bighatted security brothers. Congressman Diggs, dressed in a dashiki, denounced South Africa (and it was probably as a result of these appearances by Diggs that the racists in Congress and the FBI decided that he must be busted so that his seniority and chairmanship of the Africa committee would not stall their defense of white colonialism and racism in Africa). Haki Madhubuti read, a group sang, a preacher prayed. I spoke too. But Owusu raised everybody up as he ended with the final address to the audience, quoting Frederick Douglass.
Both the National Black Assembly and the ALSC formed in 1972, perhaps a high point of black organization at the time. But by 1975, both organizations had peaked as the result of too many internal contradictions and errors and the interference of the state. CAP also had its high point of organization and influence in ’72. That fall, at our CAP convention held in San Diego, I was elected national chairman, replacing Hayward Henry. This meant that the Kawaida influence in CAP had consolidated at the highest level, but there were also intense and still developing contradictions.
For one thing Karenga sent a few carloads of intimidators down from L.A. to pull the same shit at the CAP conference as he had pulled in Atlanta two years before. Perhaps he was still smarting from the effrontery we had had to go ahead with a project of such magnitude without his being in the driver’s seat. But he had not been in any condition to drive anything. A short time later, his whole playhouse came tumbling down when he got arrested and jailed for “torturing” two female members of the organization. This and his wife testified against him as well as George Armstrong-Weusi. He was incarcerated in St. Louis Obipso in California.
In the ’72 confrontation, two groups of armed brothers, dressed in dashikis, some old comrades, stood facing each other, ready to fight. For what? Some vague egotistical king-of-the-hill bullshit. But the conference went on. Owusu spoke and C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian writer. Unfortunately, for all of C.L.R.’s great work, he is still very much influenced by his Trotskyist youth and often counsels people incorrectly, telling them that spontaneous organization by the masses is a substitute for the Leninist vanguard party. It was just such counsel that delayed the Grenadian revolution when the revolutionaries tried to overthrow Eric Gairy without a revolutionary vanguard, heavily influenced by C.L.R.’s antiparty line. But he is still a great historical writer and his books of Marxist and cultural historical theory and his book on Haiti, Black Jacobins, are landmark works.
If my election as chairman of CAP meant a consolidation of the Kawaida tendencies, it also meant that CAP would be moving even more sharply to the left. Our contact with Owusu Sadaukai and the Malcolm X Liberation University had made us place more emphasis on Pan-Africanism, though we never believed as Stokely and Owusu did that our only struggle was in Africa. When Owusu ceased to believe this, he and Stokely split up.
In the CAP newspaper, we now pushed nationalism-Pan Afrikanism-Ujamaa. Our reasoning was that we had to fight the black liberation struggle here in the U.S., support the liberation of Africa, and at the same time push cooperative economics (as Ujamaa was defined in the Nguzo Saba). We didn’t know it clearly at the time, but there were Communists inside the ALSC, black Communists. We had only very little to do with them consciously, but obviously we were being influenced. The Black Workers Congress, the black Marxist group that had formed after the demise of the League of Black Revolutionary Workers in Detroit, was in ALSC. The Congress never came out directly and tried to organize as it should have; it worked on the inside insinuating and implying but never came straight out. If they had done so, I believe they could have set a clearer direction for people inside ALSC, especially those more advanced forces who were actively seeking to understand how to make revolution.
If the CAP newspaper is analyzed, the organization’s move toward the left will be obvious. We went from nationalism-Pan Afrikanism-Ujamaa to nationalism-Pan Afrikanism-African Scientific Socialism. Then A.S.S. became socialism, to which we appended Kwame Nkrumah’s definition. We even
issued buttons for the CAP cadres which said nationalism-Pan Afrikanism-socialism.
The contradictions in our leftward move were that we were deeply rooted in cultural nationalism of the Karenga-Kawaida variety. The ex-L.A. cadres who came East brought even a heavier dose of this with them. Everyone of them who came East lasted in CFUN only a few months. One ex-L.A. advocate, from East Orange, had been one of Karenga’s personal enforcers. In the end, Karenga had turned on him and got somebody to split his head open. We had to put him out of CAP because he had brought the L.A. polygamy trip with him and was running it to the brothers in the organization, implying that I was repressing them by not letting them practice polygamy.
A few months after we kicked this fellow out of CAP he shows up at the Central Committee of a Communist organization preaching against cultural nationalism. It was he who even helped put Karenga’s wife out of the house one night in a fit of drowsy pique. She called Amina and sobbed this over the phone.
Mtume, the rock star, was in the US organization. He came East with the ex’s but he brought so much of the same L.A. baggage that we could not work with him. The organization was a Kawaida organization, but it was not nor had never been as deeply into all the rites and rituals that Maulanism carries.
We were going to the left, and I was reading Nkrumah and Cabral and Mao. We had started to think about an Africa that was still alive and in chains, actively struggling for liberation. One heavy part of the Kawaida doctrine was based on a never-never-land Africa, the African paradise of the first chapter of Roots. We were finding out about an Africa of imperialist domination and class struggle. For Nkrumah and Cabral, the enemy of Africa was imperialism, not just white people. Though we had been influenced by the Black Muslim cosmology, Malcolm’s assassination had served to estrange many of us from the Black Muslims. The “white devil” philosophy was shown to be too narrow and limiting. We could see its reactionary underpinnings. Though the everyday torture white people took us through made our coming out of narrow nationalism problematic.