Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People

History and Memory

M. Simanga

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137080653
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This important look at CAP combines historical research and analysis with the author's first-hand experience with the organization, providing the first historical narrative of a consequential player in the Black Power Movement.

1

Born into the Storm

I grew up in Detroit, but because my father was in the Air Force I was born on an Air Force base in Chicopee, Massachusetts. It was 1954, the same year that the US Supreme Court ruled against “Separate but Equal,” the purported theory underpinning legalized segregation in the south in the case of Brown v Board of Education. This major legal victory was the culmination of almost 100 years of struggle against Jim Crow, the wicked child of slavery. Within a few months of my birth, the political landscape of the United States erupted into a battlefield as the impact of that Supreme Court decision provided the contemporary context for the African American national community to accelerate and intensify confrontation with the racist legacy of slavery. I was raised in the storm that would follow. My development as a child was influenced by the social changes that were occurring throughout the country and especially in the developing political consciousness of black people.

Within a year of that ruling and my birth, Martin Luther King and the African American community of Montgomery, Alabama, had inspired a new wave of activism devoted to confronting and dismantling the laws and social codes of injustice and oppression in the south. At the same time, Malcolm X, a fiery young ex-convict and convert to the Nation of Islam (an African American form of Islam), was traveling the country preaching a philosophy of black pride, self-help, self-defense, and separation from white people. These developments and others created a social and political storm not seen in American political and social life since the Civil War. Students began to organize and confront segregation in public accommodations and businesses. As one of many black armed resistance groups, Robert F. Williams organized armed self-defense against Ku Klux Klan (KKK) terrorism in Monroe County, North Carolina. All over the south, movements emerged to challenge and defeat the injustices of segregation, racism, and the lingering legacy of slavery.

For the next 25 years an intense period of social change would occur throughout the country as various marginalized segments of the United States, including women, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and white college youth, questioned, debated, challenged, and transformed the political and social landscape. The story of ordinary people—citizens of the United States—engaged to change the world is my story, too.

I come from working-class black people who migrated from the south to Detroit to find work and to escape the violence and humiliation of southern segregation like hundreds of thousands of black people. My maternal grandfather was from Kentucky, one of the black Appalachians. The story goes that after a confrontation with a white man who wound up mortally wounded, my grandfather walked to Detroit on back roads at night to escape and avoid capture. During my childhood, I didn’t see him much because he was a porter on the trains. When he was home, he often worked as a card dealer in illegal gambling joints around Detroit’s black neighborhoods.

My maternal grandmother was from Dayton, Ohio. An artistic and adventurous young black woman, she left home at 16 to go dance at the Cotton Club in New York. She eventually made her way to Detroit where she and my grandfather married and raised five girls. She did not have a high school education but spoke French, was well read, and culturally very sophisticated. She was one of the thousands of black domestic workers in the homes of affluent white families in Detroit.

My paternal grandmother came from a large family in Anderson, South Carolina. She moved to the Detroit area as a teenager with her family, settling in Inkster, Michigan, the mostly black working-class enclave outside of Detroit. Her memories of growing up in the segregated south were so bitter that she refused to talk about them until she was well into her eighties. She came from a long line of root workers, women who purportedly knew ancient healing and magical secrets brought by enslaved Africans and passed down from generation to generation. When she finally discussed her childhood in the south, she told me about the two Anderson families—the black one and the white one—both with a common patriarch.

My paternal grandfather was a very dignified black man from Montgomery, Alabama. He too came north as a teenager during the Great Migration. He sold copies of Marcus Garvey’s newspaper on the streets of Detroit, joined the police force in Inkster, and became one of the first black detectives in Michigan. He eventually became deputy chief and ran the department. Everyone in the black community and all the officers in the town called him “Chief,” even the white officers. They knew that had he not been black, he would have been the chief of police instead of the less qualified white man who wore the title and cashed the check.

When I was a child my life was shaped by all that was going on outside my door and an accompanying, continuous narrative and action going on within my house. My mother and father were intensely aware of and involved in the fight to liberate black people. They were also among the young African American adults who were transitioning from their working-class roots into the middle class through education and increased opportunity.

For several years, my mother dragged my brother and me to the University of Detroit where we would sit outside her classrooms with books, puzzles, or games and wait for her. I was nine when she finally completed her degree and became an educator in inner-city Detroit high schools. In response to the lack of classes and educational materials on African American literature, my mother wrote the first black literature curriculum for the Detroit school system. My father had a year or so of college but never obtained his degree. He was recruited to play football at Michigan State University, but joined the Air Force after his second year, to support my mother and brother. After returning from the Air Force and working a variety of jobs in auto factories and at the juvenile detention center, he became a community organizer and social worker, building programs in the most impoverished neighborhoods of Detroit to rescue black youth. Until his death from cancer at 48, he worked to improve the environment and life of young people in Detroit. By then, he had created a nationally recognized youth program for the city of Detroit.

Their new positions as teacher and social worker not only elevated their economic status, but gave them direct channels to organize around important issues in the black liberation movement. They were among the African American middle-class activists and intellectuals whose long tradition of supporting black causes had earned them the terms of respect, “Race Woman” and “Race Man.”

As a young couple, my parents were also involved in a variety of organizations and activities to support the southern freedom movement. As a result of their involvement, our house was often filled with activists, artists, politicians, and other guests, who drank beer and liquor, held loud, intense discussions, danced to soul music, listened to jazz, laughed, smoked cigarettes, and understood that they lived in historic times and were a part of making history.

My parents’ parties were legendary, full of excitement generated by diverse groups of old friends and new faces. There were men who worked in factories (some with missing fingers, a common sight in our neighborhood); women who worked as telephone operators; newly graduated teachers; professional gamblers (including my father’s friend a white cat named Jerry who did card tricks for the kids and took money from the adults); and members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality, and more radical elements of the community. Most were young adults, some were older, and a few were gay, like my parents’ high school friend we called Uncle Eddie. There were some veterans of the Korean War, like my uncle, and some of the men had been locked up in prison for offenses no one ever discussed. A parade of characters floated in and out of our house bringing with them a world of new ideas and news from the frontlines of the movement. It was much later in life when I realized that as much fun as those parties were, my parents also used them to organize people and to raise money to support the movement. It was a technique that I would turn to many years later.

In the midst of all that was going on in society and our house, we had a very normal childhood. My brother and I did chores around the house, earned money cutting grass in the summer, raking leaves in the fall, and shoveling snow in the winter. Our all-black neighborhood was a place where we felt safe and loved and where we played sandlot baseball and football with our cousins and friends. We rode our bikes around a wide roaming area and explored the railroad tracks that ran nearby; caught frogs and minnows in the pond behind the tracks near the library; climbed trees, had fights, and went swimming in the neighborhood recreation pool in the summer.

My mother took primary responsibility for our formal education, and her most enduring gift to us is reading. Every week she would walk with us about a mile to the community library where we selected and checked out books. At home we were required to read and discuss them before we walked back a week later to repeat the process. She took us to free European classical and jazz concerts, plays, the museum, and every other cost effective cultural experience she could find. She exposed us to the great canon of African American literature from the slave narratives and poetry of Phyllis Wheatley, to the Harlem Renaissance and writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, W. E. B. DuBois, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. She exposed us to works by Ida B. Wells, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and so many others. She read us plays and stories, had us recite poems like Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” and Margaret Walker’s “For My People,” and told us about the African origins of the stories she read us from Joel Chandler Harris’ “Uncle Remus” tales. She also took us to see plays by Shakespeare, and to films and lectures that we couldn’t quite understand.

My father gave us other parts of our education. He taught us how to box, how to shine our shoes, be gentlemen, throw a ball, and swing a bat. He showed us how to secure the house when we went to bed, how to count money, and to avoid fights if you could and to fight fiercely if you couldn’t. He also took us along when he went to meet his friends in bars and after-hours joints and taught us to trust our instincts and what to do in certain situations. When we were older, he also taught us to shoot.

My brother and I went to a neighborhood elementary school named after the infamous General George Armstrong Custer. I was particularly offended by the name because in the third grade I spent a whole summer reading biographies of great Native American leaders. I read about Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, and others and found myself siding with the Indians. I loved Western movies and always hoped the result of the staged battles would end differently, but they never did.

I did moderately well in elementary school, mainly because of my reading skills. My problem, as my teachers told my mother, was my overactive imagination. It was a characteristic that as an adult I came to understand was not a problem, just the way my brain worked as an artistic person. Our school was full of dedicated, old-fashioned black teachers who expected us to work hard, to strive for excellence so we could uplift ourselves and the race, and to behave ourselves so we would not embarrass our family or black people when we were in public.

At Custer Elementary, one of my favorite teachers taught music. He was a gentle and quiet man from Poland and a brilliant musician and teacher. He was also the first of several Eastern European Jews I met growing up. One of the things that in my young mind seemed odd about this teacher was the numbers tattooed on the inside of his wrist. Later, I would understand the horror of what those numbers represented. My teacher was a Holocaust survivor. Under his guidance I became a very good trumpet player and his top student. I also sang in the chorus and took private voice lessons from a teacher who was from France. I acted in school plays and loved doing anything creative. In the third grade I also wrote my first book. A friend illustrated it, and I sold it to my grandparents for a quarter. It was a story about a dinosaur.

During this time, I became engaged in my first action as an activist. My brother was in the local boy scout troop that met at Custer Elementary, and I used to tag along with him to the meetings. The scout leader was also the Michigan field coordinator for CORE and spent part of the meeting doing normal scout things. During the other half of the meeting he would talk to us about the Freedom Rides and the struggle taking place in the south. He would conclude by giving us literature to distribute in our neighborhood and the assignment of getting our parents and neighbors to come to one of the many informational and recruitment meetings he held to raise money and support for the struggle. I became an enthusiastic organizer. I’d knock on my neighbors’ doors, hand them the literature and almost demand in my childlike way that they come to the meeting to “help us get freedom.”

In the fifth grade my sister was born and I became a big brother. Shortly afterward, one of my mother’s sisters died and my younger cousin came to live with us. A year later my youngest sister was born. A year after that we moved from the neighborhood and the people I’d known to northwest Detroit, where black families were just integrating the area. I had a difficult time adjusting. The community didn’t feel safe to me and the people were foreign and strange to me because up until that time I had not had to interact with white people except those who owned stores or the few white teachers I had at Custer Elementary School. As it turned out, this experience was critical for me in two very important ways.

The area and the school that I first attended were not only white, but included a large Jewish population. I became friends with some of my classmates and fascinated with the difference between their lives and mine. My interest was especially aroused because of the systematic perpetuation of Jewish culture and the teaching of Jewish history. Prior to moving to the area, I had no knowledge of the Hebrew schools, bar/bat mitzvahs, temple, Jewish holy days, or other rituals.

My new friends took me to the Jewish community center where they had a huge indoor swimming pool, basketball courts, and all kinds of meeting rooms and extensive equipment. This facility was so much better than the public pools and recreation centers I was used to in the inner city neighborhood I’d moved from. They explained that it had been built with money donated from their community. They took me to the Hebrew school they attended a few days a week after school where they learned Jewish history and culture, studied Hebrew, and did service work. This learning broadened my understanding and appreciation for the process of cultural identity preservation and perpetuation.

This exposure to the Jewish community happened between 1965 and 1966. In those two years, the community was turning over fast. By 1967 it was more than half African American. Our new house was no different than our last one in that it was still a center of meetings and discussion about the movement. My family followed closely what was going on in the rest of the country and the growing nationalism in the African American community was felt strongly in our house. As much as my parents loved and followed Martin Luther King, they were also heavily influenced by Malcolm X. I can remember the weight of the grief that engulfed them and many of the adults I knew when Malcolm was assassinated in February 1965. It was a different grief then the pain they expressed when Medgar Evers was assassinated or when Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, or any of the attacks upon the Freedom Riders or the Civil Rights Movement. Violence against the movement was constant; I heard firsthand accounts in our house and we watched footage on the news. The killing of Malcolm was different and I remember hearing the adults lament that it was probably a matter of time before King would be assassinated.

A few weeks after Malcolm’s death, Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit, was murdered by the KKK in Alabama where she had gone to volunteer during the historic march from Selma to Montgomery. My mother used this as another lesson for us when she pointed out that there are people who will fight and even die for justice and it didn’t matter what they looked like, where they came from, or what religion they were. It affected her deeply, which also moved me because it was in the wake of her grief for Malcolm X.

Also, in that summer of 1965 the African American community of Watts ushered in a period of urban rebellion and riots. Out of the Watts upheaval in Los Angeles a little known scholar and community activist named Ron Karenga began to assume a position of leadership among nationalists in the area. Up the road in the Bay Area the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale the next year. All of these events and the personalities emerging around them were being talked about in our house and in the Detroit black community.

Detroit was a political city that had hosted the precursor to the historic March on Washington. Tens of thousands marched through downtown to support the Civil Rights Movement and heard Dr. King deliver an early version of his “I Have a Dream” speech. My parents were among those marching. Reverend Albert Cleage, a fiery preacher and contemporary of Malcolm X, was preaching a new black nationalist theology. Motown was the sound pouring out of transistor radios and juke boxes. The Black Arts Movement in Detroit as in New York and other cities was redefining the black aesthetic through institutions like Concept East Theater and Broadside Press, and the black pride movement was in full effect. We were inundated with cultural resistance and change, political ideologies and political organizations, and the ebb and flow of a movement literally on the move.

I began hanging out around the Black Arts community and became a protégé of the great Detroit playwright Ron Milner. I wrote and performed poetry (although my precociousness at the time prevented me from understanding that it was not very good), and I read everything I could get my hands on about the movement locally and around the country. It was also around this time that through the convergence of ideas, actions, literature, and the television that I began to take more of an interest in Africa.

Detroit, like dozens of other northern cities with large African American populations, was a powder keg as a result of poverty and alienation, the lack of political representation, and the often antagonistic relationship between blacks and the white merchants who controlled most of the commerce in the black community. The most volatile relationship was between the black community and the police force, which was predominantly white and considered racist, hostile, and violent toward black people.

Historically, Detroit had strong nationalist and revolutionary tendencies. It was one of the last stops on the US side of the underground railroad. It was a central location of the American Labor Movement and had a large black industrial working class. The Nation of Islam began there as well as many lesser known Black Nationalist local organizations. The growing nationalism, the rise of Black Power as a concept and objective nationally and locally, the anger and the supercharged political climate created a boiling hot situation in the city.

Two things happened to me in 1966 that would drive me further onto the path I would travel for the rest of my life. The first incident took place a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. I was supposed to meet my mother downtown to go shopping. There was a miscommunication and we didn’t ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Born into the Storm
• 2  Black Power: The Context of CAP
• 3  The Founding of CAP and Emergence of Amiri Baraka as a National Political Leader
• 4  The Black Arts Movement and CAP
• 5  Ideology and Ideological Development
• 6  Maulana Karenga, Amiri Baraka, and Kawaida
• 7  Amina Baraka and the Women in CAP
• 8  Revolutionary Kawaida
• 9  CAP and the United Front
• 10  Transition to Marxism
• 11  Black Marxist-Leninists and the New Communist Movement
• 12  Transformed
• 13  Lessons
• Appendix A: Organizations Represented at the Founding Meeting of the Congress of African People
• Appendix B: Congress of African People Chapters in 1975
• Appendix C: Programmatic Statement of Black Panther Party
• Appendix D: Republic of New Africa Declaration of Independence—1968
• Appendix E: Congress of African Peoples Ideological Statement—1970
• Appendix F: National Black Agenda: Black Candidate Pledge 1972
• Bibliography
• Index