by Jamal Joseph
“I’m going anyway,” I said, reaching for the doorknob.
Joyce threw herself against the door and blocked my way. “You can’t go,” she yelled.
“Why not?” I responded.
“Because it might not be firecrackers down there. It might be guns.”
I paced in front of the door. Panther in a cage. Feeling more trapped in my Harlem apartment than I did in my Leavenworth cell. “I have to do something,” I declared, pleading at the same time.
Joyce grabbed a pen and paper and shoved it at me, desperately trying to calm the caged Panther down. “Then write, just write.”
I sat on the hallway floor, and a poem flowed from my troubled heart to the page, all about my frustration, and the inevitability of more death on the streets of Harlem, and the urgent need to try to do something, any something that could break the cycle of fear and death.
I continued to work two, sometimes three, jobs and performed community theater on the weekends. My big break in theater came when Charles Dutton, a very talented actor who had served time in prison before attending Yale Drama School, introduced me to Voza Rivers.
Voza was the executive producer of Harlem’s New Heritage Theatre, founded by Roger Furman. Voza had produced hundreds of plays and concerts, including Sarafina!, which was then running on Broadway. He did a staged reading of my play 30 Days and a Wake Up at the Schomburg, costarring Charles Dutton and Joyce Walker Joseph, my wife. After that there were readings and productions of my plays around the city, and I won several awards, including a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in playwriting.
A friend from the Panthers named Tony Rodgers took me to breakfast a few months after I was first released from prison. Tony was then a vice president at City College and a cofounder of Harlem Week, along with Lloyd Williams. Tony told me about a job opening at the Harlem campus of Touro College.
“Tony, I have a record,” I said, doubting the job lead.
“But you have a college degree,” Tony said. “University of Kansas, summa cum laude.” Tony laughed and made me promise to submit my résumé.
Panther founder Bobby Seale told me that whenever he got a job, the FBI would show up the next day and scare the people who had hired him by talking about his Black Panther affiliation. I wrote up a résumé and put my Black Panther membership and time in Leavenworth under “Additional Experience.” Might as well lay it all out rather than have the FBI get me fired before I even started the gig.
To my surprise, my job application and initial interview got me a second interview, this time with Stephen Adolphus, the dean of Touro’s School of General Studies. He was a distinguished-looking white academic, with glasses, a vest, and a serious manner. He, of course, went right to the “Additional Experience” part of my résumé.
“Mr. Joseph, I see you spent time in prison.”
“Yes, and as you can see I graduated with highest honors in psychology and sociology,” I said, trying to steer him back to the good points of my résumé.
“And you were really a member of the Black Panther Party?” he pressed.
“Yes, and I was a counselor at Infinity House Drug Program and day camp director at the Settlement House,” once again trying to steer him.
“So you really understand the community. If we hired you as a recruitment counselor, you could really get out there in a grassroots sort of way and find students.” It turned out that Dean Adolphus had used Soul on Ice and The Autobiography of Malcolm X when he was an English professor at the State University of New York, and he pioneered prison college programs when he worked for the New York State Board of Regents.
He hired me on the spot, and I worked for Touro College for seven years as a counselor, director of student activities, and professor. Our family grew to three when Joyce gave birth to our daughter, Jindai.
I worked with Laurie Meadoff, Malik Yoba, and Kate Hillis at the City Kids Foundation, using theater arts to empower kids to create stories of personal experience, leadership, and social change. City Kids was located in Tribeca, in lower Manhattan, but it attracted teenagers from all over the city.
I began writing and directing educational films and documentaries. Michelle Satter, the director of the Sundance Film Institute, gave me a chance to spend a summer at its Utah facilities as a directing fellow. Many of the people who mentored my film have become lifelong friends, including Alice Arlen, Jim Hart, Scott Frank, and James Schamus.
In 1998, James Schamus and Lewis Cole gave me an opportunity to teach screenwriting at Columbia University. There I became part of a gifted and dedicated faculty and have had the pleasure of working with some amazing students, including Randy Dottin and Simon Kinberg, and I became the first African American chair of the Film Program in the School of the Arts.
In 1997 Andre, a sixteen-year-old man-child who grew up in our building, was killed at a party in Harlem. He confronted a young gunslinger who had disrespected his sister, and the gunslinger shot Andre.
Andre’s mother supported her family as a secretary. She was mother and father to her children, teaching them to value education and hard work. When she got news of her son’s death, her apartment became too small to contain her grief. She ran out to the street and wailed.
Joyce and the other women from our building surrounded her, held her, and consoled her. The men from our building stood a few feet away, watching helplessly as another black mother mourned the loss of her son. This could have been Alabama during slavery, Mississippi after a lynching, or South Africa during apartheid—but this was Harlem. This was my home. This was now. I felt angry and impotent.
I was still in mourning from the death of my godson, Tupac Shakur, who had been killed in Las Vegas a year earlier. Tupac called me Uncle Jamal, and we had been close since he was a little boy. He visited my karate dojo when he was young and liked to spar with the biggest students in class. He would amaze us with his poems and rhymes and thoughts about life, politics, and the black struggle for liberation. By the time I returned from prison, Tupac was performing with the rap group Digital Underground and about to embark on his solo music and acting career. We would get together and talk for hours about everything, from Bruce Lee to Malcolm X.
Our ongoing battle was over “thug life,” a concept and movement Tupac had started.
Essentially, thug life was a celebration of young brothers who hustled, gangbanged, and lived outside the law to survive. “Pac, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, George Jackson, and Bobby Seale were thugs who became politically aware and became leaders of the movement,” I would argue. “You are a Black Panther cub who grew up in the movement; why are you headed the other way?”
“Uncle Jamal, I just got to keep it real with street soldjas who kept it real with me,” Tupac would counter. “When I was on the street, trying to survive, it was the thugs who showed me love.” Tupac believed his mission was to make his art speak everyone’s truth, from the thugs and the welfare mothers to the heroes of the movement.
When I heard that Tupac had been shot in the lobby of Quad Recording Studio in Manhattan, I rushed to see him at Bellevue Hospital. Police, press, and fans were massed in front of the hospital; hospital security officers blocked my way in the lobby. “Let Jamal through,” Gloria Jean, Tupac’s aunt, yelled. “He’s family.” One of the smaller waiting rooms had been set up for Tupac’s family and close associates. About twenty-five of us were there, standing vigil, waiting to be part of the next group of four to go to Tupac’s bedside.
I was near the elevator with Tupac’s mother, Afeni, and Glo about to go up to his room when the doors opened and Tupac limped off, bandaged and bloody. I grabbed a wheelchair and we sat him down. “Pac, what are you doing?”
“I don’t want to stay here. They’re trying to kill me.”
We wheeled him into the waiting room. Afeni tried to convince him to go back to his room, but he refused. “Jamal, you talk to him,” Afeni asked.
I knelt by the wheelchair and placed my forehead against Tupac�
�s. It was a private gesture of affection we had made up when he was little. “Pac, you’re wounded and you’re bleeding. We will stay with you around the clock, but you need a doctor’s care,” I pleaded.
“I don’t want to stay here, Uncle Jamal. You can take me someplace else, but I don’t want to stay here.” Tupac’s mind was set. Watani (Tupac’s manager), Afeni, and I wrapped Tupac in a blanket and began to move him toward the door.
A black hospital security sergeant blocked our way. “He can’t leave,” the sergeant ordered in a Caribbean accent.
“Is he under arrest?” I asked.
“No, but he can’t leave,” the sergeant insisted.
I pulled the sergeant to the side. “Sir, look around you,” I said calmly. “There are ten or so former Black Panthers, ten Fruit of Islam security men, and ten young street soldiers. Don’t tell us we can’t leave. Kindly bring us the form so Mr. Shakur can sign himself out, and I would appreciate if you would escort us to the back door so we can avoid the press and the fans.” My account of those present was close enough for the sergeant to get the point. He came back with the forms, and we whisked Tupac out the back of the hospital and into a waiting car.
A few weeks later Tupac was back in Bellevue, this time in the prison ward. He had been convicted of sexual misconduct after being acquitted of more serious rape and assault charges. Tupac always maintained his innocence. He said he was asleep in a different room when other people in his entourage got involved with the young woman who had brought the charges. My paralegal ID got me through security at the hospital and into a private booth with Tupac. He was still limping from his wounds, but he looked strong. He wore a blue prison jumpsuit.
We hugged, touched foreheads, and sat down to talk. “Uncle Jamal, before you start,” Tupac said in anticipation that I might continue our ongoing debate about thug life, “let me tell you a story. They brought in a nineteen-year-old brother to the prison ward from a jail upstate because he needs a hernia operation. He sees me and bugs out. ‘Damn Tupac, it’s you. You’re my hero!’ he said. I told him time out and asked why was I his hero? And he said, ‘You be gettin’ all the money, you be gettin’ all the bitches, you be shootin’ at the police!’ I stepped back and thought for a moment. ‘If that’s why I’m your hero, then I don’t need to be anybody’s hero,’ I told him.”
Tupac said that in that moment he realized that thug life was dead. He wanted to use his fame to create youth centers around the country where kids could get free training in creative arts and leadership. Pac told me that he was done smoking weed and drinking because they had clouded his thinking and made him “act out” in ways he regretted. “I’m going to deal with my inner peace and sobriety one day at time, the way Mommy does,” he said, referring to Afeni.
Tupac also told me he was going to die. “They have to kill me,” he said, “because I’m a Shakur. My only choice is whether I go out like Malcolm X or like Tony Montana from Scarface. And I’ve decided I want to go out like Malcolm X.” I told Tupac that he shouldn’t claim an early death as inevitable, especially since he was talking about so many positive things. I had also prophesied my own warrior’s death by age eighteen, and here I was brainstorming with Tupac about film, music, and theater projects as well as arts programs for the youth.
Unfortunately, Tupac’s prophecy would come true eighteen months later. He was released from prison after eight months and immediately began to live and create at a velocity that is impossible to imagine. By the time he was killed, only a few months later, Tupac had recorded hundreds of songs, filmed movies and music videos, performed concerts, written essays and screenplays, created plans for his youth arts centers, and launched the One Nation project to end the dangerous feuding in hip-hop.
There was a group of teenage boys in Harlem who called themselves “25 to Life,” because they believed they would be dead or in jail before they were twenty-five. It’s what they saw all around them—fathers, uncles, older brothers, all going to jail or being murdered. Their negative projections were reinforced by songs, music videos, and films that showed young black men dying on the streets after trying to survive “by keeping it real.” Their belief was memorialized by Tupac’s life, who was killed when he was twenty-five.
I told Tupac death would not take him, yet it did, I thought weeks later as I stood with men from my building helplessly watching the women cry over the murder of young Andre. Another senseless, violent death. Maybe there was more I could have said or done for Tupac, I thought, just as maybe there was more I could have done for Andre. I was helping to run a youth program in downtown Manhattan. What about in Harlem where I live? I thought. If Andre, or perhaps even the boy who shot him, were in a creative arts workshop instead of out partying or doing drugs on the street, then maybe Andre would be alive.
These pointless deaths had to stop. I knew I had to do something, I had to fight the battle right here in Harlem where I lived, and I knew what my weapons would be.
I went to Voza with the idea of starting a creative arts and leadership program in Harlem, knowing that the money to support it wouldn’t come from the city. Mayor Giuliani had cut much of the funding for arts programs in the schools. I knew the power of arts to effect change from my experiences of Leavenworth, and more recently from working with City Kids. Voza agreed to help me, and we each took money from our own bank accounts and started IMPACT Repertory Theatre. Joyce and Alice Arlen were part of our initial founding team. Raymond Johnson and Courtney Bennett soon joined us, bringing their ideas and energy to the founding circle.
IMPACT started in the basement of Minisink Townhouse in Harlem with nine young people, including Jamal Jr., Jad, and Jindai. That was more than fourteen years ago, and since then a thousand kids have passed through the program, in the process gaining a sense of themselves as young artists and leaders through music, dance, drama, and film. Many of these young people have since gone to college and grad school and are following careers in medicine, law, education, and counseling. IMPACT alumni come back to teach and mentor current members. We started out with the idea for a program to help individuals and in the process have built a community of artistic change.
IMPACT has presented hundreds of shows at venues ranging from schools, prisons, shelters, and community centers all the way to the Apollo Theater, New York’s Public Theater, and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Jim Hart, Richard Lewis, and Kirsten Sheridan gave IMPACT a chance to play the role of a gospel choir in the movie August Rush. We asked Richard, the producer, and Kirsten, the director, if we could write the song for our segment. They agreed and the song, “Raise It Up,” was nominated for an Academy Award.
Although I was one of the official nominees, along with Tevin Thomas and Charles Mack, I always have contended that the nomination belonged to IMPACT. Our songs are created in a group laboratory, by a staff of young people, which for “Raise It Up” included Ray Jay, Dietrice, Antwon, Michelle, and Chapella.
And the real joy of the Academy Award nomination was standing on stage and performing the song with thirty young people from Harlem accompanied by Jamia Nash at the 2008 Oscars, telecast around the world for millions of people to see.
Bobby Seale once said when he and Huey Newton started the Black Panther Party, they carried both shotguns and law books because those were the weapons of dynamic social change. If they were starting the organization now, however, Panthers would be patrolling the streets with video cameras and laptop computers, because those are the relevant weapons of change for today.
We must continue to fight for our youth and change and, if necessary, wage that fight for change in militant and revolutionary ways. Our young people must know that they stand on the shoulders of people like Rosa Parks, Dr. King, Malcolm X, members of the Black Panther Party, and so many others. They must know that the true motivation for anything has to begin with love and that the right strategy for success includes service and dedication.
Looking back, I am proud of all that I’ve accompli
shed, all that I’ve done. I made mistakes along the way, but I remained true to my vision and to the tenets instilled in me by Noonie and the other positive influences in my life. I want the same for my children, who I’m proud to say are all in Ivy League schools, getting an education that will prepare them for the future.
I’m reminded of the irony of this turn of events whenever I walk by the large statue of Alma Mater that stands in front of Low Library in the middle of the Columbia campus. She looks down at me with a look that says, “So it’s Professor Joseph now, huh? I remember when you were a young Panther and all you wanted to do was burn this damn place down or die trying. Well, we both survived, and here we are. Maybe there’s a future after all.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Boundless thanks for the hard work and energy of Jared Hoffman, Stephanie Abou, Julian Riley, Lainie Cooke.
The support and encouragement of Joyce, Reggie Rock Bythewood, Afeni Shakur, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Malik Yoba, James Schamus, Pastor Michael A. Walrond Jr., Carol Becker, Jana Wright, Nile Rodgers, Felipe Luciano, Kathleen Cleaver, Dr. Joseph Harris, Alice Arlen, Voza Rivers, Scott Frank, Lloyd Williams, Tony Rogers, Steve Adolphus, Jim Hart, Laurie Meadoff, William Mogulescu, Ellis Haizlip, Lewis Cole.
The family love of Jay Jr., Jindai, Jad, Elba, Luis, Miguel, Myrna, Juan Carlos, Christian, Evelyn, Claire, Bishop Snipes, Aunt Nina, nieces, nephews, grands, Roalh, Mike H., Courtney, Tevin, Charles M., Ray Jay, Dietrice, Luther, Emilia, Sekyiwa, Tony Ricco, Jamala, Glo, impact, the Order of the Feather, Tapawingo, Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., Lewis Hayden no. 69, First Corinthian Baptist Church.
The sacrifice and commitment of Bullwhip, Claudia, Wonda, Mark, Kim, Brad, Diane, Brenda, Itelia, Lynn, Safiyah, Bashir, Malika, Ila, Butch, Tony, Stephanie, Sister Love, Marie, Cynthia, Brenda, Cathy, Frankie, Nicky, J. T., Omar, B. J., Yasmin, Cleo, Billy X, Vanessa, Ashanti, Gaylord, Shep, Tymon, Ronnie, Rahim, Cleo, Dee, Rosemarie, Denise Oliver, Nat Shanks.
And all the members of the Black Panther Party rank and file who were the heart of the movement.