The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  As we moved to the left, as we began to focus more on class, we became more and more intolerant of the black middle class. As we got louder and louder about Gibson, we were also getting louder and louder about the vacillating character and quick sellout capabilities of an entire sector of black middle-class so-called leadership. The foibles of Gibson, his failures, went hand in hand, absolutely in tune, with the dumb chump character of the national leadership of the NAACP, Urban League, national black church organizations, black elected officials, blacks in the academic world, black government appointees, media spokespersons, etc. They were all full of shit and our views grew more and more loud and caustic.

  We were doing good work nationally on issues like “Stop Killer Cops,” leading mass demonstrations against white police murdering black youth and black people in general. We headed up a huge demonstration aimed at indicting the police murderers of thirteen-year-old Claude Reese in Brooklyn. We were working for police review boards, people’s trials for killer cops, publishing information and distributing it nationally. We were mobilizing thousands of black people around the country.

  At the same time, I personally began to read more and more left material. I read more and more Mao Tse-tung, and where before I had simply excised his repeated references to his communism in the works, borrowing from him Ron Karenga style, now I would acknowledge his communism and try to understand it. I was trying to make Nkrumah and Cabral our bridges toward learning socialist theory, but I was not convinced that I needed to be a Marxist.

  Socialism obviously was necessary, I had come to that, but how to bring it? What constituted the science of bringing socialism? The phrase “scientific socialism” fascinated me. I heard it more and more around ALSC meetings. The ALSC was really an activist gathering, more so than the NBA. Many of the NBA members were more rooted in reform and electoral politics. The ALSC people were more directly products of the militant ’60s. They were closer to Malcolm X than King and more familiar with an Africa of struggle.

  At some of the ALSC meetings I began to find myself almost like a mediator. I was the head of a cultural nationalist organization, one of the largest in the country, yet I was having some misgivings about my own ideology.

  In South Carolina, at Frogmore, we had a meeting to discuss the ALSC’s Statement of Principles. On one side the nationalists were resisting what they called the “Marxist language” or “left-wing language” of the document. Actually after some discussion in which I wanted to insert how imperialism also committed “cultural aggression,” the language did not bother me so much. I recognized it as “leftist” just as the other nationalists, but I thought the essence, the content, the anti-imperialist essense, of what was being said was correct and I could uphold it. So I took the position of getting the nationalists to agree with the SOP with the few changes we had suggested.

  Two of the CAP leaders, Jitu Weusi from Brooklyn and Haki Madhubuti, the poet from Chicago, agreed in a meeting that they would compromise on the language, but when we got in the general meeting they still resisted, openly contrary to our own discussion. Finally, the discussions reached such intensity that it was agreed that a few months later at another meeting, in Greensboro, North Carolina, we should all submit our overviews of the black struggle in the U.S.

  The more I thought about this later, the more it resembled a setup. The left forces wanted a confrontation and while such struggle must go on in any visible united front, these new left forces took very sectarian positions rather than the necessary stance of unity and struggle.

  At Greensboro, Nelson Johnson, ostensibly with YOBU and closely aligned with Owusu Sadaukai, ALSC’s chairman, and Abdul Alkalimat (Gerald McWorthers before the bourgeois Negores down at Atlanta University got rid of him for steering the youth toward militance) came out with a statement which in essence was a full-blown, though ultimately incorrect, position on the Afro-American national question. The document was clearly the work of much research and study, but unfortunately it was influenced by a so-called Communist organization, the mostly white Revolutionary Union and possibly the Communist Party USA. The document dismissed the idea of a black nation, even belittling black culture as “mostly soul radio.” But what was impressive was the pages of statistics and research. The pamphlet was thick and well presented and made up to look like an official ALSC document.

  It was an ambush on the nationalists, myself among them. The “ALSC cover” I thought reprehensible; it was probably the work of Nelson Johnson who always gives you the feeling of sneaking around, even if he’s standing in your face grinning. I didn’t agree with the liquidation of the black nation or the dismissal of black people’s right to self-determination, but I understood that until we had our own research and serious study done, this pamphlet would have an enormous effect.

  Of course there was struggle in the meeting. Most of the nationalists looked to me to counter the attack, but I was too confused myself to offer much help. I half-believed much of the paper. But the nationalists felt used. The paper, indeed the entire confrontation, had been organized in such a sectarian manner. It dismissed with a wave of the hand most of the people in the ALSC. There was no understanding of the united front character of the ALSC, there were just some young people bellowing that they were right and that everyone else in the ALSC was a fool.

  Quite a few of the nationalists reacted intensely. Even some of those who could have been won over to the positions in the SCP now wanted to resign and many did. The two line struggle that had crept out into the open at Frogmore the year before had now come full out in a steering committee meeting, and it was going to come out even further.

  Since 1972, when I had become chairman of CAP, I had begun to formulate a “Revolutionary Kawaida.” I was trying to emphasize the more revolutionary aspects of Kawaida and introduce more of an emphasis on Pan-Afrikanism and socialism. By March of 1974 I was now openly including elements of Marxism in this “Revolutionary Kawaida,” but I was still unwilling or unable to cut Karenga’s doctrine, at least the main thrust of it, loose.

  The Greensboro meeting showed me, above all, that the old cultural nationalist positions which we upheld were insufficient. And instead of being a leading force in the struggle against the left, I was being won over myself. So that at the same time the right wing was fleeing ALSC and some other forces were driven out by the sectarianism and neophyte “leftism” of some of the new Marxists, we were having a struggle inside CAP.

  CAP was a loosely organized assemblage of Kawaida cadres which formed a national organization. We had worked at building a national unity between the various organizations and some of the more advanced of the city groups did take on a kind of organized national quality. At any rate, we were the best organized of all the cultural nationalist organizations, and we had proven in many different ways that we could do the work. We put out a button, “Kazi is the blackest of all,” referring to the constant struggle of the nationalists as to who was “the blackest,” i.e., the most correct. Kazi, the Swahili word for “work,” we put out was really the most correct, and those of us in the BLM should be about that work. What was that work? Building the nation!

  The various CAP cadres came from different bases. Some were former community organizations, some black arts groups, others part of national civil rights organizations which had gotten disgusted with the reformism of the parent body, still others were groups formed specifically after Atlanta, of young people trying to relate to Kawaida.

  As the two-line struggle that was boiling in the whole movement came up inside CAP, the organization went through rapid changes. At a meeting in Chicago, a midwestern regional meeting of CAP, I read a speech, ”National Liberation and Politics,” which ended by calling for the inclusion of Marx’s theories and the teachings of Lenin and Mao as part of Revolutionary Kawaida. The speech was more of a bombshell than I anticipated. At the end of the meeting, both Jitu Weusi of The East and Haki Madhubuti of Institute for Positive Education resigned. What incensed me par
ticularly about these resignations (and the resignations of those entire cadre organizations from CAP) was the fact that neither man had the honesty to tell me while we were at the regional meeting. I got a letter from Jitu a couple days later, even though we had flown back to New York together. Haki’s letter took a day or so more. I’m sure they had communicated with each other even in Chicago. I answered their letters in public in the newspaper Unity & Struggle, printing my reply in section after section in the newspaper for a year. While much of my criticism of them was accurate, the tone and approach were like beating somebody in the head for disagreeing, the same thing I had accused the Johnson-Alkalimat faction of doing in Greensboro.

  But the struggle between the CAP faction that I represented and Jitu and Haki had been going on sub rosa for most of the period I had been chairman. As long as Hayward Henry and the black nationalists, black humanists, were in the organization, the Kawaida-Pan-Afrikanist faction could unite to criticize Henry and company who we felt were just three strides past being “straight-out Negroes.” But once there was a higher level of national organization unity, namely, Kawaida-Pan-Afrikanism, then the contradictions within that grouping became clearer and clearer.

  Haki, for instance, would take the no-meat vegetarian line all the way out. In the Chicago cadre organization such concerns took on the importance of our principal work. As if we had all joined forces to root out and oppose meat eating. Perhaps the closeness to Chicago’s Black Muslims had some influence, but it became for me more and more an example of black bohemianism, like hippies in blackface. Haki was superior to us only because we stooped to eat fish.

  But the most hilarious confrontation came at one of our steering committee meetings when Haki and company produced a “Survival Kit,” a list based on the writings that Amina had done right after the Newark rebellion describing the things people must have in such an emergency. But now Haki and company took Amina’s ideas further and created a Survival Kit. This survival kit included a bath tub.

  Haki and the Chicago cache were so far into the straight-up black bohemian aspects of cultural nationalism that they spent most of their time thinking about what they could and could not eat. Much of their Survival Kit was a list of herbs one must get and store. What was lost on them is that most of the medicines in the corner drugstore come from these herbs they mentioned and the refined form could be got and stored just the same. Plus, at one point when I was saying in a meeting that we could read Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, that we should read anyone and anything that could hallmark revolution, Haki had objected, but then went on to say that in studying herbs and his Survival Kit he had consulted the works of Jethro Kloss’s Back to Utopia and various white bohemians on weeds and herbs and exotic teas and broths. He’d even gone to some right-wing madman who counseled whites to leave the cities when the final race war breaks out and go into the countryside armed to the teeth and buy land for that purpose and store various items there as preparation for the forthcoming race war.

  I asked why was it that we could read right-wing and bohemian whites, but that white and other nationality revolutionaries were taboo? The speech at the regional meeting had taken it all the way out. But at the same time too much of the move left was occurring in my own head and with only the effects being passed down to the advocates. I was grappling with ideas, desperately searching for some ideological revelation that would square socialism with nationalism. I knew, after a time, that socialism, scientific socialism, had to be the answer economically. We had grasped what we called “cooperative economics” from the beginning of Kawaida, and I had been skirting socialist theory even while I was downtown in the Village. But this was different. I had a great deal of responsibility and I was trying to deal with it, but I was still acting as if I were the only person who had to be convinced or who had to understand. Rather than holding discussions with our leadership and they in turn holding discussions with the rank and file, tried to deal, largely by myself, with my own desire for ideological clarity. I figured that all I had to do was say the word and the whole organization would not only move left but would understand why as well.

  By the spring of 1974, CAP had split open just as the ALSC had. At the National Black Political Convention in April that year, held in Little Rock, I made an address to that convention which openly called for socialist revolution. It stunned quite a few people in the National Political Assembly and at that point I’m certain the more conservative factions in the organization vowed to get me out of the secretary-general’s post.

  That was a wild convention anyway. Saladin, my forward man into Little Rock, was “kidnapped” at gunpoint by some crazy fat nigger named Shelton (who later I heard became a Black Muslim). Shelton saw the convention as a huge pork barrel and he wanted to make sure he and his fellow Little Rock thugs could make all the money with gambling casinos, after-hours spots, and hotels in which they had pre-rented all the rooms which they were going to charge us double for. He thought that we “northern boys” were going to chisel our way into his operations and get all the money.

  To get Sala back we had to assure Shelton that he could make all the money on his various illegal and semilegal deals. But only two thousand people came to the Little Rock convention. This was not a presidential election year, and a lot of the elected officials and people turned on by electoral politics stayed home. So Shelton lost his ass anyway. The last time I saw him he was sweeping down the huge stairs of the convention hall, thousands of dollars in debt, crazy mad and trailed by two or three bodyguards with their pistols hanging out.

  At one point in the convention, when we were debating the postion on Israel, about eight or nine New York delegates came into my office — headed by the professional militants Lloyd Douglas and Omar Ahmed, and several New York antipoverty militants and small-time politicians. I had told the security people to go outside. I knew all these people.

  L.D. began by saying, “Percy [Sutton] told us that if we could get you national guys to cut out the anti-Israel resolution we can get some money for the New York Assembly and even get set up in some offices. We know you guys are getting Arab money for doing this, some Libyan money, we hear.”

  It was funny to me. First, because if Percy had said that, I knew exactly where that was coming from, Abe Beame (mayor of New York) and company. But what also made it slightly more than hilarious was that here were these stomp-down militants wanting to bail Israel out. I told them I knew of no Libyan or other Arab money and that if there was some of it available, they could count me in. I also told him I was voting to uphold the anti-Israel resolution. They stood there in the office, militant by virtue of being a crowd, but it was so funny there was no menace to it at all.

  ”We know you gettin’ some Libyan money,” Douglas repeated. “You need to get us some of that Libyan money!” Some of the shit you couldn’t believe.

  I’m certain, however, that word of the Chicago confrontation and subsequent split in CAP as well as the Little Rock speech shot around movement circles. Baraka had moved to the left. CAP had an internal struggle raised to full public pitch; split in CAP; split in ALSC. In May of that year at Howard University, ALSC held its landmark conference, “Which Way the Black Liberation Movement?” It was a forum to debate frankly and openly the two lines within the Black Liberation movement. Owusu had suggested such a conference and it was meant to benefit the left.

  Stokely Carmichael, Owusu, Muhammad Ahmed of RAM (then African People’s Party), Kwadlo Akpan from PAC of Detroit (a Pan-Afrikanist cultural nationalist organization), Abdul Alkalimat from People’s College, and myself, representing CAP, all made presentations. Unknown to most of us, some of the people in ALSC, whom we connected with Malcom X Liberation University and SOBU and some other formations, had formed a Communist organization, the forerunner of the later Revolutionary Worker’s League. They were in motion even further to the left, but, like myself, they were also making errors.

  The most striking of all the presentations was Owusu’s, becau
se he was saying openly he was no longer a nationalist and Pan-Afrikanist, that he was an anti-imperialist struggling to learn Communist theory. Before that presentation, Carmichael had made a presentation. But the MXLU, SOBU, and RWL people were waiting for him. Stokely had been out of the country, he had stayed out of ALSC and kept his people’s participation in it very marginal. There seemed to be a rivalry between Owusu and Stokely, as if Carmichael was drugged that one of his ex-disciples had jumped ship. I wondered if this was anything like the relationship Karenga and I had now.

  Stokely had been questioned mercilessly by some of the RWL cadre. His “back to Africa” ideology, which he called Nkrumahism, was raked over hot hot coals, one woman calling it “a credit card ideology,” referring to Stokely’s many trips back and forth to Africa. But Stokely, Carmichael to the end, posed and profiled and mocked the audience. He still had partisans in the crowd, but the tide had swung toward the left. Stokely fought back but many in the audience were laughing at him.

  Owusu’s presentation was met with a standing ovation. Alkalimat’s was the presentation that was the most clearly based on Marxist theory, and as such it was the most orderly presentation, with the most reference to consistent scientific analysis. This also was very well received, because many of us in that audience were leaning heavily in that direction.