B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK

by Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa

  At meetings, people often say, We have sweat equity in Harlem. The reason for this is, We have paid for it with our blood.

  But a blood payment and sweat equity were not what the Reverend W. W. Brown of Metropolitan Baptist Church had in mind during the earliest days of the Harlem Renaissance, when—according to James Weldon Johnson—Reverend Brown’s Sunday sermons began to instruct his parishioners not only on the dimensions of the kingdom of heaven or the mystical capacities of sin-cleansing blood, but on one simple necessity of their lives as black people living under white supremacy and American capitalism: Buy Property! It was a sacrament that mixed spiritual salvation with the earthly deliverance of the race.

  A few decades later, another minister, Malcolm X, said it differently in his “Message to the Grassroots”: Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.

  Revolution was not launched from the land mentioned in a recent article in the Amsterdam News, where the ongoing political-cum-theological debate over property and equity and blood and deliverance arrived at a quite different resolution. Suddenly, the commandment was not to acquire land but to relinquish it, to the highest bidder. The pastor of the Church of the Master, on Morningside Drive in the 120s, announced the demolition of its 115-year-old premises. The land beneath the church was sold to the developer of a condominium block whose residences would likely be out of reach for the minister or his flock. The announcement included date and time of the demolition, promoted as a spectacle.

  During that winter of meetings, a woman known as Arapha Speaks, who sometimes refers to herself as the Cussin’ Preacher, established residence in a series of cardboard boxes fixed together near the base of the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. statue in front of the State Office Building. She identified each house by its number, according to the order in which it was built and the order of its destruction. She was continually being turned out of her houses, their contents seized and the structures demolished. At a community meeting convened to mourn and respond to the police murder of a young unarmed man shot in the back on the grounds of housing projects named for Harlem’s congressman at the time (who remained silent on the Columbia expansion and the rezoning of 125th Street), Arapha Speaks exhorted the assembly to take a stand. Are you willing to come up out of your houses? she asked. We were, she said, in as much danger of being turned out of our brick-and-mortar houses as she was from her cardboard ones. We had to be willing to be out-of-doors, without refuge, in order to preserve Harlem. She envisioned a movement in the form of a spiritual Exodus; she would lead midnight prayer meetings in the State Office Plaza, by the Powell statue. It was, she said, the only way to turn back the malevolent forces behind the destruction of her homes and the threat of Harlem’s obliteration.

  At one of those hearings, I met a man who grew impatient when I expressed incredulity at his casual anecdote about a church that, in the 1980s or early 1990s, had been entrusted with the development of its own plot of land in addition to a number of brownstone houses. The houses had been acquired during the mythic era—immortalized by real estate journalists and speakers at community meetings—when brownstones in Harlem were being sold by the city for a dollar. The construction of that particular church had never come to pass—supposedly, the money was embezzled. The shell of the church’s half-built future home was still standing on Lenox Avenue at 131st when I arrived in Harlem—it resembled the ruin of a cathedral I’d seen in Berlin. Bombed during the Allies’ air war, its rubble was left standing as if the strike had just occurred yesterday, both a memorial and a reminder to the German people of their sin. But on Lenox Avenue, there was no trace, no atonement: the property was developed into a condominium. For a few months, the tenant in the building’s ground-floor retail space was a black-owned car dealership specializing in Bentleys and other exotic luxury cars.

  When I pressed for details about the spectacular failure of that ruined church, he shrugged his shoulders and gave the vaguest details about who absconded with the money. It’s all well known, he said, this is all common knowledge. But the era of profligacy had come to an end. He invoked an image from the Bible that was equal in force but directly opposite to that earlier mention of Exodus. He said it was as if we had been forty years in the desert and our time in the wilderness was just about to end.

  All of this leaves quite a few unanswered questions.

  Which is more valuable, “sweat equity” or actual equity, such as the kind mobilized by that preacher when he sold his church’s land to developers?

  Does the legend of the one-dollar brownstone bring shame upon all in Harlem who did not purchase when the getting was good, or does the story unravel when you consider the minor detail that many would not have been able to afford to renovate or insure such a building because of red-lining practices by mortgage and insurance companies?

  Do the people of Harlem stand with forty years of wilderness stretched out in front of us, or is deliverance close at hand, the Exodus already at our backs?

  Brothers and sisters, countrymen

  You’d better get on board.

  Six steam ships want to sail away

  Loaded with a heavy load.

  It’s gonna take us all back home.

  Yes every native child,

  And when we get there

  What a time…

  Get on board the Countryman

  Get on board to leave this land

  Get on board the Countryman

  Come along ’cause the water’s fine

  Flying home on the Black Star Line.

  Depending on who tells the story, the Black Star Line was either Marcus Garvey’s most visionary Pan-African program or his greatest hoax. In 1919, Garvey launched his dream: the first black-owned shipping line to ply the seas, with black captains at the helm. It would refigure the old triangular trade between Africa, the Caribbean, and America. This new version would bypass Europe, and its cargo would be liberatory economic self-determination instead of slaves, cotton, rum, and sugar. Beyond goods, the Black Star Line would carry Garveyites back to Africa. Members of the UNIA flocked to support the endeavor, pledging at least $500,000 in stock certificates purchased at $5 apiece. The first ship was the SS Frederick Douglass. It was a reconditioned World War I navy ship, and it was a poor beginning for the shipping company. Worth only $25,000, the ship was sold to Garvey’s agents for $165,000 and then required a further $200,000 in repairs. In his own defense, Garvey later asserted that his appointed captain had profited from the payment on the ship. Another vessel, the SS Antonio Maceo, named for the Afro-Cuban general, was inaugurated with a celebration at one of Harlem’s piers. During its maiden voyage, it suffered a mechanical failure at sea that killed a crew member; it had to be towed into port. As for the Black Star Line’s contribution to commerce, one voyage allegedly carried a cargo of tropical fruit that rotted because Garvey insisted that it make ceremonial stops at ports of call around the Caribbean. Another ship made a dramatic embarkment from the Hudson River, only to deposit its passengers a few miles north on what was deemed the cruise to nowhere.

  A letter published in the October 1921 issue of The Crusader, a magazine published by the Afrocentric, Marxist-influenced Hamitic League of the World, bore the headline Salvation of the Negro. The correspondent was writing from the South during the most virulent era of lynching, mob violence, land seizure, voter disenfranchisement, and debt peonage. But he did not believe—as Alain Locke did when he called Harlem the Mecca of the New Negro just a few years later—that salvation was located north of the Mason-Dixon Line:

  No 121 Harris Street,

  Vicksburg, Miss.

  Sept 12 1921

  Mr. Editor of the Crusader:

  [I am a] gentleman and a man of race pride and of very deep and broad thoughts:

  After reading the indictments in your valuable magazine for September, I now answer your question.

  The salvation for the American Negro is t
o organize a Territory Corporation.

  There may be one more; that is the great act of God in our behalf.

  The corporation should be led by the best men as promoters. These promoters should agree on the price for a share and request the twelve millions of Negroes to take out shares.

  The Public Corporation funds should be deposited until organized to do business, on interest, under an agreement that all money should be returned if not organized and used for said purpose.

  We must colonize somewhere.

  Yours truly,

  NATIONAL STAR

  I next saw the Chief at the library. He arranged himself across from me at a table in the reading room, and I knew my work for that day had come to an end. He eyed the books that were spread before me without offering an opinion on the selection. Then he produced his own reading material. This included photocopies of his Buy Black flyers and other ANPM literature I’d seen before. He laid them out as if entering exhibits into evidence. Last, he brought out a sheet bearing a brief passage. It had no headline, and gave no reference to its original source.

  I asked if I could read that page, and when I finished, I asked permission to copy it down. He hesitated, and then—as if he were passing me a classified document, rather than a quotation that with a bit of effort I could locate in the pages of the ANPM newsletter, whose archives were available for public review right there in the library—he warily agreed, after insisting that this is not meant for Europeans.

  It was a quotation from Carlos Cooks. In the passage, Cooks is outlining the end result of a successful march to African Nationalism in America. And, despite the injunctions of the Chief, Cooks’s words and his aims would have been familiar to certain Europeans of the twentieth century:

  With the establishment of a solvent economy by the group comes self-reliance, racial clannishness, mass cooperation and a common-cause psychosis which invariably leads to the erection of racial standards and the formation of a distinct and exclusive sense of value, evolving into an original racial pattern, reaching its climax in a deafening mass claim for nationhood.

  Once I’d finished copying those words, the Chief began to lecture me on the details of this historical unfolding. His approach was familiar from universal histories, where the world-spirit is seen to animate different civilizations, doggedly aiming at its most exalted expression. He told me that Jewish girls in Israel are crying out for Jewish nationalism; Chinese girls in China were crying out for Chinese nationalism; white girls here in America were crying out for white nationalism. According to this pattern there was only one avenue for the political consciousness of a young woman like me, and it had nothing to do with attending meetings in Harlem, or my vision of going back to my hometown to do community work in Texas. Damn Harlem! he told me. Damn Texas!

  By then his tone had abandoned any hush appropriate to a library and ascended the soapbox. Like a practiced rhetorician, he shifted tack, abandoning emotional appeals for empirical ones. Gold, bauxite, rubber, cobalt, uranium, silver! The natural resources of Africa—that should be your battle cry! Though I didn’t interrupt, I was, in fact, interested in the natural resources of Africa, especially since I had learned of the deals between various African governments and various Chinese companies transferring fishing rights, mining rights, and logging rights, and allowing the construction of hydroelectric dams, among other forms of resource extraction. I had also learned that the construction of new roads and railways in Africa, while beginning to alleviate the dangers of travel in some parts of the continent, was also funded by the Chinese, in order to better facilitate their program of resource extraction.

  The Chief told me that I needed to go to Africa and join the struggle, but he made clear that this struggle was not a matter of attending meetings. I mentioned that perhaps people in Africa did not want me showing up to interfere, and maybe they had their own ideas about their destiny. The Chief said this was part of the problem. Just as the conversion of much of West Africa to Islam had taken place under the threat of death, said the Chief, it was only by threat of death that this process would be reversed, so that Africans would get in line with the program delineated by his battle cry. To make his point, he drew another example from history, noting that it was the threat of death that had motivated 50 million Uncle Tom Chinamen to give up Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism in order to get in line for Mao’s Long March. It was only the threat of death, he said, in the form of Jewish firepower, that had halted the killing of Jewish people, the rape of Jewish women, making lampshades out of Jewish skin, experimenting on Jewish babies. Not having the use of our own firepower, black people were still suffering such traumas. The last affliction, the Chief reminded me, had been exposed in recent years just across the street from the library, when doctors at Harlem Hospital were found to be using black foster children for unauthorized experimental drug treatments. He was going on about the A-bomb and its necessity for black liberation when I pointed out that the nationalism asserted by Jewish firepower meant the suppression of Palestinian people’s sovereignty. He told me the problems of the Palestinians were none of my business. My business, in case I had forgotten, involved the natural resources of Africa. I asked him what business was it of Frantz Fanon to travel from Martinique in order to struggle with the Algerians against their common imperialist oppressor, France. His answer was simple. Fanon was a fool, he said, sneering. His anticolonial brotherhood with the North Africans was misguided, since it put him in allegiance with the very Arabs who had delivered black Africans into slavery. This point led the Chief to remember his quarrel with my Arabic name, which received a smirking aside before he continued.

  All of this was secondary. The Chief thought I was changing the subject and missing the point. I had to get in line, he told me. You only get one shot.

  He invoked the spirit of Winnie Mandela and told me, You need to be a part of that spirit!

  He invoked the spirit of Harriet Tubman and told me, You need to be a part of that spirit!

  He paused and pointed over my shoulder to a painting on the wall, one of several brightly colored works by Haitian artists. It showed the three main heroes of the Haitian Revolution: Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe.

  After I had looked over my shoulder, the Chief asked me, Do you know what that represents? I said that I did, and he asked me to name the figures. After I had correctly identified them he said, You got that right.

  Then he asked me what they had accomplished. I told him they had fought for liberation and he said, You got that right.

  My history being correct, the Chief he didn’t see why I couldn’t understand the liberation of our people. I ventured that I did.

  The Chief pointed to the button pinned to his shirt; it was a small black-and-white photo of Patrice Lumumba. Continuing my examination, he asked me if I knew who it was. I said that I did. I had even read an article from the African Nationalist Pioneer newspaper, written before Lumumba’s murder, in which Carlos A. Cooks wrote an editorial, “There Is Going to Be a New Day: Lumumba Foils Colonialist Plot to Partition the Congo.” The same edition also included a poem, “The Awakening Call”:

  Hail Lumumba! Man of Africa

  Who stands like a mighty dam

  Against the floods of oppression

  A granite wall of reality before

  The white man’s dream of madness.

  To keep the African his slave and Africa

  His feasting ground of exploitation.

  Hark! The Congo is free

  The heart of Africa beats again at last

  The pulsating throb of Freedom is felt

  Throughout the land

  The giant awakens and lifts His mighty hand

  To smite the leeches who sucked

  His blood while so long he slept.

  The poem continues with a plea from a weakened Father Africa, for centuries his blood having flowed to foreign lands, crying out, “Arise Black sons of Africa on foreign soil / De
caying tools of empires created by your blood and toil.” The sons of Africa are implored to come home and:

  “Bring my daughters with you

  To work, to build, to teach, to bask

  In the glory that is due.”

  Blackmen from every point across the sea

  Send back their answers to this plea:

  “FATHER AFRICA, OPEN WIDE YOUR DOOR THIS DAY FOR WE ARE READY—WE ARE ON OUR WAY!!”

  The author of the poem is listed as one R. Waldo Williams, of New York. I imagine him as a sensitive, poetic, and politically charged young man, much the way the Chief had described himself to be upon arriving in Harlem from Chicago—eager to answer the awakening call, but perhaps not yet free of his artistic aspirations.

  But it was not a new day. Congo was partitioned. Patrice Lumumba was spirited away by treacherous countrymen to the breakaway province of Katanga, whose main town was then and is still a mining center bolstered by rich deposits of copper, cobalt, tin, uranium, radium, and zinc, among other minerals. The Belgian-owned mining company Union Minière du Haut Katanga had supplied uranium to the United States for the development of the atom bomb.

  At Katanga, Lumumba and two companions were executed by a firing squad operating under Belgian command with American knowledge and assent. After Lumumba was murdered, his corpse was buried behind an anthill. Later, Belgian officers returned with orders to destroy the evidence. They exhumed the bodies, chopping them to pieces and dousing those pieces in sulphuric acid also supplied by that same Belgian-owned mining concern. There was not enough acid to consume what was left of Lumumba and his two companions, so what remained of the body that had been one of the greatest African personalities to appear on the stage of world affairs today was set ablaze.