My Love for African People Worrill’s World By Dr. Conrad W. Worrill, PhD BC Columnist

The remembrance of our ancestors and their redemption, our continued oppression in America inspires me to re-acknowledge my love for African people. This inspiration and love also causes me to intensify my work in the Black Liberation Movement.

The word love is probably one of the most used and overworked words in the English language. According to most European definitions, love is “a feeling of strong personal attachment induced by sympathetic understanding or by ties of kinship.” And of course we are most familiar with the usage of the word love in connection with, “Tender and passionate affection for one of the opposite sex.”

From time to time we also hear the word love used as an expression and articulation of one’s love for African people as a race.

It is without question, that segments of the worldwide African Community have lost all sense of moral and ethical relationships with other African people. This is demonstrated day in and day out by the increased number of African people participating in their own genocide: killing each other, mentally and physically abusing each other, stealing from each other, being dishonest with each other, and the list goes on and on and on. This is why the Reparations Movement is so important in the process of repairing damages inflicted upon us.

I can truly say I love African people no matter how frustrated I get with the negative behavior of so many of our people.

I love African people because I understand that the creative force of the universe has endowed us to make the great contributions we have made and continue to make to the world.

A simple inspection of the ancient Nile Valley civilizations of Kemet (Egypt) should cause African people to love each other. Ancient Kemet and the Kemetic people (African people) were the creators of mathematics, science, art, architecture, writing, governance, astronomy, medicine, and so much more.

The ancient Kemetic people produced wisdom that was written down in their language called Medew Netcher / Divine Speech (our classical African language) or what the Europeans call hieroglyphs.

We can examine this ancient Kemetic wisdom in The Husia, which gives us insight into how our great ancestors viewed life, death, human relations, marriage, parenting, use of power, God, family, and standard of moral and ethical conduct.

Reading The Husia brings out all my love for African people in a most profound and spiritual way.

Listen to the words translated in The Husia:

“Do not terrorize people for if you do, God will punish you

accordingly. If anyone lives by such means, God will take

bread from his or her mouth. If one says I shall be right by

such means, she will eventually have to say my means have

entrapped me.”

This passage continues:

“If one says I will rob another, he will end up being robbed

himself. The plans of men and women do not always come to

pass for in the end it is the will of God which prevails. Therefore,

one should live in peace with others and give gifts which another

would take from them through fear.”

These words written 4,000 to 5,000 years ago and their wisdom should cause all African people to once again love each other for the greater good of our race.

Our love for each other and the wisdom of our ancestors, should give us the inspiration and motivation, to re-dedicate ourselves to the continued struggle for the liberation of Africa people worldwide.

We have a responsibility and duty to the Creator who gives us all life, power, and health, by building institutions and giving back that which has been given to us through the creative force of the universe. This responsibility and duty should inspire us to work harder in the Reparations Movement.

I love African people because I know we have the capacity to return to the concept of Maat (truth, justice, balance, divine order, righteousness, reciprocity, and love), and by doing so, restore Maat to its rightful place in our lives. Once Maat is restored, we can do as the Creator has done by giving life, power, and health. By restoring Maat, we restore ourselves, thus giving us all the necessary ingredients to continue our work in the Black Liberation Movement.

Only through love can we survive the white supremacy genocidal onslaught. I love African people and I urge all African people to love each other!

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Conrad W. Worrill, PhD, is the National Chairman Emeritus of the National Black United Front (NBUF). Click here to contact Dr. Worrill.

The man who raised a black power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7403942n&tag=segementExtraScroller%3Bhousing

When John Carlos raised his fist in a black power salute at the 1968 Olympics, it changed 20th-century history – and his own life – for ever. How does he feel about it now?

• 
• • Gary Younge
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 March 2012 17.59 EDT

John Carlos (on right), Tommie Smith (centre) and Peter Norman, who wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge in support of their gesture. When he died in 2006, Carlos and Smith were pallbearers at his funeral. Photograph: AP

You’re probably not familiar with the name John Carlos. But you almost certainly know his image. It’s 1968 at the Mexico City Olympics and the medals are being hung round the necks of Tommie Smith (USA, gold), Peter Norman (Australia, silver) and Carlos (USA, bronze). As the Star-Spangled Banner begins to play, Smith and Carlos, two black Americans wearing black gloves, raise their fists in the black power salute. It is a symbol of resistance and defiance, seared into 20th-century history, that Carlos feels he was put on Earth to perform.

“In life, there’s the beginning and the end,” he says. “The beginning don’t matter. The end don’t matter. All that matters is what you do in between – whether you’re prepared to do what it takes to make change. There has to be physical and material sacrifice. When all the dust settles and we’re getting ready to play down for the ninth inning, the greatest reward is to know that you did your job when you were here on the planet.”

Carlos’s beginning was, to say the least, eventful. Raised by two involved, working parents, he learned to hustle with his friends in Harlem and fight his way out of and into trouble. As a teenager, he used to chase Malcolm X down the street after his speeches and fire questions at him. Carlos always knew he was good at sports and originally wanted to be an Olympic swimmer, until his father broke it to him that the training facilities he needed were in private clubs for whites and the wealthy. He used to steal food from freight trains with his friends and then run with it into Harlem and hand it out to the poor. When the police gave chase, he was often the only one who never got caught. Running came so naturally, he never thought of it as a skill.

That single moment on the podium cost Carlos dear. More than four decades later, you’ll find him at his desk in a spacious portable building behind the basketball courts at Palm Springs High School in California, where he works as a counsellor. Among the family photographs on the wall are the vaguest allusions to his moment in history. Pictures of Malcolm X and African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, the pledge of allegiance, which American schoolkids must say to the flag every day, and a small poster saying Go For Gold Olympics.

For all its challenges, Carlos loves his job. “Being a counsellor, you have to talk to the children as though you’re talking to a thousand people,” he says. “Sometimes you say, ‘I love you’ and they say, ‘I don’t want your love’ and you say, ‘Well, it’s out there, so you’re going to have to deal with it.’ And I learn a lot from them, too.”

John Carlos: ‘It’s what I was born to do,’ he says of his salute.
Photograph: Michael Steele/Getty Images

Bald, tall, with a grey goatee, Carlos has glided into old age with a distinguished air and convivial manner, and more than a passing resemblance to the late activist and intellectual WEB DuBois.

“The first thing I thought was the shackles have been broken,” Carlos says, casting his mind back to how he felt in that moment. “And they won’t ever be able to put shackles on John Carlos again. Because what had been done couldn’t be taken back. Materially, some of us in the incarceration system are still literally in shackles. The greatest problem is we are afraid to offend our oppressors.

“I had a moral obligation to step up. Morality was a far greater force than the rules and regulations they had. God told the angels that day, ‘Take a step back – I’m gonna have to do this myself.’”

The image certainly captures that sense of momentary rebellion. But what it cannot do is evoke the human sense of emotional turmoil and individual resolve that made it possible, or the collective, global gasp in response to its audacity. In his book, The John Carlos Story, in the seconds between mounting the podium and the anthem playing, Carlos writes that his mind raced from the personal to the political and back again. Among other things, he reflected on his father’s pained explanation for why he couldn’t become an Olympic swimmer, the segregation and consequent impoverishment of Harlem, the exhortations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to “be true to yourself even when it hurts”, and his family. The final thought before the band started playing was, “Damn, when this thing is done, it can’t be taken back.

“I know that sounds like a lot of thoughts for just a few moments standing on a podium,” he writes. “But honestly this was all zigzagging through my brain like lightning bolts.”

Anticipating some kind of protest was afoot, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had sent Jesse Owens to talk them out of it. (Owens’s four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin themselves held great symbolic significance, given Hitler’s belief in Aryan supremacy.) Carlos’s mind was made up. When he and Smith struck their pose, Carlos feared the worst. Look at the picture and you’ll see that while Smith’s arm is raised long and erect, Carlos has his slightly bent at the elbow. “I wanted to make sure, in case someone rushed us, I could throw down a hammer punch,” he writes. “We had just received so many threats leading up to that point, I refused to be defenceless at that moment of truth.”

It was also a moment of silence. “You could have heard a frog piss on cotton. There’s something awful about hearing 50,000 people go silent, like being in the eye of a hurricane.”

And then came the storm. First boos. Then insults and worse. People throwing things and screaming racist abuse. “Niggers need to go back to Africa!” and, “I can’t believe this is how you niggers treat us after we let you run in our games.”

“The fire was all around me,” Carlos recalls. The IOC president ordered Smith and Carlos to be suspended from the US team and the Olympic village. Time magazine showed the Olympic logo with the words Angrier, Nastier, Uglier, instead of Faster, Higher, Stronger. The LA Times accused them of engaging in a “Nazi-like salute”.

Beyond the establishment, the resonance of the image could not be overstated. It was 1968; the black power movement had provided a post-civil rights rallying cry and the anti-Vietnam protests were gaining pace. That year, students throughout Europe, east and west, had been in revolt against war, tyranny and capitalism.

Martin Luther King had been assassinated and the US had been plunged into yet another year of race riots in its urban centres. Just a few months earlier, the Democratic party convention had been disrupted by a huge police riot against Vietnam protesters. A few weeks before the Games, scores of students and activists had been gunned down by authorities in Mexico City itself.

The sight of two black athletes in open rebellion on the international stage sent a message to both America and the world. At home, this brazen disdain for the tropes of American patriotism – flag and anthem – shifted dissidence from the periphery of American life to primetime television in a single gesture, while revealing what DuBois once termed the “essential two-ness” of the black American condition. “An American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

Globally, it was understood as an act of solidarity with all those fighting for greater equality, justice and human rights. Margaret Lambert, a Jewish high jumper who was forced, for show, to try out for the 1936 German Olympic team, even though she knew she would never be allowed to compete, said how delighted it made her feel. “When I saw those two guys with their fists up on the victory stand, it made my heart jump. It was beautiful.”

As Carlos explains in his book, their gesture was supposed, among other things, to say: “Hey, world, the United States is not like you might think it is for blacks and other people of colour. Just because we have USA on our chest does not mean everything is peachy keen and we are living large.”

Carlos understood, before he raised his fist that day, that once done, his act could not be taken back. What he could not have anticipated, at the age of 23, was what it would mean for his future. “I had no idea the moment on the medal stand would be frozen for all time. I had no idea what we’d face. I didn’t know or appreciate, at that precise moment, that the entire trajectory of our young lives had just irrevocably changed.”

During the Jim Crow era, life for even the most famous black sportsmen past their prime was tough. After his celebrated Olympic victory, Owens ran a dry-cleaning business, was a gas pump attendant, raced horses for money and eventually went bankrupt. “People say it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse,” he said. “But what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can’t eat four gold medals.”

Joe Louis, a world champion boxer on whose shoulders rested national pride when he fought German Max Schmeling shortly before the second world war, greeted visitors at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and went on quiz shows. And these were sporting figures who tried to keep in with the establishment. Carlos was still in his prime, but that single act of defiance ensured his marginalisation.

Paradoxically, the next year was the best of his career. In 1969, he equalled the 100 yard world record, won the American Athletics Union 220-yard dash and led San Jose State to its first National Collegiate Athletic Association championship.

The trouble was, in the years before lucrative sponsorship deals, running didn’t pay and few would employ him. In the years immediately following his protest, he worked security at a nightclub and as a janitor. At one point he had to chop up his furniture so he could heat his house. The pressure started to bear down on his family. “When there’s a lack of money, it brings contempt into the family,” he says. Moreover, his wife was facing constant harassment from the press and his children were being told at school that their father was a traitor. The marriage collapsed.

He tried American football for a few seasons, starting in Philadelphia, then moving north to Toronto and Montreal. He is keen to emphasise that the one thing that never happened, despite claims to the contrary, is that he had his medal confiscated. It’s at his mother’s house. And while he does not cherish it as you’d expect an Olympian might, he’s adamant that this part of the story is set straight. “The medal didn’t mean shit to me. It doesn’t mean anything now… The medal had no relevance. The one way it had relevance was that I earned it. So they never took my medal away from me. I’d earned it. They can’t take it.”

As time passed and the backlash subsided, Carlos was gradually invited back into the fold. He became involved as an outreach co-ordinator in the organising committee for the group bringing the Olympics to Los Angeles in 1984 and worked for the US Olympic Committee.

Did he worry, as the picture for which he was famous started to adorn T-shirts and posters, that his readmission into the Olympic world meant his radicalism was being co-opted and sanitised? “The image is still there,” he says proudly. “It keeps getting wider. If you look at the images of the last century, there’s nothing much like it out there. And ‘the man’ wasn’t the one that kept this thing afloat for 43 years. The man was the same man whupping my arse. And the Olympics are part of my history. I’m not going to run away from that.”

Carlos remains politically engaged. Late last year he addressed Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York. “It’s the same fight as it was 43 years ago. We fought unemployment; for housing, education. It’s the same thing as people are fighting for today.”

He defends Barack Obama, who he believes has not been given a fair shake. “Mr Obama didn’t get us where we are. He’s trying to get us out. Someone fabricates shit to get us into wars, then makes ordinary Americans pay for them. Now someone else is trying to make it right. If George W Bush can have two terms to put this country into this mess, we should give Obama two to get us out of it.”

But, unlike during the 1960s, today Carlos sees little hope of resistance emerging through sport, which is awash with too much money and drugs. “There wasn’t a whole bunch of money out there back then,” he says, “so just a few people were ever going to be shakers and bakers. But today, if an athlete doesn’t have a view of their history before them, then they have a view of just that big cheque in front of them. It’s not the responsibility of the oppressor to educate us. We have to educate ourselves and our own. That’s the difference between Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan. Muhammad Ali will never die. He used his skill to say something about the social ills of society. Of course, he was an excellent boxer, but he got up and spoke on the issues. And because he spoke on the issues, he will never die. There will be someone else at some time who can do what Jordan could do. And then his name will just be pushed down in the mud. But they’ll still be talking about Ali.”

Eight years earlier, during a different phase of anti-racist activism in the US, a 17-year-old student, Franklin McCain, had gained his place in the history books when he sat at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, with three friends and refused to move until they were served. Many years later, McCain was philosophical about how that experience had affected him. “On the day that I sat at that counter, I had the most tremendous feeling of elation and celebration,” he told me. “Nothing has ever come close. Not the birth of my first son, nor my marriage. And it was a cruel hoax, because people go through their whole lives and they don’t get that to happen to them. And here it was being visited upon me as a 17-year-old. It was wonderful, and it was sad also, because I know that I will never have that again. I’m just sorry it was when I was 17.”

Carlos has no such regrets. He’s just glad he could be where he was to do what he felt he had to do. “I don’t have any misgivings about it being frozen in time. It’s a beacon for a lot of people around the world. So many people find inspiration in that portrait. That’s what I was born for.”

Celebrating Malcolm X in the Streets of Harlem

Friday, May 11, 2012 4:11 PM

 

AN AMERICAN EXILE

by verummagazine on Mar 7, 2012 • 6:03 pm 1 Comment

Over winter break this year I was able to go on a two week study abroad writing class to Havana, Cuba. While I was there I was introduced to Nehanda Abiodun, currently living in Cuba under political asylum. After meeting briefly I asked to do an interview and the next day found myself in  on the outskirts of East Havana with just my photographer and a backpack filled with notebooks and cameras. Sitting for three hours in the bright Cuban sun with Nehanda was an unforgettable part of the trip but the story of how she got there in the first place is even more intriguing.

The Revolution Will (Literally) Not Be Televised

By Jake Krzeczowski

Track 1: “And now I’m like a major threat, Cause I remind you of the things you were made to forget” – 2Pac

Somewhere in the U.S., 1989

The monotonous tone of helicopter blades chopping at the brisk late afternoon air snapped her suddenly from intense concentration; “Ok, what will it be?” Nehanda Abiodun stood before her open closet, carefully investigating its contents as the walls closed in from all sides. Knowing full well that her spot on America’s Most Wanted list would warrant a parade of her image across TV stations and newspapers should she be captured, she took her time deciding precisely what to wear. “Something that won’t get dirty easily, something that won’t wrinkle,” she thought to herself, carefully fingering through the hangers. Sirens sounded in the distance.

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Havana, Cuba – 2012

Sitting on the creaky red bench attached to one of two tables at Los Pollos, a state-owned fast food chicken bodega in the cluttered public housing section of Havana, Cuba known to us as La Bahia I began to wonder if she would actually show up. Popping a chicken croqueta in my mouth and washing it down with an orange soda I saw her approaching from across the street, trading pleasantries with seemingly everyone who walked by.

Pulling herself away from the crowd Abiodun approached my photographer Louis and myself, wrapping us into a hug that seemed meant for an old friend. Puzzled looks followed her as she embraced the two tank-topped pale Americans. Grabbing three Bucaneros from the bodega, she sat down doling out the take, “Let’s do this,” she said with a crack of the can, a smile crossing her face.

“Besos.”

Nehanda Abiodun, previously known as Cherie Dalton, holds a degree from Columbia University and a host of 32 felonies against her in America. She was third on the FBI Most Wanted list during her heydey in the late 70s for her involvement in the Lincoln Detoxification Center, a drug rehabilitation complex with a revolutionary message. Whether they are all warranted is up for debate. What isn’t however is the revolutionary spirit of the movement that she and her comrades were a part of.

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Track 2: “Give the crack to the kids who the hell cares? One less hungry mouth on the welfare.” – 2pac

The phone rang, another interruption in her decision-making process. Carefully, she picked up the receiver without saying a thing. The voice from the other end informed her that police had set up road blocks around her neighborhood, were handing out photos of her asking for information. Muttering a quick thank you, Nehanda put the receiver back.

They were close; moving in.

-
Three decades ago, at age 30, Abiodun had had enough with community work. Seeing little positive results from her work within the system, along with the killing of a young boy by police in her neighborhood she felt compelled to do more.

“I felt I had to do everything I could to stop things like that from happening,” Abiodun said. “That’s when I decided to go about a more revolutionary path of bringing about human rights and the ending of ‘badisms’ that exist in the United States.”

To be a patient at Lincoln Detox and Acupuncture Clinic you had to take political education classes, do community work,” Abiodun said. “Doing community work, you were no longer a parasite on your community, you’re giving something back and getting a different outlook on yourself”

New York Comptroller Ed Koch, who would later go on to be Mayor and other members of the government had been keeping a keen eye on the center and it’s revolutionary ideals eventually closing Lincoln with a raid of nearly 100 NYPD officers and SWAT team members. The raid occurred at night, with only five or six attendants on duty, none of whom were Abiodun.

Lincoln was overseen by revolutionaries  like Mutulu Shakur and had loose ties to a string of Brink’s truck heists during which several police officers and security guards were harmed or killed. The attempted heists resulted in the jailing of several members of the group, also connected to the Black Liberation Army (BLA).

Stemming from the closing of the center, the attempted heists and the liberation of Assata Shakur in 1979, Abiodun was facing several charges under the Rico Conspiracy Act which deals with being a part of illegal organization for personal gain and had previously only been used in mob cases. She was also implicated in the escape of Assata.

“They say I and others were involved in expropriations of armored trucks, that we were also engaged in the ‘liberation’ of Assata,” Abiodun said. “Personally they say I was involved in the expropriations and aiding and abetting Assata’s liberation.”

The 32 felonies levied against Abiodun, likely a life sentence if tried, are the most of anyone involved in the liberations and “revolutionary” work.

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Track 3: The war on drugs is a war on you and me, And yet they say this is the Home of The Free. – 2Pac

It had been eight years since skipping town on the grand jury. Eight years of living out of the public’s eye throughout America and it had come to this. Taking a deep breath she grabbed a pair of dark pants, black shirt and grey sweater. As sirens sounded in the distance, she dressed in a hurry; took a moment to smooth things over in the mirror and soaked in what very well could be her last moments of freedom.

As she put the car into gear and rolled out of the driveway, reversing to the street, she glanced in the rearview mirror, “Here we go,” she said to herself. Dropping the gear from R to D, the car jumped and she turned the corner out of her neighborhood for the last time.

It wasn’t long before what her friend had told her on the phone became reality. Sitting in a long line of cars, she peeked around those in front of her where she saw the black and white of police cars, officers stopping each vehicle with a document in their hands. With a car in front and behind her, a barricade ahead, Nehanda had nowhere to go; slowly inching toward fate.

-

After the breakup of Lincoln and the subsequent backlash that followed the failed attempt on a Brink’s truck, Nehanda skipped town describing it as “underground”. With a legitimate ID, a job and a home she was well within the reach of American forces but she managed to stay out of their way, for awhile.

She had been called by a Grand Jury to testify against Mutulu, but she refused and went into hiding believing the charges against her and others were bogus.

“At the first trial there was a ledger for all the money that was liberated, robbed, whatever went to do what?” Abiodun said. “To build the clinic, to finance a camp for kids, to help kids with college money. I still have people asking me ‘what happened to the $4.5 million, there must be a stash.’ Well if there is, no one’s told me.”

Speaking to Nehanda about the decades that followed is difficult, highlighted by half sentences, pauses and smiles followed by reminders not to talk about certain things. For obvious reasons, Abiodun is conservative about what she says and does. After all, she spent eight years underground across America. Helped by those sympathetic in the struggle she managed to maintain a semblance of a real life with her children still in New York.

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Track 4: “And even to this day they try to get to her, But she’s free with political asylum in Cuba” – Common

As the officer approached her mouth went dry and she swallowed hard to clear her throat, thinking about the hectic schedule of the next couple of days would hold if she were recognized. A rapping on the window broke her reverie, bringing her back to the present. An officer stood outside her window, a similar bored look on his face. She rolled the window down slowly.

“Hello ma’am,” the officer said from behind thick black aviator sunglasses. “Have you seen this woman?”

She reached out and met the officer’s hand at the window,flipping the photo over over in her grip.

Nehanda had expected to see the picture, she had seen it almost everywhere for the better part of a decade: newspapers, magazines; repeatedly on television. This time though, tracing the photo quickly with her eyes she hardly recognized the woman she held in her hands in black and white. She followed the smile on her face to the dread-locked black hair she now wore up in a hat. The photo had been snapped a lifetime ago.

“Never seen her” she said, handing the picture back hoping he wouldn’t notice.

He didn’t.

Feeling herself slowly breathing again she passed by the cars and wooden blockades that made up the stop under the watchful eyes of the other officers before turning the corner and hitting the highway. It was late 1990. A couple months later she would arrive on the shores of Havana, Cuba; leaving the U.S. for good.
-

If Abiodun thought she had seen struggle in America, her arrival in 1991 in Havana was sure to open her eyes up to more. When asked how she got there she says matter of factly, “I didn’t walk on water.” The year marked the beginning of what Fidel Castro called “the special period” in Cuban history. Following the fall of the Soviet Union the country went through a time of intense economic collapse, felt most harshly by the people. It was normal for condoms to be shredded to mask a lack of cheese on pizzas.

“During the special period, people were just so united. If I had something and you needed it there was no questions of sharing it and vice versa,” she said. “I got used to holding on to things because you never knew when you might need it.”

She had arrived on the island fresh from her own revolution and eager to continue her support from abroad. The Cuban government granting her political asylum, however, had other plans. They ordered her to stop, to relax, allowing Nehanda the first semblance of peace she had felt in almost a decade of living underground.

“I’m really, really grateful to (the Cuban government) for insisting that I take a rest because I had spent eight years underground and even though I thought I was normal, I wasn’t. It had psychological repercussions, being underground all that time.”

Abiodun speaks of the pain she felt leaving her children behind initially, not being able to see friends or family members and a pesky habit of waking up in the middle of the night.

Life outside of the United States hasn’t been easy. Cuba, the only country listed as “self-sustaining” by the World Wildlife Foundation has it’s downsides. While she is appreciative of everything the people and government have done for her, there are times she feels it weighing on her.

“I’m comfortable,” Abiodun said. “I feel safe here. I have stress but it’s not the same stress if I was back in New York right now. I don’t worry about being put out of my house, about not eating.”

Politics now on the backburner, Abiodun had a chance to try something new. She began working in communities throughout Havana, blending into her community, picking up spanish word by word. It wasn’t long before her reputation preceded her and she was sought out.

Those looking for Abiodun however weren’t FBI operatives or military officials, but young hip-hop acts in Cuba looking for insight to the turbulent sixties and seventies in America; they wanted to hear about the struggle.

“I’m spoiled,” Abiodun said. “The youth that I see for the most part are very progressive, politically aware, involved in some sort of movement.”

The genre of hip-hop, mascaraded in America with showers of dollar bills, platinum grills and twenty-inch rims has taken on a different role in the land of socialism. It is a political tool of sorts in a country where there are few. Lyrics often work as a commentary on the government, confronting, within bounds, the issues they face.

Before long, Nehanda was tending to groups of Cuban rappers, often nearly a dozen at a time sitting on the floor of her apartment, looking to her for inspiration that is impossible to ignore when she speaks of listening to Malcolm X live or standing on protest lines at the age of ten.

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Track 5: “In case you don’t know, I ride for Mutulu like I ride for Geronimo” – 2pac

During her time in New York during her community and revolutionary work there she came to be friends with a woman named Afeni Shakur, future member of famed American rap artist Tupac Shakur. For the first thirteen years of his life Tupac grew up playing and spending time with Nehanda’s children.

“Tupac was a year older than my son, but they played together like most kids that age.”

Abiodun was among those who impressed a revolutionary, socially aware spirit on the young Tupac Shakur was first impressed upon him. That politically aware mindset has carried over to her teachings amongst the Cuban hip-hop youth. Many come to hear the teachings she learned through time spent with the likes of Mutulu and Assata and the do it yourself mindset of their resistance to perceived biases around them.

She was first introduced to the hip-hop community by Dana Kaplan, then a young American college student studying at the University of Havana.

“While I was there I kept getting all these questions about the civil rights movement and racial justice issues in the U.S.,” Kaplan said. “Nehanda has a great historical perspective, I made sure they could have direct access to her, eventually she was hosting discussion groups in her apartment.”

Around the turn of the millennium the Cuban government declared hip-hop “an authentic expression of Cuban Culture,” and Fidel Castro called it “the vanguard of the Revolution.” The art form had jumped American borders and the locals were hungry.

Abiodun obliged,  bringing the Black August Hip Hop festival to Havana in 1999 along with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement of the U.S. The festival has hosted the likes of Mos Def, Common and The Roots. Today Black August is one of the most important hip-hop organizations in the country.

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Track 6: “It ain’t easy, being me. Will I see the penitentiary or will I stay free” – 2pac

Life in Cuba isn’t perfect. While citizens don’t worry for basic necessities, luxuries are seldom. The government is nearing a change as the Castro brothers age every day and it is the Cuban hip-hop groups that have increasingly looked to be the voice of the youth.

Since she was ten years old Nehanda Abiodun has sought to stand up for the change she feels is right for the world. She has sacrificed her family and her freedom but the only thing she regrets is not having done things a bit smarter. She is at peace with her life but of course would jump at the chance to return to America without jail time.

Whether she is lending her teachings to the young people of Cuba or fighting for equality in “The Land of the Free,” Abiodun has never stopped pushing for what she believes in as others forced her to adapt.

“When I meet my ancestors I want to be able to look them in the eye and say ‘yes I made a lot of mistakes, but I tried my best. That’s what I really want.”

By Jake Krzeczowski

(scenes in italics early on are not necessarily how things happened)

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Podcast: Political Prisoner Radio – Free Mumia Abu-Jamal & Occupy the Justice Dept

Podcast: Political Prisoner Radio – Free Mumia Abu-Jamal & Occupy the Justice Dept

Prof. Johanna Fernandez and Sis. Jamila Wilson will give info on the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal and discuss the worldwide Occupy the Justice Dept. mass mobilization to free political prisoners and end mass incarceration. Prof. Fernandez is a member of Educators for Mumia and Prof. at Baruch College Department of Black and Hispanic Studies, producer of the film “Justice on Trial,” and author of the upcoming book “Young Lords.”

Sis. Jamila Wilson is a prison abolitionist and hard-working organizer for the Occupy the Justice Dept. event in Washington, DC on April 24, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s 58th birthday, and who’s demands are:

Release Mumia Abu-Jamal, End mass incarceration,
Jobs, Education, & Health Care. NOT JAILS! End solitary confinement & stop torture End the racist death penalty
Hands off immigrants, Free all political prisoners!

More info at http://occupythejusticedepartment.com/

Women of Color are Being Extinguished Right Before Our Eyes 74% African American and 75% Latina senior women over 65 cannot meet basic living expenses

Every day, I send out news and information and write about the ongoing extermination of women of color. Mostly, but not only, I write to women of color because if we don’t organize, collaborate and develop a major, immediate effort to save ourselves, we will not be saved. I have been writing to hundreds, surely thousands, in the last few years. I started a petition to insist that the Census Bureau issue reports on the specific status of women of color, by group and age cohorts. I wrote and published the book, The Constructive Extermination of Women of Color: Consequences of Perpetual Socio-Economic Marginalization.

Less than 20 people have responded to the letters and postings in this period. Less than 10, including me, signed the petition to the Census Bureau. We are dying from every social-consequence and our deaths are not even adequately acknowledged by our own communities, including most women of color, let alone doing anything about this situation. It should be no surprise to anyone that people of color, especially African Americans, along with white poor and homeless of all colors are being widely murdered with murder victims being maligned and murderers being excused and unpunished.

As the Occupy movement has continued, they have been vilified so that even people they are advocating for are speaking out against them and in favor of those who are oppressing us all. Laws have been passed and signed to end civil rights and courts are upholding the idea that corporations are people with rights and people are not human and therefore have no rights to be informed about allegations of violating laws, or to have attorneys, warrants, hearings, trials or face accusers. Everyone can now be incarcerated indefinitely by the military under the authority of the president or executed without ever knowing why and without family, friends or the public having any information. We can just disappear without explanation. These new laws and policies apply to citizens and non-citizens alike inside the US and around the world. Last week it became unlawful to protest some of these actions.

A recent report by the Secretary of Defense indicated that 3000 women serving in the US Armed Forces were raped in 2009 by our own military members. Disproportionately, such rapes are women of color. Previously, reports and testimony to Congress documented that women in the Peace Corps have been raped for decades, refused help or medical and psychological treatment and put out of the organization if they complained. Similar treatment has been accorded women in the military. It has never been clear to me why so many men see war or military service as a reason to rape women, who are not the reasons for the wars nor are directing them or the governments represented by the military.

Also recently, a 64-year-old African American man with a heart condition, wearing a medical alarm which went off erroneously, received a visit by police, supposedly to see if he was OK at 5 AM while he was sleeping. He answered from inside his house that he was OK but was afraid to open the door (inexplicably, one of the police officers was in some kind of head to toe riot-type protective gear). So the police broke down his door, tazered him while he begged to know why, then shot and killed him – reminding of Amadou Diallou who was shot 40 times by police when he reached for his wallet after being asked for identification. Who is compiling the data on all of the deaths and assaults which are occurring and being excused?

Over and over again, people are being murdered with impunity, with no consequences to the murderers. The murders are justified by constitution-bearing politicians. When are people going to face that there has been no more democracy here than in Greece, where the term “democracy” was coined without including women, immigrants, or non-property / wealth-owning Greeks. The US Constitution has never been just to women, people of color – indigenous or immigrants – and is not just now. The recent decision of the Supreme Court regarding Troy Davis made clear that innocence, like justice, are not considerations for us. All that matters is that procedures are followed-procedures that are obviously unjust. Where is the justice in the justice system? It was not there in the Dred Scott Case in March 1857-155 years ago-and is not there now. In this case, the US Supreme Court declared that “all blacks – slaves as well as free – were not and could never become citizens of the United States.” To make matters worse, the court decided that the 1820 Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, thereby continuing the legality of slavery in all US territories.

Dred Scott v. Sanford concerned a slave who had lived in a free state and a free territory of the US, where slavery was illegal, before moving back to the slave state of Missouri. Dred Scott appealed to the Supreme Court for freedom based on these and other facts which he asserted had ended his condition of slavery. In the opinions of the Chief Supreme Court justice and 6 other justices, because Scott was black, he was not and could never be a citizen and had no right to sue. Theses justices wrote that the framers of the Constitution, or as they are often referred to still-”the forefathers of our nation” – believed that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it.” Chief Justice Taney took note of the Declaration of Independence phrase, “all men are created equal” and stated that “…the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration…” The same conditions seem to exist today for African Americans and a host of others who are being denied justice. Though together we now are the majority of the nation, we have yet to attain citizenship. There is no such thing as partial citizenship. Either one has it or one doesn’t.

As the US suspends food aid to North Korea, threatens to attack Iran, refuses to leave Afghanistan and Iraq despite the will of their people, supports an assortment of dictators like the Saudis, and kills anyone who gets in the way, where is the outrage? What is the role of the religious communities? Where are the legions of activists, progressives, educators, environmentalists, civil/human rights advocates, people on any side with enough sense of human decency to speak out in opposition to what is taking place?

Thinking about what must lie ahead for us is horrifying, terrifying. Willie Lynch strategies are rampant so that there are people within the same and different ethnic groups denouncing each other. Younger generations are attacking older ones, hoping they will die and not collect Social Security and Medicare. Older generations are attacking younger ones whom they consider the cause of problems by the music they listen to and the clothes they wear, who they believe are mostly gang members, substance abusers, unwed mothers, baby daddies and undeserved users of food stamps and Medicaid. Too few in any of these groups have full factual information about each other or even adequate information about their own groups.

Meanwhile, issues like environmental racism are rarely mentioned, though the newly recommended and unsafe nuclear reactors are headed for minority populated areas and the old reactors, despite radiation leaks and other problems, are not being forced to shut down. Food and water, along with air, are widely contaminated, as is medicine. People are under surveillance through their cell phones, computers and televisions, with appliances like refrigerators and dish washers being developed to do the same. The absence of overwhelming, nationwide reaction to all of these events and circumstances, added to the denial of global warming and the insistence that creationism is equal to science, is equivalent to a conscious or unconscious mass death wish. The two million people who signed petitions insisting on justice for Trayvon are not enough. A hundred million and more must speak. Below is one more story about the problems.

Older Women Can’t Afford Basic Expenses, Study Finds *

Posted: 03/29/2012 6:15 pm  

Protestors demonstrate against cuts to federal safety net programs in Chicago.

Huffington Post – Doing Without: Economic Insecurity and Older Americans, No. 2: Gender | March, 2012

Every day, more of America’s older women reach retirement age – and then struggle to pay for the simplest things.

A new analysis of US Census Bureau data performed by Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW) finds that 52% of elder-only households report incomes that do not cover basic, daily expenses. While the threat of economic insecurity affects elders of all backgrounds, it varies substantially by gender, race, age, household composition and other demographic characteristics. In order to assess the economic security of today’s older adults, WOW compared 2010 incomes for elders who live alone or with a partner to the US Elder Economic Security Standard™ Index for their household compositions and housing statuses. The Doing Without series presents findings from this analysis

Among all women in the United States, age 65 or older, living alone or with a spouse, 60 percent have trouble covering their monthly expenses such as food, housing and health care, according to research published Thursday by the nonprofit group Wider Opportunities for Women, based on an analysis of U.S. Census data.

It’s a problem that Donna Addkison, the president and chief executive of WOW, called “staggering.”

“We’re talking about what it takes to just simply cover the everyday necessities,” Addkison told The Huffington Post. “Older women are very quietly making decisions at home to split their pills in an attempt to stretch their medication. They’re choosing between having heat in the winter and having nutritious food on the table.”

The situation transcends geography, with “no states in the nation” that can be described as “a haven for older adults,” she said.

Indeed, with the economy the way it is, older women aren’t the only ones being forced to make these kinds of decisions. In post-recession America, deprivation is increasingly a way of life for millions.

With the jobless rate high and wages more or less holding steady, vast swaths of the population today are leading a precarious, savings-less existence, in which one financial emergency is all it would take to tip a family into poverty. Record numbers of Americans are now counted as poor, and the percentage of people who say they can’t afford food is at its highest level since the financial crisis.

Among all this, seniors face their own set of challenges, from rising health care bills to the growing industry of financial scammers who target elderly people.

More than 9 million people age 65 and older don’t have enough money to cover their basic costs, according to a separate WOW report published earlier this month.

And within that group, women are having a rougher time of it. While 60 percent of women are unable to pay for necessities, only 41 percent of men wrestle with the same problem, WOW calculated.

For women of color, the problem is more pronounced, according to WOW: While about 49 percent of older white women have trouble covering their basic costs, the rate for older Asian women is 61 percent, older African-American women 74 percent and older Hispanic women 75 percent.

“That goes beyond staggering,” said Addkison. “That becomes epidemic.”

This gender gap is the result of a lifetime of imbalances, Addkison told HuffPost.

Women earn less than men – the disparity varies by industry, but averages out to about 77 cents on the dollar. For college graduates, this pay gap tends to emerge within a year of their entering the workforce, and it only grows wider over time.

Ultimately, the result is that most women, compared with most men, have smaller Social Security benefits waiting for them when they reach the end of their working lives.

The roots of the disparity are so multiform that it’s hard to know how to begin fixing them.

At the state and federal level, Addkison said, policies that encourage pay equity would be welcome, as would efforts to protect safety-net programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Looking at how young men and women make career choices – how students at high schools and community colleges separate themselves or become separated, onto different vocational paths, for example – could also contribute to an understanding of the pay gap, Addkison said.

It’s also important, she said, for working-age women to look at the statistics about widowhood and divorce and understand that they’re real possibilities.

“These are life events for which we have to plan,” Addkison told HuffPost. “At some point, we as women may be taking care of ourselves alone.”

Given the economic shockwaves of the past few years – the collapse of home equity, the spikes in unemployment – it seems likely that more retired women might find themselves financially challenged, Addkison said. “My suspicion is that things are certainly no better than they were five years ago, and have the potential to be much worse,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that we can’t do something about it. It just means that we have to start paying attention.”

BlackCommentator.com Columnist Suzanne Brooks is the founder and CEO of International Association for Women of Color Day and CEO of Justice 4 All Includes Women of Color. Click here to contact Ms. Brooks.

Ashanti Alston-H.264 800Kbps Streaming ++custom.mov

Ashanti Alston-H.264 800Kbps Streaming ++custom.mov

http://www.freespeech.org/

Former Black Panther and Critical Resistance Organizer, Ashanti Alston discusses his work with the Black Liberation struggles and compares them to contemporary work of the Zapatistas.

salute: February 23rd…Stokely Carmichael

“BLACK POWER”

“It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations. “
Stokely Carmichael

“I walk in the footsteps of giants”

“Books Taken from George Jackson’s Cell”

Books Taken from George Jackson’s Cellhttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/74717270/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-1vkw0cio6wmenj7t5354(function() { var scribd = document.createElement(“script”); scribd.type = “text/javascript”; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = “http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js”; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();

Black People Resisted

As a Pan-afrikanst living here in the amerikkka’s.I pledge to continue the fight that my ancestors fought and even gave their lives 4 so that i would have freedom to live as a proud NU-Afrikan.  That dream is still differed still some 450 yrs later,and i will not rest until freedom is a reality for all people of colour throughout the Afrikan world. Live Free or Die Tryin

Red Black Green till i die