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.”

Remembering George Jackson

Posted by Eljeer Hawkins on August 25, 2011

The United States imprisons 2.3 million women and men. This is the highest incarceration rate in the advanced capitalist world. Every day this system continues its deadly assault on working people…
by Eljeer Hawkins (Harlem, New York)

Remembering George Jackson: September 23, 1941 – August 21, 1971

George Jackson

On August 21, 1971, the black freedom and prisoners’ rights movement lost one of its “organic intellectuals,” to use a term made famous by 20th century Italian Marxist and political prisoner Antonio Gramsci. The revolutionary commitment that raged inside of George Jackson was born in the belly of American capitalism’s institution of social control, the prison system. He would be gunned down a month shy of his thirtieth birthday, by San Quentin prison guards during an alleged prison break.

Jackson’s Soledad Brother was published in the fall of 1970. His book Blood in My Eye was published posthumously in the fall of 1971. These two works stand as his political manifesto—an unbounded dedication to freedom for the most oppressed people in the world.

George Jackson stands alongside Malcolm X and countless others who became politically and socially aware of racism and capitalism’s underdevelopment of black America while locked down behind the walls of prison. In a few short years he developed into an activist and revolutionary theorist committed to revolutionary change.

I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me. For the first four years, I studied nothing but economics and military ideas. I met black guerrillas—George “Big Jake” Lewis, and James Carr, W.L. Nolen, Bill Christmas, Torry Gibson.…We attempted to transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality.
—Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

California Dreaming
Following the Great Depression of the 1930s and driven by the harsh realities of living in the Jim Crow South, the second Great Migration of African-Americans began. Donna Jean Murch, author of Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, describes this transformation:

In 1940, 77 percent of the total black population lived in the South, with over 49 percent in rural areas; two out of five worked as farmers, sharecroppers or farm laborers. In the next ten years, over 1.6 million people migrated north and westward, to be followed by another 1.5 million in the subsequent decade.…By 1970, more than half of the African American population settled outside the South, with over 75 percent residing in cities. In less than a quarter century, “urban” became synonymous with “black.” (p.15)

During World War II, well-paying jobs in defense plants attracted many working people to industrial cities on the West Coast. Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) from the trade union movement fought for jobs and resources for this expanding black working class. However, by the end of the war, the white working class and middle class began to flee urban centers like Oakland. Racism, discrimination in the trade unions, and deindustrialization after 1945 turned cities like Oakland into wastelands of social decay, economic depression, and political alienation.

The California Youth Authority
Capitalism needs and must have the prison to protect itself from the criminals it has created. It not only impoverishes the masses when they are at work, but it still further reduces them by not allowing millions to work at all. The capitalist’s profit has supreme consideration; the life of the workers is of little consequence.
—Eugene V. Debs, Walls & Bars: Prisons & Prison Life In The “Land Of The Free”

The arrival in California of African-Americans from the rural South was met with outright suspicion by the police authority and the state government. The generation of blacks born outside of the South, during and after World War II, tasted the bitter pill of Jim and Jane Crow, California style.

The California Youth Authority (CYA) became the prototype for social control of young people, particularly urban youth of color. CYA was founded in 1941; the Adult Authority followed in 1944. Professor Murch states:

The infusion of federal defense money and newfound prosperity enabled the state to build five medium-security adult facilities between 1944 and 1950…. In 1953, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a special report to “all law enforcement officials,” warning about the dangerous effects of California’s baby boom: “The first wave in this flood tide of new citizens born between 1940 and 1950 has just this year reached the ‘teen age,’ the period in which some of them will inevitably incline toward juvenile delinquency and, later, a full-fledged criminal career.”(p.58)

Lester and Georgia Jackson moved George and the rest of their family from Chicago to California in 1956. George spent time at the CYA in Paso Robles for assault and burglary as a juvenile. Future Black Panther Party (BPP) leaders like Huey P. Newton and Emory Douglass would also serve time in the CYA system. George Jackson entered the California adult prison system at the tender age of eighteen in 1960, having been accused and convicted of armed robbery. He had stolen $70 from a gas station, and went into court with a record as a petty criminal and inadequate (public) counsel. After pleading guilty, George Jackson received the bizarre and cruel sentence of one year to life. He spent his first nine years in San Quentin State prison—seven of them in solitary confinement.

The Birth of a Revolutionary
In his first years in prison, Jackson was not considered a “model” prisoner. He seemed to have a total disregard for authority and fellow inmates. He spent significant time in solitary—or “the hole,” as prisoners called it. The prison letters he authored between 1964 and 1970 showcase a young man grappling with a society that stunted his growth in the context of the collective African-American struggle to overcome the evils of white supremacy and the vestiges of slavery. Especially in the candid letters to his parents, Georgia and Lester, he attempts to understand and explain the interplay of capitalism’s values and its effects on him and the Jackson family.

The letters give us a glimpse into the mind of the voracious reader that George Jackson was, and show the influence of such authors and revolutionaries as Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Mao Zedong. Jackson was inspired by the powerful events of the Cuban revolution and the struggle of the people of Vietnam, as well as the anti-colonial rebellions going on all over the so-called Third World.

Jackson became one of the foremost prison intellectuals and activists of the time, organizing prisoners and later becoming a Field Marshal of the BPP. In 1966 he co-founded, with W.L. Nolen, the Black Guerrilla Family, which was rooted in the ideas of Marx and Mao. In 1969, Jackson and Nolen were transferred to Soledad Prison. In January 1970, a prison guard would gun down Nolen and two other black inmates during a riot. Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Cluchette were accused of killing prison guard O.G. Miller, who had shot and killed Nolen and two other inmates. If convicted of murdering Miller, Jackson and his comrades would face the death penalty. Their case, popularly known as the Soledad Brothers case, gained national and international news coverage and support.

The case exploded with the Marin County courtroom hostage-taking organized by Jonathan Jackson, George’s younger brother. Three prisoners—James McClain, William A. Christmas, and Ruchell Magee—were in court for a hearing when they took over the courtroom with Jonathan Jackson’s assistance. They took Judge Harold Haley, Deputy District Attorney Gary Thomas, and several others hostage at gunpoint. In an act of desperation and love, Jonathan Jackson demanded the release of the Soledad Brothers. Angela Davis, then a professor of philosophy at UCLA and the key organizer of the Soledad Brothers campaign, was also a member of the Communist Party USA and a “fellow traveler” of  the Black Panther Party. She was named as an accomplice to the crime because the guns used in the takeover were registered in her name.

Jonathan Jackson, McClain, and Christmas all died in a hail of bullets as the police sought to stop the getaway vehicle. Judge Haley would also die in the gunfire. Angela Davis became a fugitive. After her arrest, her case led to a landmark trial in which she campaigned against state-sponsored violence and the FBI’s notorious Counter Intelligence Program (a.k.a., COINTLEPRO). She was acquitted.

You Can Kill a Revolutionary, But You Can’t Kill Revolution
Prison guards, they cursed him
As they watched him from above
But they were frightened of his power
They were scared of his love.
Lord, Lord,
So they cut George Jackson down.
Lord, Lord,
They laid him in the ground…
—Bob Dylan, “George Jackson,” 1971

In 1971, the tension leading up to the Soledad Brothers’ trial for the alleged murder of prison guard O.G. Miller was interrupted by the sudden death of George Jackson. Prison authorities alleged that on August 21, Jackson attempted to break out of San Quentin using a 9mm handgun smuggled in by his lawyer and supposedly hidden in his Afro wig. A gunfight resulted in the death of Jackson, two other prisoners, and three prison guards. The Soledad Brothers would be acquitted of the murder of O.G. Miller years later.

A Critical Assessment: Blood in My Eye
Many people believe the Attica prison rebellion of September 1971 was partially inspired by the death of George Jackson the month before. His book, Blood in My Eye, was published posthumously in the fall of 1971. The book is Jackson’s political testament. It touches on themes of imperialism, internal colonialism, Marxist economics, labor history, political consciousness, state violence, and armed struggle.

Jackson examined Salvador Allende’s Chile with a critical eye: “There is simply no way to compare this society or its historical experience with that of a tiny colonial country like Chile: Allende is not seizing property; his government is ‘buying property.’ Until the Chilean ruling capitalist class is suppressed, the Chilean revolution is as meaningless as the Swedish experiment. Socialist governments which attempt to coexist with capitalist economics completely forget the economic motive of human social history.” (George Jackson, Blood in My Eye, p. 77-78.) What Jackson could not see from behind prison walls was the political development and power of the Chilean working class through factory and community committees taking the Allende electoral victory in 1970 as a starting point from which to construct a socialist society. The Chilean revolution was very meaningful to working people worldwide. That is why world capitalism went on the offensive to destroy it. That attack, plus political mistakes by Allende and his government, led to the revolutionary process eventually drowned in blood. The struggle culminated in Augusto Pinochet’s CIA-sponsored military coup on September 11, 1973.

The influence of Maoism was profound during times of Black Power and the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s. The BPP sold copies of Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book” on college campuses as a fundraising tool to establish the party and purchase firearms. The Chinese revolution of 1949 that overthrew the capitalist nationalism of Chiang Kai-shek was viewed by many African American activists as a powerful moment for the anti-colonial struggle. The solidarity messages and visits from African American leaders such as W.E.B Dubois, Shirley Graham Dubois, Paul Robeson, Robert F. Williams, and Huey P. Newton would cement the links between Mao’s victorious Chinese revolution and the struggle of African Americans in the US.

On August 8, 1963, Mao expressed his solidarity with African Americans and the struggle for civil rights: “An American Negro leader now taking refuge in Cuba—Mr. Robert Williams, the former President of the Monroe, North Carolina, Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—has twice asked me for a statement in support of the American Negroes’ struggle against racial discrimination. On behalf of the Chinese people, I wish to take this opportunity to express our resolute support for the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination and for freedom and equal rights.”

Maoism’s appeal stemmed from a rejection of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and third world solidarity with people of color. The BPP was not grounded in genuine Marxism, but their influence on revolutionaries of all country cannot be denied. The BPP commitment to freedom, self-determination, socialism, and the rejection of reformist politics has inspired youth and workers around the world.

The BPP circulated its pamphlet, “What We Want,” as well as the ten-point program for full employment; decent housing; free food, clothing, and medical care. All these ideas are socialist in character, but as independent Marxist and organizer James Boggs states: “…the Black Panther Party has resorted to social service programs, such as the Free Breakfast and Free Health programs. Instead of mobilizing the black community to compel the city, state, or federal government to provide such services under community control, the party has taken over the responsibility for their funding and administration.” (James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook, 1970.) The BPP’s orientation of recruiting urban youth, the unemployed, working poor, and the prison population demonstrated the revolutionary potential of this layer of the black community. Their great weakness was the inability to make vital links with the black working class, trade union movement, and the militant white working class.

The Cuban revolution that put an end to the Batista dictatorship’s landlordism and gangster capitalism also heavily influenced the BPP. What the Chinese and Cuban revolutions had in common was the negation of the social power and democratic control of  society by the working class in the construction of socialism. There was greater emphasis placed on the needs of the peasant population and guerilla warfare. What the BPP, George Jackson, and the black radical left often ignored was the political character of Mao: “He was, by his own admission, a ‘Stalinist,’ and constructed not a democratic workers’ state along the lines of Russia in 1917–23, but a regime similar to that existing in Stalinist Russia. Landlordism and capitalism were gradually eliminated and the beginnings of a planned economy were put into place, although this was presided over by a one-party, totalitarian regime, with power in the hands of a privileged bureaucracy in the party, the state, the army and the economy.” (Peter Taaffe, www.socialistworld.net, 7/20/2005.)

Fascism
The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class,
destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the
capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with
the help of democratic machinery.
—Leon Trotsky, Whither France?, 1934

George Jackson’s writings on fascism and class struggle demonstrate his deep understanding of history and Marxism. He carefully examines the rise of the counter-revolutionary phenomenon of fascism in Mussolini’s Italy in 1922 and Hitler’s Germany in 1933. He draws a parallel to the US government’s violent response to the militant and revolutionary character of the black freedom movement, the anti-war movement, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords movement for Puerto Rican nationalism, and New Left activism generally. Activists in social struggle began to use the term fascist to describe the violent tactics of Hoover’s FBI and other US government agencies that sought the annihilation of these movements for freedom and economic justice.

It is crucial to understand the important differences between the events in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, on the one hand, and those in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, on the other. This history must be placed in the proper political context.

Leon Trotsky was the co-leader of the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution of 1917 and a great international revolutionary socialist. One of his theoretical contributions to Marxism and to the international workers movement was his program to combat the rise of fascism in Europe. He described the process he saw taking place in Europe in terms of fascists’ manipulation of the people, made desperate by poverty: “At the moment that the ‘normal’ police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium, the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized Lumpenproletariat —all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy….After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty…” (Leon Trotsky, What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat, 1932.)

The rise of fascism in Italy, Germany, and later in Spain was rooted in the deep economic crisis of European capitalism following World War I. The social power of the working class and development of socialist and communist ideas throughout Europe opposed this rise of fascism. Memories of the Russian Revolution were still fresh in the 1920s and ’30s. That example of the tremendous potential of revolutionary power was in the background as workers were taking over factories and whole industries, fermenting the revolutionary process in an effort to establish a socialist society. The failure of social democratic parties and Stalinism to lead the working class to take political, economic, and social power would help usher in the dark days and nights of fascism under Hitler and Mussolini. Equating the fascism of the ’30s and the ’40s with the American fascism of the revolutionary ’60s and ’70s was an overreach.

The US experienced a tremendous economic upswing after World War II. For many years after the war the US was the pre-eminent economic, political, and military superpower in the world. Through social struggle by the working class and trade union movement, transformative gains and benefits were achieved under US capitalism and bourgeois democracy. But not everyone benefited from fruits of the post-war upswing. The black working class had to contend with the apartheid system that existed in the South. There were even vestiges of Jim & Jane Crow in northern cities such as Chicago and New York. The civil rights movement began to break the back of racial and class oppression, and eventually led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The militant Black Power movement challenged the institutions of capitalism and state-sponsored violence. Black Power posed the question of self-determination for black Americans, and eventually led not just to a national perspective but to a broader view that included the ideas of anti-imperialism and internationalism.

The presidential election victory of Richard Nixon in 1968 introduced a law and order doctrine, gaining much support from the white working class and the middle classes, particularly in the South. The traditional divide-and-conquer was adapted for the times to become Nixon’s “southern strategy,” which eventually developed into a basic strategy of the Republican Party still in use right up to the present day. In the 1960s, this counter-revolutionary strategy was part of a clear and decisive response by big business to stomp out all dissent in the streets, on campus, and in penitentiaries all across the country. It dovetailed with imperialism’s blood-thirst to end the communist threat in southeast Asia.

The US ruling elite did not need to employ European-style fascism, with its reliance on street thugs and stormtroopers to terrorize the population. Instead, that elite focused on the US labor movement and targeted socialist and communist trade unionists, ultimately expelling almost all of them from the leadership ranks of most unions. A bureaucratic, conservative, and pro-imperialist leadership came to power in the labor movement. These new leaders kept the militancy of organized labor dormant, in the main.

The tactics were not so subtle in the attempts to crush the militant black freedom movement of the ’60s and ’70s. Black Power faced police state tactics and violence by the “armed bodies of men” that daily violated civil and human rights of militant black activists.

The recent Georgia state prisoners strike, the hunger strike by four prisoners held in Ohio State Penitentiary a supermax prison, and the Pelican Bay prisoners hunger strike are all in the spirit of George Jackson and all prisoners fighting for human dignity. The United States imprisons 2.3 million women and men. This is the highest incarceration rate in the advanced capitalist world. Every day this system continues its deadly assault on working people, the poor, youth, and people of color. Another George Jackson is being born every day. George Jackson lived, struggled, and died to create a better world for the most oppressed people. Only through the revolutionary commitment to democratic socialism can we find peace, freedom, and justice.

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”

February 15, 2012

by Sanyika Shakur, s/n Kody Scott
Robert Williams, who first came to prominence as president of the Monroe, N.C., NAACP, later wrote “Negroes with Guns” and advocated Black self-defense. Friends of both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Robert and his wife Mabel lived in exile for many years, traveling the world and befriending Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh. His book inspired Huey Newton and the Black Panthers.
We are the ones who refused to be captured in Afrika without a fight, who staged daring raids on enemy supply lines and brought our nationals back to freedom. We are the ones who made longer, sharper spears, thicker shields and turned our backs on collaborating kings.

We are the ones who, on the high seas enroute to the “New World,” brought new forms of combat to bear on our oppressors. We are the ones who couldn’t be broken, who kept our languages in circulation, our spirits alive and our minds free of foreign gods and hostile demons. We are those who, on a move, became Maroons, who settled the Geechi Islands, fought alongside the indigenous nations, until we, too, became indigenous.
We are the ones who couldn’t be broken, who kept our languages in circulation, our spirits alive and our minds free of foreign gods and hostile demons.

We are the ones who, in the midst of the first Two Thousand Seasons (a thousand dry, a thousand wet), birthed new ideas of national existence and national continuity.

We are the ones that whispered, “Strike now!” to Nat Turner, who plotted and planned with Denmark Vesey and Gabriel Prosser. We are of the same blood as General Harriet Tubman.

We are the ones who didn’t need to be freed by the 13th Amendment because we had never been anyone’s slave. We are the same ones who laughingly rejected the 14th Amendment to make us citizens of the oppressor nation. And, when the so-called Negroes fell for the farce of “Reconstruction,” we had long been organized and waiting for the Klan.

When bourgeois Negroes formed the NAACP, we formed the African Blood Brotherhood and Universal Negro Improvement Association. When the White Citizens Councils attacked the Civil Rights Movement, we struck back as the Deacons for Defense. We are the ones who left the right wing reactionary Nation of Islam with Malcolm X.
When the White Citizens Councils attacked the Civil Rights Movement, we struck back as the Deacons for Defense.

We are the ones who organized the ghettos, from California to Philly, as the Revolutionary Action Movement. We were in Monroe with Robert and Mable Williams. We sat at the feet of Queen Mother Moore, Ella Baker and Dara Abubakari. We are the ones who adopted the attacking Black Panther as our symbol, those who stared down pigs, created Black Student Unions and fed free breakfast to children. We sharpened the contradiction.

We are the ones who, realizing the neo-colonial nature of the term “Negro,” changed our national identity to Black. When that term, too, had been co-opted by opportunists and counter revolutionaries, we are the ones who converged on Detroit 500 deep and brought into existence the New Afrikan national identity. We are the ones who said Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina is the national territory.

We are the ones who breathed life into the Black Liberation Army, who proceeded to combat our historical enemies from coast to coast and all areas in between. We were on the roof in New Orleans with Mark Essex, in South Central L.A. with Geronimo ji Jaga, in El-Malik at the Capitol with the RNA-II. We are the ones who were in Chicago with Santa Bear and Spurgeon Jake Winters; in Attica with L.D. and Sam Melville. We were in Soledad with George, Fleeta and John; in the Marin County Courthouse with Jonathan, William, James and Ruchell. We are the ones who were with George, Hugo and Bato in San Quentin.
We were in Soledad with George, Fleeta and John; in the Marin County Courthouse with Jonathan, William, James and Ruchell. We are the ones who were with George, Hugo and Bato in San Quentin.

We are the ones from the George L. Jackson Assault Squad of the BLA in San Francisco. We are the ones in both Olugbala and Amistad Collectives of the BLA. And that was us in the Five Percenter-BLA units, too. We invaded the tombs to free our comrades and went underwater to assault Riker’s Island as well. We are the ones who made Nicky Barnes run to the Italian mob for protection.

We are the ones who were in support of the United Freedom Front, the May 19th Communists Organization, the George Jackson Brigade, the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit, and the Prairie Fire/John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. We are the ones who introduced comrade-sista Assata Shakur to Fidel and Raul. We hooked Robert Williams up with Mao and Chou En Lai.

We are the ones who defended the people in a raging gun battle against pigs at Aretha Franklin’s father’s church in Detroit. We are the ones who brought you Kuwasi Balagoon, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Nehanda Abioudun, Fulani Sunni Ali, Safiya Bhukari, Yassmyn Fula, Afeni Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, Maliki Shakur Latine, Sekou Odinga, Jalil Muntaqim, Herman Bell and all the other stalwart standard bearers of liberation.

We are the ones who speak truth to power, who practice our theories, who are the messages we bring. We are the ones in the Provisional Government Republic of New Afrika, Peoples Center Council, The Peoples Revolutionary Leadership Council, New Afrikan Peoples Organization, New Afrikan Panthers, New Afrikan Scouts, Spear and Shield Collective, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, August Third Collective, New Afrikan Security Forces, Revolutionary Armed Task Force, New Afrikan Peoples Liberation Army and New Afrikan Women for Self-Determination. And we’ll be in many more to come.

We are the ones who support Puerto Rican Independence, the Mexicano/Chicano Movement, the American Indian Movement and all other revolutionary struggles for freedom against capitalist imperialism. We are those who stand firm against patriarchy, heterosexualism and liberalism. We are those that study Butch Lee, J. Sakai, Owusu, Yaki Yakubu, Chokwe Lumumba, Makungu Akinyele, Che, Cabral, Fanon and Dr. John Henrik Clarke. We are the ones who know that “revolution without women ain’t happenin’”!

We are the ones the enemy calls, “criminals,” “terrorists,” “gangs,” “militants,” “leftists,” “separatists,” “radicals,” “feminists,” “worst of the worst,” “America’s Most Wanted” and enemy combatants. Whatever.

We call ourselves Humans. We are New Afrikan revolutionaries. Those who weren’t afraid.

Who are you?

Free the Land!

Send our brother some love and light: Sanyika Shakur s/n Kody Scott, D-07829, PBSP-SHU C-7-112, P.O. Box 7500, Crescent City, CA 95532.

2/21 Albany Occupy Prisons Action for ending PP Jalil Muntaqim’s solitary confinement!

NOTE: The Free Mumia Coalition will be driving up to Albany for this Occupy Prisons Action, call our hotline if you want to join us.  212 330-8029

 

Justice For Jali!

 

End Prison Abuse and Solitary Confinement!

 

Attica “Correctional” Facility, January 23, 2012.

 

Jalil Anthony Bottom, a former Black Panther, was sentenced to SIX MONTHS IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT (called SHU or Special Housing Unit) for possession of PHOTOS OF MEMORIAL SERVICES FOR 2 FORMER BLACK PANTHERS.

 

We call on Governor Cuomo, the NYS Legislature, the Attorney General’s Office, and the Department of so-called “Corrections”

 

ISOLATION = TORTURE. END IT!

 

“Long term solitary confinement in excess of 15 days could amount to torture and should be banned.” — Juan E. Mendez, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. New York locks people in isolation at almost twice the national rate.

 

REVERSE JALIL’S DISCRIMINATORY TICKET AND INCREDIBLE 6-MONTH SENTENCE.

 

Six months in solitary confinement for photos of a memorial service exposes the arbitrary and cruel over-use of SHU for targeting, harassment, and abuse.

 

STRIKE DOWN THE “UNAUTHORIZED ORGANIZATIONS” REGULATION, written so vaguely that it invites abuse and harassment based on prisoners political beliefs or staff whims

 

ATTICA = ABUSE. SHUT IT DOWN! “Attica has clearly been unable to cast off its violent past, and has proven, time and time again, to be an unsafe and inhumane place for prisoners… The only possible remedy is to close the facility.” –The Correctional Association of New York

 

JOIN THE PEOPLE’S MIC FOR JALIL & AGAINST CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT in solidarity with occupy4prisoners national occupy day in support of prisoners

 

Tuesday, February 21, 12:00 noon

 Capitol Building, Washington Ave. entrance, Albany

 

Protest Jalil’s sentence (Anthony Bottom #77A4283) and the abuse of solitary confinement: Call your NYS

legislator or Commissioner of Corrections Brian Fisher.

 

The Radical Caucus of Occupy Albany

 

(2011) The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

“The Black Power Mixtape examines the evolution of the Black Power Movement in the black community and Diaspora from 1967 to 1975. The film combines music, startling 16mm footage (lying undiscovered in the basement of Swedish Television for 30 years), and contemporary audio interviews from leading African-American artists, activists, musicians and scholars.” From the official webpage: http://blackpowermixtape.com/

All rights reserved to Goran Olsen creator of this documentary. I do not own this documentary but I am merely sharing it for educational purposes. Translations into english were made possible by “Sundance”, all rights reserved to Sundance.

by Cherie Saunders

Author/activist Angela Davis speaks onstage during the “Independent Lens Examines Black History Month” panel at the PBS portion of the 2012 Winter TCA Tour — The Langham Huntington Hotel and Spa, Jan. 5, 2012 in Pasadena, Calif.

*Activist and university professor Angela Davis – the former Communist Party associate and Black Panther Party member whose afro and raised fist alone personifies the black power movement of the 60s and 70s –  says she isn’t 100 percent satisfied with the current occupant of the White House.

“Of course there are critiques that I would propose of the Obama administration. I would probably be critical of any administration,” she told a group of television critics Thursday. “But I think it is important for us to claim the victory of Obama’s election.

“I think we have forgotten the world-historical character of that victory and the fact that at one point most people did not believe that it was possible to elect a black person — not even the black community. The vast majority of people supported [Hillary] Clinton because they didn’t think Obama was electable. But, there were young people who refused to believe that it was impossible.”

In the audio below, Davis – founder of the organization “Critical Resistance,” which works to do away with the prison-industrial complex – says she believes the current “Occupy” movement is merely a progression of the mass energy that coalesced to elect Barack Obama.

Angela Davis says the Occupy movement is a byproduct of the Obama election

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Audio: Angela Davis Critical, Yet Supportive of Obama

January 5, 2012 3 Comments

by Cherie Saunders

Author/activist Angela Davis speaks onstage during the “Independent Lens Examines Black History Month” panel at the PBS portion of the 2012 Winter TCA Tour — The Langham Huntington Hotel and Spa, Jan. 5, 2012 in Pasadena, Calif.

*Activist and university professor Angela Davis – the former Communist Party associate and Black Panther Party member whose afro and raised fist alone personifies the black power movement of the 60s and 70s –  says she isn’t 100 percent satisfied with the current occupant of the White House.

“Of course there are critiques that I would propose of the Obama administration. I would probably be critical of any administration,” she told a group of television critics Thursday. “But I think it is important for us to claim the victory of Obama’s election.

“I think we have forgotten the world-historical character of that victory and the fact that at one point most people did not believe that it was possible to elect a black person — not even the black community. The vast majority of people supported [Hillary] Clinton because they didn’t think Obama was electable. But, there were young people who refused to believe that it was impossible.”

In the audio below, Davis – founder of the organization “Critical Resistance,” which works to do away with the prison-industrial complex – says she believes the current “Occupy” movement is merely a progression of the mass energy that coalesced to elect Barack Obama.

Angela Davis says the Occupy movement is a byproduct of the Obama election by CherieNic

Davis was at the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena, Calif. to discuss her presence in the upcoming PBS special “Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975,” a film documenting the Black Power Movement in the US – all shot by a group of Swedish journalists. [Scroll down to watch a clip.] It’s set to premiere in February for Black History Month.

The film, co-produced by actor Danny Glover, is put together like a 70s mixtape – complete with speeches, news accounts and interviews that were uncovered in the Swedish Television archives by director Göran Hugo Olsson. One of the film’s more memorable interviews is a 1972 Q&A with Davis in her jail cell while awaiting trial for murder, kidnapping and criminal conspiracy. (She was later acquitted).

Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and other figures from the black power movement are also featured in the film, while the music swings without breaks from sounds of the time period, to contemporary contributions from such artists as Talib Kweli and Amir “?uestlove” Thompson of The Roots.

Watch a clip below.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 – Movie Trailer (2011) HD

Related articles

• Recommendation: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (womenintheology.org)
• Angela Davis (moorbey.wordpress.com)
• Doc of the Day: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (daysofdocs.com)
• Life + Times Lock My Body, Can’t Trap My Mind (moorbey.wordpress.com)

Radical Black Reading, 2011

Radical Black Reading, 2011

Posted: 27 Dec 2011 02:01 PM PST

While post-Black vapors have intoxicated contemporary culture, many of our favorite books of 2011 were part of a wave of scholarship that re-evaluated the Black Arts Movement and the Black Power era and took a second look at a long-ago time when “black” was still Black. In Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minnesota), Alondra Nelson provides a smart and timely evocation of the Black Panther Party’s forgotten community health care initiatives. Art historian Kellie Jones’ lavish Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Prestel) was published alongside an exhibition of the same name that was part of Pacific Standard Time, a sprawling multisite project on postwar LA art. Howard Rambsy’s The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry (Michigan) offered an innovative and exciting approach to Black Arts print culture while in Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, poet Evie Shockley (Wesleyan) explored experimentation and form in Black radical verse.

Yet Black Power and Black Arts were not the only examples of black radicalism that came across our desk in 2011. With its stylish and spirited ethnography of everyday life and everyday desire among Afro-Cubans in Havana and Santiago de Cuba, anthropologist Jafari S. Allen’s ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba (Duke) demonstrated how quotidian gestures can embody the most radical practices. Minkah Makalani reconsidered the transnational activism of Black Communists including CLR James, George Padmore, and Cecil Briggs in In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (UNC). Stephen M. Ward compiled the writings of Detroit autoworker and political philosopher James Boggs in Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader (Wayne State). Louis A. Parascandola continued his fantastic work resuscitating the legacy of the enigmatic Guyanese writer Eric Walrond, co-editing, with Carl A. Wade, In Search of Asylum: The Later Writings of Eric Walrond (Florida).

Let’s not forget the independents. 2011 saw a number of wonderful releases from those presses that have fought to forge a public discourse on Black politics and Black culture that is unencumbered by either corporate imperatives or academic distractions. Black Classic Press continued their righteous mission of keeping Black history’s sacred volumes in press by re-issuing Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Pambazuka, who gave us an incredible dossier on the anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death, released Jacques Depelchin’s Reclaiming African History, a slender but powerful volume on the history and political economy of pan-African dispossession. They also published Africa Awakening: The Emerging Revolutions, a compendium edited by Firoze Manji and Sokari Ekine examining the 2011 uprisings from the perspective – finally – of Africa. The legendary Présence Africaine published Moïse Udino’s meditation on the condition of Antilleans in France, Corps noirs, têtes républicaines: le paradoxe antillais. While London’s Peepal Tree Press has made available the Selected Poems of Una Marson, the great West Indian poet, publisher, broadcaster, and pan-Africanist.

Earlier in the year, our Reading Haiti post highlighted some of the notable volumes published on Haiti since the earthquake – but we completely passed over the titles of independent Montreal publishing house Mémoire d’encrier. Certainly among the most exciting publishers in North America, and rapidly emerging as critical platform for writers from the global south, in the past year alone Mémoire d’encrier has published Rapjazz: Journal d’un paria, Frankéttiene’s poetic meander through Port-au-Prince, Dany Laferrière’s earthquake memoir Tout bouge autour de moi, and Refonder Haiti edited by Pierre Buteau, Rodney Saint-Éloi and Lyonel Trouillot. Refonder Haiti brings together more than forty Haitian writers and thinkers addressing the question of reconstruction.*

Two other assessments of post-earthquake Haiti are due out early in 2012: Haiti: the Aftershocks of History (Metropolitan) by historian and Duke University Haiti Lab co-director Laurent DuBois, and the mammoth anthology Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Quake (Stylus/Kumarian), edited by anthropologist Mark Schuller and NACLA editor Pablo Morales. The contributors to Tectonic Shifts address questions of neoliberalism and disaster capitalism, resettlement and forced evictions, and women’s rights and public health – all of which move us far beyond the vapid pronouncements of a post-black condition.

All best for the New Year.

The Public Archive

*Thanks to @bulldozia for drawing our attention to these texts.

Image: “The House of Common Sense, the Home of Proper Propaganda,” Lewis Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore, 125th St. and Seventh Avenue Harlem (1964). Source: Uptown, Saturday Night. Also, this.

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Black Unity – A Home Away From Home

This Saturday’s show. We will discuss why amerikkka would have the nerve to put a million dollar bounty on Queen Assata. amerikkka’s government may as well done the same thing Nana Harriett Tubman. The Black Woman is the mother of all nations.

via Black Unity – A Home Away From Home.