by Amiri Baraka
She has frequently had to struggle with me to take positions that people then applaud only me for. She has also had to take assaults from people who want to attack me and see her as the most accessible point to launch that attack. Too often I have been so self-absorbed I have not helped her when I should. Obstructed by others, I might get sullen with her. Lionized by many, I would not always be as attentive and loving as I could. Traveling all the time, I would forget that she might be lonely. Involved in constant struggle, I might occasionally forget to be tender. To add to this, the white press and art world seemed only to want to talk about my first wife. The fact that I had been divorced and remarried and that Amina and I had had five children was lost effortlessly in their reams of distortion. According to many biographies and accounts of my life, it ended, both the living of it and the writing in reflection of it, when I left the “white world.” They would not honor my life or my work. To raise a black woman is to raise the mothers of the black nation, the wives of that nation, its beautiful struggling daughters, and hence that nation itself!
But a man is only as strong as the woman he’s with, and it is difficult for a woman to develop past the life situation sanctioned by the man she is with—it is the nature of the society itself. The man, usually with the purse strings, becomes the boss, the woman the exploited worker. The marraige is like a reflection of society, the economic system itself; it enforces the same kind of relationship. I have learned these things only after a long struggle and much study. And still I am not always able to act wisely on them.
For Amina and me, our relationship has been one that began in passion and then that passion took a backseat to nationalism and organization. It is one that has even been diverted by male chauvinism. But it is a relationship whose essence has always deepened and gotten stronger through the very adversity which has constantly threatened it. It is a relationship whose deepest foundation is an ever-ripening love, an ever-developing respect.
Our first son, Obalaji Malik Ali, born just before the rebellion, in May 1967. Our second son, Ras Jua Al Azia, born in 1969. I stayed up all night reading and studying to find a name for Ras. The ancient black name of wisdom, Ras means “the wise” or “wisdom,” and, more contemporarily, “president” or “leader.” Ras, people say, is the most Imamu-looking of all the children. The third child was a girl, Shani Isis Makeda. Shani means “something wondrous”; Isis, the ancient Egyptian goddess, wife of Osiris, the father of judgment; and Makeda, the Queen of Sheba, the Ethiopian beauty. Shani was born in 1971.
The fourth child was another boy, Amiri Seku Musa, named after me and born the day before my birthday, October 6, 1972. Shani and Amiri are Libras, and the fifth child as well. Ahi Mwenge (”brother of the masses,” “a torch”), born October 10, 1973. So after the first two were two years apart, the next three came one year after another. This was a reflection of our cultural nationalist line against birth control, which we deemed genocide. But obviously “too many children” can be used to cover the real causes of pauperizing people, so birth control is just another modern method of environmental control. We should not confuse birth control, which is voluntary, with enforced sterilization, which the imperialists practice on oppressed people.
All the time Amina had to struggle in the organization and work and study with us she was also having child after child. Plus, she had two older girls by her previous marraige, Vera and Wanda, whom she had to look after and raise. So much pressure and never enough help. A husband whose life is used up publicly in art and traveling and speeches and common struggles and sometimes in abject stupidity and conceit. And all of it is still in motion, this very minute I write.
From 1972 on, ours was a steady march in quick time to the left. If I had been allowed to publish as widely from that point on as I had been before, all this motion would have been well documented. As it was, Jihad and later People’s War put out an endless stream of inexpensive pamphlets. Many of my speeches and writings of the period were sold in many printings. We also published a book of poems of mine, Spirit Reach, and books by Sekou Touré, Julius Nyerere, Amilcar Cabral, and later even reprints of Lenin.
From the big publishers I published regularly until about 1970. Jihad brought out Black Art (poetry, ’66) and Slave Ship (67). Grove published The Baptism and The Toilet in 1967 and Tales, a book of short stories, around the same time. Black Music came out in ’69 and Four Black Revolutionary Plays the same year from the same publisher, Bobbs Merrill. This is probably when they thought it was still good business. The last book was In Our Terribleness, also published by Bobbs Merrill, in ’70, a collaboration between Fundi (Billy Abernathy), a great photographer who was in the organization at the time, his wife, Laini (Sylvia), a fine graphic artist who did the layout and design, and my words.
After that, until 1976, everything I published was published by Jihad, such as Black Artor the poem Afrikan Revolution or the books on nationalism such as A Black Value System. Haki Madhabuti’s Third World Press out of Chicago took up some of the slack, It’s Nation Time (poetry) and J-E-L-L-O, a play.
The words of an incendiary poet are finally less frightening than a political organizer. The one can be used merely to titillate, the other assumes a functional presence in the world that can intimidate.
Inside the ALSC we were exposed, I believe, to black Communist organizers and that had a real influence. Our exposure to a real Africa, a contemporary Africa, also helped change our worldview. But we were also exposed everyday to class struggle. We saw everyday how Ken Gibson vacillated, lied, sold himself, and showed his ass to the black community. (If somebody wants to object I’ll say, OK it wasn’t his ass, it was his face, but most of us couldn’t tell the difference!)
We saw how a small group of blacks, a little petty bourgeois bureaucrat class, got over at the expense of the rest of us. We saw how the little “verticality” created by the election had got one group of blacks over, a tiny group, while for the rest of us the struggle had to go on, with not much change. We were seeing class struggle in reality. Reading Marxist literature only confirmed what we had already seen and gave us a scientific terminology and proven references so that we might better understand already existing phenomena.
At each ALSC meeting we got into struggles with brothers and sisters on the left, either announced or otherwise, and learned something. In a minute, I found myself moved to the “middle,” where I was trying to understand what those further left were saying and trying to make a bridge for my nationalist comrades.
In the National Black Assembly, we encountered growing hostility from the elected officials and other middle-class academic and political types. On one hand they didn’t mind if we did the agonizing work that went with trying to maintain and expand a national organization, they probably thought this is what CAB is for. But on the other they deeply resented the fact that as secretary general I had a great deal of influence in the organization. Plus, I did not always handle these contradictions as they should have been handled to keep them nonantagonistic. As Mao says, contradictions among the people can remain. I was quick not only to criticize but to take the criticism out as far as I could and to make it public. This created widening rifts between CAP and certain elements in the NBA. After a time, they both began to mobilize to get rid of me.
The redder I got, the more this mobilization intensified. Ron Daniels and Hayward Henry, two ex-CAP members who got off the train at social democracy, the former as “economic democracy,” the latter as “black humanism,” were the final executors of this mobilization.
But it was as if reality was forcing us even further to the left and this motion caused further contradictions to emerge, new tensions and explosions inside our various organizations. If we had handled this motion leftward more scientifically, perhaps there would have been less destruction with the explosions. But we were only where we were, and only knew what we knew.
In Newark, there were many things, a series of things, in our struggle with what could be char
acterized as the “neocolonial” reality that Kenneth Gibson represented, even though I don’t think black people in the U.S. are a colony, but an oppressed nation. But the oppression we suffer is no less than what our brothers and sisters under colonial oppression suffer and have suffered.
We were trying to build housing in the Central Ward on a plot designated R-32. I got a friend of mine, an old friend of White’s, Earl Coombs (Majenzi), a Howard-trained architect, to design the whole area. He worked up a fantastic neo-African design for buildings, businesses, parks, and schools in that depressed Central Ward area, but Gibson would give us no help. He wouldn’t even tell General Electric they had to remove some old un-used railroad tracks that were dangerous and a terrible eyesore, serving no function but the collection of garbage.
At the Housing Authority, the son-in-law of a Mafioso was the director. He took me into the conference room one afternoon and told me frankly, you take this architect, this consultant, and this construction firm and you go forward tomorrow, otherwise nothing. I told him all that was cool but how could I tell black people that I’ve been struggling for black development and then tell them these are the people who’re going to make a profit off this development? Gibson would do nothing but burp when he was told of these things.
We joined with attorney Ray Brown in planning and getting designed another project in Newark. This in the North Ward, to be called Kawaida Towers, a low- and moderate-income housing development that we would build with New Jersey state funds since we were a nonprofit organization. We broke ground and put in a million-dollar foundation, but when we had our formal public ground breaking we ran into trouble. I had arranged to talk to Imperiale beforehand about the project, through Kamiel, so there wouldn’t be any trouble. Imperiale asked for jobs, but since the main contractor was Italian I thought there would be no trouble. A meeting was arranged between Imperiale and the contractor. We had set up a “mix and match” situation: in any area or business necessary to the building, there would be whites where blacks could not be found, but there would be black subcontractors working with them learning that skill or developing a track record so that they could get the bonding the next time on their own.
But when we went public, a so-called liberal Italian, a Democratic Party, new-style ward heeler, Steve Adubato, raised a stink, because “he had not been told.” Imperiale, then, not to be outdone, came out denouncing the housing project as “racist.” The African name Kawaida was “threatening.” It was to be “a racist housing project.”
What went down next and afterwards is public record. Imperiale mobilized the racist elements of the Italian community against the housing, even though the particular area it was to be built in was a mixed area, heavily black and Puerto Rican as well as Italian. It was raised that there should be no high-rises in the area, and the New York Times came out with this story while photographing the site from an existing luxury high-rise in the area where mainly whites lived, so that it looked as if there were no high-rises!
The racist trade union bureaucrat leadership backed Imperiale and would not order their workers, mostly skilled trades, into the site to do the work. Only the black laborers’ union crossed Imperiale’s picket line and some of them got jumped by Imperiale’s goons. When we came down to the site to defend the workers, Gibson’s police director, Redden, first allowed his cops to jump on us rather than Imperiale’s goons, even though we were trying to keep the site open and they were chaining themselves to the gate to stop the building. Then, rather than have to arrest white people, Redden resigned. We had been on Ken Gibson’s case constantly to get him to replace Redden with a black police director, but he refused. He had even made a public statement saying Redden was the greatest police director in the country. Great, as long as all he had to arrest were blacks and Puerto Ricans.
Gibson, with any show of integrity, could have gotten Kawaida Towers built at once, but he betrayed us again and let the state and county officials get in it and declare an emergency and close the project down, which is exactly what Imperiale and company wanted all the time. So that even in a black majority city with a black mayor no housing could be built for the poor and moderate-income people because of Gibson’s backwardness and vacillation.
During the period when the project was closed down we had to go through endless legal battles and we won every one of them, but by the end of it, inflation had sent prices up some fifteen percent and we needed that fifteen percent in addition to the $6 million we had got from the state. They said we should build only efficiency apartments, since part of the cry of the racists was that all those black and Puerto Rican children would be brought into the racist project. So the state went along stride for stride and word for word with the most racist group in the city and then justified it with double-talking bullshit.
Gibson meanwhile appointed a Negro named Eddie Kerr as police director; Kerr was simply the standard colored Stepin Fetchit model to sit around, scratch his head, and take orders from whites. During this period a carload of white cops broke into my house claiming they had received a report that a patrolman was being tortured on the second floor. I was not home when they came in, but they went directly to my study, threw shit around, then left.
Twice our windows on High Street were fired into, and once they even shot into the Afrikan Free School. Imperiale and company even staged a disorder in the North Ward, and when a white man was killed in the confrontations, a month or so later a young black activist was murdered while he jogged through the city streets early one morning.
But even Kerr’s appointment came only after Earl Harris, Dennis Westbrook, and I took Gibson in the back of Earl’s record store and jawboned with him for hours. But Cur was not who we meant, Gibson was not brave enough to appoint the young Harvard graduate Hubert Williams, who was the only person with even reasonable accomplishment in Gibson’s cabinet, until several years later and after several more tragic “accidents.”
One of the most tragic was the Puerto Rican rebellion in 1974. It jumped off after a festival in Branch Brook Park. Two white police brutalized some of the brothers and they responded. In a flash the whole of the widely scattered Puerto Rican community had been mobilized and descended into the center of town demanding justice and the firing of the police.
We got in it immediately and groups of CAP people went downtown too and milled out in front of City Hall with the Puerto Ricans, demanding justice. Brothers and sisters from the Puerto Rican Socialist Party were out there too, but they did not take control like the old Young Lords would have. They were shaky and didn’t know how to deal with the crowd.
You want to feel some deep shame, Blood, let there be some kind of half-ass nigger government in power and they be brutalizing people of other nationalities. The sense of class distinction and class struggle is keen and obvious at such times.
I was chosen as part of the group to go upstairs and meet with asshole Gibson. When we get up there he’s already got a group of Puerto Rican compradors and so he feels he’s got everything cooled out and doesn’t even have to talk to this group of militants (CAP, ex-Young Lord Ramon Rivera, PRSP, and other activists), but as he’s bullshitting, one of the brothers says, “Hey, the people only gave us ten minutes for this whole rap.” Gibson starts to say something off the wall, burping and staring vacantly at some horrible abstraction given to him by “Arty Ruler,” when a stone comes flying through his picture window and almost bangs him in the knot. The expression on his face at that moment was really high art!
We got back downstairs and the people are chanting for Gibson to come down. Then more stones got thrown and suddenly from around the corner, police on horses and in patrol cars. The whole of the front of City Hall got shattered and the crowd went surging up the street. The police then did what the police of any white racist monopoly capitalist government would do, they tried to kill people. They roared down the street, one car slamming on its brakes just a few yards from a crowd of us, then turning sideways so it could slam broadsi
de into us. A young Panther running beside us was slammed high into the air but did not get hurt. Later two young Puerto Rican brothers were killed. But the Ricans did tear out the downtown windows. The earlier rebellion only fucked with windows in our own community.
One of the brothers was shot, the other had his head smashed, probably by a policeman’s horse. Gibson came out after the initial violence and said that gatherings of over two or three people were banned. He was playing “white boy” to the Puerto Ricans like Addonizio to the Bloods. I hated the feeling this gave me, I could understand somewhat what radical whites must feel when white racists and white supremacy freaks are running their usual hate everybody oppress everybody bullshit.
We were working with groups in the Puerto Rican community around the clock. We had been planning a demonstration against Gibson’s terrorism of the Puerto Rican community anyway, but when Gibson came out with his Hitler-like declaration that there would be no demonstrations, we really got down to organizing. Fuck him! Let him do whatever he thought he had to, we were going to organize, and march. Some two thousand to three thousand people, mostly Puerto Ricans, marched from the North Ward right down the middle of Broad Street to City Hall. The demonstration was well planned and well executed, so there were no casualties, but we could see now we were facing a little fat colored dictator.
There were so many things happening during this period. Ourselves scrambling to the left were right in the middle of all of it. Gibson was making his quick march even further to the right, taking a tiny little pimple of middle-class colored bureaucrats with him. Interestingly, many of the people who had come from L.A. fleeing Karenga jumped on that bandwagon. Every other day smoke would be coming out of my nose or my face was turned to fire by the blatant disregard for the people of Newark by our fat stupid Negro mayor. The class contradictions were what I was learning. How the different classes fared, even as black. Not to mention the wider class disparities that cut across the boundaries of nationality or were exacerbated by nationality. No, we were seeing how a little petty bourgeois coterie could scoop up and run with a whole city, yeh, carry it right back to where we had supposedly got it.