A world dominated by America and driven by cheap oil, easy credit, and conspicuous consumption is unraveling before our eyes. Drawing from seven decades of movement-building experience, Grace Lee Boggs shows how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities. From her home in Detroit, she reveals how hope and creativity are overcoming despair and decay within the most devastated urban communities.

This groundbreaking book not only represents the best of Grace Lee Boggs, but the best of any radical, visionary thinking in the United States.

Robin D. G. Kelley

Reading Grace Lee Boggs helps you glimpse a United States that is better and more beautiful that you thought it was.

Michael Hardt

Grace Lee Boggs [is a] legendary activist.

Amy Goodman

Grace Lee Boggs [is] one of the great freedom fighters in the history of this nation… a revolutionary in spirit, heart, and mind.

Cornel West

http://graceleeboggs.com/

By Grace Lee Boggs

May20-26, 2012

The Malcolm I remember is still very much with me, especially in May, the month of his birth in 1925, 87 years ago.

I recall him in Chapter 3 of The Next American Revolution, my book with Scott Kurashige..

“From the moment I first heard Malcolm speak at a huge Nation of Islam rally in the old Olympia Stadium in Detroit, I was captivated by the razor-sharp yet playful language with which he exposed and opposed white society. Later, at smaller meetings, I was fascinated by the way he chided blacks for their ‘slave mentality,’ calling them ‘brainwashed’ because they depended so much on whites. They squirmed as he criticized them. But they also laughed and applauded because his criticisms were so right-on and because they knew he was challenging them to look in the mirror and think for themselves, instead of catering to their weaknesses, as most black leaders still do.

“From his best-selling autobiography, millions know that while in prison, in his early twenties, Malcolm was transformed from a petty hustler into a black nationalist leader by the ideas of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. However, few people know how seriously he began thinking for himself after he discovered in 1963 that Mr. Muhammad had fathered children with his secretaries.

“It was during those two years that I had the most direct and indirect contact with Malcolm.

“In the spring and summer of 1963, Max Stanford of the Revolutionary Action Movement came for long discussions with Jimmy at our home in Detroit while he was deeply engaged in talks with Malcolm in New York. Out of these talks came the new ideas about revolution in Malcolm’s speech at the Grassroots Leadership Conference, held in Detroit on November 10, 1963. I was one of the main organizers and Jimmy was the chair of the conference.

“The next spring, together with Max Stanford, Baltimore Afro- American reporter William Worthy, and Patricia Robinson of Third World Press, Jimmy and I met with Malcolm in a Harlem luncheonette to discuss our proposal that in the light of his break with the Nation of Islam, he come to Detroit to help build the Organization for Black Power. After thinking it over, Malcolm declined because he felt it more important that he make the hajj. His response was that we should go ahead while he served the movement as an ‘evangelist.’

“In the fall of 1964, Malcolm’s friend, Milton Henry and I called him in Egypt to ask him to run for the U.S. Senate on the ticket of the Michigan Freedom Now Party, the ‘all-black’ political party that I served as coordinator. Again he declined, without explaining why.

“Later I learned that in this period Malcolm was rethinking the ideas about black nationalism and violence with which most people still identify him. During the hajj he had discovered that revolutionaries come in all colors. He had also begun to recognize the contradictions in ‘meet violence with violence’ politics. As a result, in December 1964, only two months before he was killed, he went to Selma, Alabama, to explore working with Martin Luther King Jr. At this time King was in jail, but Malcolm was able to meet with Coretta.

“By this time he had also become painfully aware of the hard theoretical work needed to develop a new body of ideas. In a conversation with Jan Carew in London a few weeks before his assassination, Malcolm explained how he was still growing personally and politically:

“‘I’m a Muslim and a revolutionary, and I’m learning more and more about political theories as the months go by. The only Marxist group in America that offered me a platform was the Socialist Workers party. I respect them and they respect me. The Communists have nixed me, gone out of the way to attack me . . . that is, with the exception of the Cuban Communists. If a mixture of nationalism and Marxism makes the Cubans fight the way they do and makes the Vietnamese stand up so resolutely to the might of America and its European and other lapdogs, then there must be something to it. But my Organization of African American Unity is based in Harlem and we’ve got to learn to creep before we walk, and walk before we run. . . . But the chances are that they will get me the way they got Lumumba before he reached the running stage.’’’

‘This kind of introspection, questioning, and transformation, which were so characteristic of Malcolm, has unfortunately been ignored by too many black nationalists and Black Power militants.

“Every February, as another anniversary of his death passes, I have wondered if our world would be different today had Malcolm lived into his fifties and sixties.”

The Malcolm I remember did not need guns and violence to expose and oppose racism. His power was in his razorsharp wit and words.

………………………………………………………..………………

UC Press has just issued an updated and expanded paperback edition of TNAR, with a new Introduction and a new Afterword reproducing my 2010 conversation with Immanuel Wallerstein at the second U.S . Social Forum,

For more on Malcolm, I recommend the powerful critique of Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by my old friend, Bill Strickland. Bill’s critique, on the Boggs Center website, was originally printed by The Black Commentator, (October 13, 2011, Issue 445). It will be published in June by Black Classics Press and in a forthcoming volume of The Black Scholar.

Disrupting Education

By Shea Howell

May 15, 2012

Emergency Manager Roy S. Roberts is proving to be even more of a bully than his predecessor, Robert Bobb. Unlike EFM Bobb, Roberts likes to keep his bullying tactics out of the public eye. But his reign in office displays a pattern of intimidation and petty punishments of those who dare challenge him. Roy Roberts’s performance as EM is one of the best reasons to repeal the Emergency Manager legislation, when we ultimately get the right to vote on this.

The core of Mr. Roberts’s failure is his anti-democratic view of education. In a May 10th letter to elected School Board President LaMar Lemmons, Roberts describes his mission. In the opening paragraph Roberts claims, “For anyone who desires what I’m here to accomplish, that is, improved educational conditions to prepare Detroit’s students for 21st Century college and career-readiness, I need all those similarly focused at the table.” This seems to be one of Mr. Roberts’s favorite ways to describe himself and his role, as it is appearing in all sorts of public statements.

This emphasis on individual advancement into a broken and dysfunctional system is both shallow and limited. Further, the letter is written to chastise those members of the elected school board who supported the student walkouts. Roberts says, “I am highly concerned regarding both the educational well-being and safety of our students in light of the your involvement {original phrasing} and that of other Board Members at several student walkouts including those from Frederick Douglass Academy, Western International High School, and Southwestern High School.”

If Roberts had an inkling that the central role of education in the 21st Century is to prepare young people for the responsibilities of self-government, he would have had a very different response to the School Board and to the students. He would have recognized that the board members who supported these students were providing important adult leadership in how to peacefully and imaginatively address serious political issues.

In his work looking at place based education as a way to strengthen the economies of communities and to see students as citizens creating a new culture right now, Professor Gregory Smith identifies four key aspects of education. He notes that in school districts from Appalachia to the fishing villages of the West Coast, innovative education for community change shares the desire to preserve the best of their community cultures, to resist efforts at dehumanization and destruction of the environment, to restore people and places that have been damaged, and to invent new ways of living, working and playing together. Smith sees the kind of education that Roberts upholds as “education to domesticate people.” It is what he calls an “education for compliance, not engagement.” Smith argues that instead of working to “fit students into a system of limited duration, young people need to be involved in creating new cultures. As we make schools more permeable to local knowledge and traditions, we can see that community problems are the basis for learning.” Smith explains that in schools that “create supportive environments that focus on what would be better for the community, kids become able to understand, to make plans and to dream.” He says, “When walls come down, we open up the possibility of rethinking a society that does not work for everyone to one that works for all. In this kind of environment, parents become involved when they see their kids thrive.”

For Roy Roberts an education based on fostering community change is unimaginable. The very idea that education should encourage citizens to Preserve, Resist, Restore and Invent, is beyond his scope. That’s why he “relocated” the Board office. He will not tolerate the possibility of “disrupting teaching and learning during the school day.”

From Grace Lee Boggs

PHILOSOPHY/ECOLOGY

Phenomenology of Mind by G.W.F. Hegel

Science and the Modern World

By Alfred North Whitehead

Dreaming the Dark: By Starhawk; Appendix-”Burning Times”’

Staying Alive By Vandana Shiva

Death Of Nature By Carolyn Merchant

Small Is Beautiful By E.F. Schumacher

Leadership and Modern Science –

By Margaret Wheatley

Healing Civilization – By Claudio Naranjo

Permanence and Change By Kenneth Burke

Aquarian Conspiracy –

By Marilyn Ferguson (re Paradigm Shift)

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions By Thomas Kuhn

EDUCATION

The School and Society By John Dewey

Community Based Education

By Gregory Smith & David Sobol

The End of Education By Neil Postman

The Disappearance of Childhood

By Neil Postman

Centuries of Childhood By Philippe Aries)

Handbook of Social Justice in Education –

ed: Ayers, Quinn and Stoval

(articles on Emancipatory Pedagogy)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I Call Myself an Artist – Charles Johnson

AFRICA

Listening To Africa – By Pierre Pradervand

Challenge From Africa – By Wangari Maathai

Food Movements Unite – ed. Eric Holt Giminez

BLACK /ANERICAN HISTORY

Testament of Hope Essential Writings and Speeches,

Martin Luther King, Jr. Ed: James Melvin Washington

Autobiography of MalcolmX, with Alex Haley

The American Revolution – By James Boggs

Black Odyssey By Nathan Huggins

Ghosts In Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England

and the Caribbean By Jan Carew

Citizen Douglass by Nathan Huggins

Malcolm X at The Oxford Union –

by Saladin Ambar

James Boggs: Pages From A Black Radical’s Notebook – ed. Stephen Ward

HISTORY

The Modern World System By Immanuel Wallersteiin

Utopistics: Or Historical Choices of the Twenty-First Century By Immanuel Wallerstein

Conversations Between Grace Lee Boggs and Wallerstein (pamphlet)

The Great Transformation By Karl Polanyi

The Third Wave By Alvin Toffler

The City in History By Lewis Mumford

MOVEMENT/POLITICS

Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century – By James & Grace Lee Boggs

The Next American Revolution – Grace Lee Boggs with Scott Kurashige

Thomas Jefferson The Declaration of Independence -By, Michael Hardt

Multitudes – Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

Blessed Unrest By Paul Hawken

POETRY

Collected Poems – author, T. S. Elliot

RE-IMAGIINING

New Work, New Culture – By Frithjof Bergman

Re-IMAGINING WORK IN THE MOTOR CITY By Olga Bonfiglio

The Reinvention of Work – By Matthew Fox

Environmental Crisis or Crisis of Epistemology – By Bunyan Bryant

WITH Earth In Mind: On Education, Environment and the Human Prospect – By David Orr

By Grace Lee Boggs

Special to The Michigan Citizen

Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, a James Boggs Reader, compiled and edited with a 34 page introduction by University of Michigan historian Stephen M. Ward, will be released in February by Wayne State University Press.

The Reader is part of the African American Life series, edited by WSU Professor Melba Joyce Boyd who is planning a book party Tuesday evening, February 15, at the McGregor Conference Center.

Described as “required reading for anyone who wants to understand urban social transformation in the second half of the twentieth century, “ the Reader is arranged in four chronological parts that document Jimmy’s activism and writing.

Part 1 presents columns from Correspondence written during the 1950s and early 1960s. Titles include “ What makes Americans run?” and “A Visit from the FBI.”

Part 2 presents the complete text of The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook, Jimmy’s most widely known work which documents the rise and fall of the union and the challenge of automation. It was translated and published in French, Italian, Japanese and Catalan.

Part 3, “Black Power—Promise, Pitfalls and Legacies,” collects essays, pamphlets and speeches that reflect Jimmy’s participation in and analysis of the origins, growth and demise of the Black Power movement.

This section includes the complete text of the Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party, Jimmy’s 1972 New York Times column “ Beyond Rebellion,” and “Think Dialectically, not Biologically, ’ his 1974 speech challenging Black Nationalism.

Part 4 comprises pieces written in the last decade of his life, the 1980s and early 1990s.

During this period Jimmy not only challenged Coleman Young’s Casino gambling proposals. He proposed Detroit Summer, a youth program to “redefine, rebuild and respirit Detroit from the ground up’ and insisted that the time had come to “ Stop Thinking Like Victims and “Act Like Citizens, Not Subjects.”

Steve Ward’s introduction provides priceless insights into the pivotal role that Jimmy’s southern roots played in his thinking and practice. “The youngest of four children born to Ernest and Lelia Boggs, young James picked blackberries and worked in cotton fields as a child. He attended school in Selma and Bessemer, and at an early age became something of a scribe, penning letters for elderly people in the community who had not learned to write. Throughout most of his adult life as an activist, he credited the community in which he was raised for instilling in him a sense of responsibility and an appreciation for struggle, a sensibility that is captured in the African American folk saying ‘making a way out of no way.’”

The introduction also provides an account of our close relationship and later split with C.L. R..James , and of our relationships with Robert Williams, Rev, Cleage, and the Henry brothers, Milton and Richard.

It concludes with an Afterword by me and over 15 pages of endnotes

What time is it?  No longer American Century.WarfareState has replaced

Welfare State. U.S. facing defeat in Iraq/ worsening conditions at home/protests  growing.   Classic characteristics of revolutionary situation (Lenin) or Counter-revolutionary situation (Germany in 1930s)

Yet radical groups only exposing, protesting. WHY?  Is it because we have not developed new concept of revolution based on examining revolutions  of 20^th C (Russian, Chinese, 3^rd World)  and Movements of Two-sided transformation beginning with 1955-6 Montgomery Bus Boycott?

 EL SALVADOR REUBEN ZAMORA: “We must open ourselves to new kinds of Revolutions.”  5 Affirmations and 3 ReOrientations for Popular Movement. (1993) Recognizing that concentration on taking State Power allows state to turn popular movement into appendage, we  need to change revolutionary strategy 

• from war of movement (assault on power structures) to war of positions

                        (construction of power from below);

• from  Single subject (workers, women, blacks  et al) to Multiple Subjects
• from Verticalist to Horizontal. i.e. From Politics of Control to Politics of Alliance

ZAPATISTAS

Based  in communities of indigenous peoples.

Armed takeover of Mexican cities on Jan. 1, 1994 when NAFTA went into effect.

Goal  was not to take power, but  to create space for “democratic struggle.”

Call for Non-Violence and for all sections of society to enter into discussions;

• go beyond spontaneous struggles to understanding complex political ideas
• go beyond OPPOSITION (taking power) to RESISTANCE (create new infrastructures from below).

By going from Global to Local Zapatistas have become world symbol of Grassroots Post-Modernism. Beyond NeoLiberalism to  International of Hope

(Naomi Klein: The Unknown Icon. AntiCapitalist Reader, ed. Joel Schalit)

ECOFEMINISM

• Critique of Scientific Rationalism, the philosophy  which in 17^th C enabled ruling class to (a) expropriate knowledge from Women thru witchhunts (b) expropriate Land from peasants and  © conquer/dominate Nature. Frances Bacon “Knowledge is Power.” (See Starhawk:  Burning Times; Carolyn Merchant: Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution)
• EcoFeminists: Vandana Shiva is Indian physicist, philosopher, feminist. E.G. e.g..Chipko & other village movements vs.Violence of high tech/big dams.. Maria Mies is German sociologist and environmentalist.  Both view HiTech & focus on economic growth as “colonizing”  Nature,Women. Third World.   WORK in the  new society (unlike Labor under capitalism) needs to be modeled on Work of Women, Peasants, Artisans – which is difficult but rewarding because it  is nurturing and creates Use Values.
• In The Subsistence Alternative, Mies has  page on Detroit Summer.

 LISTENING TO AFRICA by Pierre Pradervand (UN)

            “The time has come to realize that the poverty of Africa has blinded us to its

human and cultural wealth – just as our own very recent material wealth seems to have hidden from us more insidious forms of spiritual, human and moral poverty.”

In the 1980s Pradervand visited 111 villages in 5 countries (Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe and Kenya)  and found farmers  consciously seeking another development based on their own reality  rather than trying to emulate/catch up with  the industrial development of the West. E.g. Wangari Matthei – Nobel Peace Laureate. More Self-Reliance/Small rather than large-scale development; Regional Markets. Care for local environment. Leaders are Women/ Local.  Success depends on working together..

See also

• Paul Harrison: Third World Revolutions and The Third World Tomorrow
• Paul Ekins: The Living Economy: A New ´Economics in the Making
• The New Global Economy: A Participatory Workshop from U of MN
• Dirlik:: Places and Politics in an Age of Globalization

MLK

Not just replacing Oppressors with Oppressed.Villains with Victims,  but creating 2-sided Movements that are  Self-Transforming/Structure Transforming. Began with 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott.  In 1965 MLK recognized that with  Voting Rights Act and Watts Uprising, the 1st (protest) phase of  movement was over. NOW  facing   

• The contradictions of Hi-Tech which limits Participation and Human/Spiritual Growth, and encourages materialism/militarism.
• Need for new structures, in our relations with one another and with rest of world.
• Young people  need to be involved in Self-Transforming/Structure-Transforming direct action in “our dying cities.”  I.e. put careers and Middle Class values in second place as  SNCC youth had done.

 BOGGS CENTER

Our experience with Black Power led us to conclusions similar to Zapatistas/MLK. Need to distinguish .Rebellions from Revolution (Rev&Evol). Rebellion brought black politicians to power,  who then  became appendages to the system.  This became clear in 1980s struggles with Coleman Young over Poletown, Casinos. (See DU Brochure; JB: Rebuilding Detroit: An Alternative  to Casino Gambling. ).  Need to connect issues.  So in 1992 we founded DETROIT SUMMER  to provide young people with an opportunity to rebuild, redefine,  respirit Detroit from the ground up.  By using Detroit Summer model to reconnect schools with community,  we can address crisis of schools (dropouts/finances) and  at same  time bring “neighbor” back into the ‘hood.

 DISABILITY MOVEMENT et al

Instead of depending on grants, have begun creating small businesses that model Self-Reliance, produce Use Values.   ( See Michael Shumann, “It’s time to pay for the Revolution Ourselves.” The Nation 1/24/05)

A Personal Critique of Manning Marable’s Non-Definitive Biography of Malcolm X

by Bill Strickland

At the outset, I want to “make it plain” that my critique of Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X is political, historical, and personal—personal because I was born in Boston and grew up in the same Roxbury that Malcolm once called home. Though he was, of course, a generation older.

Malcolm, Roxbury and Me

I first met Malcolm when I was a youngster in Roxbury because he was a good friend of my cousin, Leslie Edman, who I thought, in my elementary school days, was the coolest cat in the world because girls would call him long distance from faraway exotic places like New York City. I also knew Gene Walcott—before Malcolm recruited him into the Nation of Islam—and he became Louis X. Indeed in those days Gene Walcott was Boston, and New England’s, own version of Harry Belafonte; playing the violin and performing calypso music on his ukulele under his stage name: The Charmer. Now the world knows him as Minister Louis Farrakhan.

I especially remember Malcolm though because he and Leslie were members of a neighborhood sports club called the Panthers who wore these shiny black jackets embossed with the orange emblem of a black panther (long before the Oakland Black Panthers). So when Malcolm came to my aunt and uncle’s house on Hubert St. to pick up Leslie and be off to whatever devilment they were up to, his jacket made an impression that has stuck with me over the years. But I would move away from lower Roxbury after the third grade; away from Hubert St., and Marble St., and Shawmut Avenue where Gene Walcott lived, to “the Hill” in upper Roxbury. And time-wise, I would finish high school and military service and be in college before I met Malcolm again.

That was in the early Sixties when Malcolm came to Harvard to speak. After the talk, I introduced myself, brought up our Roxbury connection, and told him that I was Leslie Edman’s cousin. After that, we stayed in touch; crossing paths purposefully—and coincidentally. I invited him, for example, to speak in an extracurricular seminar in Eliot House that I was involved in. And I arranged interviews for him on Harvard’s radio station when he was in the Boston area. I also would attend meetings at Louis X’s Temple No. 11 on Intervale St. when I knew that Malcolm was going to be the guest minister. Because, aside from Malcolm, Fate had also intervened to pique my interest in the Nation.

What had happened was that I had been accepted as an undergraduate in a graduate seminar in sociology taught by one of the preeminent sociologists of the day, Gordon Allport, the author of The Nature of Prejudice. And who was in that seminar? Why, C. Eric Lincoln who had just published his groundbreaking book on the Nation of Islam, Black Muslims in America. Also enrolled was Atlanta’s Whitney Young who was being prepped to go to New York and become head of the National Urban League. So the race question was all around me; motivating me to write my seminar paper on the Nation, and visit the mosque whenever I could.

To this day, I don’t know what Malcolm saw in me but we became friends. He even came to my house on Cobden St. on occasion. And whenever I had a break from school and went down to New York, I would drop by the Nation’s restaurant on 116th St. to see if Malcolm was in town. But despite our various interactions, he never tried to convert me. So though I never joined the Nation, it was Malcolm’s political perspective that I imbibed—and that guides me still. . . Because in the same way that Karl Marx is the fundamental critic of capitalism, and Frantz Fañon is the fundamental critic of colonialism, Malcolm X is the fundamental critic of American racism.

Malcolm, The Movement, and Me

Like many others in college at the time, I answered the call of the Movement and formally joined the Boston chapter of the Northern Student Movement (NSM) which had been organized by a young white undergraduate at Yale named Peter Countryman. Peter, inspired by the southern student sit-ins, had mobilized northern students to aid the southern movement in general, and SNCC, the southern Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, in particular. (Cobb, 44)

Combining protest against northern discrimination with its original focus of tutoring children in urban black communities, NSM had offices in New York, Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, Hartford, and Boston. But the more the NSMers tried to combat the failures of the public school system, the more they began to feel that the problem of education was just one of the many afflictions of a basically unjust system. So taking a leaf from SNCC’s book, they elevated their game to community organizing; trying, a la the SNCC mantra, to empower people to empower themselves.(Cobb, ibid)

At this stage of NSM’s development, Peter Countryman decided to go back to school and asked me to become NSM’s Executive Director. I agreed, and left Boston and Roxbury to move to New York to NSM’s national office on Morningside Drive near Columbia and above Central Park. . . and Harlem. Later, the office would move to 514 W. 126th St. to the same block, I would soon learn, where lived one of Malcolm’s most devoted followers, Japanese-American, Yuri Kochiyama. So the gods had put Malcolm and me back in touch once more.

Living now in New York, I would see Malcolm fairly often because he would preside on 125th St., making critical commentary on national and international events, on the errors he believed the civil rights movement and its leaders were making, and, of course, extolling Elijah Muhammad’s worldview. In those days, one didn’t need television news, all one had to do was stroll over to 125th St., and tune in on the X.

After Malcolm left the Nation in March of 1964, we were in even closer contact because NSM had begun working more closely with SNCC and I went to Mississippi to help the MFDP, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, with its Congressional Challenge. (Carmichael, 356-57) Coming back from Mississippi in June, I bumped into Malcolm in Lincoln Center not too long after he had returned from Africa. He told me that he was planning a new organization and was having planning meetings that he asked me to participate in. I said, “sure” and went as a student representative to what turned out to be his secular political organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the OAAU. But after successfully kicking off the OAAU, Malcolm left in July for Africa again, not returning until around Thanksgiving.

In the meantime, NSM had deepened its involvement with the MFDP and its Congressional Challenge to three targeted white Mississippi Congressmen who had won their Congressional seats by depriving black Mississippians of their right to vote, a violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In protest, the MFDP had nominated Mrs. Annie Devine, Mrs. Victoria Gray, and Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer to challenge for those three Congressional seats when Congress reconvened in January.

NSM rallied its supporters in all their cities to support the Challenge and an overall Northern Coordinating Committee was established in New York, which I co-chaired. (Carmichael, 419-20) Naturally, I immediately sought Malcolm’s support. Thus when a delegation from Mississippi came to Harlem in December, Malcolm not only spoke to the youth, he also hosted a meeting with Mrs. Hamer and me that Christmas week at the Williams Institutional Church to publicize the MFDP’s Challenge. Exactly two months later, he was killed.

Atlanta, The Institute of the Black World (IBW), and The Search for “An Adequate Theory of Emancipation.”

After Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, Coretta Scott King asked Dr. Vincent Harding, the stellar black historian and one of Martin’s closest friends, to take the helm of the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center.

Vincent was teaching at Spelman at the time but he agreed to become Director of the Center. He also proposed to establish, as one element of the Center, a project which he, and his colleague, Stephen Henderson, chair of Morehouse’s English Department, had been brainstorming about for some time: a black think tank that would analyze the lessons of the movement that had just ended, research the longitudinal history of the black struggle, and propose policies, agendas, and programs that might help advance the next stage of struggle. It was to be called The Institute of the Black World (IBW). To staff it, Vincent reached out to scholars and activists from near and far to join him in Atlanta as Senior Research Fellows.

In education, Chester Davis came from Sir George Williams in Canada. Lerone Bennett, Jr. took leave from Ebony to teach history along with another native Chicagoan, Sterling Stuckey. Joyce Ladner, a SNCC alumna, came from St. Louis and Steve Henderson and Gerald McWorter (now Abdul Alkalimat) joined IBW while retaining their teaching positions at Morehouse and Spelman, respectively. And I, flattered by Vincent’s invitation, left New York to teach and analyze politics.

IBW was a critical learning experience for me in ways too numerous to count. One of the most important was that through researching movement history and talking to Vincent about Martin, I gained an appreciation for Dr. King that I had never had before. Since, as a confirmed Malcolmite, when I and my high school buddies would see Martin on television saying things like, “If any blood is to be spilled, let it be ours,” we would look at one another and ask, “What’s wrong with this silly mother….?” But discovering later that the FBI and other government agencies had the same animus toward Martin that they had towards Malcolm, caused me to regard Martin more sympathetically. It soon became evident, however, that the politics of IBW and those of some of the key advisors of the Center were not compatible so IBW broke with the King Center to follow its own independent path.

Ironically, IBW lasted (1969-1983) as long as Martin’s own movement life, from Montgomery to Memphis (1955-1968)–even though we had to overcome the inevitable fallout from funding sources when we no longer had the benediction of a Martin affiliation. Thus we had to try and fend for ourselves.

One strategy we agreed upon was to reduce payroll. So several of us took teaching jobs away from Atlanta but commuted regularly to continue contributing to IBW’s mission. Chet Davis, for example, went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, while Bobby Hill, the Jamaican Garvey scholar who had joined IBW’s staff, went to Dartmouth. Vincent went to the Quaker school in Pennsylvania, Pendle Hill, while I followed Chet to Amherst and UMass. And who was at UMass studying for her doctorate in education? Betty Shabazz, Malcolm’s widow. . . .

Amherst, Malcolm, and Me

I did not know Betty Shabazz personally, though I had spoken to her on occasion when I called their house in Queens to speak to Malcolm. Of course, I naturally sought her out and we talked a few times because she had moved to Mt. Vernon, New York and was commuting weekly to Amherst. But when we talked, she did not seem terribly interested in writing about Malcolm herself or being interviewed about her life with Malcolm. And when I asked her if there were any unpublished documents, she mentioned , “Yes there were some things in the garage.” But she never volunteered anything further. So I concluded that if I was truly interested in doing what I could to advocate how central I believed Malcolm’s thought and analysis was to illuminating and advancing the black struggle, I could not depend solely on other voices. So I wrote about Malcolm for Presence Africaine, The Village Voice, and sundry other newspapers, magazines and journals. Then the gods intervened again; sending Jan Carew, the Guyanese writer/playwright to Hampshire College in 1977 and Tanzanian revolutionary, Abdul Rahman Babu, to Amherst College in the early Eighties. Both were living witnesses to Malcolm’s thought and persona abroad, in London and Africa respectively, in the last few months of his life. Now the gods had brought us each, sequentially, to Amherst.

I recount these smidgens of my personal relationship with Malcolm so that the reader will understand my Malcolm bias and the lens through which I view–and fundamentally disapprove of–Manning’s solipsistic creation.

PART TWO: MANNING MARABLE’S NON-DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY

The problems with Manning’s biography are many and multiple. They range from historical gaffes, and endless non-sequiturs, to key historical omissions; from patchwork analysis pieced together from the works of others without accurate attribution–and sometimes with no attribution at all–to selective and questionable sources. But most of all, the work disqualifies itself as historical scholarship because it is consistently riven with allegations and statements based on speculation alone. (I invite the reader to read–or reread–the book with pen and notebook at hand to keep a count of the frequency of qualifiers in the text such as “may have,” “could have,” “probably,” “likely,” “if,” ad infinitum.)

And then there are the facile character assassinations of Malcolm, Betty Shabazz, Alex Haley et al. justified, we are told, as “humanizing” Malcolm’s story. Malcolm, for example, is accused, among other things–and en passant–of adultery, homosexuality, sexual inadequacy, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and being purposefully manipulative about the facts of his life, i.e., “Malcolm deliberately exaggerated,” (Marable, 260) “packaged himself . . .[like] a great method actor,” etc., etc. (Marable, 10)

Not Riots But Rebellions: Malcolm and the Masses Confront the American Police State

Manning’s interpretation of Malcolm’s life as “reinvention” had given me my original sense of unease because “reinvention” suggests a designed twisting of the truth and self-glorifying motives. I wondered why, for instance, Manning didn’t use more neutral language such as “transformation” or “development,” or “growth,” or “evolution.” But utilizing that kind of language would derail a central theme of the book: to portray Malcolm as both hero and anti-hero, to de-iconize him. Thus, in the very first pages of the book, Manning accuses Malcolm of being “controversial” and of making “provocative” statements. One wondered, of course, “controversial” and “provocative” to whom since Malcolm enthralled most folk who heard him.

As evidence for his accusation, Manning cites an interview which Malcolm gave to a New York Times reporter in March of 1964:

The whites had better understand this while there is still time. The Negroes at the mass level are ready to act. There will be more violence than ever this year.” (Marable, 3) (emphasis mine)

Manning then frames Malcolm’s observation by quoting the New York City Police Commissioner who castigates Malcolm as:

. . . another self-proclaimed leader [who] openly advocates bloodshed and armed revolt and sneers at the sincere effort of reasonable men to resolve the problem of equal rights by proper, peaceful, and legitimate means. (Marable, ibid)

And what happened four months later in the summer of 1964? In July, Harlem erupted over the police killing of fifteen year old James Powell, the second black youth shot by New York City cops that month. (Evanzz, 251) Nor was Harlem the only black community to erupt that summer. Rebellions also occurred in Jacksonville, Florida; Rochester, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Patterson, Elizabeth, and Jersey City, New Jersey. All of these 1964 rebellions which America misleadingly called “race riots,” were in response to some real or perceived racist conduct by the police of those cities. But instead of citing these rebellions as proof of the accuracy of Malcolm’s March prediction, Manning mentions them not at all, thus lending undeserved credibility to the Police Commissioner’s condemnation of Malcolm.

I was incredulous at this omission since one feature of the Harlem rebellion was the masses calling on Malcolm, in Africa at the time, to come home and lead them. . . So the Police Commissioner’s “self-proclaimed leader” was precisely the leader Harlem turned to in its summer uprising.

Neglecting these rebellions which continued to erupt until July of 1968 is to neglect their tie to Malcolm’s own earlier protests against police racism in Harlem in 1957 and 1958, and his later desire to confront the Los Angeles police who invaded the L.A. Mosque in 1962, assaulted mosque members willy-nilly, and killed Malcolm’s transplanted Roxbury comrade, Ronald Stokes. Only Elijah Muhammad’s prohibition kept Malcolm, and other black Muslims, from descending on Los Angeles to avenge Stokes’ death. (Evanzz, ibid, 117-121)

So from 1964 to 1968, with the exception of the firestorm of black rebellions that swept the country after Martin’s assassination in Memphis that April, black folk, nationwide, rose up against racist police rule; escalating Malcolm’s pioneering protests of the Fifties. Consequently, Manning’s failure to identify Malcolm’s historical link to these subsequent mass protests against the police, the occupying military force over black America, is an analytical shortcoming that significantly undermines his stated aim of clarifying Malcolm’s real political-theoretical contribution to the black struggle, i.e., rejecting America’s identity as a democratic Republic and linking it to South Africa as a racist state.

Malcolm (and Martin’s) Assassination Revisited

In attempting to give the reader a preview of his interpretation of Malcolm’s life which is supposed to eclipse all others, Manning recapitulates in his Prologue,(pgs1-14),”Life Beyond The Legend,” the events of Malcolm’s assassination in the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965.However he leaves out the most significant detail casting suspicion on the role of the NYPD that day.

That is, he laboriously identifies the members of Malcolm’s Muslim security detail; giving their names, where they were stationed, their usual routines, and alleged deviations from those routines that he, Manning, insinuates is suspicious. Except there is one bodyguard, Gene Roberts, famously depicted in the photo of the group trying to minister to the fallen Malcolm on the Audubon stage who Manning does not mention at all in his version of what took place.

This omission is not only incomprehensible, it is historically–and politically–inexcusable since Gene Roberts, as Manning tells the reader belatedly ( on pg.422), was an undercover police agent. Roberts is especially significant in evaluating the role of the police that day because, after Malcolm’s previous meeting at the Audubon, on February 15th, Roberts had told his police superiors that he had observed what he believed to be “a dry run on Malcolm’s life.” He said that there had been. . .

a commotion [and that he had seen] . . . this young fella come down the middle aisle and slip into about the second or third row and take a seat. He was wearing a blue suit, white shirt and a red bow tie which is basically the uniform for the Nation of Islam. I remember seeing a couple of people there that I hadn’t seen before. . . and I mentioned their names. (Strickland, 202)

Roberts says that the reaction of his superiors to his warning was, “We’ll take care of it. . . And that was that.”

Well we now know how they ‘took care of it.’ That, despite Malcolm’s house having been bombed on February 14th, and their own agent reporting a potential death threat on February 15th, on February 21st, a minuscule police presence was carefully stationed in an irrelevant part of the building but not inside the ballroom itself while the vast majority of police were stashed across the street, conveniently and safely away from the meeting itself. Of course when questioned about it later, the police claimed that someone in Malcolm’s entourage had made the request that they absent themselves. (They did not volunteer, of course, the fact that Malcolm’s “entourage” was heavily infiltrated with police spies.)

This tragicomedy is remarkably similar to one that would take place three years later on April 4th, 1968, when the Memphis police reduce Dr. King’s security detail from the usual ten or more officers, to two, and then pull the head of the detail, black detective Ed Redditt, from his assignment at the Lorraine Motel and order him back to police headquarters. There, in a meeting with the Chief of Police, the Sheriff, the Highway Patrol, Army Intelligence, the National Guard and the Secret Service, Redditt is told that word has come from Washington that there is a contract out on his life and that he must go home immediately. (Lane & Gregory, 131) (emphasis mine) (Now are we to assume that James Earl Ray had such good federal connections?)

Redditt defers however; volunteering to stay on the job despite the alleged threat on his life. But to no avail. The Chief of Police orders him home and sends him there, accompanied by Memphis police officers who camp in his house “to safeguard him.” (And of course to ensure that he does not go back to the Lorraine on his own.) (Lane & Gregory, 132-33) This 1968 Memphis scenario at the Lorraine Motel is a virtual replica of the Audubon scenario in New York in 1965 in that the Memphis police, like the New York police, also alleged that someone in Dr. King’s entourage had told them they would not be needed because a local black street gang, the Memphis Invaders, would handle security. (Although it has never been conclusively proven that it was members of the Memphis Invaders, or provocateurs pretending to be Invaders, who precipitated the violence of the first King march in Memphis on March 28th that prompted Dr. King to return to Memphis to prove that non-violence could work, it has been verified that police agents had infiltrated the Invaders. Indeed one of those agents, Marrell McCollough, like Gene Roberts in New York, is captured in the photograph huddled around King’s body on the balcony outside King’s Lorraine Motel room.) (Pepper, 254-55)

It is thus quite extraordinary that a scholar of Manning’s reputation should inform his readers of the inherent contradictions of the official explanation of the assassination of Malcolm X but not expound on the bigger picture that emerges when one witnesses the same dishonest “cover story” trampling on the truth of King’s assassination as well. But the shape of that “big picture” did surface, if ever so briefly, some thirty years after King’s assassination when, unbeknownst to the American people, and scrupulously ignored or misreported by the national media, the official version of the King slaying was rejected on December 8, 1999 by a Memphis jury of six blacks and six whites who concluded that King was assassinated by “a conspiracy involving Lloyd Jowers and others, including government agencies.” (New York Times, 12/09/99, 23) (emphasis mine)

One would have thought that such a verdict would have been front page news of every newspaper in America and the lead story on all the television news shows. But with the exception of one reporter from the local Memphis paper, only foreign media covered the trial. In addition, the startling headline: “Memphis Jury Sees Conspiracy in Martin Luther King’s Death,” was treated as only one of several stories reported on page twenty-three of the New York Times!

Unaccountably, Manning fails to mention this exposé, even after accusing both the FBI and the NYPD of having “advance knowledge” of the plot to kill Malcolm. He also hypothesizes “that the New York District Attorney’s office may have cared more about protecting the identities of undercover police officers and informants than arresting the real killers.” (Marable, 13) His lapse may be due to the fact that he seems to accept the sanctioned version of King’s death; equating it with that of Medgar Evers, since he writes that both were “gunned down by lone white supremacists.” (Marable, ibid) But be that as it may, we know that Malcolm was not only targeted by the FBI, BOSS, and the NYPD, but also the CIA, the State Department, the Secret Service–and god knows who else. We also know that J. Edgar Hoover, after King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, said that “We must mark him now. . . as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro, and national security.” (O’Reilly, 130) So what are we to call these forces arrayed against Malcolm, Martin, and the movement as a whole?

Well, Malcolm often reminded us what to call them when opening his meetings at his myth-shattering jocular best. He would greet the audience with, “Hello, brothers and sisters. . . and friends and enemies.” Then, while folk were still chuckling, he would ask: “You know that you have enemies, don’t you? You wouldn’t be here if some ’enemy’ hadn’t brought you here.” This was the iconoclastic Malcolm with a different vision than the civil rights leaders of his day. Because, unlike most of them, Malcolm did not proceed on the assumption that America was capable of racially reforming its institutions and culture on its own. That is why he proposed the two-pronged strategy of internationally charging the United States of genocide at the United Nations on the one hand, and the national strategy of “the Ballot or the Bullet” on the other.

Malcolm “Deconstructs” America

Malcolm was such a spellbinding orator that the fact that he was also a political theoretician is little appreciated. But he was. He advocated, for example, that instead of pursuing the misdirecting goal of integration, black people ought to control their own communities economically and politically, and fight to exercise their 15th Amendment right to vote nationwide. Then they could extricate themselves from the hypocritical grasp of the two party system and be an independent political power in their own right. But if America was unwilling to “do the right thing,” voting-wise and otherwise, Malcolm advised Blacks to emulate the revolutionary struggles of Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, et al. and fight for their liberation too, i.e., “the Ballot or the Bullet.”

Accordingly, the larger context lacking in Manning’s biography is its failure to sufficiently explicate that Malcolm was much more than America’s most angry black man. Rather, Malcolm was America’s most quintessential racial critic, the person who exposed the inadequacy of defining “the racial problem” in terms of “prejudice,” “discrimination,” “southern segregation,” et al. In fact, he used to say: “Stop talking about the South. When you cross the Canadian border, you’re in ‘the South.’”(Strickland, 3)

Ergo the critical question that America needed to ask itself was not about Malcolm the so-called individual spewer of “racial hatred,” but why the tens of thousands of black men and women, given their own racial experience in the land, were so willing to accept Elijah Muhammad’s depiction of the white man as “the devil” and join the Nation of Islam.Or why the thousands who didn’t join, yet identified with the Nation’s characterization of America’s racist nature. I suspect that would have been Malcolm’s sixty-four dollar question.

So where Aretha breathed life into our cultural souls, Malcolm resurrected our political minds–and souls. Because it was Malcolm who told us that we were victims of a national and historical SYSTEM. And he gave that system a name which clarified our consciousness a thousand fold. He called it racism. And in so doing, he not only redefined our struggle, he also redefined America.

PART THREE: ON THE METHODOLOGY OF MERCANTILISM, CHARACTER DENIGRATION, AND WRITING A BIOGRAPHY FULL OF HOLES

“Reinvention” Über Alles

It is awkward to criticize someone whom one knew fairly well who is now not able to defend himself. Some may even consider it in bad taste–or worse. While understanding those feelings, I have two rejoinders.

First, speaking well of the dead is a standard that Manning did not adhere to himself. Second, our task as scholars and researchers is to seek the truth of our history rather than bend it to our subjective will. For the lessons to be drawn from the history—for our own time and for the future—are infinitely more important than the arbitrary musings of any one individual. In fact, as one example of the arbitrary nature of Manning’s hegemonic trope, his theory of Malcolm’s “reinvention” of self, let us take the concept and apply it to Manning’s own life. To wit. . .

In the thirty-odd years of Manning’s academic career (1974-2011), he taught at at least eleven different colleges and universities. Two were black, Fisk and Tuskegee, the rest were white institutions. Moreover, his academic identity at those institutions was many and varied. He begins as an Associate or full Professor of Political Science. Then in his next locales, he morphs into a Professor of Economics or History or Sociology. After that he is, at the same place, a Professor of History, Political Science and Sociology, all in one. In the latter stage of his academic journey, he chairs a Black Studies Department, then takes his last post at Columbia as Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies. Thus Manning has traveled from east coast to west coast; from Massachusetts and upstate New York to California; thence to the South, Alabama and Tennessee, and from there to the Midwest, Ohio and Indiana. He then crosses the Mississippi to Colorado before finally returning to the East and taking root at Columbia.

This is quite a unique travel record since one assumes that he received offers of tenure at some, if not most, of the universities where he taught. So why did he leave so many, so often? Was it wanderlust? Or was it tempting status-raising offers he received from an Academy that coveted him as a young rising black star? But who and what did he leave behind as he vacated one position after another? One might even ask: Did he leave all of these places voluntarily or is there some hidden history, personal or professional, behind all these uprootings? The point here is twofold: to demonstrate how neatly Manning, by raising questions from left–or right–field about his life, might be garbed in the cloak of self-reinvention himself. It also shows how easy it is for practically anyone to be tarred and feathered by this approach… A particular example of which is the most problematic conjecture in the book, Malcolm’s alleged homosexuality.

Manning’s book index contains two citations re Malcolm and “homosexual encounters.” In the first, Manning tells the reader that the fictional character, Rudy, in the Autobiography who sprinkles talcum powder over an “undressed” white man named Paul Lennon is actually Malcolm himself. He writes: “Based on circumstantial but strong evidence, Malcolm was probably describing his own homosexual encounters with Paul Lennon.” (Marable, 66) (emphasis mine) But where is this “strong evidence” since Manning doesn’t cite it but invokes his relentless tendency to “probablytize” history.

Again, a little later in that same paragraph, still riding the Detroit Red horse, he writes, “But in his Detroit Red life, he [Malcolm] participated in prostitution, marijuana sales, cocaine sessions, numbers running, the occasional robbery and apparently paid homosexual encounters.” (emphasis mine) So he changes the adverb from “probably” to “apparently” but the aspersion does not change. Then, having established Malcolm’s homosexual history to his own satisfaction, Manning writes about it as a given fact in his next chapter: “. . . Malcolm-Detroit Red, Satan, hustler, one time pimp, drug addict and drug dealer, homosexual lover, ladies man, numbers racketeer, burglar, Jack Carlton, and convicted thief. . .” (Marable, 78) (emphasis mine)

Manning has now become his own authority; quoting himself as his evidentiary source! (I am certain that other contributors to this volume will have something to say about the homosexual issue raised by Manning, so let us focus now on another example which, I think, is the most revealing about where this book is really coming from: Manning’s case against Alex Haley and the Autobiography.)

On Making A Case For Oneself

There is a persistent theme in the biography: that Alex Haley, a black Republican and integrationist, was fundamentally opposed to black nationalism, and therefore, slyly, shaped the Autobiography to be more in tune with his own ideology than Malcolm’s.

Few of the book’s reviewers appreciated that it was actually a joint endeavor—and particularly that Alex Haley. . . had an agenda of his own. A liberal Republican, Haley held the Nation of Islam’s racial separatism and religious extremism in contempt. . . In many ways, the published book is more Haley’s than the author’s” because Malcolm died in February, 1965, he had no opportunity to revise major elements of what would become known as his political testament. (Marable, 9)(emphasis mine)

To begin with, Manning’s statement that most of the reviewers of the Autobiography did not realize “it was . . . a joint endeavor,” defies logic since the title of the Autobiography—in big, bold letters—reads: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X—AS TOLD TO ALEX HALEY!! There is also the small matter of the seventy-three page “Epilogue” by Haley at the end of the book. So one assumes that book reviewers who are allegedly literate, are able to put two and two together and conclude that the book was ‘a joint endeavor.’ But Manning doesn’t seem to think so.

Then there’s his issue of Haley being a black Republican. Well let’s see if we can make sense of that fact. . . Haley was from Tennessee and Tennessee happens to have been the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan whose political party to which the White Leagues, the Knights of the White Camellia, and other white terrorists belonged—was the party that overthrew Reconstruction, the Democratic party. Therefore most Southern black men, after the passage of the 14th and 15 amendments, who were not harassed, intimidated, or murdered, and had freedom of choice to vote, were Republicans. Indeed, Frederick Douglass once said: “The Republican party is the ship. All else is open sea.”

But we need not linger with the horror stories of the nineteenth century to establish the strength of the Klan in the Democratic party because fifty years after Reconstruction, the Klan was so strong that in 1924, at the Democratic National Convention in New York City, it nominated its own candidate for President, a New York lawyer, William McAdoo. (Murray, 87-88)

McAdoo had been born in Georgia, reared in Tennessee, and moved to New York at the age of twenty-nine in 1892. Thirty-two years later at Madison Square Garden, the Democratic party held the longest political convention in american political history. Deadlocked Democratic delegates cast one hundred and two ballots over sixteen days before they could elect a compromise candidate over McAdoo, the Klan’s nominee. But although they had lost the first prize, the Klan had already consolidated its power in Oregon, Texas, California, Georgia, Oklahoma, Kansas, Indiana, and the South. It had elected a senator from Texas, and “as many as seventy-five members of the U.S. House of Representatives.” (Murray, 19)

So what party should a southern black man, like Haley, belong to, especially in the years 1963-1965 when the Autobiography is being written and the Democratic party in Alabama and Mississippi is proudly flying their state flag of a white rooster with the caption, “White Supremacy”? Being a black Republican, as Haley was in those movement years, is therefore not the same as being a black Republican in the era of Clarence Thomas, Ronald Reagan, Bush, Sr. Bush-Cheney, et al. A distinction that seems to have eluded Manning entirely.

His other points seem equally in limbo. . .

He implies that Haley inserted ideas of his own into the text but offers no proof.

He says that Malcolm had no time to revise the Autobiography because he was killed in February and the book was published six months later. Except Haley says Malcolm reviewed all the chapters and that they worked together in December and January “incorporating his new views into the final chapters of the Autobiography. . .” (Marable, 402) On February 14th, in fact, a week before Malcolm’s death, Haley tells his agent, Paul Reynolds, that the book is practically finished; that he is “winding up Malcolm X’s book. . . You’ll have it prior to March . . .” (Marable, 403) (emphasis mine) That is to say, within the next two weeks! So if Haley wrote something after March, what was it and where is it? Most tellingly, Manning’s insinuations about Haley masterminding and undermining Malcolm’s message in the book, is contradicted by Haley’s own admission that just the opposite was happening, that collaboration with Malcolm on the Autobiography had profoundly affected him, i.e., he told his agent and editors that “. . .he was at the point at which the process of writing the Autobiography was changing him” . . ‘when the material begins to direct you and command you into what must be done with it.’” (Marable, 261) (emphasis mine) But casting a shadow over Haley’s and the Autobiography’s integrity is only one scene in a script that disparages the work of all previous writers, researchers, and biographers of Malcolm X.

According to Manning, “the historical Malcolm, the man with all his strengths and flaws was being strangled by the iconic legend that had been constructed around him. “In reading nearly all the literature about Malcolm produced in the 1990’s, I was struck by its shallow character and lack of original sources. . .” (Marable,490) At any rate, the solution to this perceived historical deficiency was self-evident: like the cavalry in the classic American westerns, Manning felt compelled to ride to the rescue.

But significantly, Manning was no Lone Ranger riding to the rescue by himself. Factually, a more appropriate image is to see him as the overseer of a large research plantation stretching back over two decades; manned–and womaned–by countless staff. That is what distinguishes Manning’s project from nearly all other Malcolm researchers and historians: he had financial and institutional resources others didn’t have. He had numerous staff over the years that others didn’t have. He worked over a time span others did not enjoy. (Remember Manning developed his research perspective over a twenty year time period while Haley and Malcolm wrote the Autobiography in two years.)

More importantly, the Autobiography was a two person collaboration in which Malcolm was the ultimate decision-maker as to what went into the book. Manning, on the other hand, acknowledges that he worked closely with one Viking editor “in the development of each chapter” [and] “. . . communicated almost daily. . . for nearly eighteen months. . .” [with other editors to discuss] “. . . various versions of chapters, in the effort to reach the broadest possible audience.” (Marable, 492) (emphasis mine)

Thus Manning’s biography was a collective effort crafted, under the publisher’s aegis, “to reach the broadest possible audience,” which is to say that the historical narrative appears to have been subordinated to the marketing strategy; depriving us of comprehending how prophetically Malcolm’s political analysis, insights, and conclusions about America’s fundamental racial failings became the movement’s own…How the incessant betrayals by government and society led even the once hopeful and idealistic Martin Luther King, Jr. to take on Malcolm’s perspective– and even his language.So that he too,twelve years after the Montgomery bus boycott,had reached the point of deploring a society crippled by its “materialism, militarism, and RACISM”(emphasis mine). Leading him to conclude, six months before his own assassination, that:

I have found out all that I have been doing in trying to correct this system in America has been in vain. . . I am trying to get to the roots of it to see just what ought to be done. . . The whole thing will have to be done away with. (Strickland, 165) (emphasis mine).

Malcolm couldn’t have said it better….

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carew, Jan, Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean. Chicago:Lawrence Hill Books, 1994.

Carmichael, Stokely with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael. New York: Scribner, 2003.

Cobb, Charles E., Jr. On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2008

Churchill Ward & Jim Vanderwall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret War Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1988.

Evanzz, Karl, The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1992.

______ The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad. New York: Pantheon, 1999.

Lane, Mark & Gregory, Dick, Code Name Zorro: The Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1977.

Marable, Manning, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. New York: Viking, 2011.

Murray, Robert K., The 103rd Ballot. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

O’Reilly, Kenneth, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972. New York: Free Press, 1989.

Pepper, WIlliam F., Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King. New York: Carrol & Graf, 1995.

Strickland, William & Greene, Cheryll Y., Malcolm X: Make It Plain. New York: Viking, 1994

U.S. Riot Commission Report. 30New York: Bantam, 1968.

7,266 words

By Grace Lee Boggs

May 12-19-2012

At Oakland University’s commencement ceremony on April 28, I was awarded the degree of Doctor of Humanities Honoris Causa “as a distinguished political activist, agent of social change, writer and speaker” who “has had a lasting, positive impact on communities in the Detroit metropolitan region.”

I thank Oakland University and everyone involved in awarding me this honor.

But, as I sat in my wheelchair on the stage at the Meadowbrook Theatre and watched hundreds of graduates march across it to receive diplomas and shake hands with their professors and OU President Gary Russi, I couldn’t help wondering whether I’ve become a player in the system which in the last few decades has financed the explosive growth of student and faculty bodies and university buildings.

Writer-activist Rebecca Solnit calls it the debt peonage system:

“…. The young are constantly told that only a college education can give them a decent future. Then they’re told that, to pay for it, they need to go into debt — usually into five figures, sometimes well into six. And these debts are, in turn, governed by special laws that don’t allow you to declare bankruptcy — no matter what. In other words, they are guaranteed to follow you all your life.

“One of my close friends wept when her husband began to earn enough money to pay off her $45,000 loan, structured so that it looked like she would continue to pay interest on it for the rest of her life; not so dissimilar, that is, from the debts sharecroppers and workers in company towns used to incur.

“…we’re creating a new generation of debt peonage. And my friend is not the worst case by far. Early in the Occupy Wall Street moment, she told me, someone arrived at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan with markers and cardboard on which participants were to write their debt. What shocked her was how many of the occupiers in their early twenties were already carrying huge debt burdens.

“According to the website for Occupy Student Debt, 36,000,000 Americans have student debts. These have increased more than fivefold since 1999, creating a debt load that’s approaching a trillion dollars, with students borrowing $96 billion more every year to pay for their educations. Two-thirds of college students find themselves in this trap nowadays. As commentator Malcolm Harris put it in N + 1 magazine:

“‘Since 1978, the price of tuition at U.S. colleges has increased over 900%, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the U.S. economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But… wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.

“‘About a third are already in default. You can only hope that this bubble will burst in a wildcat strike against student debt, and if we’re lucky, a move to force tuition lower and have a debt jubilee.

”Getting an education to make your way out of poverty and maybe expand your mind is becoming another way of being trapped forever in poverty.”

That’s why I wish OWS activists had gone beyond militancy on May Day to show and/or encourage all of us to imagine better ways for young people to get an education and expand their minds.

.

Reimaging Education

By Shea Howell

May 12-19, 2012

The walkout of students from Western International High School is continuing to reverberate through the city. Emergency Financial Manger (EFM) Roy Roberts has vigorously denied charges this week that he intends to disband the elected school board because some members supported the walk out. The spokesman for the EFM, Steve Wasko said, “Mr. Roberts continues to state that for anyone who desires what he’s here to accomplish, that is, improved educational conditions to prepare Detroit’s students for 21st-century college and career-readiness, he needs all those similarly focused at the table.”

This seat at the table, however, requires sharing a very narrow, destructive view of education. In spite of strong public outcry, Roy Roberts and his appointed administrative team are continuing their heavy-handed response to students who exercised their democratic rights. The walk out by hundreds of students at Southwestern and Western International high schools protesting the decision to close Southwestern high school was met with force. Students were threatened with criminal prosecution. Cell phones were taken. Student leaders were suspended and then told they had to sign contracts pledging to never violate school policies again upon their return to classes.

Underlying this reaction is a deep fear of the power of public protest. The EFM gang labeled the march “irresponsible” and pledged swift punishment. Steve Wasko said, “DPS and the school will ensure that the student code of conduct is enforced.”

Had Roy Roberts bothered to talk to the students, to read their statements or visit their Facebook postings, it would have been immediately clear that these students are exactly the kinds of people we want and need to make our city better. First, students were not only walking out for themselves, but for others. Second, as they are concerned about quality education. They said, “We were also fighting for quality education for us at Western, and at ALL DPS schools. We do not understand why we are being punished with a loss of educational opportunity when that is exactly what we were fighting for.”

Finally, students showed imagination, initiative and an understanding of history by responding to the suspensions by organizing a Freedom School with classes about the history of Southwest Detroit, Civil Rights, Codes of Conduct, expressive arts, social justice, and media. In essence these students see themselves as engaged, responsible citizens, demanding and creating new kinds of education.

The EFM sees them as troublemakers, needing to be controlled and punished. This view is how we know the EFM will ultimately fail in his mission to “prepare students for the 21st century.”

We are living at a time when creativity, imagination, courage and vision are required from all of us. These attributes terrify the ruling elites who are imposing an educational system of control, punishment, and persistent meaningless testing.

In contrast to the EFM view of public education is that of Professor Gregory Smith of Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education. Professor Smith visited the Boggs Center to talk about place-based education this week. He has written six books demonstrating how place based education offers a way to create meaningful educational experiences by basing curriculum on local knowledge and issues. In his latest book, Place and Community-based Education in Schools, with David Sobel, he chronicles imaginative educational practices throughout the country.

Smith and Sobel write: “By making space for local knowledge and issues, it diminishes the boundary between the classroom and students’ lives in their homes and neighborhoods. When teachers involve students in projects that address genuine community concerns, students come to see themselves as knowledge producers and actors. Young people who might otherwise be disengaged from learning become willing to invest themselves in their own education, the life of their community, and the wise stewardship of local resources.”

Through the walkout and creation of Freedom Schools students are reimagining a stronger educational system for everyone.

BOOK REVIEW • The Next American Revolution

Reviewed by Greg Smith

Few, if any, U.S. leaders can match the long-term and sustained commitment to civil rights, social justice, and grassroots democracy of 95-year-old Detroit activist and intellectual Grace Lee Boggs. A friend of Malcolm X as well as Martin Luther King Jr., Boggs blends the vision and insights of a PhD-holding philosopher with the street-smart savvy of a community organizer. In her new book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, she provides a road map for individuals and communities ready and willing to respond to the challenges and contradictions of our special time “on the clock of the universe.” This special time, she says, requires a fundamental transformation of the way human beings have come to envision our lives on this small and increasingly imperiled planet. She believes that young people can be enlisted to play a significant role in the “re-building and re-spiriting” of our communities and that public school teachers have a major responsibility to ensure that this happens.

At the heart of Boggs’ critique of the current world system is the same concern about the “giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism” that King articulated in his 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” In the nearly half century that has passed since this speech was given, Boggs argues, little has been done to resist, let alone reverse, the social and environmental consequences of these handmaidens of the corporate state and transnational capitalism. She goes on to say that little will continue to be done unless people reject the notion that we are victims of the systems and individuals who perpetuate these ills, and instead take up the responsibility to become the creators of an alternative society predicated on “hope, cooperation, stewardship, and respect.”

Central to this transformation must be a recognition that the lifestyles of most Americans are directly related to the exploitation of people in less advantaged countries and the planet itself. The shaping of a new social reality will require embracing frugality and rejecting the fruits of an economy based on endless growth and domination. This message will not be heard easily by people who already enjoy these benefits or by those who have long been denied but now aspire to them. Boggs writes:

The next American Revolution, at this stage in our history, is not principally about jobs or health insurance or making it possible for more people to realize the American Dream of upward mobility. It is about acknowledging that we Americans have enjoyed middle-class comforts at the expense of other peoples all over the world. It is about living the kind of lives that will not only slow down global warming but also end the galloping inequality both inside this country and between the Global North and the Global South. It is about creating a new American Dream whose goal is a higher Humanity instead of the higher standard of living dependent on Empire. It is about practicing a new, more active, global, and participatory concept of citizenship. It is about becoming the change we wish to see in the world. (p. 72)

Participating in this revolution means abandoning expectations of an endlessly increasing standard of living within and across generations—the carrot that has induced far too many of us to forego what is humane for what is comfortable. This revolution instead promises a deeper sense of connectedness and personal fulfillment. One of the consequences of capitalism is the relational, moral-ethical, and spiritual impoverishment that accompanies the pursuit of wealth and status. As Bill McKibben suggests in Deep Economy,people in the 20th century were fooled into believing that more and better are the same thing. Having enough is certainly essential, but more after a certain point does not make us happier. Boggs concurs: “Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers and to relate to other human beings.” (p. 60)