carmichael - Blogs - TheBlackList Pub
2024-03-28T08:42:18Z
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1968 protests at Columbia University called attention to ‘Gym Crow’ and got worldwide attention
https://www.theblacklist.net/profiles/blogs/1968-protests-at-columbia-university-called-attention-to-gym-crow
2018-08-29T01:46:45.000Z
2018-08-29T01:46:45.000Z
Nana Baakan Agyiriwah
https://www.theblacklist.net/members/NanaBaakanAgyiriwah
<div><h1>1968 protests at Columbia University called attention to 'Gym Crow' and got worldwide attention</h1><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233695/original/file-20180827-75972-19v0afj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" alt="File 20180827 75972 19v0afj.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1" /><br />Black power militant H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael (right) appeared at a sit-in protest at Columbia University in New York City on April 26, 1968. <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-Domestic-News-New-York-United-/1aea42ff04f2da11af9f0014c2589dfb/287/0">AP</a></span><p></p><p><span><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/stefan-m-bradley-540901">Stefan M. Bradley</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/loyola-marymount-university-2631">Loyola Marymount University</a></em></span></p><blockquote><p>“If they build the first story, blow it up. If they sneak back at night and build three stories, burn it down. And if they get nine stories built, it’s yours. Take it over, and maybe we’ll let them in on the weekends.”</p></blockquote><p>This is what <a href="https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/the-story-of-sncc/">Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee</a> and Black Panther Party affiliate <a href="https://snccdigital.org/people/h-rap-brown/">H. Rap Brown</a> told a crowd of Harlem residents at a community rally in February 1967.</p><p>They were there to protest Columbia University’s construction of a gymnasium in Morningside Park, the only land separating the Ivy League university from the historic black working-class neighborhood. The gym, along with the discovery that Columbia was affiliated with the <a href="https://www.ida.org/">Institute for Defense Analysis</a> – a national consortium of flagship universities and research organizations that provided strategy and weapons research to the U.S. Department of Defense – stirred students to protest for more decision-making power at their elite university.</p><p>When considering the key events of 1968, such as the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/tet-offensive">Tet Offensive</a>, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/01/01/1968s-chaos-the-assassinations-riots-and-protests-that-defined-our-world/?utm_term=.3eae1a9710a2">assassinations of national leaders</a>, demonstrations at the <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/protests-at-democratic-national-convention-in-chicago">Democratic National Convention</a> and the <a href="http://time.com/3880999/black-power-salute-tommie-smith-and-john-carlos-at-the-1968-olympics/">Olympics</a>, as well international events concerning democracy, the Columbia uprisings merit attention.</p><h2>Issues converge on campus</h2><p>As I detail in my book – <a href="https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/69erx5xt9780252034527.html">“Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s”</a> – all the issues of the 1960s and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/New-Left">New Left</a> collided on the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia. Students contended with the war in Vietnam, institutional racism, the generational divide, sexism, environmentalism and urban renewal – all while trying to find dates and attend classes.</p><p>Everything came to a head on April 23, 1968 – just weeks after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. That was when members of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society hosted a <a href="http://spectatorarchive.library.columbia.edu/?a=d&d=cs19680424-01&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------">rally</a> on campus to decry the war – and, what many considered the racist gym in Morningside Park. Members of the Students’ Afro-American Society, or SAS, and Columbia varsity athletes – known as jocks – were in attendance as well. SAS followers showed up to resume an earlier fight they had with the jocks who supported the construction of the gymnasium.</p><hr /><p><em><strong>Read more: <a href="http://theconversation.com/revolution-starts-on-campus-102243">Revolution Starts on Campus</a></strong></em></p><hr /><p>Some students had been working with Harlem community groups. They saw the gym as a symbol of the university’s “power” over a defenseless and poverty-stricken black neighborhood. They joined local politicians who opposed the gym for a myriad of reasons, including its concrete footprint in a green park and the inability of the community to have access to the entire structure once built.</p><h2>Troubled relations</h2><p>The situation was, of course, complex. Columbia had long been a contentious neighbor to Harlem and Morningside Heights. The campus gym was decrepit and prevented the university from competing with its Ivy peers effectively in terms of facilities and space. Regarding the park, Columbia had constructed softball fields that initially community members could use. By 1968, however, only campus affiliates could access the fields. Then, white faculty members had been mugged in the park.</p><p>The university, seeking to expand in the postwar period, purchased US$280 million of land, mortgages and residential buildings in Harlem and Morningside Heights. That resulted in the <a href="https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/69erx5xt9780252034527.html">eviction of nearly 10,000 residents</a> in a decade, 85 percent of whom were black or Puerto Rican.</p><p>Columbia acted in coordination with Morningside Heights, Inc., a confederacy of educational and religious institutions in the neighborhood that also sought to “renew” the area to serve their mostly white patrons. David Rockefeller, grandson of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, acted as MHI’s first president. Columbia was the lead institution.</p><p>Despite being close to a black neighborhood, the university admitted few black students and employed a handful of black instructors. For instance, as I report in my book, in the 1964-1965 school year, there were only 35 black students out of 2,500 students enrolled in Columbia’s College of Arts and Sciences, and just one tenured black professor. By spring 1968, there were more than 150 black students enrolled.</p><p>On April 23, protesting students attempted to take over the administration building but were repelled by campus security. Then, they walked to the gym construction site where they tore down fencing and physically confronted police. From the park, they returned to campus where they finally succeeded in taking over a classroom building, Hamilton Hall. In doing so, they surrounded the dean of the college, Henry Coleman, who chose to stay in his office with his staff. To “protect” Coleman, <a href="http://spectatorarchive.library.columbia.edu/?a=d&d=cs19680424-01.2.2&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------">several jocks stood guard</a> outside his door.</p><h2>Clashes with police</h2><p>What started as a racially integrated demonstration of students took a turn in the late night when H. Rap Brown and several community activists showed up at the invitation of the Students’ Afro-American Society. The student group, Brown and the community activists agreed that black people solely should occupy Hamilton Hall and that white activists should commandeer other buildings. The white demonstrators accommodated, leaving Hamilton and taking over four other buildings. That forced Columbia officials to contend with not just a student protest but a black action on campus at that height of Black Power Movement. Incidentally, the community activists removed and replaced the jocks as sentries of the dean’s office.</p><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233697/original/file-20180827-75996-1t09zhg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" /><br /><span class="caption">Participants of a student sit-in assist each other in climbing up into the offices of Columbia University President Grayson Kirk on April 24, 1968.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-Domestic-News-New-York-United-/e464d889dde6da11af9f0014c2589dfb/297/0">AP</a></span><p></p><p>To the ire of many white university administrators of the period, Stokely Carmichael of SNCC and the Black Panthers fame showed up to explain – <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1968/04/27/archives/facultys-effort-fails-to-resolve-columbia-dispute-protest-leader.html">through the press</a> – that the university deal either with the student activists on campus or militants coming from Harlem. This insinuated the tone of the demonstrations would change drastically. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated less than three weeks before. From offices in Morningside Heights, Columbia administrators had watched Harlem burn as residents mourned and reacted to the black leader’s death. The only thing that separated the elite white institution from angry black rebels was the park in which the university was building a gymnasium <a href="https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/69erx5xt9780252034527.html">against the will of many community members</a>.</p><p>In consultation with New York Mayor John Lindsay, Columbia administrators chose to end the demonstrations by calling 1,000 New York police officers to clear the five occupied campus buildings on April 30. <a href="http://spectatorarchive.library.columbia.edu/?a=d&d=cs19680430-01&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------">Chaos and brutality prevailed</a>. As the NAACP and other Harlem community organizations stood watch, black students vacated Hamilton, which SAS had renamed Malcolm X Hall, and were arrested peacefully. In the building that national Students for a Democratic Society leader and <a href="http://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antivietnamwar/exhibits/show/exhibit/origins-of-students-for-a-demo/port_huron_statement">Port Huron Statement</a> author Tom Hayden occupied, police and demonstrators collided physically. One of the most iconic documents of the postwar period, the 1962 Port Huron Statement outlined the need for young people to be in the vanguard of the movement to eradicate racism and grind the military-industrial complex to a halt; it centered the notion of participatory democracy, which called for greater inclusion of the citizenry in decision-making. In other buildings, students found themselves on the hurt end of police batons when they resisted arrest.</p><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233699/original/file-20180827-75978-mpc9p5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" /><br /><span class="caption">Police rush toward student protesters outside Columbia University’s Low Memorial Library on April 30, 1968.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Columbia-Protests-Anniversary/76748e36da3c4dac84fd27e87105c29f/9/0">AP</a></span><p></p><h2>Worldwide attention</h2><p>In opening the door to violence, the university turned what was a local matter into an <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/03/the-students-behind-the-1968-columbia-uprising">international story</a> and radicalized moderate students and neighborhood residents. Young radicals abroad learned of “Gym Crow” and university-sponsored defense research. In solidarity, they supported the Columbia student activists’ causes and chanted “two, three, many Columbias” – a refrain that gained popularity among American student protesters.</p><p>After the demonstrations in April, ensuing violent demonstrations in May, and a <a href="http://spectatorarchive.library.columbia.edu/?a=d&d=cs19680501-01&e=23-04-1968-30-06-1968--en-20--1--txt-txIN-Strike------">six-week student strike</a>, the university did not build the gym in the park and <a href="http://spectatorarchive.library.columbia.edu/?a=d&d=cs19680920-01.2.11&srpos=8&e=23-04-1968-30-12-1968--en-20--1--txt-txIN-IDA------">renounced its membership</a> in the Institute for Defense Analysis.</p><p>In my view, elements of the 1968 Columbia rebellion are inspiring and instructional for today’s students, protesters and community residents. As <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/10/atlanta-super-gentrification-eminent-domain">gentrification threatens</a> the homes of poor black people in urban areas today, activists should recall that 50 years earlier young people believed they could cut their university’s ties to war research and prevent a prestigious white American institution from expanding into black spaces at the same time. They succeeded.</p><p><em>Our new podcast “<a href="https://heatandlightpod.com">Heat and Light</a>” features Prof. Bradley and Columbia University’s Michael Kazin discussing this issue in depth.</em></p><p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/heat-and-light/id1424521855?mt=2"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233721/original/file-20180827-75984-1gfuvlr.png" alt="Listen on Apple Podcasts" width="134" height="34" /></a> <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9oZWF0YW5kbGlnaHRwb2QuY29tL2ZlZWQucnNz"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233720/original/file-20180827-75978-3mdxcf.png" alt="" width="134" height="34" /></a> <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=221807&refid=stpr"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233716/original/file-20180827-75981-pdp50i.png" alt="Stitcher" width="116" height="34" /></a> <a href="https://radiopublic.com/heat-and-light-WYDE55"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233717/original/file-20180827-75990-86y5tg.png" alt="Listen on RadioPublic" width="105" height="34" /></a> <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/History-Podcasts/Heat-and-Light-p1149068/"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233723/original/file-20180827-75984-f0y2gb.png" alt="Listen on TuneIn" width="86" height="34" /></a></p><p><span><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/stefan-m-bradley-540901">Stefan M. Bradley</a>, Chair, Department of African American Studies, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/loyola-marymount-university-2631">Loyola Marymount University</a></em></span></p><p>This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/1968-protests-at-columbia-university-called-attention-to-gym-crow-and-got-worldwide-attention-102093">original article</a>.</p></div>
Female Black Panther Party, Sexism in the Group?
https://www.theblacklist.net/profiles/blogs/2055350-BlogPost-236953
2016-02-12T03:13:06.000Z
2016-02-12T03:13:06.000Z
Nana Baakan Agyiriwah
https://www.theblacklist.net/members/NanaBaakanAgyiriwah
<div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align:left;"><div style="font-family:cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gkwsVwiOhKo/Vru2xVUOi0I/AAAAAAACWYk/QFQ1HsKOOM0/s1600/black%2Bpanthers.jpg" style="margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em;"><img border="0" height="313" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gkwsVwiOhKo/Vru2xVUOi0I/AAAAAAACWYk/QFQ1HsKOOM0/s320/black%2Bpanthers.jpg" width="320" alt="black%2Bpanthers.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HxMfKvwAVa0/Vru2xF0HraI/AAAAAAACWYg/OummLHFOuCA/s1600/Women%2Bin%2Bthe%2BBPP.jpg" style="margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HxMfKvwAVa0/Vru2xF0HraI/AAAAAAACWYg/OummLHFOuCA/s320/Women%2Bin%2Bthe%2BBPP.jpg" width="320" alt="Women%2Bin%2Bthe%2BBPP.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-weight:bold;"> </span></div><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br /></span> <span style="font-weight:bold;">NB COMMENTARY:</span> I really wanted to NOT be in this Beyoncé Madness, but the irony of it all is to see folks being offended by her antics to the point of calling it racist when in fact, if they took the time to read the lyrics, they would see the song is all about <span style="font-size:18.6667px;">Beyoncé </span>getting hers. With a smattering of some retorts against "whatever." The fact that she even uses this "so-called" Black Panther imagery, which in and of itself is a smack in the face of the movement, a downgrade at best in its presentation and surely not militant at all; is amazing to me. The fact that folks are getting hot under the collar over it is outright laughable. Then, on the other hand, you have these drones who support and even consider this "show" as something meaningful or even intrinsically an acknowledgment of her "Blackness." Now I am ROFLMAO and sadly, there are many in that camp as well.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">In it's simplicity it barely shows any aggression or hatred or anything against the police. It's a bunch of scantly clad women, fist balled up, dancing with Beyoncé in formation. The directive?? Work hard, grind hard, own it so you can "have the paper." Which none of that was what the BPP Movement was about but surely a capitalistic approach to success.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"></div><div style="font-family:cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">These folks give money to these movements (Black Lives Matter which is suspect on its face), and bail protesters out of jail, but none of them will give up their way of life to join the Movement on the Real, and that's the point. If twirling her ass, and rocking her crotch gets her money, that is what she will do, she certainly is not on the front lines of the conscious movement or on the front lines of the progressive movement. <br /> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z1hOPpeKfv4/Vru2xRVvYeI/AAAAAAACWYo/7sF-48xtj2o/s1600/beyonce-super-bowl-black-panther.jpg" style="margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em;"><img border="0" height="171" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z1hOPpeKfv4/Vru2xRVvYeI/AAAAAAACWYo/7sF-48xtj2o/s320/beyonce-super-bowl-black-panther.jpg" width="320" alt="beyonce-super-bowl-black-panther.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:14pt;text-align:left;">Being part of the conscious or progressive movement would be detrimental to her power bank account cause folks would stop spending money on those things that do nothing for their progress and that would mean to stop buying her and her husbands stuff. Her lyrics were more about, "this is what you get for your money, I work hard for it, I slay for it, and see, what your money did for me??? I am at the Super Bowl."</span></div></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">It's all about her and will always be about her, and folks need to get real cause she ain't doing nothing against her handlers who are all "albinos." LOL Check out the lyrics if you haven't already. <a href="http://nanas-rants.blogspot.com/2016/02/beyonce-media-hype-2016-super-bowl.html">Click Here for the Lyrics</a></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8wbZGjMckHw/U1DGC-hE4aI/AAAAAAACUUU/C0hvEqFCnhI/s1600/banner%2Bcopy.jpg" style="margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em;"><img border="0" height="38" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8wbZGjMckHw/U1DGC-hE4aI/AAAAAAACUUU/C0hvEqFCnhI/s320/banner%2Bcopy.jpg" width="320" alt="banner%2Bcopy.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"><b>Assata Shakur Speaks</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"></div></div><div style="text-align:center;"><iframe width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nvYqYlvboEg?wmode=opaque"></iframe></div><div style="text-align:center;"></div><div style="color:#333333;font-family:cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><div style="text-align:center;"><iframe width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Kq7xpptfIQk?wmode=opaque"></iframe></div></div><div style="margin:0in;"><br /> <a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/" style="color:#333333;font-family:cambria;font-size:18.6667px;font-weight:bold;" target="_blank">SOURCE</a><span style="color:#000000;font-family:cambria;font-size:18.6667px;font-weight:bold;">: </span><span style="font-family:cambria;"><span style="font-size:18.6667px;"><b><a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/">http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/</a></b></span></span><br /><div style="color:#333333;font-family:cambria;font-size:14pt;">Although the Black Panther Party (BPP) revolutionized the condition of Black people and communities in the 1960s, sexism in the group silenced the voices of Black women to promote a Black nationalist agenda that became conflated with the idea of preserving Black masculinity. This project aims to examine how and why this brand of racialized sexism in the Black Panther Party operated in the group, and to shed light on some of the silenced and erased the narratives about radical Black womanhood.</div></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RQpQQGDXlA8/Vru2wxH6osI/AAAAAAACWYY/dtP8wAfaj1E/s1600/Female%2BBPP%2Bwith%2Bguns%2Bdrawn.jpg" style="clear:left;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;"><img border="0" height="222" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RQpQQGDXlA8/Vru2wxH6osI/AAAAAAACWYY/dtP8wAfaj1E/s320/Female%2BBPP%2Bwith%2Bguns%2Bdrawn.jpg" width="320" alt="Female%2BBPP%2Bwith%2Bguns%2Bdrawn.jpg" /></a></div><span style="color:#555555;font-size:14pt;">December 18, 2013</span></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/post/70423301997/why-i-joined-the-party-an-africana-womanist#notes">3 notes</a></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Flibcom.org%2Fhistory%2Fwhy-i-joined-party-africana-womanist-reflection&t=YmNlM2NjMWVjNWNkMmE2N2U5NThkZGI4MzZkY2IzOGVmM2U5MzFjZCxIbmlLNzMwaQ%3D%3D">Why I joined the Party: An Africana womanist reflection</a></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Regina Jennings, a Black woman who joined the Black Panther Party as a teenager, reflects about her experience with sexism in the group. She recounts a particularly difficult encounter with a captain who romantically pursued her. When she rejected his advances, she explains, “he made my life miserable. He gave me ridiculous orders. He shunned me. He found fault in my performance” (262). Ultimately, he had her transferred to a different branch of the organization, even though that meant completely disrupting her way of life. Jennings brought the incidences to the Central Committee’s attention, but the all-male panel accused her of white, bourgeois behaviors and values.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">In spite of this situation, Jennings takes great pains not to demonize the entire group. While she and other women in the Black Panther Party confronted this form of sexism and misogyny, they also received a lot of support from Black men. Some Black men even defended Jennings when she complained of the sexual harassment, even when that meant that other men would shame them or call them emasculated. Jennings attributes these circumstances with a lack of knowledge or experience with power. “Black men, who had been too long without some form of power, lacked the background to understand and rework their double standard toward the female cadre” (263), she contends, demonstrating that oppression not only works to degrade a group, but also impels that group to internalize a set of power structures and enact oppression upon others. In spite of her claims, she emphasizes that this type of sexism should not be excused but rather understood. Jennings celebrates the love present in the BPP, forgiving the Party for the conditions that made it imperfect while honoring the uplift it achieved.</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color:#eeeeee;"><i>“I want you to know how much they perfectly loved you,” she clarifies in reference to those who dedicated their energies to Black communities. “I want you to know that they were willing to die for you” (264).</i></span></blockquote><div style="font-family:cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><span style="font-size:14pt;"><b>December 18, 2013</b></span></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/post/70420453870/memoriasconsazon-kathleen-cleaver-on-black#notes">373 notes</a></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><a href="http://memoriasconsazon.tumblr.com/post/52264750365/kathleen-cleaver-on-black-natural-hair">memoriasconsazon</a>:</div><div style="color:#555555;font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;font-style:italic;margin:0in;">Kathleen Cleaver on Black Natural Hair</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Kathleen Cleaver was the first female member of the Black Panther Party’s decision making body. In this interview, Cleaver challenges Euro-centric standards of beauty while expressing the BPP’s stance on self-love, and Black revival through celebrating different images of Blackness. She really does make a case for “the personal is political”!</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:0in;"></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:0in;"><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-62Qb8XLPS4Y/Vru2wydQfII/AAAAAAACWYU/hd7-1RoxGTA/s1600/Breakfast%2Bprogram%252C%2BBPP.jpg" style="clear:left;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-62Qb8XLPS4Y/Vru2wydQfII/AAAAAAACWYU/hd7-1RoxGTA/s320/Breakfast%2Bprogram%252C%2BBPP.jpg" width="246" alt="Breakfast%2Bprogram%252C%2BBPP.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-size:14pt;">What about Feminism?</span></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Although Black women have not always identified with labels such as “feminist,” Black women have advocated for women’s issues as early as the 19th century. Black women have fought for economic justice/equality, against racism, against sexism, and against imperialism throughout U.S. history. In fact, the first wave white feminists learned much of their organizing and political strategies from Black, female abolitionists.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">The late 1960s and the 1970s did witness an increasing number of Black women articulating their experience around the words “feminist” or “feminism,” but also a number of Black women challenging the structure of feminist movements. The Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) took the nation by storm, voicing many women’s grievances, but it did not appeal to many Black women and women of color who interpreted the movement’s work as an agenda that principally furthered white, upper-class women’s issues. Furthermore, many Black women considered their involvement in mixed gender spaces more pressing because they identified more with their male counterparts’ struggles than with the affluent white women’s problems. Kathleen Cleaver explained this phenomenon:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color:#eeeeee;"><i>“The problems of Black women and the problems of White women are so completely diverse they cannot possibly be solved in the same type of organization nor met by the same type of activity… [but] I can understand how a White woman cannot relate to a White man.”</i></span></blockquote><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">This racial solidarity in some ways led some Black women in mixed gender groups to tolerate oppressive ideologies to avoid division, or to subscribe to certain roles. In the pamphlet, “Panther Sisters on Women’s Liberation,” some women insisted that “Black men understand that their manhood is not dependent on keeping Black women subordinate to them,” but also claimed that because “our men have been sort of castrated,” women had to avoid taking up too much space in leadership so that Black men would not have any “fear of women dominating the whole political scene”. That kind of admonition to other Black women invokes ideas about pathologized matriarchy. Other women in the BPP adopted more masculine roles in order to be taken more seriously. Assata Shakur confessed, “You had to develop this whole arrogant kind of macho style in order to be heard… We were just involved in those day to day battles for respect in the Black Panther Party,” revealing the complications in negotiating one’s gender identity and the implications of said gender, even in anti-oppression organizations.<br /> <br /><div style="text-align:center;"><iframe width="420" height="315" frameborder="0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3oU8EOX5SH0?wmode=opaque"></iframe></div><div style="text-align:center;"></div></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Although the climate of the BPP proved difficult to articulate in terms of gender politics, it was due to Black women’s participation in mixed gender groups and organizations (as opposed to the tendencies of some white, radical feminist groups who championed separatism), that Black women could interrogate the sexist and misogynistic ideologies present in anti-oppression organizations. Various BPP chapters even collaborated with the Women’s Liberation Movement at times, such as in 1969 when WLM members protested the cruel treatment of imprisoned Panther women.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Black women’s presence in the BPP forced men to reconsider their sexist assumptions. Even Party leaders like Eldridge Cleaver shifted positions. In 1968, Cleaver limited Black women’s political potential only to “pussy power,” or, the idea that Black women should withhold sex from Black men until he was ready to “pick up a gun” and embrace his own activism. In contrast, a year later, responding the cruel treatment of Black Panther women in prisons, Cleaver asserted that “if we want to go around and call ourselves a vanguard organization, then we’ve got to be… the vanguard also in the area of women’s liberation, and set an example in that area.” Black women demonstrated that sexist gender norms could not dictate their worth, and that in the grand scheme of things, the police imprisoned them just as they imprisoned Black men, and that white society had stripped them of their femininity just as it had stripped Black men of their masculinity.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Sources:</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Anon. “Panther Sisters on Women’s Liberation.” In Heath, ed. <span style="font-style:italic;">Off the Pigs!</span> Pg. 339.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Cleaver, Eldridge. “Message to Sister Erica Hugggins of the Black Panther Party.”<span style="font-style:italic;">The Black Panther Party</span>. 5 July 1969. Reprinted in Foner, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Black Panthers Speak</span>. 98-99.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Cleaver, Eldridge. “Speech to the Nebraska Peace and Freedom Party Convention,” 24 August 1968. Pg. 22</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Matthews, Tracye. “No One Ever Asks, What a Man’s Place in the Revolution Is”: Gender and the Politics of The Black Panther Party 1966-1971.” In: <span style="font-style:italic;">The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered]</span>. Edited by Charles E. Jones. Black Classic Press, Baltimore, 1998. Pg. 274, 284, 290.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:0in;"></div><div style="font-family:cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><b>December 18, 2013</b></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/post/70409103247/matriarchy-and-the-moynihan-report">Matriarchy and the Moynihan Report</a></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">In 1965, then Assistant Secretary of the US Department of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, issued a report about the question of poverty and the Black American population. Startled by statistics that showed that the unemployment rate of Black people doubled that of white people, Moynihan set out to expose the conditions that economically limited African Americans.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Given its historical context, the Moynihan Report actually represented a radical conceptualization of the relationship between gender identities, family structure, and socio-economic class; however, Moynihan’s statement falls short of the mark by pointing to Black matriarchy as the damning factor. While recognizing that structural conditions that originate in the enslaving of Black people in America has contributed to and caused many of the social disadvantages that plague African American communities contemporarily, Moynihan implicates Black motherhood thereby suggesting that without a patriarchal structure, the Black family is doomed to fail. “He does… identify the fundamental problem confronting the Black community as the ‘tangle of pathology’ associated with a matriarchal family structure,” contest Juan J. Battle and Michael D. Bennet in “African-American Families and Public Policies.” By legitimizing Western, patriarchal culture over non-white alternatives to the family structure, Moynihan prioritizes the suggestion that the Black family is deviant and therefore pathologically damaged instead of demonstrating how institutions like racism, sexism and classism systematically oppress Black families. In this way, he roots the problem in a presumed cultural deficiency, shifting the onus to Black mothers to stop corrupting the family structure instead of on the government to stop discriminating against people of color.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">African Americans had initiated conversations about the Black family long before the Moynihan Report; nevertheless, using anecdotal, historical, sociological, and statistical evidence, the Report validated many Black men’s sentiments of “castration” and their resentments about a lost masculinity. Without a doubt, some Black men within the Black Panther Party endorsed the Moynihan Report to sanction their own desires for male superiority. Even Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton attested to this male inferiority complex:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color:#eeeeee;"><i>“[The Black man] feels that he is something less than a man… Often his wife (who is able to secure a job as a man, cleaning for White people) is the breadwinner. He is therefore, viewed as quiet worthless by his wife and children” (Huey Newton, To Die for the People. Pg. 81)”</i></span></blockquote><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Interestingly enough, although Newton does not necessarily subscribe to the subordination of Black women to elevate the Black man, he does not attempt here to undermine the assumption that men <span style="font-style:italic;">should</span> be the breadwinner, that women<span style="font-style:italic;">should not</span> head the Black family, or that the solution is to esteem the Black man above the Black woman. Women, especially those in the BPP, would have to create most of the awareness about the fallibility of this form of social change.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Sources:</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Battle, Juan J. and Bennet, Michael D. “African-American Families and Public Policy: The Legacy of the Moynihan Report.” Sage Publications, London and New Delhi, 1997. Pg. 154 </div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Moynihan, Daniel P. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” 1965 </div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Newton, H. <span style="font-style:italic;">To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton</span>. City Lights Publishers, 2009. Pg. 81</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><br /> <span style="color:#555555;"><b>December 18, 2013</b></span></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/post/70398938802/cultural-nationalism">Cultural Nationalism</a></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">In the 1960s, Maulana Karenga spearheaded Us, a Los Angeles-based organization dedicated to raising Black people’s awareness of their cultural heritage. Us propounded the notion that a revival of African traditions would elevate the condition of African Americans. Whether real or contrived, these traditions would ennoble Black people in new ways.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xDn9zzr8bis/Vru52QHbleI/AAAAAAACWY8/84GrC_UoUfo/s1600/Ron%2BKaringa.jpg" style="clear:left;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xDn9zzr8bis/Vru52QHbleI/AAAAAAACWY8/84GrC_UoUfo/s1600/Ron%2BKaringa.jpg" alt="Ron%2BKaringa.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-size:14pt;">[Malauna Karenga, founder of “Us,” creator of the pan-African/African American Holiday of Kwanzaa, intellectual and writer.]</span></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">The Black Panther Party and Us supported each other ideologically, and Maulana Karenga even attended various BPP meetings and rallies. In spite of this initial alliance, the two groups diverged when their ethics no longer aligned. The BPP pushed back against Us’ idea that all Black people were allies in the struggle simply because of the color of their skin. On January 17, 1969, a shootout erupted between BPP and Us members during a Black Student Union meeting at UCLA, which resulted in the death of two BPP members. From that point onward, the relationship between the two organizations never recovered.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Although the Black Panther Party and Us often feuded, the earliest philosophies in the Black Panther Party do reflect many of Karenga’s beliefs. With respect to women, Karenga championed female submission in the name of reinstating Black male authority. He observed:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i style="background-color:#eeeeee;">“What makes a woman appealing is femininity and she can’t be feminine without being submissive. A man has to be a leader and he has to be a man who bases his leadership on knowledge, wisdom, and understanding… The role of the woman is to inspire her man, educate their children and participate in social development. We say male supremacy is based on three things: tradition, acceptance, and reason. Equality is false; it’s the devil’s concept.”</i></blockquote><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Karenga espoused a complimentary gender theory; this theory depends on the credence that Black women serve to affirm Black men’s superiority. The foundation for this brand of Black racial uplift remains in the notion that empowering Black men necessarily will translate to empower Black communities. Ironically, this philosophy does not interrogate the premise that the restoration of Black male supremacy only occurs insomuch as Black women <span style="font-style:italic;">inspire</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">educate</span> these Black men. Unfortunately, many of these problematic viewpoints continued to circulate in BPP chapters after Karenga’s departure from the group, necessitating that the Party resolve many of its gendered issues in later years.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Sources: </div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Halisi, Clyde, ed., <span style="font-style:italic;">The Quotable Karenga</span>. Los Angeles: Us Organization, 1967. Pgs. 27-28</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Matthews, Tracye. “No One Ever Asks, What a Man’s Place in the Revolution Is”: Gender and the Politics of The Black Panther Party 1966-1971.” In: <span style="font-style:italic;">The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered]</span>. Edited by Charles E. Jones. Black Classic Press, Baltimore, 1998. Pg. 272</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><br /> <span style="color:#555555;"><b>December 18, 2013</b></span></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/post/70393779392/question-of-context">Question of Context</a></div><div style="font-family:cambria;margin:0in;"><div style="font-size:14pt;">How is it that an organization so committed to righting the wrongs committed against Black <span style="font-style:italic;">people</span>, could often support ideologies that endorsed the subordination of women? It is important to recognize that the Black Panther Party (BPP) did not exist in isolation; competing concepts about gender and sexuality perpetuated and upheld in mainstream society shaped the social frameworks of BPP members. The process of dismantling sexism meant theoretical and practical work on the part of <span style="font-style:italic;">all</span> Party members. One female Black Panther who worked in the Oakland and international chapters, the late Connie Matthews assessed the disparity between the BPP’s philosophies and practices.</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color:#eeeeee;font-style:italic;">“I mean, it’s one thing to get up and talk about ideologically you believe this. But you’re asking people to change attitudes and lifestyles overnight, which is not just possible. So I would say tht there was a lot of struggle and there was a lot of male chauvinism… But I would say all in all, in terms of equality… that women had very, very strong leadership roles and were respected as such. It didn’t mean it came automatically.” (Interview with Tracye Matthews, 26 June 1991; Kingston, Jamaica.)</span></blockquote></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">The men and the women in the Black Panther Party had internalized various views that validated sexism and even a racialized form of sexism. This brand of misogyny that specifically targeted Black women (contemporarily referred to as misogynoir) manifested itself in public discourse in two important ways: through<a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/post/70398938802/cultural-nationalism">cultural nationalism</a>, and through the <a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/post/70409103247/matriarchy-and-the-moynihan-report">Moynihan Report</a>. True equality in the Black Panther Party meant interrogating these cultural “norms” and exchanging those views for a more egalitarian framework. </div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Source: Matthews, Tracye. “No One Ever Asks, What a Man’s Place in the Revolution Is”: Gender and the Politics of The Black Panther Party 1966-1971.” In:<span style="font-style:italic;">The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered]</span>. Edited by Charles E. Jones. Black Classic Press, Baltimore, 1998. Pg. 289</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><br /> <span style="color:#555555;"><b>December 18, 2013</b></span></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/post/70373244935/artof-poetry-1969-the-free-breakfast-for#notes">4,375 notes</a></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><a href="http://artof-poetry.tumblr.com/post/39454627842/1969-the-free-breakfast-for-school-children">artof-poetry</a>:</div><div style="color:#555555;font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;font-style:italic;margin:0in;">1969, the <span style="font-weight:bold;">Free Breakfast for School Children Program</span> was initiated at St. Augustine’s Church in Oakland by the <span style="font-weight:bold;">Black Panther Party</span>. The Panthers would cook and serve food to the poor inner city youth of the area.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-G-K2FnCcUh0/Vru2wwZ7PiI/AAAAAAACWYo/033akYa-deA/s1600/Unity%2Bis%2Btheir%2Bsurvival%2BBPP.jpg" style="clear:left;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-G-K2FnCcUh0/Vru2wwZ7PiI/AAAAAAACWYo/033akYa-deA/s320/Unity%2Bis%2Btheir%2Bsurvival%2BBPP.jpg" width="209" alt="Unity%2Bis%2Btheir%2Bsurvival%2BBPP.jpg" /></a></div>Male figures in the Black Panther Party, such as Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and David Hilliard, were key to the initiation process of this project; however, Black women figured greatly in the <span style="font-style:italic;">execution</span> of the first Breakfast Programs. Neighborhood mothers, who lived close to St. Augustine’s Church and actively participated in local parent-teacher associations, focused their energies on the program, even though they were often unaffiliated with the BPP, and made it a success. Female members of the Black Panther Party also contributed to the Free Breakfast Program by feeding as well as educating the children present. Although tensions often arose between the more conservative community mothers — who preferred that the children quietly and orderly ate — and the Black Panther women — who brought their restless, activist spirits into the spaces — these women cooperated to transform their neighborhoods.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Ms. Ruth Beckford, a parishioner at St. Augustine’s Church who helped to establish the Free Breakfast program with Bobby Seale and head of the Church, Father Earl Neal, spoke of the communal uplift that occurred through nourishing the community’s children. “When we were doing it the school principal came down and told us how different the children were. They weren’t falling asleep in class, they weren’t crying with stomach cramps, how alert they were and it was wonderful” (412), Beckford insists in an interview, demonstrating that by feeding the young children, the predominantly female Black Panther Party and Black community members radicalized their youth’s relation to education systems and thus their youth’s access to societal opportunities. The Free Breakfast Program, a largely woman-run project, asserted Black people’s right to food, to preparations so that they could thrive academically, and to conditions to further their position in society.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Source: Heynen, Nik. “Bending the Bars of Empire from Every Ghetto for Survival: The Black Panther Party’s Radical Antihunger Politics of Social Reproduction and Scale.” Department of Geography, University of Georgia, published online: May 2009.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><span style="font-size:14pt;"><b>December 17, 2013</b></span></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/post/70349427823/disciplesofmalcolm-women-of-the-black-panther#notes">4,665 notes</a></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><a href="http://disciplesofmalcolm.tumblr.com/post/67030029930">disciplesofmalcolm</a>:</div><div style="color:#555555;font-family:cambria;font-size:14pt;font-style:italic;margin:0in;"><div style="text-align:center;">Women of the Black Panther Party demonstrating in front of Alameda County Courthouse <span style="font-weight:bold;">Oakland, CA</span><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;"><br /></span> <br /><div><table border="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse:collapse;border:0pt solid #a3a3a3;"><tbody><tr><td style="border-width:0pt;padding:4pt;vertical-align:top;width:4.1465in;"><div style="font-family:cambria;font-size:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:0in;"><div style="text-align:center;"> <img src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KpMaGW3WETs/Vru5u2v6rYI/AAAAAAACWY0/cqwkGgMZUVo/s320/BPP%2BWomen-2.jpg" style="color:#555555;font-family:cambria;font-size:14pt;font-style:italic;text-align:center;" alt="BPP%2BWomen-2.jpg" /></div></div></td><td style="border-width:0pt;padding:4pt;vertical-align:top;width:4.352in;"><div style="font-family:cambria;font-size:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:0in;"><div style="text-align:center;"> <img src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-m-o56xdNjmQ/Vru5uxOa6EI/AAAAAAACWY4/n6Pjv4TxNvk/s320/BPP%2BWomen.jpg" style="color:#555555;font-family:cambria;font-size:14pt;font-style:italic;text-align:center;" alt="BPP%2BWomen.jpg" /></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table></div><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br /></span></div><br /><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:0in;"></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:0in;text-align:center;"></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"></div><div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:14pt;">Taken from “Black Panthers: 1968” by Howard L. Bingham</span></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><br /> <span style="color:#555555;"><b>December 17, 2013</b></span></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/post/70349520448/womens-work">Women’s Work</a></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i style="background-color:#eeeeee;">“[W]omen ran the BPP pretty much. I don’t now how it got to be a male’s party or thought of as being a male’s party. Because those things, when you really look at it in terms of society, those things are looked on as being woman things, you know, feeding children, taking care of the sick and uh, so. Yeah, we did that. We actually ran the BPP’s programs.” (Frankye Malika Adams in an interview with Tracye Matthews, 29 September 1994; Harlem, New York)</i></blockquote><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">When the media invokes images of the Black Panther Party (BPP), it often displays images of gun-toting Black men in military garb. Historical representations have relegated many women who participated in and devoted their energies to the Black Panther Party to a prop status. Excluding the outliers like Assata Shakur and Kathleen Cleaver, women in the Black Panther Party earn their time in the spotlight insomuch as they endorse the male cause; even some of the more famous images of these Black women feature them holding up signs for the Free Huey Campaign. Despite these depictions, Black women played a fundamental role in the Black Panther Party. Often comprising the majority of local BPP groups, women staffed and coordinated free breakfast programs, liberation schools, and medical clinics. The Party even sought out Black women unaffiliated with the organization, such as women on welfare, grandmothers and community figures, to staff these initiatives. If these women played such a fundamental role in the infrastructure of the BPP, why aren’t Black women as celebrated for their contributions? History has a way of degrading work that mirrors “traditional” female duties to categories like “community service” or “support work”. The term “support work,” especially invokes the connotation of inferior, menial and subordinate labor. Sexism not only impacted what jobs Black women in the BPP received or fulfilled but also how history conveys the value of said efforts.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Source: Matthews, Tracye. “No One Ever Asks, What a Man’s Place in the Revolution Is”: Gender and the Politics of The Black Panther Party 1966-1971.” In:<span style="font-style:italic;">The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered]</span>. Edited by Charles E. Jones. Black Classic Press, Baltimore, 1998. </div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:0in;"></div><div style="font-family:cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">December 17, 2013</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/post/70345762416/objective#notes">1 note</a></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"><a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/post/70345762416/objective">Objective</a></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">“Black liberation politics became equated with black men’s attempts to regain their manhood at the expense of black women,” asserts Anita Simmons in the chapter “Black Womanhood, Misogyny and Hip-Hop Culture: A Feminist Intervention”. Simmons continues, “In the Black Panther Party, attainment of black manhood meant the degradation of black women and womanhood.” Sexism in the Black Panther Party (BPP) silenced the voices of Black women to promote a Black nationalist agenda that became conflated with the idea of preserving Black masculinity. This project aims to examine how this brand of racialized sexism in the Black Panther Party silenced and even erased the narratives about radical Black womanhood in the late 1960s from our social history. What are these narratives? How did women in the Black Panther Party radicalize their position? This project will also examine the interaction between Black feminists of the 1970s and their criticism of Black men’s understanding of Black womanhood. What was the stance of women in the Black Panther Party? Were there Black feminists who were also Black Panthers?</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"></div><div style="font-family:cambria;font-size:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:0in;">ABOUT</div><div style="margin:0in;"></div><div style="color:#333333;font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;">Although the Black Panther Party (BPP) revolutionized the condition of Black people and communities in the 1960s, sexism in the group silenced the voices of Black women to promote a Black nationalist agenda that became conflated with the idea of preserving Black masculinity. This project aims to examine how and why this brand of racialized sexism in the Black Panther Party operated in the group, and to shed light on some of the silenced and erased the narratives about radical Black womanhood.</div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;margin:0in;"></div><div style="font-family:Cambria;font-size:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:0in;"><a href="http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/">SOURCE</a>: </div></div></div>
Lincoln University Class of 67 Celebrates Our 45th Graduation Anniversary
https://www.theblacklist.net/profiles/blogs/lincoln-university-class-of-67-celebrates-our-45th-graduation
2012-05-03T03:06:54.000Z
2012-05-03T03:06:54.000Z
Gloria Dulan-Wilson
https://www.theblacklist.net/members/GloriaDulanWilson
<div><div class="navbar section" id="navbar"><div class="widget Navbar" id="Navbar1"></div></div><div id="outer-wrapper"><div id="wrap2"><div id="wrap3"><div class="header section" id="header"><div class="widget Header" id="Header1"><div id="header-inner"><div class="titlewrapper"><h1 class="title"><a href="http://gloria-dulan-wilson.blogspot.com/">Gloria Dulan-Wilson Blog</a></h1></div><div class="descriptionwrapper"><p class="description"><span class="font-size-4" style="color:#993300;"><strong>Eclectically Black News for Eclectic Black People VIP <br /> <br /> Views . Interests . 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The name was changed to Lincoln University in honor of Abraham Lincoln after he was assassinated. The school was placed just north of the Pennsylvania/Maryland State Border, away from the slave monsters who had made it illegal to educate Blacks, during slavery.</strong></h3><h3 class="post-title entry-title"><strong>I love bragging about being a Lincoln grad – the Alma Mater of such greats as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes,Roscoe Lee Browne, actor, Rev. Dr. James H. Robinson, founder of Crossroads Africa, among so many others.</strong></h3><h3 class="post-title entry-title"><strong>We are the only Black college to have given Africa two dynamic presidents: Kwame Nkrumah, first President of Ghana and Nnamde Azikewe, first President of Nigeria. We conferred dual doctorates on President Jerry John Rawlings, former President of Ghana, and his wife, first lady Nana Rawlings.</strong></h3><h3 class="post-title entry-title"><strong>But now I'm really going to kick it up a notch or two, because we, the Class of '67 are celebrating our 45th Anniversary of graduating from the hallowed halls of Lincoln University!! It's such a momentous, ausicious occasion, of such magnitude, that I'm now in the “who woulda thunk that we had come so far and done so much, and are still standing?? mode.</strong></h3><h3 class="post-title entry-title"><strong>As I talk with my classmates, I can't help but go back in my mind's eye to what we were up to and what we were involved in during those heady times. We were the agents of change that jump started what the current generation now considers common every day occurrences.</strong></h3><h3 class="post-title entry-title"><strong>And believe me, when we started college in 1963, there was no such thing as integration. In fact, there were many who did not believe that we would achieve it in our lifetime. There was definitely no such thing as the right to vote in the south. Poll taxes ruled the day.</strong></h3><h3 class="post-title entry-title"><strong>By the time 1963 had come along, many of us, including yours truly, had been participating in sit-ins by that time since we were 10 years old, that was 8 years of being on the front line of civil rights. In 1965, Lincoln University sent a busload of students down to Selma, AL to march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge</strong>.</h3><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-5685187195223027924">By the time I was 18, though, I was no longer disposed to be “civil” and neither were many of my peers. In 1966 Stokely Carmichael enunciated the tenets of BLACK POWER at Mary Dodd Brown Chapel, and it was “on!!” It was at Lincoln University that we first heard the phrase BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL. What a thrill. As Stokely stood before us, with that smooth, almost whispery voice of his, I can still see the look on the faces of my fellow classmates. A new day, a new ethos, a new consciousness – a whole paradigm shift - was born on the campus of Lincoln University, and spread throughout the Black college campuses of the US. Freedom, liberation, autonomy, Afrocentricity was in the air. We were reclaiming our African heritage, getting in touch with our African roots, and making no apologies about it. <br /> <br /> Of course, for the most of us at Lincoln, being the iconoclasts that we were, the closest we came to in terms of a church was Mary Dodd Brown Chapel, which served as our theatre and auditorium. It's where we went for talent shows, roasting our professors, Black Power meetings, panel discussions, movies, etc. Our other favorite gathering place was The Grill, where we solved all the problems of the world. It also housed the cafeteria, with some of the worst food on the planet. Everything was managed (dictated) by Ma Renwick, who walked around with a cigarette hanging out of the side of her mouth, and an ash at least an inch and a half long before it finally dropped to the floor. She kept the guys in line, but we all loved her. However, when it came to real food, we would just as soon sneak over the fence and make midnight runs to Sissie's home of the best cheesesteak hoagie on the planet. It was also where we could hang out after long hours of fighting material. <br /> <br /> We were one of the few Black colleges to have an official center for African students from Non-independent African countries: Angola, Mozambique, the Congo, South Africa, Southwest Africa (Namibia), Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Besutoland (Lesotho) Swaziland, Rwanda, Burundi, etc. African refugees would come and attend on a full scholarship and (hopefully) take what they had learned back home to teach their people. I was peer counselor to those students and made lifelong friends as a result. Many of them have returned home and are working in behalf of their own governments. Sadly, many also returned home to fight for liberation and have since joined the ancestors. <br /> <br /> Lincoln University was one of the few, if not the only, Black school to have a Pan-African Student Union, where African and African American, African Caribbean students came together to plot, plan and discuss liberation issues - especially as it pertained to South Africa. For the most part, however were very much about the reunification of African nations, now that Africa was slowly being released from their colonial monsters. Sometimes there was total congruency at those meetings; other times our brothers, a/k/a “Homeboys” argued about such insipid issues as the correct pronunciation of a word, or the proper manners (which by the way were remnants of colonial brainwashing). Many of our brothers came to the US knowing more about country and western music than they did about Soul Music. By the time we got through with them, they knew James Brown, the Temptations and Four Tops, chapter and verse.<br /> <br /> Black in the day Lincoln University had a varsity soccer team, instead of a football team, because the campus had a large African and Caribbean population – nearly 1/3 the student body. Our team actually participated in the national soccer tournament, and missed being champion by a hair, coming in second in the nation. At one match, on campus, our center forward, Paul Moonyane from Lesotho, broke the leg of a rival white South African player after he had the audacity to call him a “dirty kefir” – a break that was heard throughout the campus as they carried him off the field on a stretcher. The rest of the demoralized team lost to Lincoln by a huge margin. Needless to say, future white soccer teams who went up against Lincoln were very careful to mind their manners.<br /> <br /> Lincoln had some of the greatest international parties comprised of a mix of soul music, calypso, African, and other intra-African music. I personally never lacked for a dance partner – at least during the first two years of being among the first co-eds on the campus (personally, my idea of heaven). We actually had our own live steel band, with Gene Harvey, Tony Roberts from Bermuda and other parts of the Caribbean, who would rehearse on a regular basis. <br /> <br /> It was in 1965, when I transferred to Lincoln University it had been an all male college known as the Black Princeton. You had to be super smart to attend there. When they began to actively recruit females to live on campus, they had the same stiff criteria they exacted for the male students. At the time there were only 600 hundred students – All Male! I was one of the first 16 female co-eds to reside on the campus. The guys had to give up their dorms, and their caveman ways. Having had things pretty much their way, they were very happy about our invasion. <br /> <br /> The additional lights on the campus they felt was a violation of their ability to tough it out under rigorous circumstances and still be able to “fight material”. Being required to wear ties on Sunday, and being urged to watch their language was an invasion of their sanctity (they would always challenge the rule, and we co-eds, would give them our scarves as pretend ties to keep them from having to go back to the barracks to re-dress.<br /> <br /> Lincoln was also the place we learned to tell the difference between mere males (players) and real men - and we had a representative number of each, across cultural lines. (Some of the older alumns, such as actor Roscoe Lee Browne never, ever acknowledged us co-eds as Lincoln grads, and was pretty testy when I introduced myself as one years later, when I met him on location in Hollywood).<br /> <br /> Lincoln University was the first Black college to have an all Black Natural fashion show with natural hairstyles and afrocentric fashions – 1966 – the Grandassa Models, founded by Elombe Brath and Kwame Brathwaite. Thanks to Sam Anderson and Paul Moore, who were seeking to bring unity between African and African American students. There was a rift borne of colonialism on their part, and post-traumatic slave syndrome on ours. Thank goodness, it worked, and Lincoln students began to understand that, as Malcolm X had said on several occasions, no matter where that boat landed, we were all ONE PEOPLE. <br /> <br /> Lincoln was first Black college to have its own African Museum, and receive regular contributions from President Nkrumah, Azikewe, and other African leaders and former students – including Kente Cloth, Ashanti Goldweights, and 14 karat gold jewelry, masques, and as well as artifacts from all over Africa. It was curated by H.D. Gunn, a refuge from Dachau; and co-curated by yours truly, as part of my college work study program. <br /> <br /> Lincoln University was also the first Black college to offer a full complement of African studies, as well as Swahili language classes; African cosmology classes, and movies originating from Africa written and produced by Africans. We read Franz Fanon, Cheik Anta Diop, Chinua Achebe, Leopold Sedor Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah's principles; along with WEB DuBois, Carter G. Woodson, Lerone Bennett, E. Franklin Frazier. You name it we had it at the Vail Memorial Library. If it was Black we had read it, were reading it, discussing it, throwing in our own theories to boot. You could actually get a degree in African studies long before it was popular in the rest of the Black schools. Even Albert Einstein loved Lincoln University, and left a legacy to our campus (that was long before we arrived, of course).<br /> <br /> Lincoln University's Sociology Department, headed by Lawrence“Shabby” Foster, was the only Black college that relied primarily on texts written by Black sociologists Goode and Hat. It was the mainstay of our department. From it we learned the socio-psychological effects of racism, and how it impacted our child rearing practices. <br /> <br /> In 1966, Lincoln University was the first Black college to have a Homecoming Queen with natural hair: Maxine Stewart LU'69.<br /> <br /> In 1966, we were the students who fought off the KKK with real guns when they burned a cross across from our campus. We posted guards at every entry, and made it known that they could come at their own risk. They threatened but never crossed onto Lincoln Soil. In the 150+ years of our existence, they have not yet laid set foot on our campus. <br /> <br /> We were the students who had none other than <span class="font-size-3"><strong><span style="color:#0000ff;">the great Charles V. Hamilton</span></strong></span>, head of our Political Science Department, as our mentor. He was legal counsel for SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). Students would cut classes and sit in on his class to learn of their latest status and exploits. We were the campus where Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown and other Black leaders would come to formulate strategies for liberation. Dr. Hamilton co-authored “Black Power” along with Stokely Carmichael, on our campus.<br /> <br /> We were the students who dared to take a bus to the UN on a cold November day, along with the classmates from the Class of 1966, to protest Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) formulated by despot Ian Smith, when they fought for liberation and independence. It was freezing cold, and we were the only students who showed up for the protest – but we stayed and made our symbolic point. <br /> <br /> We were privileged to have had Langston Hughes visit as Poet in Residence for 6 weeks, and his protege, playwright Ron Milner as writers in residence. We had the honor of having had the great, powerful, dynamic Adam Clayton Powell Jr. come to our campus after he had been “sanctioned by Congress for being too powerful.” He had just recorded his famous album “Keep the Faith, Baby!” I remember how candid and self assured he was. He kept a cigar on him at all times. <br /> <br /> It was at Lincoln University that I started wearing my hair natural, and have done so ever since – thanks to my upper class brothers, Sam Anderson, and my classmates Paul Moore and Tony Montiero. I remember coming up with all the usual negrified excuses of the day: I had Indian in my family so my hair wouldn't get kinky; I had Irish in my family, so my hair wouldn't get kinky; I had German in my family, so my hair wouldn't get kinky – stop me when you've heard enough bogus excuses. I had a million of them!!<br /> <br /> Sam would tell me that what I called a “permanent” was really temporary, since I had to complete process over and over. He dared me to wear my natural for my senior class picture. After having seen how beautiful the Grandassa Models looked with their natural hair, I took him up on it, and that photo in the yearbook was the day after I got it done. However, my entire family in Oklahoma were in a state of shock when I came home with “nappy” hair! Now, not so much.<br /> <br /> Lincoln used to operate on a tri-mester basis, and allowed students to drop in and drop out at will. We had many students who returned to complete their classes after having served in Viet Nam; or who had “washed out” because of poor grades. It was at Lincoln that our classmate, John Huggins, who had returned after having spent four years fighting in Viet Nam, decided that he needed to deal with America's racism; and so joined the Panthers in San Francisco. He lost his life as a result, and set off a fire storm of consequences.<br /> <br /> At Lincoln we were such iconoclasts, even our grading system was different: our grades were A through E – E being a a flunking grade; A being superior; there was no F grade. At Lincoln, “1” meant being tops, and a passing grade; while “5” or a nickel, meant flunking, and all of the worse possible things. By the way, if you were “ugly” by Lincoln male standards, they would throw nickels at you. If you picked them up, you were double ugly.<br /> <br /> We were also known for our “Rabble” names, and Rabble phrases. Everyone coming onto the campus was tagged with a nickname that stuck with them for life. In many instances, to this day, you have to know the person's rabble name in order to identify them, and many of us are still not familiar with their given names.<br /> <br /> At Lincoln, we were taught to challenge everything, and not take it as true just because they said it was (“they” being whites, and the Uncle Toms who loved them). At Lincoln you went around quoting the likes of Kwame Nkrumah, Frederick Douglass, Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achbe, Jomo Kenyatta, Nelson Mandela (while he was still in prison); Stephen Biko, African proverbs, Stokely Carmichael, and any and all Black heroes, s/heroes past, present and future. <br /> <br /> It was to Lincoln that the famous Mitchell family of Baltimore sent Mike to follow in the footsteps of dynamic family members, Clarence and Parren, who had already made lifetime contributions to the Black community.<br /> <br /> <strong><span style="color:#ff9900;">We, the Class of 67 are the “Change Agents.”</span></strong> We launched new programs to educate and empower our people. We precipitated and participated in the liberation of our people via action and education, challenging the status quo, standing for our rights, regardless of the consequences. We have contributed through our writing, speaking out; our professional development and leadership; through the advancement of the lessons learned vis a vis a devoted and loyal faculty who nurtured our minds, making sure that when we moved forward into the world, that we were always Black and proud of it. <br /> <br /> If, by the time you had graduated from Lincoln in 1967, you didn't get that one understanding – that you are Black and Proud and have a contribution to make to the world - you had completely missed the point of the whole reason for being at Lincoln. While academics were, of course, an important component of being a Lincoln Lion and Lioness, it was even more of a paramount importance that we emerge, in all our glory, as Black men and women ready to take our place in a world where our ancestors had sacrificed so much to make it possible for us to go forward; and be the change we wanted to see. We the Class of '67, have done that and then some - with more yet to be. Our contributions are still being made. <span class="font-size-3"><strong><span style="color:#ff6600;">We are the paradigm shift!</span></strong></span> <br /> <br /> <span class="font-size-3"><strong><span style="color:#ff6600;">Hail! Hail! Lincoln!!!</span></strong></span> <br /> <span class="font-size-3"><strong><span style="color:#333399;">Hail The Class of 1967!!!</span></strong></span><br /> <br /> Stay Blessed &<br /> ECLECTICALLY BLACK<br /> Gloria Dulan-Wilson</div><div class="post-body entry-content"></div><div class="post-body entry-content">Want to read more? Log on at <strong><span style="color:#008080;"><a href="http://www.gloriadulanwilson.blogspot.com">www.gloriadulanwilson.blogspot.com</a></span></strong><br /> <br /> <br /> .</div><div class="post-footer"><div class="post-footer-line post-footer-line-1"><span class="post-author vcard">Posted by <span class="fn"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/10697937958373924179" title="author profile">Gloria Dulan-Wilson</a></span></span> <span class="post-timestamp">at <a class="timestamp-link" href="http://gloria-dulan-wilson.blogspot.com/2012/05/lincoln-university-class-of-67.html" title="permanent link"><abbr class="published" title="2012-05-01T19:09:00-04:00">7:09 PM</abbr></a></span> <span class="post-icons"><span class="item-action"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=8661755859413500477&postID=5685187195223027924" title="Email Post"><img alt="" class="icon-action" src="http://img1.blogblog.com/img/icon18_email.gif" height="13" width="18" /></a></span> <span class="item-control blog-admin pid-870342552"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=8661755859413500477&postID=5685187195223027924&from=pencil" title="Edit Post"><img alt="" class="icon-action" src="http://img2.blogblog.com/img/icon18_edit_allbkg.gif" height="18" width="18" /></a></span></span><div class="post-share-buttons goog-inline-block"></div></div><div class="post-footer-line post-footer-line-2"><span class="post-labels"><br /></span></div></div></div><div class="comments" id="comments"><a></a><div class="comment-form"><a name="comment-form" id="comment-form"></a><p>Thank YOU For Visiting Gloria Dulan-Wilson Eclectic Black People VIP Blog. 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Keeping Our Eyes on the Ball (2)
https://www.theblacklist.net/profiles/blogs/keeping-our-eyes-on-the-ball-2
2010-10-29T00:30:00.000Z
2010-10-29T00:30:00.000Z
KWASI Akyeampong
https://www.theblacklist.net/members/KWASIAkyeampong
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman,Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman,Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4"><em>by Kwesi Kwaa Prah</em></font></strong></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman,Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman,Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4"><em>Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS)</em></font></strong></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman,Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman,Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4"><em>Cape Town<br /></em></font></strong></font></font></p>
<p></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Dear Gen. Williams<strong>*</strong>, <br /></font></font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">The flurry of emails, I have so far seen, have maintained the pace and heat of the discussions that were initiated and aired during our Johannesburg meeting of early January this year. This is enormously encouraging, because the free exchange of views is crucial to the identification and elaboration of a platform for ideas which could eventually feed into the 8</font></font><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond">th</font></font> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Congress. As originators of the request to me and Prof. Nabudere to create machinery for the organization of an 8</font></font><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond">th</font></font> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">PAC, you and Mr. Bankie deserve to be prioritized for address in this post-meeting response from me. What I have written here are my personal views. Writing this also forces me to articulate thoughts which have meandered and coursed through my mind in the wake of the meeting. I am doing a sort of extended after-thought in full knowledge of the pitfalls and the sort of challenges one faces in philosophical terms.</font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Whatever may be the case or the outcome of this present exercise, it is certainly not meant to be merely a playback or flashback. It is more a summary cogitation on the consequences and mplications of the January meeting; brain-storming we called it. I have taken a critical look at the project and asked myself if the approach of a Congress is at this time the most beneficial method for the achievement of our tactical and strategic objectives as Pan-Africanists. The meeting was certainly successful in terms of the aims it had set out in the Agenda. At the start of the meeting, we discussed at some length the thrust and breadth of the Agenda. You missed that. Eventually, we found it only necessary to alter the order of items in the tasks we had set ourselves to cover and went through our day‟s work expeditiously. In the initial stages of our discussions, we were slow and cagy in picking up momentum, but as time went on we moved forward with the Agenda with remarkable speed. I dare say we surprised ourselves.</font></font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">My greatest pleasure was to note that many of the ideals we share as an older generation are also held with fervour by the younger generation, and that they reveal a diversity of opinion and thought as variegated as those displayed by our generation. Some of these views were passionately articulated with logical dexterity and consummate expression. Others were intellectually roughshod and occasionally hot-headed. All of this mix made the meeting memorable.</font></font><font size="3" face="Times New Roman,Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman,Times New Roman"><br /></font></font><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">However, I came back from the meeting vaguely in two minds; unsure of the value in using the organizational formula of a Congress, as tradition has bequeathed, for rallying Pan-Africanist thought and practice in our times. It seems to me that the advantages of a Congress cannot match the benefits of a smaller, more focused and plumbing exercise where in-depth knowledge over a defined and specified area is deliberately favoured for the more definitive and earthbound answers needed for programmed and planned practice; yes practice; away from rhetorical flightiness and oracular pronouncements which may superficially sound earth-shaking and calculated to strike terror in the hearts of all real and putative detractors of Africans, but which in fact provide little or no practical guidance and realistic prescriptions for the emancipation of African people today. We can repackage the language of the inimitable and indomitable Marcus Garvey, but we cannot bring back the 1920s, the world he lived in, with lynchings, Jim Crow and unvarnished racism. To my mind the greatness of Garvey lies in the fact that, in his times, he enabled people of African descent to face their historical tormentors eyeball to eyeball. His boundless courage and absence of any recognizably stifling inhibitions fired the imagination of Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora. His remarkable organizational acumen and vision enabled him to set up with his acolytes the most ambitious political and economic structure people of African descent had seen before his time.<br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">I agree that state-led Pan-Africanism is a road to nowhere. This has been the experience of the last 50 years. Too quickly and too easily the leadership of African states subvert the real purposes and agenda of Pan-Africanism to suit their own petty and narrow flag and anthem purposes. Some of us have argued that these states, as we have them today, are more part of the problem than the solution. If our leaderships were more open and more serious about unity they will open the door to more people-to-people engagement, within and across borders; they would welcome democratically sponsored and popularly supported irredentism as a possible route to our collective ideal. But, their entrenched petty interests and hoggish attitudes in maintaining the</font></font> <i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">status quo</font></font></i> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">for the material and non-material benefits these provide eclipse their commitment to more meaningful and earnest efforts at unity. The example of post-Congress Uganda is a classic case in point. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">The Museveni regime treated the Secretariat of the Congress as its political property and in the initial period used it as one of its mouthpieces on the African continent. If we have another Congress under the auspices of whichever government or with the blessing of any host government in Africa, I am sure that a similar fate will befall it. I know there are some of us who would say, as we heard in the Johannesburg meeting, "provide these governments or states some space in our midst." I cannot in my own mind agree to this. I suppose it‟s like letting the lion out of the front door and letting the leopard in through the back door. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">During the meeting, I sometimes felt and heard in the sub-text of some participants that the shadow of continentalism was still stalking their minds. If we have a congress in which the issue of continentalism or non-continentalism rears its head, it would be most unfortunate for those amongst</font></font></p>
<font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">us who definitely want to put continentalism behind us. There are some who may think for their purposes it may be tactical not to raise the issue now, but come up with it in a congress. <br /></font></font><p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Equally worrying to my mind is the oftentimes near compulsive vulgarization of the catchword and slogan; "black power." I do not believe that in contemporary Africa this terminology deals with reality. We already have "black power" in Africa. Even in the former settler-colonial areas of Africa, we have been able to gain political power. The pertinent question and problem is what are we doing with the power that we have? I repeat, what are we doing with the power that we have? To talk about "black power" today in societies which are in almost all instances over ninety percent "black" is extravagantly fatuous and only succeeds to obscure our real political colouring. It reduces African politics and power contestation to irrelevancies and distractions. I think also that I read in that tendency an attempt to find blame with extraneous factors when the real culprits should be ourselves, the elites. We have now a half-century of independence, whatever problems we face collectively as Africans can be dealt with if we put our heads together and our shoulders to the task. To talk about our situation as if we are powerless is a lie. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">The notion of "black power" in African countries on the continent and the ideology of racial holism is an even bigger myth because it assumes that in African societies colour is or should be a determinant of power. But Africa proper is overwhelmingly black. Furthermore, it does not recognize the primacy of the fact that amongst black skins there are rich and poor, elevated and down-trodden, voluble and voiceless. Indeed, in any society, anywhere, power is within the structure of the society and the state differentially distributed. To believe that the leading societal contradictions we face in Africa, in our everyday lives are due to skin colour is misguided. It is totally wrong. People who say in Africa that our challenge is to install "black power" may be physically in Africa but in their minds living elsewhere (possibly the United States). Even in South Africa, the quintessential erstwhile settler-colonial state in Africa, Africans are now in power, and have been in power for fifteen years. Here Africans form more than three-quarters of the population. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">The idea of "black power" was born in the USA. Its first significant usage dates to the 1954 publication by Richard Wright of his reflections on the final stages of the Ghanaian march to independence entitled;</font></font> <i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Black Power</font></font></i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">. He had spent six months travelling in the Gold Coast (as Ghana then was). Wright was referring to the fact that Ghana‟s prospective independence represented, in his view, the first African country which had politically travelled that far; and where "black people" were coming to power. Of course, I need to draw attention here to the fact that this idea carries in itself the mistaken notion that Ghana was subsequently the first country in Africa proper to be independent. As I have often argued, this is not correct because the Sudan got its independence in January 1956; ahead of Ghana. The problem is that the Sudan, in the minds of many, is identified as an Arab country. Needless to say, this is not the case because the overwhelming majority of the people of Sudan are Africans not Arabs and incidentally, in the Sudan, you can hardly tell the</font></font> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">difference between an African and an Arab on the basis of colour. Both groups are overwhelmingly visibly black.</font></font> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><br />However, the popularization of the slogan "black power" came into currency through the US civil rights movement, during the tempestuous years of the 1960s. We are told that its political deployment was through the initiative and genius of Willie Ricks and Stokely Carmichael (a.k.a Kwame Toure). The precise historical location of this was the 1966 Meredith March in the South of the United States when as leading members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) they used the slogan "black power" as a rallying call to galvanize minds and mobilize African-Americans for civil rights, local and community power. Apparently, this was meant also as an attempt to set up a contrastive ideological position to the argument of Martin Luther King and the members of the Southern Christian Leadership Committee (SCLC). King‟s position was an argument for "equal rights" while Carmichael and his SNCC membership were saying, "what do we want … we want black power." At that time "black power" was often translated to mean Black political and economic empowerment and control of predominantly Black towns, cities and counties in the South, especially in places like Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas and Mississippi. In Carmichael‟s words during that period; "Everybody in this country is for „Freedom Now‟ but not everybody is for Black Power because we have got to get rid of some of the people who have white power. We have got to get us some Black Power. We don‟t control anything but what white people say we can control. We have to be able to smash any political machine in the country that‟s oppressing us and bring it to its knees. We have to be aware that if we keep growing and multiplying the way we do, in ten years all the major cities are going to be ours. We have to know that in Newark, New Jersey, where we are 60% of the population, we went along with their stories about integrating and we got absorbed. All we have to show for it is three councilmen who are speaking for them and not for us.<br />We have to organize ourselves to speak for each other. That‟s Black Power. We have to move to control the economics and politics of our community." This is how the person who popularized the term meant it to be. Carmichael frequently returned to this thesis. In the book he wrote with Charles Hamilton (</font></font><i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Black Power: The Politics of Liberation</font></font></i> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">– 1967) they exhorted and prodded African-Americans to take pride in their heritage, culture, institutions and descent, to cultivate a greater sense of solidarity and community-spirit in order to create, own and direct a singularly Black economic and political base that would augment the political bargaining position of African-Americans in their bid for equality in American society. <br /></font></font><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">In Simon Hall‟s insightful piece,</font></font> <i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">The NAACP, Black Power, and the African American Freedom Struggle, 1966 – 1969</font></font></i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">, he writes that; "On the evening of 17 June 1966, Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), addressed a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. The SNCC leader had been released from jail minutes before and acknowledged the „roar‟ of the angry crowd with a „raised arm and a clenched fist‟ as he moved forward to speak. „This is the 27</font></font><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond">th</font></font> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">time I have been arrested – and I ain‟t going to jail no more, I ain‟t going to jail no more,‟ he told the several hundred mostly local African Americans. „The only way we gonna stop them white men from</font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">whuppin‟ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain‟t got nothin‟. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!‟ Carmichael proclaimed that „every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned tomorrow to get rid of the dirt … from now on when they ask what you want, you know what to tell „em. What do you want?‟ The crowd thundered back „Black Power!‟ " Even more telling are the observations he made on July the 28</font></font><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond">th</font></font><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">, 1966 when he said that; "There is a psychological war going on in this country and it‟s whether or not Black people are going to be able to use the terms they want about their movement without white peoples‟ blessing. We have to tell them we are going to use the term „Black Power‟ and we are going to define it because Black Power speaks to us. We can‟t let them project Black Power because they can only project it from white power and we know what white power has done to us. We have to organize ourselves to speak from a position of strength and stop begging people to look kindly upon us. We are going to build a movement in this country based on the colour of our skins that is going to free us from our oppressors and we have to do that ourselves." Carmichael‟s views are further elaborated in;</font></font> <i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism</font></font></i> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">(1971). <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">The point to be remembered here is that in the USA and many other places in the Western world the cultural denationalization of Africans has proceeded to such a thorough or near-thorough extent that colour has become the only badge and reference point of historical difference. It is therefore understandable that Africans in the Western Diaspora use colour as the marker of the different histories, different experiences between themselves and their fellow citizens. Furthermore, the oppressor has historically consistently used colour to set apart people of African descent and identify them for racist, exploitative and oppressive treatment. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Racism is about power relations in which physical attributes and/or culture are used to justify and practise discrimination, exploitation and oppression. Philosophically it belongs to the political right. As a socio-political feature its fundamental and frequently masked object is almost always economic. Certainly, to take the term "black power" out of its historical and social context and use it in a blanket fashion to cover all Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora is not only to distort its meaning, but also to open ourselves up to serious misinterpretation. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Equally perplexing for me is the frequent race talk that I hear and read from some of our colleagues. I can very well see the relevance of race pre-occupations in societies where, to different degrees, clearly anti-African racism both on the continent and in the Diaspora constitutes an everyday issue and haunting problem for people. I mean, for example in South Africa, the United States or many parts of Europe and some parts of South America. But we must remember that racism is not unique to the black-white context. Hitlerian racism as we all know was directed principally, but not exclusively, against European Jewry who are of the same colour as Germans. It was also immediately directed against the Roma people (Gypsies) and Slavs. Hitler regarded Africans as half-apes. As I earlier said, in the Sudan the contradiction between Arab and African does not lie along the colour</font></font> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">line. Israeli Jews and Arab Israelis do not physically differ, neither do the Koreans, Japanese and the Chinese differ by look and yet there have been historically racist and violent tensions and expressions between all these groups. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">In the Western world it is not only people of African descent who suffer from Western racism. Pakistanis and Indians in Britain, Arabs in France, Turks in Germany, Moroccans in the Netherlands, Spanish settlers and Amerindians in South America, Indians in Australia, Aboriginals in Australia, Native Americans, Mexicans and Hispanics in the United States all face racism on a daily basis. Therefore to talk about racism as if it is the particular preserve of the relationship between Westerners and people of African descent is at best ill-informed and at worst disingenuous. Racist attitudes have existed between Chinese and Malays, Indians and Malays, Indians and Chinese in South Asia and on the African continent racial tensions and feelings have been present in the relations between Lebanese and Africans, Indians and Africans. The Japanese (</font></font><i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Wajin</font></font></i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">) have for ages despised the Okinawans and Ainu of Hokkaido. Japanese treatment of</font></font> <i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Burakumin</font></font></i> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">is more or less the same as general Indian treatment of</font></font> <i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Dalits/Harijans</font></font></i> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">(Scheduled Castes). In both societies, the Indian and the Japanese, these fellow citizens are regarded as "untouchables." It is interesting to note that, in the Indian caste system, the Dalits who technically fall out of the caste system proper are historically derived from the Aboriginal peoples of India, the Dravidians. Many Russians have regarded Central Asians as racial inferiors. The list is much longer than this. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Racism is an evil which has for ages bedevilled inter-group relations within the human race. Sometimes, in practical effect, its objectives are genocidal. The studied beastliness and perversities of institutionalized racism are beyond all known animal behaviour. It is acquired; learnt behaviour. It is a condition which has to be fought as ruthlessly as it is ruthless. As the world globalizes and we all geographically and culturally pack-in like sardines, the urgency of this fight becomes by the day more pressing. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">My argument here should also extend to the record of slavery. The African holocaust, in particular the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade, in evil effect and horror, is second to none in the history of the human race. In space, intensity, time and scope, its dimensions cannot be equalled. But we must be careful not to talk about it as if we are the only people who have historically been enslaved. For a start, Arabs systematically traded in black skins a thousand years before the Westerners. This practice has continued to the present day. Equally telling has been the comprehensiveness of their pattern of cultural denationalization. Their mode of denationalization was geared towards removing all memory of Africaness within the shortest possible time. This is why in spite of the fact that in time span and absolute numbers they possibly eclipse the Atlantic slave trade, the existence of Africans in the Arab world is today hardly visible. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Let‟s remind ourselves about the extent and experience of slavery in human history with a few examples. The</font></font> <i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Code of Hammurabi</font></font></i> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">(1760 BC) from Babylon in the 18th century BC provides vivid</font></font> <font size="3" face="Times New Roman,Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman,Times New Roman">7</font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">details on slave life in the period. Slaves or the so-called helots of Greece were strongly in evidence from the 7th century BC. Both the principal states of Greece, Sparta and Athens, were driven largely on slave labour. In his time, Julius Caesar brought over a million slaves from routed armies from all corners of the empire back to Rome. As the Roman Empire expanded entire communities were enslaved, to create a steady supply of labour. The slaves of the Romans came from all over Europe and the Mediterranean. These included Berbers, Greeks, Britons, Germans, Thracians, Gauls, Jews, Arabs etc. Slavery was part and parcel of Genghis Khan‟s 13</font></font><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond">th</font></font> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">century imperial order. The Mamlukes, a warrior caste of slaves were dominant in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East for over 700 years. Islamic rulers created this warrior caste by pressing into service non-Muslim slave boys and training them as cavalry soldiers. Mamlukes were first used in Muslim armies in Syria by the Abbasid caliphate in the 9th century. They served as cavalry of the Ayyubid sultans from the 12th century onwards and later challenged their rulers for power. There were historically two dynasties of Mamluke sultans; the Bahris (1250-1382), mainly Turks and Mongols, and the Burjis (1382-1517), who were principally Circassians. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">The road to Irish subjugation by the English runs through Irish slavery. In the beginning of the 17th century, the English banished 30,000 Irish prisoners of war. This solution was however, for their purposes and intentions inadequate so James II, the last Catholic king of England, urged the selling of the Irish as slaves to planters and settlers in the Americas. The first lot of Irish slaves were sold to a colonial outpost on the Amazon River in 1612. A Proclamation in 1625 ordered that Irish political prisoners be shipped overseas and sold to English planters, who were then colonizing the West Indies. In 1629 a large group of Irish men and women were shipped off to Guyana. By 1632, Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat in the West Indies. A 1637 census revealed that 69% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves. Irish slave labour was in such demand that, for the most inconsequential misdemeanour in colonised Ireland the culprit was shipped off. Slaving squads went round the Irish countryside lifting people to make up their quotas. In the 12 year period from 1641 to 1652, over 550,000 Irish were killed by the English and 300,000 were sold as slaves. The Irish population of Ireland fell from 1,466,000 to 616,000. In 1649, when under instructions of the Rump Parliament Oliver Cromwell and his Roundhead army landed in Ireland, they laid a siege around Drogheda and put some 30,000 Irish in the city to the sword. Cromwell is reported to have observed that; "I do not think 30 of their whole number escaped with their lives. Those that did are in safe custody in the Barbados." A few months later, in 1650, 25,000 Irish were sold to planters in St. Kitts. During the 1650s over 100,000 Irish children, generally from 10 to 14 years old, were taken from Catholic parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In fact, more Irish were sold as slaves to the American colonies and plantations from 1651 to 1660 than the total of the then existing "free" population of the Americas. After the "Bloody Assizes" of 1685 a good number of the English prisoners were sent to the West Indies as slaves.</font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">For centuries, till the early part of the 20</font></font><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond">th</font></font> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">century, Circassian and Georgian women slaves (from the North Caucasus) were invaluable commodities in Turkish homes, harems and seraglios. Mark Twain</font></font> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">noted in 1869 in</font></font> <i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">The Innocents Abroad</font></font></i> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">that "Circassian and Georgian girls are still sold in Constantinople by their parents, but not publicly." Slavery in China dates back to the earliest period of Chinese civilization. In his book;</font></font> <i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">A History of Chinese Civilization</font></font></i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">, (1996), Jacques Gernet points out that Chinese agricultural slaves were intensively utilized in the fifteenth century, and by the late sixteenth century it was observed that all the Manchu military officers had both field and house slaves. Between 1645 and 1647, Manchu rulers enslaved large numbers of local people on previously Han Chinese-owned estates in North China, eastern Mongolia and the Peking area. For cultivation, they used a slave-labour force of former landowners and prisoners of war. Slavery in China was technically abolished in 1910, but transformed and lingered on right into the 20</font></font><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond">th</font></font> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">century until the emergence of modern China.<br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Slavery was abolished in Nepal in 1924. Yet in 1997, human rights observers reported that 40,000 Nepalese workers were being subjected to near-slave conditions and 200,000 kept as bondsmen and women. The Nepalese Maoist-led government has only recently in 2008 abolished the slavery-like</font></font></p>
<i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Haliya</font></font></i> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">system. A large slave –labour class was present in the old Khmer Empire (present day Cambodia). These slaves built the monuments in Angkor Wat. Between the 17th and the early 20th centuries one-quarter to one-third of the population of some areas of Thailand and Burma were slaves. In Thailand, Siam as it then was, the prisoners of war became the property of the king. During the reign of King Rama the 3</font></font><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond">rd</font></font> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">(1824-1851), there were an estimated 46,000 war slaves. Slavery was not abolished in Siam until 1905. Slavery in Japan was for most of its history indigenous. This is probably because for centuries before the Meiji Restoration (1868) Japan was a closed society. However in the 16th century, Koreans were shipped to Japan as slaves during the Japanese raids in the peninsula. In the late 16</font></font><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="1" face="Garamond,Garamond">th</font></font> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">century slavery was officially outlawed in Japan; but forms of unfree labour persisted. In the making of South African society Western settlers brought into the Cape slaves from West Africa, East Africa, India, Malaysia and Indonesia. So let us regard slavery for what it is, indeed, a universal historical phenomenon with no exceptions among victims and perpetrators in humanity. But when that has been said, we must also say that, although the reality of slavery has been historically ubiquitous, without doubt, the extent and depth of its infliction on us, as Africans, is without parallel.</font></font><p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">I think what is important at this stage for us to get off the ground and going is a cultural movement, a cultural movement which will provide in effect confidence and affirmation for our people with regard to our historical heritage and cultural patrimony. This is what we have, together with many other people thought of as a</font></font> <i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Sankofa Movement</font></font></i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">. In other words, the reclamation of values, tenets and institutions of our African heritage. Without reclaiming and repositioning ourselves with these bequeathments, in my estimation, there is no hope for our sustained advancement. By this, I do not mean rigging ourselves with the externals or superficialities of our heritage; I do not mean the outer finery of African culture; I mean the central institutions – religious, social, and cultural – of our belongings. I do not mean a fluffy, contrived or colourful ritual celebration of our nativeness to emphasize the fact that our nativeness is losing ground in a Western dominated world. <br /></font></font><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">When we plead for a</font></font> <i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Sankofa</font></font></i> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">approach we are saying that we want a selective and judicious reclamation of our substantial cultural patrimony not an infantile and wholesale reappropriation of every cultural habit from the past. To give a concrete example, I think we need to be able to put our religious and ritual traditions on the same level as the received cultures of Islam and Christianity. Let us treat our own as equal in all respects to the foreign borrowings of Christianity and Islam and allow our people to choose freely, selecting what they like and what suits them best in any situation. The Japanese managed to achieve a good blend of their indigenous Shintoism and imported Buddhism. If we dismiss our traditions and treat them as backward, heathen, primitive, we will never be able to hold our own or our heads up within the human community. I am not saying that we must, fired by sentiments of naive atavism and blind tenacity hold on to age-old practices which may be developmentally unhelpful, defunct or backward. I mean we should be able to discard and reject what is obviously decrepit or modify what we consider to be needful in order to meet the challenges of the present without compromising the core values of our cultural heritage.</font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Another example; in South Africa ever since I came here in 1992, every year during the period when the passage of the circumcision rite is in season, countless hapless youngsters are either grievously mutilated, genitally amputated, or killed in the process of botched surgeries. We insist on circumcision taking place in obviously unsanitary and uncongenial circumstances in the bush and on the ground with little by way of protection from the elements. Such conditions are assumed to be the "genuine conditions" which the institution has lived with from time immemorial. But I ask you, what is more important with respect to this institution; is it the rite of passage; the values that are instilled in the youth, the commitments that are contracted for social and cultural purposes from the youth or the external trappings of the bush, scant clothes, old-fashioned blades and knives. Is it the core values and social commitments, or the epiphenomenal nuances of ambiance, dance and ritual? If it is the former, then obviously we do not need to keep the unhygienic and unsanitary conditions which surround the circumcision rite. Try explaining this to many of our people.<br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">I have often explained that circumcision is not restricted to Africans or any group of Africans. As a tradition, circumcision is fairly common on the African continent and beyond. It is common to large parts of Asia and the Middle East. Jews practice circumcision and have done so from time immemorial. Muslims likewise also practice circumcision. But in both these instances, today circumcision is carried out mainly by qualified medical doctors in hygienic and comfortable conditions. This does not detract from the rite of passage it comes with as an institution. The fact that the circumstances in which circumcision is carried out can keep abreast with modernity does not undermine the institution. I would argue that it only goes to strengthen it. It only goes to show that the institution is evolving with time and discarding aspects which are unhelpful. We do not have to be caught in a time-warp of backwardness through wilful, irrational and uninformed stubborn attitudes. We only discredit our tradition and make ourselves the laughing stock of the world.</font></font><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><br />What goes without saying is the fact that without our cultures there is little or no hope for meaningful change for Africans. I mean change which will ensure that we developmentally advance and do not culturally disappear. Please remember, it is not our colour which will guarantee our continued existence. It is our culture. If we allow ourselves to be assimilated by Arab or Western culture, we shall as Africans disappear. This point cannot be over-emphasized. For our historical salvation as a people, the more we understand the importance of the culture question, the less important skin colour and so-called racial factors appear to be. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">For the present, the</font></font> <i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Sankofa Movement</font></font></i> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">is most crucial. We have got to convince and engage the minds and activities of all our creative people; artists, writers, musicians etc, to remind our people about the vitality and saliency of our cultural belongings in any drive towards modernity and societal advancement. Development is ultimately a cultural construction. Once this message and its import win the hearts and minds of our people the political implications and requirements will become easily perceptible and a natural evolution towards a political movement will be within our grasp. I am saying that the road to a political movement for unity and African advancement must start in our times with an Africanist cultural and intellectual movement. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">The cultural route to democracy and unity assumes the use of our languages as instruments for the empowerment of people. We transact all our social interaction on the basis of language and indeed language itself is a record of the history of the people who use the language. Language is also a register of the extent of our perceptible world. Without doubt, it is the central area of culture and carries culture in its entirety. If we want to make progress we cannot achieve this without the use of our languages. These languages which are spoken by the overwhelming majorities of our people are the instruments for deepening the culture of democracy. I am in my mind convinced that when we start using and developing our languages, the road to unity would be put on firmer ground. I ask, would it not be better, if a congress is the way forward for us, to restrict its focus to cultural considerations? Please give this serious thought because a congress which in ideas is here and there and everywhere and therefore nowhere would be a repeat performance of all the weaknesses of the last one. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Also, we cannot have democracy in any societally meaningful way if the pursuit and exercise of democracy is not grounded on cultural usages understood, recognized, appreciated and shared by the broad masses of African society. Too often, too many people want to suggest that democracy is foreign to Africans. There is of course the classic saying of General Mobutu to justify his dictatorship; "where have you ever seen two chiefs in an African village?" I also heard someone once remark that; "leave Rawlings alone to get on with his job. When the chief has spoken, it should be last word on the matter." Such sentiments are obviously unhelpful in modern African societies attempting to build democracy. But such sentiments cannot be uprooted or enforced by decree. With time the sentiments die out in the face of evolving realities and more suitable practice. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Years ago, during my spell as a Visiting Professor in China (1980), one day on a journey to Sian, the ancient capital of China, driving through miles of spectacular ancient monuments in the approach to the city, I asked my host the Director of the Institute for West Asian and African Studies, why in the wake of the death of Mao and the fall of the Gang of Four, Chinese opinion seemed to have discovered suddenly that their regard for Mao had been inordinately elevated. His response was that, I should never forget that China is a country which for 3000 years has had emperors; it is unrealistic to expect that suddenly, however sweeping the changes of modernity may have been since 1949, for such sentiments of the lofty supremacy of the leader to be altogether devoid of past notions of imperial status and aura. I of course immediately understood what he meant. In similar fashion many tradition-bound Africans may have sentiments of excessive admiration and elevated status for our contemporary heads of state. But with time and experience, in the eyes of the people, such leaders will be brought down to ordinary human levels. This cannot be decreed. Only experience and evolutionary or revolutionary practice will alter this. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Let‟s also remember that, democracy in its operations and conceptualization is not cast in stone for all societies at all times in the same way. What democracy meant in practice in the United States in 1900 is very different from what it means now. In the 1950s, an African-American was not tolerated as a student in the University of Mississippi. In 2008 Obama debated McCain in the same institution for the presidency of the country. Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland did not have the same civil rights until the 1960s and 70s. Women had the vote in England less than 100 years ago and long after the franchise had been extended universally to the male of the species. Democracy in Britain still includes a place called the House of Lords for people specially elevated to the status of Lords or those who have inherited these titles. Such an institution would be today unacceptable to the French. What I am saying is that democracy is not only historically specific, but societally also so. In all these societies democratic practice and institutions are adapted to the specificities of history and culture. We can simply not borrow wholesale in a one-size-fits-all approach, democracy from anywhere and implant it in Africa. We need to make democratic institutionalization fit cultural and historical relevancies. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Another point I can make with conviction is that part of the reason for our blindness and inability to move forward towards unity in a systematic way, with a clear road map, is because we lack a strong and all-embracing African national consciousness. This also partly explains the continued adherence of so many people to continentalism. I must warn immediately that my understanding of national consciousness goes beyond neo-colonialism or the nationalism tailor-made for the</font></font> <i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">ersatz</font></font></i> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">states created under Western tutelage, sponsorship and blessing. In fact, neo-colonial nationalism throws a fog before us in terms of our ability to see our way forward. It makes us creatures of Western intent and drives us into a conceptual cul-de-sac with respect to a positive and creative rendition of nationalism which identifies the unities and diversities of African cultures and histories whilst recognizing the overriding unifying characteristics within these diversities. How can a Tswana in</font></font> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">Botswana regard him/herself as culturally, historically and nationally separate from a Tswana in South Africa or a Sotho in Lesotho? <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">It is interesting to note that during the colonial interlude and the end of colonialism we started manufacturing historical narratives to rationalize and justify our handed-down post-colonial states, which we call nations, and which are supposed to be the practicalization and ultimate repositories of our nationalism. We wrote; "A History of Zambia"; "A History of Ghana"; "A History of Namibia"; A History of Uganda", etc., etc. to make real what a few years before did not exist and was in actual fact unreal. We tuned our politics into the realities of these</font></font> <i><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">ersatz</font></font></i> <font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">states and behaved as if these states had been handed down from Adam. These states are not viable and will in the end prove to be so. I am sure in my life-time I shall not see this unity, but I am equally sure that the slow decomposition of these states in favour of greater African unity will in due course come to pass. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">African unity does not have to mean one single heavily centralized entity. That is unlikely to work and I dare say, undesirable. African unity can only be achieved on the basis of the recognition of cultural differentiation, diversity and decentralization of rule. People have to be able to rule themselves in their own little corners in their different ways and different forms of order. But all this can best and easily be accommodated under a wide umbrella which unifies us all and our common interests. <br /></font></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond"><font size="3" face="Garamond,Garamond">To close, I must say clearly that I do not subscribe to the idea of "the whole world is against us." This is simply misguided and untrue. In all communities and amongst all people around the world there will always be some who support us in the name of justice, fairness, democracy, freedom and emancipation. It is very true that only Africans can save Africa and we must fight by all means necessary to uplift and unite our people. But we are not alone in our wish to uplift our people and end the injustice, exploitation and oppression that we have suffered for hundreds of years. All truly democratic and freedom loving people support us. <br /></font></font></p>
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<div><strong>* About</strong> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}3828520892,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><strong><em><font size="4">Gen Ishola Williams.rtf</font></em></strong></a><br /></div>
<div><strong><em>Submitted by B..F.Bankie<br />Sudan Sensitisation Project (SSP)<br /></em></strong><a><strong><em>www.bankie.info</em></strong></a><br /></div></div>