B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK

by Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa

  the nation’s number one Black Nationalist, and the foremost proponent of the Marcus Garvey postulations; Administrator of the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement, editor of the erstwhile Street Speaker magazine, and one of the two deans of the Harlem street speakers. He contended that black men had nuclear weapons in ancient Africa and by the use of them desiccated the land, producing the Sahara Desert.

  The same book explained that this claim was part of Cooks’s effort of convincing Negroes of their innate ability to do big things now and in the future. Cooks and his fellow orators at African Square speak of great Negroes of long ago, and tell of magnificent performances by dark souls in African states of antiquity. Commenting on the excavation of pharaonic tombs in Egypt, Cooks noted the deaths of several scientists involved. They were not, he said, the result of the “Pharaoh’s Curse” or some word-magic effected by inscriptions on the tombs. According to Cooks, the reason was the presence of nuclear fission within the burial chambers. When the explorers opened and entered them, their bodies became radioactive and this brought about their death.

  Cooks’s ideas on ancient nuclear physics were a minor part of his presence and influence. Born in the Dominican Republic in 1913, Cooks immigrated to New York, where he founded the ANPM in 1941. He led the group until his death, in 1966. During his quarter century as a political personality, he seems to have enjoyed a level of local celebrity that, despite his penchant for the world-historical, never transcended the borders of Harlem. Indeed, most writing about Cooks by his acolytes emphasizes the lack of attention paid to his work while he lived and to his legacy in death. He is mourned as one who never got his due and described with a level of hyperbole intended to assert his place in history: Carlos Cooks was to Black Nationalism what John Coltrane was to the so-called avant-garde “jazz”, and what Aretha is to soul music; the prime progenitor among their respective peers. But he was robbed of this recognition because he was denied national coverage—by white and “Black” press—and was bound by an oath (the sacri) not to seek publicity for himself.

  Perhaps Cooks would not have tolerated that coverage—that publicity—if it had been granted him, and certainly he would not have trusted it. His own newsletters, Street Speaker and The Black Challenge, would have been publicity enough, providing an outlet for Cooks and his cohort to write on various topics both contemporary (one issue reprinted a speech of Sékou Touré to the United Nations on the subject of the sovereignty of African nations) and historical (Zimbabwe was in its noonday of culture and refinement two thousand years before the Germanic Tribes abolished the gruesome practice of feasting on the flesh of their conquered dead).

  The latter-day African Nationalist Pioneers strive to keep the memory of Carlos A. Cooks alive. The Contributions of Carlos Cooks include, apart from founding the ANPM and its newsletter: a merchant organization known as the African Pioneering Syndicate, Inc.; a resettlement organization, the African Colonization Society; the Universal African Relief, a charity arm; an African Communities League; the African Nationalist Legion, which was the military arm of the race; the School of African Culture and Fundamentalism; the Nationalist Social Club; and the production of Orthodox African Nationalist Literature. Cooks also presided over annual celebrations of Marcus Garvey’s birthday; an African Freedom Day held in January to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation and the anniversaries of various African independence declarations also celebrated in that month; and the Miss Natural Standard of Beauty Contest, held in conjunction with the Marcus Garvey Day celebrations, a unique and rare contest designed to help restore pride and self-confidence in the heavily inferior-minded Black woman who falsely believes that the white woman (and all other women) is more beautiful than the Black woman.

  Some of these accomplishments were achieved only in theory. Their fate as part of Cooks’s legacy is sealed in another of his contributions: the Marcus Garvey Memorial Building. Planned as a headquarters for the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement, the building was to serve as a stone monument that will spiritually testify to the admiration and respect that the Black people of Harlem and throughout the world have for the life, efforts, deeds, doctrine and memory of Garvey. The date, day, and time of a 1962 groundbreaking ceremony is recorded, along with its position on a site located on the south side of 141st Street, approximately 100 feet east of Eighth Avenue, Harlem, New York.

  After breaking ground, Cooks postponed the official launch of all ANPM programming until the building’s completion. But by the time of Cooks’s death, it was only two-thirds constructed. The building, a ruin before its time, was demolished by the city in the 1970s. Consequently, the programs of the ANPM were never launched and remain unfinished business for the African Nationalists. The erection of the Marcus Garvey Memorial Building or its equivalent is also unfinished business for the African Nationalist.

  Lacking a physical home, Cooks’s movement found shelter under the still-erect pillar of his most frequently articulated aim:

  We submit that the Black people of Harlem and all other Homogeneous African communities, have the same natural and moral right to be clannish in their patronage as all other people have dramatised that they are. We advocate as a matter of sound racial economics, the BUY BLACK CAMPAIGN.

  Patronize the merchants of your own race. Build a solvent foundation for your children. Help create employment and independence for your race.

  Buy Black was the enduring cause of the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement, and in Harlem, the Chief was its main booster. He could be found most Saturdays at the same spot beneath the Powell monument, passing out flyers and holding court before a posse of supporters and protégés.

  When we met, the Chief explained that the campaign was only the first action of an extensive movement for self-determination. He asked me which movement I was a part of. I told him I was not a part of any movement. He asked what my platform was. I fumbled for an answer, saying something about liberation, and then confessed that I had none, but that I was a writer and that I was from Texas. One or both of these facts caused him to pursue his initial line of questioning with greater fervor—the Chief was even more convinced that I should have an urgent and articulate platform. I was, after all, from a place where a black man had recently been tied to the back of a truck and dragged along a country road until his limbs were torn from his body. I was from a state where a small-town drug bust had resulted in the arrest of 15 percent of the town’s black population on suspicion of involvement in a drug ring. These more spectacular and egregious acts, the Chief informed me, could be joined by other more mundane atrocities. But since my place of birth and my chosen vocation had not inspired in me a form of political engagement that could be expressed as a slogan, the Chief gave up and began to give me a history quiz.

  He asked me what I knew about Juneteenth. I told him it was the day, celebrated in Texas, when slaves finally learned the news of the Emancipation Proclamation, more than two years after it had been ratified. I told him how, as a child, I’d been taught (or had been half-listening and misheard what I was taught) that it had taken two years for the news to reach Texas. I did not tell him that this was a holiday about which I’d always felt ambivalent. Two extra years of slavery had always seemed a dismal cause for celebration.

  That last bit would not have impressed him any more than the first part of my answer did. He told me I was wrong. He told me I had absorbed a rather benign if not fraudulent version of the events of June 19, 1865. The belated emancipation in Texas could not be blamed on the poor service of the Pony Express. Confederate slaveholders in Texas had refused to recognize Lincoln’s proclamation, so Juneteenth celebrated the date when a general of the Union Army landed at Galveston with a phalanx of 1,800 soldiers to take possession of the state and enforce the order. The Chief lingered on this last detail, emphasizing the necessity of military force to assert the liberty of my ancestors in Texas.

  I thanked him for the corrective history and said I’d read up on it. He told me that w
hen we next met, he expected me to have a platform.

  A person in search of a platform could hardly find a better spot than the setting of my encounter with the Chief. The Adam Clayton Powell statue faces southwest, across from the Hotel Theresa. The hotel is famous for hosting Fidel Castro during his postrevolutionary visit to New York, after Castro was unsatisfied with his reception by a downtown hotel. The Theresa was briefly the headquarters of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, founded by Malcolm X about a year before his assassination, after he broke with Elijah Muhammad and returned from Mecca. Its mission was modeled after the Pan-African platform of the Organization of African Unity, connecting the U.S. struggle to the circumstances of blacks across the diaspora.

  Before Nelson Rockefeller’s office tower was built, the corner had been a congregation point for soapbox orators. The confluence of those speakers and Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore had earned it the name Harlem Square or African Square. Aside from a regular cast of street speakers, the intersection was also the setting for mass rallies featuring speeches by Powell, Malcolm X, and Kwame Nkrumah, among others.

  Currently, African Square is also the place where the Brooklyn-based Pan-Africanist group the December 12th Movement and the Malcolm X Millennium Committee each year convene a “Black Power March” on the leader’s birthday, May 19, enforcing a three-hour shutdown of all businesses on 125th Street (and boycotting those establishments that refuse to close). On the same day, the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee organizes a caravan of buses that leave from African Square on an annual pilgrimage from Harlem to Woodlawn Cemetery in Queens, where a graveside ceremony is held to honor the man, who, after pilgrimage to Mecca, took on the formal designation of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.

  Just a few blocks away, on 129th Street, is the former Elks Lodge where, in 1925, A. Philip Randolph held a meeting of five hundred railway workers, organizing them in defiance of the Pullman Company. The men became the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first African American labor union, under the motto Fight or Be Slaves.

  Adam Clayton Powell Jr. launched one of his most famous crusades a few blocks from the spot. The “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign was a boycott that forced white merchants on 125th Street to hire blacks as shop attendants. And in the 1940s, Powell led a “black-out” boycott against Consolidated Edison Electric and Gas, successfully forcing them to hire blacks by organizing Harlem residents to abandon the use of electricity once a week. Participants in the campaign lit their dwellings with candles. Later, the effort culminated by converging on the Con Ed premises on 125th Street in a “Bill-Payers’ Parade,” where marchers appeared at the office en masse to pay bills with pennies.

  But that was all in the past. In the present, I could find a platform on posters covering store windows, and from flyers pressed into my hands or picked up from the pavement. All of these beckoned toward protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, but most of all, they announced meetings. They offered urgent information bulletins:

  The Frederick Samuels North End Merchants store owners between 142nd and 147th on Seventh Avenue are losing their stores!

  They put forward fiery exhortations:

  Fight to Save the Record Shack… We say Harlem is ours, we will not be moved! The Record Shack Must Stay! Renew the Lease!

  They suggested boycotts and mass actions that never took root:

  Don’t buy at H&M.

  Every item you purchase at H&M helps to evict black shoppers and their families from Harlem. 10,000 Black families have been evicted from Harlem in the last ten years.

  SAVE HARLEM!!

  To protest the destruction of the black capital of the world and the cruel, heartless evictions of our poor black brothers and sisters from their homes, apartments and small businesses in Harlem,

  HANG A TOWEL IN PROTEST OUT OF YOUR WINDOW TODAY!

  Shame America! Let the World See an Ocean of Towels Hanging from Every Apartment and Every Black Business in Harlem

  There were signs posted in front of Bobby’s Happy House, where the ninety-year-old proprietor of the oldest black-owned business in Harlem had been evicted, along with several other commercial tenants, as a result of the largest single-parcel real estate deal in Harlem, valued at about $30 million. The high dollar value was not the only remarkable thing about that transaction. At meetings activists exhorted the public to investigate rumors that the real estate broker behind the deal and the property owner benefiting from the sale and the evictions were one and the same person. That person was also president of the 125th Street Business Improvement District, an organization of business owners with strong ties to Harlem politicians.

  KIMCO MUST GO

  PROTEST CORPORATE TAKEOVER OF HARLEM

  Rally against ethnic cleansing of long standing black owned business on 125th and throughout Harlem

  In Unity and Militancy we can save the soul of black businesses in Harlem and end the economic siege of our community. Show your support its now or never.

  Another sign carried an unusually plaintive call to action, notable because it was unattached to any specific building under threat. Besides the “NYC Council” and “Your House of Worship Leader,” it did not identify any particular actors to blame. It did not bear the name of any organization to join, or the date of a rally to attend—the crisis was general and the siege ongoing.

  A Plea to the tenants of Harlem

  Don’t let yourself be pushed out of your apartment by the constantly increasing RENT Hike

  Call your House of Worship leader

  Or call the NYC Council

  Tell them “The extortionist rents and mass eviction warrants must stop now!”

  You Vote!

  You Pray!

  You have power

  Use your power

  To save your home in Harlem

  It was because of such signs that I began to attend meetings. They were held in church sanctuaries and anterooms, school auditoriums and community centers.

  PUBLIC HEARING

  “HARLEM IS NOT FOR SALE”

  Sale Price 1 million @ 10% Down

  Can you afford to live here?

  NO!

  STAND UP AND FIGHT!

  SAVE HARLEM’S HISTORY, CULTURE,

  SMALL BUSINESSES AND HOUSING

  LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD!

  The Oberia Dempsey Multiservice Center was nearly filled to capacity. It was the first presentation of the city’s plan to rezone 125th Street, an initiative known as the River-to-River plan because the changes would sweep the corridor from Broadway to Second Avenue between 124th and 126th Streets. The meeting was hosted by the Community Board representing Central Harlem (no. 10) and attended by representatives of the Department of City Planning. The thousand-page rezoning document was distilled into a slide presentation. The main objective of the rezoning was to transform the commercial district into a residential area and to revise prevailing codes restricting density and height, allowing the construction of high-rise luxury condominiums. By the city’s own estimate, the rezoning would increase the residential capacity of 125th Street by 750 percent. The majority of this housing would be market-rate, but developers had the option to include affordable housing, with the incentive that any developer offering a certain number of affordable housing units would be rewarded with permission to build even more luxury or market-rate units.

  Another incentive offered to developers was an “arts and culture” bonus, in which developers were similarly rewarded with more market-rate units if their buildings included space that could be rented as galleries, performance spaces, studios, or offices for artistic organizations. The representative from the city planning department put it thusly: We’ve been told that arts and culture are important up here, so there are going to be restaurants and cultural venues. A community member in the audience grumbled in response: Arts and culture don’t pay the bills. Another suggested that the arts and culture bonus would lead to a situation where black cult
ure was celebrated in Harlem but no black people actually lived there anymore. A long line of residents stood at a microphone to denounce the plan, the testimonies growing more and more heated. One man suggested that there have been riots before in Harlem’s past, and there can be riots again. Another man wore a T-shirt that read HARLEM IS NOT FOR SALE BECAUSE HARLEM’S ALREADY BEEN SOLD. He named the local politicians and businessmen he claimed were responsible, then left the mic to hover close to the urban planners seated at a dais in the front of the room. He looked each in the eye and then said: Whatever you build, we’ll burn it down.

  The auditorium erupted in shouts. The community board member at the helm of the meeting admonished the crowd like a bunch of unruly children, threatening to shut the meeting down. No one settled down. The meeting was abruptly ended. A young woman from city planning was in tears.

  A small sign on West 138th Street just off Lenox Avenue marks the spot where Marcus Mosiah Garvey convened his first gathering on American soil. The location was a meeting hall of St. Mark’s Roman Catholic Church. The sign itself is unassuming, hardly doing justice to the aims Garvey unveiled there in May 1916. I told them in Harlem that it was my duty to reunite the Negroes of the Western world with the Negroes of Africa, to make a great nation of black men. Garvey had founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities (Imperial) League (UNIA) two years earlier in Kingston, Jamaica, soon after returning from a stint in London, where he’d polished his political chops as an orator at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. Within a few years of arriving in America, Garvey claimed UNIA membership had reached the millions, galvanized by the soaring rhetoric on display in such writing as “An Inspiring Vision”:

  So Negroes, I say, through the Universal Negro Improvement Association, that there is much to live for. I have a vision of the future, and I see before me a picture of a redeemed Africa, with her dotted cities, with her beautiful civilization, with her millions of happy children, going to and fro. Why should I lose hope? Why should I give up and take a back place in this age of progress? Remember that you are men, that God created you Lords of this creation. Lift up yourselves, men, take yourselves out of the mire and hitch your hopes to the stars; yes, rise as high as the very stars themselves. Let no man pull you down, let no man destroy your ambition, because man is but your companion, your equal; man is your brother; he is not your lord; he is not your sovereign master.