Amiri Baraka Speaks! Pt1 - The Early Years

Amiri Baraka: Art speaks to people. That's why they use it against you. You know, everything surrounding you is art, but it's being used against you, you see. I mean, you hear hundreds of times a day stuff that's anti your development. Hundreds of times. They sing— they make you sing songs that are telling you you don't have no sense, you crazy, you don't have no future. I'm not crazy.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Amiri Baraka: You think you're just singing a song. You're actually teaching yourself the propaganda of your opposed. So always the artist, progressive artist, wants to put art into the hands of the people, into the minds of the people. But it's— I mean, look at the films that exist and find one of those 100 films that has a progressive line. Look at the television shows. Find even one of them that's socially progressive. The problem is that they are able to bribe and entice our people, oppressed people, to take part in, you know, art forms that actually attack them and, you know, Discriminate against them and even, you know, call them names and stuff. They are people who a lot of times are not conscious enough to avoid being placed in situations where they're actually helping their enemies, you know, because they can finally say they're getting paid. I think that's a very good point. You know, and that's their excuse. You know, they're getting paid.

Speaker 3: What was the theory of the Black Arts Movement? What were the roles of the revolutionary journals that we forged? Because the liars are telling the youth that it was a bunch of mad anarchist protest writers who had no theory. Now, we could say the theory was not as refined in the '60s, but it was a basis, it was a It was a worldview forged through our journals and the organic relationships, I think, in terms of the work and the concerts and stuff you organized with Coltrane, how Pharoah and Sun Ra and them were actually up and in and out of the Black Arts Movement. Yeah, sure.

Speaker 4: Absolutely.

Speaker 3: So, because see, my contention is the Black Arts Movement was the largest cultural, uh, upsurge that our people have had in this century and that we were—

Amiri Baraka: um, America has no responsibility to tell the truth about us.

Speaker 3: Of course not. That's why we're fighting for equality, so that—

Amiri Baraka: so there will be.

Speaker 3: They have no responsibility. So that when we are like shocked to see that the people who work for them lie about what we did, that's naivete on their part. And that's finally What keeps me cool and not punching people in the mouth recently, in the last few years, when the fact that—

Amiri Baraka: So very close.

Speaker 3: No, no close. But knowing that you are actually the one. Now, don't— you can't put down— I can't put down Uncle Sam's Negro for doing what Uncle Sam pay him to do.

Amiri Baraka: You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 3: That's stupid.

Amiri Baraka: Well, you said, I want him to do my gig.

Speaker 3: See? No, the point is, you need to do your gig. That's right.

Amiri Baraka: And to the extent that you do your gig, you're going to neutralize Uncle Sam's Negro.

Speaker 3: And that, and that I think is, is what I've come to that realization in the last decade, that deep in politics as we were, what we forgot, and me, is that you are much— you are an artist, you are a writer, and the strongest political work you can do, the strongest political work you can do is in the arts.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 3: Okay.

Amiri Baraka: And I mean that in the sense that who is going to be reached?

Speaker 3: Yes, yes.

Amiri Baraka: Most broadly. That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 3: And coupled with that, and I agree, continuing of the work, but part of our creativity, our innovativeness must be manifested in journals, workshops, institutions.

Amiri Baraka: That's what I'm saying. You have to create the institutions and organizations.

Speaker 3: Or else the boule will write you out of history.

Amiri Baraka: Exactly.

Speaker 3: You have nowhere to even be shown.

Amiri Baraka: Yes, right, right.

Speaker 3: You have to create your magazines and your news. That's right.

Speaker 2: That's right.

Amiri Baraka: That's why I came down here with all these books and stuff I don't have no more.

Speaker 4: I have 4 of them.

Speaker 2: Why?

Amiri Baraka: I made them on my machine and I sold them. That's my work.

Speaker 3: I sold my little 200 books.

Amiri Baraka: That's my work.

Speaker 3: There you go. Now I can't complain about so-and-so didn't publish me, so-and-so— he ain't supposed to publish you. It finally has to do with us. What— where are the institutions that we have created? Where are the magazines?

Amiri Baraka: Where are the theaters?

Speaker 3: You know, where are the movie companies? And as cold as that might be, That's what I believe, because I believe that we have 2 struggles.

Amiri Baraka: We have a struggle for equal rights in America, because we're supposed to be Americans.

Speaker 3: We know that's a sham, but yeah, we have the struggle for equal rights. But you cannot even fight for equal rights successfully unless you have something to struggle with. And that's the question of self-determination. You must create at least a stick. Yes. If you're going to have equality in America, you're going to have to have a stick.

Amiri Baraka: That's right.

Speaker 3: And that stick has got to be some organization.

Amiri Baraka: Who live in the biggest house? Who do the biggest crime? Who go on vacation anytime? Who kill the most Negroes? Who kill the most Jews? Who kill the most Italians? Who kill the most Irish? Who kill the most Africans? Who kill the most Japanese? Who kill the most Latinos? Who, who, who own the ocean? Who own the airplanes? Who own the malls? Who own television? Who own radio? Who own what ain't even known to be owned? Who own the land? Who own the owners that ain't the real owners, who own the suburbs, who suck the cities, who make the laws. Low coup. Craziness is no act. Not to act is craziness. Da da da da da da da da. In the funk world, if Elvis Presley is king, who is James Brown? God. Amiri Baraka, The Power of the Word, is a co-production of the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, advancing and celebrating African American literature and writers.

Speaker 4: Welcome all. Welcome all to this evening. We have poet, activist, novelist, essayist, organizer, playwright, agitator Amiri Baraka in the house. I don't— I want to apologize in advance because it's going to be a little long, just a little, in terms of introductions, but I feel like This is— it's not every day we have a brother like this walking through the house.

Amiri Baraka: That's right.

Speaker 4: Because in some real way, I think of this man as the core strength of the thing I've devoted my entire life to: black words and black worlds. I really don't think I'd be standing here if it wasn't for Amiri Baraka. I never wanted to be him exactly. I just wanted to be as brave as he was when it came time to tell my story. I wanted to write like him, be as smart as he is. I wanted to be a black writer. But forget me, what Amiri Baraka has meant to African American life and culture cannot be easily spoken of. He symbolizes fierce, honest, courageous truth-telling, no matter the consequences. He symbolizes a deep, unflinching, unwavering love of black people here and throughout the diaspora. He symbolizes fire, anger, uncompromising integrity. He symbolizes the function of words as weapons, art as implement. Ishmael Reed might have said, you know, he did say anthemically, writin' is fightin'. He is a maker of the highest order, and words of love and anger emanate from him like radiant beams. We must speak of this man as a movement of people embodied, as a family man, as a politically engaged black man who takes his life in America seriously. Rappers say, when I move, you move. When Baraka moves, we all move. You have to talk about Amiri Baraka in terms of phases and periods. He was before beat. He was born in 1934 as Everett Leroy Jones in the city he— which he later returned to, Newark, New Jersey. He attended 3 schools: Rutgers, Columbia, and most notably Howard U. In '54, he actually was a member— joined the United States Air Force, but an anonymous letter to his commanding officer accused him of being a communist, which in turn led to a little bit of discovery. And short story— long story short, he was eventually discharged. He moved then to the Village in New York, flexing his poetic muscles, and became a part of the Beat movement. In '58, he founded Totem Press with Paul which published such Beat icons as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He also co-edited the influential Eugen Literary Magazine. And then in 1960, he went to Cuba.

Amiri Baraka: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 4: If you haven't read his essay Cuba Libre, I recommend it highly, because it's an amazing account of this trip that foreshadows his great transformation. The Cuban Revolution challenged this poet to focus his art politically. I mean, you can see this change immediately in the play Dutchman and in the work Blues People: Negro Music in White America. But it was the assassination of Malcolm X that turned the tide. He broke with the Beat poets, left his wife and 2 children and moved uptown to Harlem. He was Beat, then he was Black Arts.

Amiri Baraka: Thank you.

Speaker 4: The poems began to flower in bouquets. The plays, including Slave, Four Revolutionary Plays, Jello, and others, the jazz criticisms he wrote on black music, and the book Black Music. In this time, he moved back to Newark, as I said, and became a significant political force. Over these years, he was Kawaida, he was nationalist, he was anti— he was/is Anti-imperialist, was, is communist, was, is socialist, and each was or is he was poeting, writing, speaking, shouting, fighting. He was, is. He's written over 20 books, poems, criticism, plays, essays, biography, novels, short stories. His latest are Somebody Blew Up America, Poco Loco.

Amiri Baraka: Monk Poems.

Speaker 4: His latest collection of stories, Tales of the Out and Gone. He's won an American Book Award as well as a Langston Hughes Award. He's been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He's also won the James Weldon Johnson Medal for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts. In his— in a poem called Numbers/Letters, he wrote, I am a meditative man, and when I say something, it is all of me saying. And all the things that make me, have formed me, colored me this brilliant reddish night. I will say nothing I feel is a lie. My heart is large as my mind. Now, you may have heard something from him over the years that stung you. I mean, if you start at the beginning of his career as a poet and read every poem, every play, every essay, you will find something to offend you. Black people, white people, women, wooden Negroes, apologists, separatists, Muslims, Jews, whoever. In Baraka's world, love of human liberation and the struggle for it is exalted. And if you are not with that, then your only comfort might be found in Curtis Mayfield's line, if there's a hell below, you're all gonna go. Maybe we are already there.

Amiri Baraka: Right.

Speaker 4: But whatever you do, please, do not minimize this brother's significance, please, because these are the facts. Amiri Baraka is now an elder in the Black world. He is without question one of the primary architects of the Black Arts Movement. If not for Baraka and others of the movement, but him especially, he— we would not have been able to throw off the ridiculous idea that white people could sit in judgment over our lives and our art. The Black Arts poets and artists and theorists empowered us to define our mission, our goals, our agendas for ourselves. Baraka has been doing that from day one. In my way of seeing things, Baraka is always looking at a subject to find the sliver of truth or the provocation toward a truth that that moment offers. We depend on him to do that, and we love him for that. We might— he might miss the target sometimes, I'm guessing. But that's the job of truth-tellers. If you want a poem that is capable of speaking to power, a play that exposes oppression, an essay that articulates a remedy, a story that takes you deep into the core of Black American life, Amiri Baraka has written it. Many of them. Take your pick. Fighting oppression, understanding oppression, murder, genocide. Baraka has done what we asked him to do better than anyone else. He has carried forth the banner of Black poetry and Black art as one of the last remaining vehicles of Black American oppositionality. It's hard to find anymore in novels, in the academy-blessed poets, raw, frayed at the edges, beautifully timed poetry and art that blows fire back at the dragon. That's what he does. And you know he does it because he loves us.

Amiri Baraka: Yes.

Speaker 4: His life has been like a jazz solo. As he wrote in his book of essays, Home, the Black artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as we know it. The Black artist must draw out of his soul the correct image of the world. He must use his image, this image, to bond his brothers and sisters together in common understanding of the nature of the world and the nature of American And— of America and the nature of the human soul. He's done that. He's still doing that. Let us welcome Amiri Baraka.

Amiri Baraka: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Speaker 4: Thank you.

Amiri Baraka: You know, I live in Newark, New Jersey. We could see the World Trade Center from our top floor. Somebody called me. I was supposed to go to New York that day to help Felipe Luciano with his election. He woke me up and said, turn on the television. I looked on television. This thing is burning. So I thought it was like when I was a kid, you know, a plane hit the Empire State Building and left a hole in it. I thought it was like that. But then while I'm looking, here comes the other plane. Patoom! Go upstairs, you could see it from the 3rd floor, you could see the flames. So, you know, we were scared. We were scared. It wasn't like you read about it. This was actually terror, you know. Then I started to think. I said, well, wait a minute now. That's how we got over here, terror. Slavery is terror. Slavery is terror. You know, the Klan. I don't know, left to be uneducated and live in these ghettos, that's terror. So a month later I wrote this poem. I read it all, I've sent it on the internet, I read it around the world, came back home to the Dodge Festival and I read this to about 1,000 people. Maybe more, it was 2 shows. And so then I was sitting there signing autographs on the book, and one guy comes up to me and says, hey man, I like that poem, but I didn't like that stuff you said about Israel. So I'm sorry, man. The last 2 people came up there, my wife and I were sitting there, and they walked past me, well-dressed people, and they said, that was a hateful poem.

Speaker 4: That's right.

Amiri Baraka: And I said, what part? And then I knew. Next morning, the governor called me, said, you got to apologize and resign. But the thing is that I begged these people in the state legislature. I said, well, let me go down to the legislature. Y'all be there. Let's read. I'll read it. Put it on the wall. Go down each line. Tell me what you think is anti-Semitic in Oh, we don't have to do that. So why you don't have to do that? Because we don't have to do that. That's what the head of assembly said. He said we could do anything we want to do.

Speaker 2: You know.

Amiri Baraka: That's Monk, Misterioso. Somebody blew up America. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. All thinking people oppose terrorism, both domestic and international, but one should not be used to cover the other. Somebody blew up America. They say it's some terrorist, some barbaric Arab in Afghanistan. It wasn't our American terrorists. It wasn't the Klan or the skinheads. Or the them that blows up Negro churches or reincarnates us on death row. It wasn't Trent Lott. It wasn't the gonorrhea in costume, the white sheet diseases that have murdered Black people, terrorized reason and sanity most of humanity as they pleases. They say— who say? Who do the saying? Who is them paying? Who tell the lies? Who in disguise? Who had the slaves? Who got the bucks out the bucks? Who got fat from plantations? Who genocided Indians? Tried to waste the black nation? Killed and hired. Who say they God and still be the devil? Who the biggest only? Who the most goodest? Who do Jesus resemble? Who created everything? Who the smartest? Who the richest? Who the greatest? Who say you ugly and they the good-lookingest? Who define art? Who define science? Who made the bombs? Who made the guns? Who bought the slaves? Who sold them? Who call you them names? Who say Dahmer wasn't insane?

Speaker 4: Who?

Speaker 2: Who?

Amiri Baraka: Who? Who stole Puerto Rico? Who stole the Indies, the Philippines, Manhattan, Australia, and the Pleiades? Who forced opium on the Chinese? Who own them buildings? Who got the money? Who think you funny? Who lock you up? Who own the papers? Who own the slave ship? Who run the army? Who the fake president?

Speaker 4: Yes!

Amiri Baraka: Who the ruler? Who the banker? Who, who, who? Who own the mind? Who twist your mind? Who got bread? Who need peace? Who you think need war? Who own the oil? Who do no toil? Who own the soil? Who own the city? Who own the air? Who own the water? Who own your crib? Who rob and steal and cheat and murder, make lies the truth, who call you uncouth, who live in the biggest house, who do the biggest crime, who go on vacation anytime, who kill the most Negroes, who kill the most Jews, who kill the most Italians, who kill the most Irish, who kill the most Africans, who kill the most Japanese, who kill the most Latinos, who own the ocean, who own the airplanes, who own the malls, who own television, who own radio, who own what ain't even known to be owned, who own the owners that ain't the real owners. Who own the owners.

Speaker 4: Real owners.

Amiri Baraka: Who own the suburbs, who suck the cities, who make the laws. Who made Bush president? Who believed the Confederate flag need to be flying? Who talk about democracy and be lying? Who, who, who, who, who the beasts in Revelations? Who's 666? Who decide Jesus get crucified? Who the devil on the real side? Who got rich from Armenian genocide? Who the biggest terrorists? Who change the Bible? Who kill the most people? Who do the most evil? Who don't worry about survival? Who have the colonies? Who stole the most land?

Speaker 3: Who rule the world?

Amiri Baraka: Who say they good but only do evil? Who the biggest executioner? Who, who, who? Who own the oil? Who want more oil? Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie? Who, who? Who found Ben Laden? Maybe they Satan. Who paid the CIA? Who knew the bomb was gonna blow? Who know why the terrorists learned to fly in Florida and San Diego? Who know why 5 Israelis was filming the explosion and cracking their sides at the notion? Who need fossil fuel when the sun ain't going nowhere? Who make the credit cards? Who get the biggest tax cut? Who walked out of the Conference Against Racism? Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy, and his brother? Who killed Dr. King? Who would want such a thing? Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln? Who invaded Grenada? Who made money from apartheid? Who keeps the Irish a colony? Who overthrew Chile and Nicaragua later? Who killed David Sibeko, Chris Hani? The same ones who killed Biko, Cabral, Neruda, Allende, Che Guevara, Sandino. Who killed Kabila? The ones who wasted Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Betty Shabazz, Princess Di, Ralph Featherstone, Little Bobby, locked up Mandela, Daruba, Jovanovic, Assata, Mumia, Garvey, Dasturul Hamid, Al-Fayed, Saddam. Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton, Medgar Evers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney? Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel? Who tried to keep the Vietnamese oppressed? Who put a price on Lenin's head? Who put the Jews in ovens? And who helped them do it? Who said America first and okayed the yellow stars? Ho ho! Who killed Rosa Luxemburg, Liebknecht? Who murdered the Rosenbergs and all the good people? Iced, tortured, assassinated, vanished. Who got rich from Algeria, Libya, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Kuwait? Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine? Who cut off people's hands in the Congo? Who invented AIDS? Who put the germs in the Indians' blankets? Who thought up the Trail of Tears? Who blew up the Maine and started the Spanish-American War? Who got Sharon back in power? Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo, Chiang Kai-shek? Who, who, who, who, who, who decided affirmative action had to go? Reconstruction, the New Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society. Who do Tom S. Clarence work for? Who doo-doo come out the colon's mouth? Who know what kind of skeezer is a Condoleezza? Who pay Connally to be a wooden Negro? Who give genius awards to homolocal subsidiary? Who overthrew Nkrumah?

Speaker 4: Bishop?

Amiri Baraka: Who poisoned Robeson? Who tried to put Du Bois in jail? Who framed Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin? Who framed the Rosenbergs, Garvey, the Scottsboro Boys, the Hollywood 10? Who set the Reichstag fire? Who knew the World Trade Center was going to get bombed? Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home that day? Why did Sharon stay away? Who, who, who, who? Explosion of owl, the newspapers say. The devil's face could be seen. Who, who, who, who, who make money from war? Who make dough from fear and lies? Who want the world like it is? Who wants the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror, violence and hunger and poverty? Who is the ruler of hell? Who is the most powerful? Who, you know, has ever seen God? But everybody's seen the devil. Like an owl exploding in your life, in your brain, in yourself. Like an owl exploding in your life, in your brain, in yourself. Like an owl. Who know the devil? All night, all day, if you listen, like an owl exploding in fire, we hear the questions rise in terrible flame, like the whistle of a crazy dog, like the acid vomit of the fire of hell. Who and who and who and who and who and who and who?

Speaker 4: Who? Who? Who?

Amiri Baraka: Who?

Speaker 4: Thank you.

Amiri Baraka: Wow.

Speaker 4: So when you sat down to write that poem, I mean, you described all of the things that were weighing on you at that point, but the palette is so full. Like, you have such a rich history of things to reach, to point to. I mean, you had to make decisions about what to say or what not to say, because you could go on, you could still be writing that poem, right?

Amiri Baraka: It's practice. Like my grandmother said, practice makes perfect. You practice, you practice, you practice. You know, it's like a story I always tell about Billy the Kid walking down the street with his nephew, and his nephew sees some reeds over there and says, Billy, make me a whistle, please. And he says, pow! And shoots it. And he said, how you do that without aiming? And Billy says, I'm always aiming. So the poet is always supposed to be—

Speaker 4: Ready.

Amiri Baraka: I mean, you hear click, click, click, click. Everything you see, you're supposed to be Or you do. The question is, can you recover it? Because your perception is like antennae. Anything happens, you pick it up. The question is, how do you rationalize what it is, and then how do you use it?

Speaker 4: And you were saying earlier today that it's really our job to know what the hell's going on in the world, so then you have this information with which to use.

Amiri Baraka: Well, see, I think poetry is labor. This is a friend of mine, Ed Doran, said that. Said poetry is labor, is work. It's not just your emotions. It's not just you saying, I hurt, I feel, I'm sorry, I love. You know, because that's boring, you know what I mean? So everybody's like that, you know. But you have to find out what Brecht said about the causal connections of the world. Why is the world like it is? What makes it happen? If you don't know that, you're just, you know, an ignorant person. Unfortunately, most of us are. We walk through the world without knowing really how it works, you know, which is tragic because it's working on you, you in it.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Amiri Baraka: Mm-hmm. You know, so the question is you have to know those causal connections. But then we don't even see Brecht's work. They don't bring that over here except Threepenny Opera, you know. So, you know, that's why to be a writer, which I will tell these people, you see, you have to work. It is understanding that people want, you know. It's not just talking about yourself. There's some understanding about the world. And how it works, you know.

Speaker 4: I heard you say yesterday you don't tell the truth to a liar. I just heard you say that. And then I just want—

Amiri Baraka: Well, that's another situation.

Speaker 4: But I also wanted to wonder, what is the cost of truth-telling?

Amiri Baraka: Well, I mean, I can show you. I can take these false teeth out and show you this scar on my head. You know, I was sentenced to 3 years.

Speaker 4: '67.

Amiri Baraka: '67 in Newark. And the judge read a poem of mine. He said, this poem is— this is a prescription for criminal anarchy. A poem. I said, Judge, you mean these Negroes came in my house to read the poem before they set fire to the town? He said, what do you think? Let me see that poem, Baraka. I want to burn up this house. You know, no, but I mean— When I first read David Walker's Appeal, I know all you students should have read it. When I first read that, and he was a free black living in Boston, and they poisoned him 6 months later. You know, his mama was free, that's why he was free. And I looked at that and said, dog, when could I ever do that? Write something like that that would be so terrible that people would want to lock you up. I didn't know I could actually do that more than once. More than once. Be careful what you wish for, you know. Doo doo doo doo doo. Doo doo. Something in the way of things, something that will quit and won't start, something you know but can't stand, can't know but get along with. Like death riding on top of the car, peering through the windshield for his cue. Something entirely fictitious and true that creeps across your path, hallooing your evil ways like they were yourself, passing yourself, not smiling. The dead guy you saw me talking to is your boss. I tried to put a spell on him, but his spirit is illiterate. I know things you know and nothing you don't know, except I saw something in the way of things, something grinning at me, and I wanted to know, was it funny? Was it so funny it followed me down the street greeting everybody like the Good Humor Man? And they got to taste the good humor, but no ice cream. It was like that, me talking across people into the houses and not seeing the beings crowding around me with ice picks. You could see them, but they looked like important Negroes on the way to your funeral. They looked like important jigaboos on the way to your auction. They let them chant the numbers and use an ivory pointer to count your teeth. Remember Step and Fetch It? How we laughed knowing it was Sunday school images given flesh and jiggling with the ice pick high over his head? Made you laugh anyway. I can see something in the way of ourselves. That's why I say the things I do. You know it, but it's something else to you, like that job this morning when you got there, it was quiet and the machines were yearning soft behind you, yearning for the Negro to come and give up his life.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Amiri Baraka: Standing there being dissed and broke and troubled. My mistake is I kept saying that was proof God didn't exist, and you told me, no, it was proof that the devil do. But still, it's like I see something, I hear things. I saw words in the white boy's lying rag said you was going to die poor and frustrated, that them dreams walk with you across town is going to die from overwork, that the garbage on the street is telling you you ain't And you almost believe it. Broken, mistaken all the time. You know some of the words, but they ain't the right ones. Your cable back on, but ain't nothing on it you can see. But I see something in the way of things. Something make us stumble. Something get us drunk from noise and addicted to sadness. I see something and feel something stalking us like an ugly thing floating at our back, calling us names. You see it and hear it too. What you say, it got a right to exist just like you. And if God made it, but then we got to argue. And the light gonna come down around us even though we remember where the bank is, remember the Negro squinting at us through the cage. You seen what I see too, a smile that ain't a smile, but teeth flying against our necks. You see something too, but can't call its name. Ba ba dum bum, ba ba dum bum, ba na, ba da dum da, ba da na na na na. Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. Ain't it too bad, y'all said, ain't it too bad? Such a nice boy, always kind to his mother, always say good morning to everybody on his way to work. But that last time before he got locked up and hurt real bad, I seen him walking toward his house and he wasn't smiling and he didn't even say hello. But I knew he'd seen something. Something in the way of things. And it worked on him like it do and will, and he kept marching faster and faster away from us and never even muttered a word. Then the next day he was gone. You want to know what I'm talking about? Saying, I seen something, something in the way of things. And how the boy's face looked that day just before they took him away. There is in that face— and remember now, remember all them other faces in all the many places you've seen him or the sister with his child wandering Remember what you seen in your own mirror and didn't for a second recognize the face, your own face, straining to get out from behind the glass. Open your mouth like you were gonna say something. Close your eyes and remember what you saw and what it made you feel like. Now don't you see something else? Something cold and ugly, not invisible but blended with the shadow crisscrossing the old man squatting by the drugstore at the corner with his head resting uneasily on his folded arms.

Speaker 4: I see it.

Amiri Baraka: And the boy that smiled, and the girl he went with, and in my eyes too a waving craziness splitting them into the jet stream of a blackbird, his ass on fire, or the solemn notness of where we go to know we're gonna be happy. I seen something, and you seen it too. You just can't call its name. Boom ba dum ba, boom ba dum ba dum ba da.

Speaker 4: Thank you.

Amiri Baraka: Thank you.

Speaker 4: So I was reading, I was reading your book Eulogies, which is a really amazing book. It's a collection of all of the poems and essays, commentary he's made at other people's funerals and departure memorials. It's just a really touching book. But, you know, what happens is Amiri often is saying, you know, he's saying goodbye to someone and he's sort of ticking off or counting off the people who have left and who are going. But at one point you said You know, remember the times you were— I think this was Ellis Haizlip's eulogy, and he said, remember the time when we were winning, you know? Do you remember that? When the revolution was the main trend of the world, until a time when we rise again to the challenge of destroying slavery and white supremacy forever. Where are we now?

Amiri Baraka: We are at the bottom of the Sisyphus syndrome, as Du Bois called it. You know, he's the one who characterized the Black liberation movement as the Sisyphus syndrome, that we roll the rock up the mountain, they roll it back down. You get out of slavery, and suddenly they have the Black Codes. You think you're gonna have Reconstruction, you get the Klan. You know, you fight to the end of the 19th century, and they put Plessy v. Ferguson, separate but equal. You start the Harlem Renaissance, you bring Du Bois and Garvey, You know, the African Blood Brotherhood, they bring fascism. In the '30s, Hitler, the Klan comes back. You go to A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King, CORE, Malcolm X, Robert Williams, you know. Then they killed Malcolm X. They killed Martin Luther King. They killed Robert Kennedy. They killed John Kennedy.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Amiri Baraka: That is, the most progressive aspects of American politics were all slain between 1963 and 1969. They killed all of them, see. Plus, you know, you can mention Medgar Evers, you know, Patrice Lumumba, Steve Biko. I mean, you can keep on.

Speaker 4: In all your work, the names flow.

Amiri Baraka: Well, that's because you study. You're supposed to study, you know, you're supposed to study. I used to see my grandfather and uncle in the house late at night, and they'd be in there, you know, they'd be in there at it, man. And I would stand there and look at them, say, look at them in there. Old dudes, they was in there at it, you know. So I always thought that was— and then my grandfather used to read this book called Pelubitz Notes. You ever hear of that? Pelubitz Notes? It's notes on the Bible.

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.

Amiri Baraka: So it references the Bible in historical terms. It takes all the stuff that was in the Bible and explains it as actual history, see? And so that was fascinating to me. But I had to depart from that because it was all up high up in the church, you know. And when I got baptized, after he brought me out of the water and I ain't see no change, that was the end of that. I thought immediately, you know, I was going to be able to talk to Jesus or one of them, you know. But it didn't happen. So I said, well, that ain't happening yet. Well, let me read this thing here. It's called Dig This Out. Remember when the blood met us on his doorstep, unlocking the door? He explains that he is not who we think, but he will explain. And when he went in, he started right away saying he was a replacement for himself, but from a different planet. Maybe he said place. We asked him which planet. He looked at us like we was corny. Earth, he said. Dig that, Earth. And then he begins to put everybody down, or a lot of people we know, because we can be in the zoo calm and employed as the animals. Man. Now he says that this is not the Earth but dirt, and humans cannot yet inhabit it like it was the jungle and we was all animals, or even if we knew about humanity and dug it, We couldn't go all the way because animals ruled the zoo and forbid humanity to develop. He said, this is a big cave in the sky. I can see it even where I come from, but we so hip we can imagine the smell. So who is you? was what we was asking. Who is you? I am why Negroes never die. Yeah, he said that. And dig this. I am the Charlie Parker bird, the soul of blackness, a tail of fire exploding through space, black and flying, tail on fire. Out is my castle, gone is my name. Who leaves burnt lies beyond the moon. I am from where you are going and who you will be to get there if you don't die. In 2031, Christmas was replaced by Halloween as America's holiday. The jack-o'-lantern and skeleton replaced the star and Christmas tree. The devil became Santa Claus, and death was celebrated instead of birth. Finally, the world had become a great poison cave with skulls and bone crosses piled up to the edge of the polluted endless twilight horizon of corpses which were money Right. Afro-America slid, we blew razor out, we black belts sharp like streetlight flash in the city's collective eyes, swift and rising in us hand like night, black and invisible, in a swinging arc of everything over your head, swinging hard, coming down, and where it strike, red star blood. And having said that, he sits down at the piano and begins to speak parables. You hip to parables, right? Then he starts to recite very rhythmically, and then he sings. We try to remember it, a copy of it. This is the transcript that follows: Out is gone, Yahus, yes, Yah, yes, the creating that is jazz, the is God, is be Yahweh, Jehovah is the signs, ZZ equal lightning, the and from the sky, the N and the J upright and connect, up not M, ZZ equal lightning, thunder, Shango, Electric Sky, Jism, I equal J, M move more, I rar, R, ya, yes, ya, A first, I am, I are looking down. Since then we get messages on the box. He's saying we can meet whenever we got a question or an answer, so we discussing it first, you know.

Speaker 4: 1995. But there's really 2 different— you know, it's sort of— Baldwin talked about how white America, black America were in an argument over the definition of reality.

Amiri Baraka: Well, it's a different reality. One's looking from the top of the mountain, one's looking from the bottom. See, that's what it is. If you're rolling a rock up and somebody's pushing it down—

Speaker 4: Hence you have Sisyphus, right?

Amiri Baraka: Sisyphus.

Speaker 4: That's what it is. I was going to save this for the We'll end. get to it later, but talk about your role as a playwright and what has— where you've been at in your mind over these years about theater, Black theater, etc.

Amiri Baraka: Well, you know, actually this play next week called The Sisyphus Syndrome, where David Murray, a saxophone player, wrote the music, and it's literally where I took the Ford and Backward movements in Black history, you know, like the ending of slavery, Reconstruction going up, the destruction of Reconstruction, the Klan, the Black Codes going down, you know, '48, you know, the whole— then the whole Harlem Renaissance and, you know, the pushing back up, Negritude, all those movements internationally, and then the coming of fascism and so forth. Then the Black liberation movement in the '60s, you know.

Speaker 4: All of that's in there.

Amiri Baraka: All of that, yeah. Like that. And he's written those songs singing about those things. My words, of course, but he's singing about those things, you know. And it's interesting once you, you know, as a playwright, it's very interesting to hear your words put into music, especially David Murray, who's Music is very strong, you know, and it's, it's very interesting.

Speaker 4: Music as befits the man though.

Amiri Baraka: Huh?

Speaker 4: Music as befits the man.

Amiri Baraka: Well, see, I'll tell you one thing about music. When Eisenstein did his films, you know, you know Eisenstein, the Russian, the creator of modern cinema, Russian. When he brought the film to England, They said you can bring the film, Strike, and those films, but you can't bring Prokofiev's music. In other words, seeing that silent stuff on the screen was one thing, but if we have to hear Prokofiev, we ain't having that, you know, because that then makes it an emotional situation, you see. And that's true. And that's why old theater Theater always had music, just like movies. One of the things about movies, movies always have music, no matter what kind of movie it is. But the idea of non-musical stage, that's some recent Western stuff. You know, Talking Heads, that's some Western—

Speaker 3: Right.

Amiri Baraka: You have to have music in it, you know, because that's part of the whole thing. So we have music, dance, poetry. That's what theater is. I mean, you know, Shakespeare has always had music. Da da da da da da da da da da da da da. That I, the undaunted laureate of the place, daunted in some unassiated pretense of what they see they be, as if such where they was was yet to be, and then to say there is and is not like revelations. Wow! Humans, the skin, the lodging inside dumbness, a slight breeze frees they speech. To speak as if acquainted with small things in the world— eating, belching, farting, murder, robbery— and so as if in them too they is, but nothing further but the wee dots on the deletion resembling the minds of them yet to come. Imagine you were me, or imagine you were thee, and we knew the things, all the things both do and is and will ourselves to be. Imagine you were in this place Yes. And they wanted to run everywhere, pointless, endless understanding, not even why they smell or their hair fall out or what to do about gout, that they are yet stupid to colds and cancer and death. They think holy and ultimate when death is simply a report card of the ignorant. Nothing dies but that which never lived, and it might return in a white suit and in charge of ugly small mistakes. Somebody at Harvard could win a billion dollars in a post if they could find out, but they never will because it's the reason Yes. They committed suicide. Suppose you had to live with ignorant white people and Negroes in cages with important chains around their mouths. Suppose you had heard of Trent Lott. Suppose you woke up 1 AM and there was a vampire on the tube being interviewed by a Negro, you know, boob, a handsome rat for whom the idea of brain was only an idea, which he did not think if he could was a bad one. And the boob was a killer, yet to graduate from killer school, so he worshipped The vampire's teeth. The 2 juicy fangs hanging from each end of his lip, the Negro thought was hip and dreamed of having teeth like that so he could be a rat. He was tired of being a mere heel. And the vampire was planning to bite the whole world, to suck the blood out of everything, to suck the blood out of the world and make its future a vampire that could whirl through space and suck the blood out of the stars, suck the blood out of the planets, suck the blood out of the moon, suck the blood Out of the sun, and then armed and blubbery fat with everything's blood, still hot and musical like emptiness he could lift into the outer way, goner's fair, and search for God, if there was such, and suck the blood out of him, her, it, them, whatever, till there was no blood anywhere, not even you, blood. In fact, you'd be one of the first to go. It was a special issue of Jungle Comics where the vampire, the thin-nosed kind from the outback who can suck with his teeth and stir with his nose, whose eyes are missing, And what you see is the bottom of a coal mine filled with 2,000 fathoms of lynch, execution, missing, raped, cheated, framed, slandered, stolen, frowned, frozen ex-corpuscles hid under the glistening, listening underwater asscraft of the satanic moron cult whose breath is toxic and pokes holes in the sky so dead things can turn our food. He is called Fungool the Asshole.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Amiri Baraka: And dances to dry lips set on fire by missing junkies he has eaten. He is the devil's newspaper and wears his ass backwards so the colon can wear uniform. I speak with the rage of angels, them that be with Marx. I speak with the clarity and inferno of the necessary, like my man John on Patmos watching Skyvision and digging it was all commercials. I speak like Ali Baba, the Arabian Pope, who when he spoke the magic words, open this sucker up. And the mountains swang and visioned one day there would be a John named Train who would blow the same. I blow with the deep fear of John on the island looking at the actual devil. I am like him in that I try to count the mammy jammers' heads and horns and find out what will kill him. I speak like him who spoke to Philadelphia and hung out with Jesus before they murdered him. I speak like him who dug that Peter was a coward and gave the Lord up and that Paul was an anti-Semite who never came out of the closet.

Speaker 4: Amen.

Amiri Baraka: I speak as one who knew Judas would drop a dime on the movement and confirmed the chump had hung his lousy self just before I got busted. I speak as one betrayed by the lies of those who say they are religious but are greed-ridden worshippers of Satan who will kill anyone who opposes them and calls it a church of defense against evil. Like John, I would speak. Like John who baptized. Like John the Knower, John the Blower, John the Brown, and John the Revelator. I speak like James, The brother, James the other, Jim the hip, like Dick the rude, like Bird the high, like Monk the deep. I speak from the island of my soul and cast a terrified look into the sky full with monsters, with witches and devils and great whores and beasts of things with heads and horns and blood dripping out of their eyes. It is out. Imagine you were here in this place staring into the soul of something filthy. Trying to keep it from murdering you, to keep your eyes from registering, your ears from hearing, your mouth from reporting. And you could feel it breathing on your neck and saw sometimes the shadow of its horny hands reaching out of the blind dark. You could see the shadow of its gun, its lie, its teeth sweating. Imagine you could actually understand its obscene ideas. And they made you enter the mind of Fred Douglass and stare out at the ocean just as John at the edge of Africa Yes. Staring at the overhead commercials on the death of the beast. And so the blessing that is in my name and in my words I give to myself and you who are truthful as the actual life of the world. And it is this blessing, and it is this blessing which will save us, will make us strong as we go on with our work of scientifically determining how to kill the beast. Each night I fill my notebooks with formula and instructions to myself and others on what to do, what to study, where to go, who to talk to and when.

Speaker 4: Yes.

Amiri Baraka: Words and names, events, processes, necessary stages of what we have come to realize is protracted. And what we do, we will do. And what we succeed at is worth the pain. What we fail at is worth the understanding, if we can understand what the next step is. We are studying with all our minds and hearts and souls' determination to understand how to slay the serpent. This task, Nat handed down to whoever did understand that that was what he did, hanging on that tree, slain by the serpent's host. So we have learned that we cannot die except by our own submission to it, and have decided we will not die except when we understand what place we go to. And so begin to set that where in order and begin to understand where the beast will be hiding there. We are the rider of the black horse. We are the rider of the black horse, black horse, black rider who conquers with a scale, with justice and measure and the mighty pentatonic mode of finite music of infinity, a new joint. And when I returned from this forwarding of my feeling and knowing, the beast sat still and teeth wiggled with lies. And at once I remembered where before I'd seen him, before his tenure as the counterfeit ghost in the Caucasian crib. Yes, it was the same one. Remember the little devil Gerald 2X arrested and placed in the pages of Muhammad Speaks? And we saw him where Malcolm had locked him up with the little horns out of his head, the little evil eyes, and the twin-fanged straws for sucking oil and blood? It got clear to me as he rose to leave, and the Negro boob slobbered happiness at being recognized as the newest commode in the Caucasian abode. The vampire turned, and where before the cunning little tail that used to dangle out his hiney Struck me at its absence. Oh, I thought. And at that moment I saw the thing dart like a copperhead's fart out of the Negro's curled lips, ringed with a white chalk Caucasian circle of merit, which identifies wooden Negroes promoted to the honorary genus of Homo locus subsidiarii, literally near man, who no longer kneel when they are made well pay heels, but now can assume the funky bedbug crouch. Yes.

Speaker 3: Yes.

Amiri Baraka: Of the hideously self-hating. At the same time, they're given a gray facsimile carte blanche weapon of ugliness to use against N-words and any who would violate the sanctity of Northern appetite. And so I came to understand that the beast's deadly arrow shot from out of the first horseman's white bow from the white horse, the weapon which Revelation prophesied to John was the weapon of his transitory rule, was now the tongue of the boob, who I err at calling him that, or rat, or heel, or dog, or traitor. That tail become a tongue was the sign that from the vampire's tail was bestowed on the wooden Negro a badge that allowed him to enter Klan meetings and skinhead lynchings and Texas executions and Palestinian ethnic cleansings and report with the slobber of his terrificatious White-winged serpent's beak, symbol, font, and punctuation on the tabula rasa of the media sheet, the empty echo of his eviscerated self. And in the soul's place, that beast's tail was hung, that beast's tail was sung. In the soul's place, that beast's tail was hung, that beast's tail was sung. And I stood remembering Patmos and the images that sailed across the air when you and I was there.

Speaker 3: Thank you.

Amiri Baraka: And wondered what next the world of this life held for those who would love goodness. And wondered what next the world of this life held for those who would love goodness. Dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee.

Speaker 4: I also read Jello this week.

Amiri Baraka: Going back in time.

Speaker 4: Back in time, way back in time. This is a very short play in which, if you know Jack Benny and Rochester, Rochester jacks up Jack Benny, takes all his money. I mean, but you wrote a lot of stuff similar to that, and in that way, it's spare, minimalist, very intense, word-centered. And then I think about somebody like Suzan-Lori Parks and how celebrated she is. And I just feel like your work sort of went under the radar in that way.

Amiri Baraka: It's just that, you know, once you opt to be in the movement itself, not as a separate intellectual who's commenting on things that you're not involved with, then people look at you differently, see? I mean, Dutchman was— I won the Obie Award, Best American Play, 1964.

Speaker 4: Right.

Amiri Baraka: But when we went up to Harlem with the same play in 1965, they said it was racist.

Speaker 4: Right.

Amiri Baraka: Well, what was the difference? The difference was that looking at it in a dispassionate way of— as art is one thing, but if somebody thinks that you're telling somebody to do something, you know, like they closed theater, you know, in 1960, Was that '66, '67? They closed theaters. They closed the theaters. They closed Dutchman in Los Angeles when it first went out there. Tried to arrest the actors. They set fire to the set of Slave Ship in Switzerland. You know, they closed 2 theaters. I mean, you know, you tell a— if you've got a play called Arm Yourself or Harm Yourself, one of my early efforts, Nobody takes that as just simple, dispassionate intellectualism. You know what I mean? No, it's true. And that's what you want, actually. When my daughter, who's dead now, but she was a schoolteacher, and she came running in there one day after they had busted me for that Somebody Blew Up America. And she said, you know, Amaru, the principal said your father must be really uptight about this. She said, no, my father like it. I mean, the idea of you— that's your job. Mao Zedong says if your enemies don't put you down, something's wrong with you. You need an enemy or something, you know.

Speaker 4: Question of what art is.

Amiri Baraka: When I was a kid, I used to read Chinese and Japanese poetry. I was a weird little kid, you know, living in Newark. And I read something called a haiku, you know. And so I think I would create something for Black people, for Afro-American people, called a locu. The difference is, you know, we can't count the syllables. You know, the Japanese got time to count the The syllables. We don't have time to count the syllables. These are just short, you know. Blood pal, un poco loco, a little crazy. Da da da da da da da da. Loco for so what? They ask him the difference between insane and outsane. He said, "You know the difference? That's why you ask it." Two days later, they came back. He had left a note. It said the same thing. That's when his picture went up in the post office. The caption read, "Wanted for any reason you can think of." This meant they really did understand. Da da da da da da da da da da Silent Night. Whenever the devil is disguised as God, he is called Santa Claus. Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. Adventures in Negrosity. A Negro tried to cash himself for money at a bank. He got arrested as a counterfeit nickel. Da da da da da da da da da da da da da. Culture. European Jews say the devil speaks perfect German. Black Americans, on the other hand, say he speak pretty good English too. Ba ba ba da da da da da. Heaven appeared with property. Heaven appeared with property. Heaven appeared with property. God with slavery. Heaven appeared with property. God with slavery. Da da da da da da da da da da. Before fortune was money. Before fortune was money. Finally, everything points to the people and things we understand. Understanding is a point of view. If you look. What looks down from that point? If it is the sun, okay. If you see it better, if you don't, okay. But for instance, and there you go across the sea to be with the devil. The preparation for pain is minimal; for joy, a lifetime. Is that fair? We ask. Is that fair? You mean a fee, a circus, or white people? Da da da da da da da da da da. Low coup. Low coup. Craziness is no act. Not to act is craziness. Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. The Children of Dorian Gray. The Children of Dorian Gray. Americans have gotten much uglier since yesterday and will probably be even uglier tomorrow. Why are Americans getting so ugly? King, who is James Brown? God? The silent partner, that man you were just talking to, yes? I have proof, incontrovertible proof that he is really the devil. So what do you think we should do? Nothing, he just offered me a job. Da da da da da da da da da. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it very much.

Speaker 2: Evolving out of the first black political convention was the unanimous acceptance of Imamou Amidi Baraka, who is in the studio with me to analyze the convention. As a viable political architect, the merging of his ideology of black nationalism and his creative history as a poet and writer were demonstrated at the Congress of African People in September of 1970.

Speaker 3: The nationalist must be the spine to the black nation, not some kind of weird projection off the side of his head going off at a right angle.

Speaker 4: Yes.

Speaker 3: The nationalist must be the spine of the body of the black nation. What the nation does, the nationalist must make him do a little better, a little faster. If it's slow, it's because we slow. You understand that? But the minute you put yourself away from the people, no matter how backward and corny you might think they are, then you are isolated, standing there by yourself, and you will get killed. You will get killed. You will get killed, and it's not about being killed. Liberation is not about being killed. We are not interested in no suicide. We want to live. We want a new life. We want a life that we remember vaguely sometimes in the back of our heads as a liberated African people. So, I know what we are trying to do. Let's create a sympathetic atmosphere in which to develop a strong, organized understanding of what the struggle is, how we must win, how can we win. Everything of value in the black community we must control. Whoever runs for public office must be a nationalist or be accountable to nationalists.

Speaker 4: That's interesting.

Speaker 3: Anybody that speaks using the black community as his base must refer and deal with nationalism and Pan-Africanism. All our politicians must do as much for us and Africans all over the world as Javits does for the Jews. I know it's hard to be black in a world controlled by white folks. Du Bois said we always have the double consciousness. We trying to be black, and meanwhile you got a white ghost hovering over your head that says, if you don't do this, you'll get killed. If you don't do this, you won't get no money. If you don't do this, nobody will think you beautiful. If you don't do this, nobody will think you smart. That's the ghost. You trying to be black and the ghost is telling you to be a ghost. We hope you won't submit. In Newark, when we greet each other on the street, we say, "What time is it?" We always say it's nation time. We say, "What's going to happen?" Say, "Land is going to change hands." Say what time is it? Nation time. And what's gonna happen? The land's gonna change hands. Now you think about that. That's what it's about. Nationalism is about land and nation, a way of life trying to free itself. So the next time somebody asks you what time is it, you tell them it's nation time, brother. Come on, niggas, niggas, niggas, niggas, come out, help us Stop the devil. Help us build a new world, niggas.

Amiri Baraka: Come out, brothers.

Speaker 3: Are we with you and your sons? Your daughters are ours, and we are the same. All the blackness from one black Allah. When the world is clear, you'll be with us. Come out, niggas.

Amiri Baraka: Come out.

Speaker 3: Come out, niggas.

Amiri Baraka: Come out.

Speaker 3: It's nation time. It's nation time. It's nation time. It's nation time. Champ with bells and drum. It's nation time. Nation time, get up, Santa Claus, get up, Roy Wilkins, get up, Diana Ross, get up, Jimmy Brown, it's nation time, build it, get up, Muffet Dragger, get up, Rastas, for real, become Rasta Ferrari, Rast Jeweler, get up, nigga, get up, nigga, come over here, nigga, take a bow, nigga, it's nation time.

Speaker 2: Brother Baraka, I think more than anything that That film shows the combination of you as an artist and as a politician. People are now asking, particularly many of your followers who have defined you as the architect of black art, as well now as the architect of unity without uniformity, do you consider yourself basically an artist, or now do you consider yourself basically a politician?

Speaker 3: Well, I don't see the division. I think those kinds of divisions are basically Artificial. When we were dealing with redefining aesthetics from a black point of view, one of the points that we tried to make is that there is no division between art and life, or politics and life. You know, it's a particular way of defining things at a particular time. We believe that that the development of black people depends. on their first unifying, and it also depends on them being able to create political structures, you know, actual structures to transform their potential into power, you see. And in that kind of thrust, artists are necessary, black artists are necessary, black politicians are necessary, black economists are necessary.

Speaker 4: Right.

Speaker 3: You see, people in diverse walks of life are necessary, but I don't see the division between the black politician and the black artist. I think all of that energy is necessary, and it all needs to be focused in the same direction, that is, the creation of a strong national black community.

Speaker 2: I think one thing that's affecting everybody, even the people perhaps that believed in you, is that it looks as though now you're not just talking, you're really pulling it off. And obviously this film goes back a few years. You've been talking it a few years even before that.

Amiri Baraka: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2: I'd like to address myself to this question. You were one of the 3 co-chairmen, along with Congressman Charles Diggs and Mayor Hatcher of Gary. And universally, everyone, including, I might add, the opponents of the convention, and you in particular, are writing and televising that you are the only man, perhaps, who could have held that convention How do you react to that?

Speaker 3: Well, I think if that's true, and where it is true, it's because of our belief, that is, in the Congress of African People, Committee for Unified Newark, which is our local organization, that without the entire nation of black people, then there is no hope for real progress, that it's all right for us to have personal ideologies, You know, we're all in favor of personal and very strong ideological commitment. But also we believe that, you know, if you are like a good Christian or a good Muslim, you know, or I'm a good nationalist, you know, it's actually futile for me to try to convert you to my ism. I think what we have to look for is the easiest point at which we do merge, at which there is some real communion. And that's following, to a certain extent, what Malcolm X said when he talked about the unity of groups, and that the strength of the Black community would come when we learned to put aside our petty differences, our petty sovereignties, and transcend those kind of petty concerns to reach a stronger kind of unity. And I was impressed, my trip to Africa, by the kind of Yes. —of diversity in, say, liberated nations like the Republic of Guinea and Tanzania, where there's real diversity, where you have Christians and Muslims and different tribes, you know, Maasai, Chagga, Kikuyu, but yet within the framework of a national kind of consciousness and a national kind of unity, they're able to sort of put those diversities together, you know, and come up with a national agenda.

Speaker 2: And that was Well, the concept at the convention, sticking in the context of your statement, was various tribes coming together with various tribal chiefs. The tribe, I might add, from Michigan, the Michigan delegation and their tribal chiefs had perhaps a little different concept of unity without uniformity, perhaps, than the basic philosophy of the convention.

Speaker 3: Well, I think I think some of the people from Michigan, the ones who walked out— because didn't all of them walk out. As a matter of fact, part of the delegation stayed and elected a new chief, as a matter of fact. But I think some of the people that did walk out were accused of being representatives of the United Auto Workers, the UAW. They said the UAW had paid their way to the convention. But I believe very truthfully that even that persuasion, if it's legitimate— and I'm sure that there are a lot of, you know, black folks, Negroes, Bloods, what have you, who have their way paid different places by white folks. I think we have to accept that as a legitimate kind of direction for some black people to come. But I think those people have to realize that, again, they can have an input into the total assembly of black folks, but they can't dominate it. The only thing that can dominate is what is really— can be considered by the majority as something which will benefit that majority. I think the majority always has the right to decide, you know, and the minority always has the right to be heard, you know. But I think there has to be, you know, that kind of interreaction where each group knows that finally what you're after is some kind of, you know, transcendent, some kind of dialectical reality that takes into consideration opposites. And then makes a better truth out of those opposites.

Speaker 2: OK, acknowledging your success as the, I might say, moderator at the convention, and the fact that some 8,000 blacks got together and did some of the things, many of the things you're talking about, one of the major magazines wrote recently that that convention really didn't represent a diversity of black America.

Speaker 3: Well, I think that the only way they could have said that is not be there, because Because in all my days of being, you know, around different places, I can truthfully say that that was the most diversified group there. I think we had within that 8,000 people— and I guess those 8,000 were the ones that we could see in the school. There were another 3,000 or 4,000 that came in and around the city of Gary and the city of Chicago that never even got to the convention. But the 8,000 or so that we saw—

Amiri Baraka: Right.

Speaker 3: There were absolute diversity. There was the so-called black integrationists and the so-called black nationalists and the Muslims and Christians and black Democrats and black Republicans. It was a very, very diverse group. And I think what we have to do is see ourselves as that kind of diverse group. We are not a monolithic people. And people keep saying, well, what does the black What does the Black community think? First of all, it's necessary for us to create the Black community. So far, all we have is a kind of settlement where we share space but don't share values. What we're trying to do is evolve past just the sharing of space and the sharing by default of negative kind of qualities. We're trying to get— create a community, you know, which has to do with people coming together, you know, and evolving a specific political Yeah. Based on that diversity. Well, once we can accept the fact that we are diverse, we're not monolithic, you know, and just like the white community, nobody says, well, what is the white community saying? If they can have, like, Jerry Rubin and Richard Nixon, you know, both claiming to be white folks, I think that we can at least claim some kind of diversity, you see, and still see ourselves as having a common direction, you know, finally, that we can work out. With a little kind of effort and a little science.

Speaker 2: In practical terms, what can we do? We are, I think, 13 million registered voters. Something like 6 million blacks either don't vote or are not registered. We're 13 million, I believe, potential black voters. How can we, in a pragmatic way, how would this political convention, a political agenda, how is that going to, in a practical way, affect American politics?

Speaker 3: I think one of the important things that come out of the convention, a steering committee has been named, chairmen from 50 different states plus national organizations, to put together a method of electing a national assembly, which would be about 427 black folks, a minimum of 2 per state, and the rest proportionally elected.

Speaker 2: Actually, 10% Yes.

Speaker 3: Of the, uh, of the amount that came to the convention. Now, what this assembly would try to function much like a Congress or a national assembly of a nation, of a country, uh, which would very consciously try to involve these diverse groups on a continuous basis. And there'd be no attempt to, like, dominate by one group, that all the groups would be able to come together in a well-organized You know, evolving political structure. We need a political structure, a concrete political structure, whether we call it a party or we can call it a banquet. You can call it anything you want to, but we need a concrete political structure that will allow black people, even though they might be black Democrats, they can remain black Democrats as long as they can also, you know, understand that they. should, and eventually will feel they must, contribute to the development of this black political structure, you see, which will even be able to make their functioning within the Democratic Party much more valuable to themselves and to the black community.

Speaker 2: All right, on an issue basis, does this mean that we should decide to support a candidate who is opposed to busing? Who is for busing, who is opposed to community control of schools, who is for community control of schools? Is this the kind of— are we talking— I'm asking, are we talking about organizing around an issue, or are we talking about organizing around a concept of nationhood?

Speaker 3: We're talking about organizing now around the concept of political power for black people, self-determination for black people. And in that context, Next, specific issues have to be handled according to what benefits the national black community at any given time, you see. So we say, uh, on the issue of schools, for instance, uh, what does this national assembly, what does the great diversity of the black community think about this? What will benefit us? Well, let's look at this scientifically, you know, not out of some kind of, like, sudden emotionalism. Let's sit down and look at this.

Speaker 4: How will it benefit us?

Speaker 3: What about the schools? Actually, the majority of us, and then place the weight of our national black community behind that. You see, and by doing that, we'll find that more and more we'll isolate those, say, representatives of purely white interests that exist in the black community. You see what I mean? Where legitimate black interests will more and more begin to refine and define themselves. And to show themselves, you see, and create a kind of legitimacy.

Speaker 2: Do you think the Democratic Party has taken the black vote for granted?

Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. I think the Democrats are— can take the black vote for granted because most of the people who function in the black community have been Democrats, you see. But I think that's That's over, certainly. I think that the taking for granted, not only by the Democrats, but any white-controlled institution, or any institution that is not clearly, you know, controlled by black people for the benefit of black people, it's all over. I think that the '70s, one clear thing will come out of this decade, is the creation of some strong black political structure that will evolve more and more to a direction-giver, you see, for the black community, national black community.

Speaker 2: Do you think that black people, that this black assembly, should or will, do you believe, relate to the Republican Party? Do you foresee a time, possibly, that we might direct our votes on the side of the Republicans around an issue?

Speaker 3: One thing that most of us who, you know, were paying attention in the late '50s and the Yes. What I think the African nations and the Asian nations learned is that it's not necessary for you to, like, get in anybody's boxcar, you understand? When you make alliances or coalitions, or when you make deals, you see, you're not giving up your sovereignty. And too often what happens, a weak people, when they make some kind of coalition, they're not really making a coalition, or they're not Getting a deal, they're actually giving up their sovereignty. For instance, a small island in the Pacific, you know, can't make a deal with the United States. The United States co-opts them. They go along with the United States. For too long, so-called Negro leaders have not been able to deal from a power base. What they've done is just give up their sovereignty to white folks. What we're saying when we create our own kind of National base and national kind of, you know, overall structures, then we can deal with people from the bases of power. This is why when you see Nixon going to China, you don't worry about Mao, you know, like selling, you know, his body, his soul to Nixon, because you know the Chinese with 800 million people are coming from a position of power, so they can work together, and there need not be any permanent interest.

Amiri Baraka: Right.

Speaker 3: You see, it can change according to the interests of the black community. We have to deal from the concept of a national kind of sovereignty, where what benefits us, we go for. What doesn't benefit us, we don't go for.

Speaker 2: Well, let's talk about some of the problems in the black community that you in particular will face. I don't think it's any mystery that many of the political types, black political types in our community, are highly egotistical in terms of their self-centered interests and needs. And you may be at this point. Secondly, you've constantly referred to the paranoia, the fear, the unfounded fear in our community of any move that you, as Imam Amiri Baraka, makes. How are you, as an individual, going to remain intact with those 2 forces operating? How are you going to get into the political arena and not be accused of being selfish or self-centered?

Speaker 3: Well, first, let me say this, that we believe, you know, and I'm speaking for I'm speaking now as a nationalist, that what we do, our work will legitimize us with the community. We don't have to be self-aggrandizing or self-advertising. What we do will legitimize us with the community, the work itself, you know. We have a saying that kazi, which is Swahili for work, is the blackest of all, which means that the work will legitimize you. What you do will legitimize you. And I think that black people You know, we've been so used to well-advertised failures and rhetoric, you know, above action, that what all of us are looking for now is work and accomplishment and success. And I think that more and more in the '70s, that we'll begin to see people becoming more action-oriented, accomplishment-oriented, and more communally oriented.

Speaker 4: Is that right?

Speaker 3: You see, speaking from, you know, our own organization, Committee for a Unified Newark and the Congress of African People, our feeling is that we believe in collective work and responsibility, ujima, again, a Swahili word. We believe that our brothers' and sisters' problems are our problems to begin with, because there is no liberation for, you know, the African people anywhere unless all of us are liberated. Right. Vest pocket liberation, you know. So we don't have any worry about that because we believe, first of all, the community will legitimize what needs to be legitimized, that black people are not fools, even though a lot of people, even some colored people, think they are fools. I think that eventually we will see the coming together of the diverse forces of the black community. You had a program that said, is it Is it late, or is it too late? I think that that kind of anxiety works within a lot of us, you know, consciously and unconsciously. And I think that the legitimacy of what we do will be based on what we actually can begin to accomplish.

Speaker 2: Well, I don't think there's any doubt in anybody's mind, including the people who weren't there, many of whom have found need perhaps, or reason to attack the convention per se, and the people who were there, many people observed that particularly the members of the Committee for a Unified Newark Worked all night. They didn't go to bed. They typed and they set up the meetings for the next day. They held caucuses. No one can ever find you at a party, at a convention. They say that you're having meetings and you're getting ready for the next day. But I think we have to understand in a very human sense that this does make you successful, that it does make you recognizable by your deeds, and that there have to be interests in the black community. When you deal in the political arena, I'm sure you will admit it's different from you dealing in the arts In the artistic community, the interests are more vested, and the other people have their representatives in our community representing them. I'm still— I'm wondering about you surviving. I'm wondering about the fact that you keep a low key and you are moving into a very prominent situation. I really would like to know what your plan is to continue to do this.

Speaker 3: Well, as I say, you know, our basic strength comes from the strength of the community. I think that the more of us realize this, the healthier we as a community will be. I don't think any of us has any defense except the organized community. And what we are actually trying to do is to be a part of the organization of the community. Now, what people— why people are surprised at the kind of selflessness of the New Nationalists is that this is like a legitimate But we think this is a legitimate approach to life, to see something actually created, you know, rather than the creation of another, yet another little ego, you know, yet another little ego. So people will find that we're very sincere in saying that we believe in collective work. You know, we believe that it is the community which is of value. We believe that in terms of our organization, that it is the organization to which we owe our loyalty.

Speaker 2: When can the black community expect a report from the Continuation Committee about the convention, on the resolutions that were adopted there?

Speaker 3: Well, the report, the official report, is supposed to be made May 19th. That's the birthday of Malcolm X. There's already a meeting this week with the steering committee, first meeting. Post-convention steering committee to begin to chart out a direction and to set the guidelines for the elections in each state to this national assembly.

Speaker 2: Well, will we, will we hear the resolutions as they were adopted at the convention, or will we get from the continuations committee the resolutions as they will be modified by the committee?

Speaker 3: Well, I don't know the exact You know, documents that would be given out, I'm sure that they'd be pretty much the way they were given in Gary. There's a lot of confusion— They have to be ordered and put in some kind of—

Speaker 2: In one specific issue, we don't need to spend much time on it, but there's a lot of confusion as to what the final form of the resolution against busing was.

Speaker 3: Well, I think there were 3, as I remember it, there were 3 specific resolutions that that came off the floor about busing and education in black communities in general. One was the resolution on the unitary educational system that came from CORE and Brother Ennis. Another was an addition to that that was put forward by Livingston Wingate from New York. And the third, I think, came from the South Carolina delegation, or the Alabama delegation. Alabama. I think it was the Alabama delegation. And I think that those 3 resolutions, all of which came off the floor, when they're put together, I think you'll see a well-balanced concept of black priorities around education and busing, you know. And I think the important thing that got said was that busing is no substitute for quality education and that the main priority in the black community community is control, community control of the education in our communities and quality education.

Speaker 2: Which means control of the budget. Am I right?

Speaker 3: Control of everything that has to do with administrating and seeing to the educational quality of the schools, you see.

Speaker 2: I think that it's a very exciting prospect, the idea of a political movement or perhaps an I don't believe that anyone has a crystal ball at this time, but I don't think anybody can doubt the fact that you are and will continue to be a very important figure in that thrust, which obviously seems to be a new thrust for black people and particularly for black nationalism. I'd like to thank you very much for being our guest on Black Journal.

Speaker 3: Thank you.

Speaker 2: And now, the Black National Anthem.