The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (79 page)
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 broadside 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.
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 particularly 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.