IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Jones writes that the initial days of his return to Newark were spent warding off despair. Part of this was due to the demise of the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School (BART) and his breakup with Vashti, the young “fly” black woman who had been his female companion since the end of his marriage to Hettie. In addition, shortly before he left BART, Jones had unintentionally impregnated Bumi, an eighteen-year-old woman and a member of an African dance troupe. Attracted to her youthful sensuality, Jones desired her only as a momentary sexual liaison.1 Accordingly, he received the announcement of her pregnancy as dismal news, particularly after she steadfastly proclaimed, against his wishes, that she had no intention of obtaining an abortion. Instead, she expected Jones to take responsibility for her and their child and was devastated by his hesitation to do so. Feeling guilty about his disregard for the young woman’s feelings, Jones finally allowed her to join him in Newark, where they lived in a run-down hotel frequented by pimps, prostitutes, and impoverished black migrants. Angry at himself and his irresponsible sexual promiscuity, Jones felt trapped. Depression ensued.
In an attempt to escape his rapidly constricting personal life, Jones returned to his dream of bringing black art to the black masses. He rented a large but inexpensive house in central Newark, and with several friends and neighborhood youths, he cleaned and painted it. They tore down walls and created a theater on the first floor. Spirit House was born. Having learned from the experience of the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School, Jones was far more knowledgeable about the particular demands of a Black Arts center. This time, he was on familiar turf and had fewer illusions about the need to tolerate the frenetic and destructive individuals who might be attracted to his new institution.
Jones organized the Afro-American Festival of the Arts, which was held in a neighborhood public park. Using his BART contacts, Jones was able to attract prominent black artists, critics, and political activists to the event, including Harold Cruse, Stokely Carmichael, and New York’s Yoruba Temple Dancers and Drummers. The festival attracted sizable crowds, and equally important, it notified other Black Arts activists in Newark that LeRoi Jones had come home. Soon he began to interact with a group of like-minded, local Black Arts activists. Shortly thereafter, Jones and his Spirit House colleagues began to publish a magazine that featured the Black Arts. A repertory theater followed, and Jones produced two plays that he had written while at BART, A Black Mass and Jello. One of the lead actresses in A Black Mass, Sylvia Robinson, became, in a short time, his second wife and the most enduring and intimate companion of his life.
Before she met Jones, Sylvia Robinson had been active in the emerging Black Arts movement in Newark. Jones wrote that Robinson, a dancer as well as an actress, “had a whole life as cultural worker in Newark that paralleled what we were trying to do at the black arts.”2 When they first met, Robinson, the mother of two, was in the process of divorcing her husband. Already divorced, Jones was the disengaged father of three children, and another child was on the way. A budding couple, LeRoi and Sylvia also had to decide what to do with the young expectant mother who was living with Jones on the third floor at Spirit House. Jones tried to persuade the two women to enter into a polygamous relationship with him. He later attributed his overtures to his deeply implanted sexism as well as his attraction to Yoruba cultural nationalism.3 But neither Robinson nor the young woman would consent to Jones’s proposal.
Robinson decided to leave Jones, but then tragedy struck. Bumi, the young expectant mother became ill and was rushed to the hospital where she remained in a coma until she died. For LeRoi and Sylvia, her death was a fortuitous calamity, as it enabled them to cultivate an intimate relationship. But Jones claims that for years, he and Sylvia felt extremely guilty about the young woman’s death precisely because they knew that they had benefited from it.4 In her memory, Jones wrote “Bumi,” which reads in part:
I forgotten who
I is
I wanted to be some body
and lost it
I lost my self
I lost love
I left a girl
dying
I see her
all the time
I don’t know
what
to do5
Robinson soon learned that Jones was far from ready to commit himself to a serious monogamous relationship. His chaotic and anarchic bohemian tendencies plus his entrenched male chauvinism must have made her quickly realize that a relationship with Jones would not be easy.
During the spring of 1967 Jones was a visiting professor at San Francisco State University. He had been invited by Jimmy Garrett, the president of its black student union, to organize cultural events at the school, particularly black dramatic productions. Robinson, several months pregnant with their child, accompanied Jones to the West Coast as Mrs. LeRoi Jones. With the aid of Marvin X and Ed Bullins, both of whom became prominent Black Arts movement artists, Jones was able to put together a repertory theater company that produced plays by Jones (Mad Heart), Bullins (How Do You Do), Ben Caldwell (Militant Preacher), Marvin X (Taking Care of Business), and Jimmy Garrett (We Own the Night). Leaving Jones to his busy creative schedule, Robinson returned to Newark alone to deliver their first child. Not until two weeks after Obalaji Malik-Ali was born did Jones first see his son. Robinson was not impressed by his priorities.6
In August 1967, LeRoi Jones and Sylvia Robinson were married. Sylvia later became known as Amina Baraka (Amina means faithful in Swahili). Baraka stated that the marriage fundamentally changed his life, and he credits his wife with forcing him to confront his sexism and the irresponsibility of his “bohemian ways.”
There was no doubt that I regarded Sylvia as a very singular woman, both sensual and intelligent, but I had thought that I would never get married again. I wanted to avoid those kind of forever ties. But I loved this woman, so why all the bullshit? Sylvia Wilson and Everett L. Jones were married the first weekend of August 1967 by the Yoruba priest Nana Oserjeman in a Yoruba ceremony.7
Baraka’s marriage to a black woman was a decisive step toward ridding himself of the ethnic vulnerability he had endured because of his previous marriage to a white woman. In the eyes of Baraka’s black nationalist and separatist confreres, his interracial sexual relationships as well as an interracial marriage were the supreme acts of race betrayal. The white female–black male sexual connection attracted extreme invectives (masquerading as art) throughout the Black Arts era. One example, which bordered on the fanatical and farcical, was the often recited Sonia Sanchez poem, “To All Sisters,” in which she rhetorically asks, “What a white woman got cept her white pussy . . . her straight hair covering her fucked up mind . . . her faggoty white man.”8 Sanchez might well have asked what a black man has who evidently finds this vacuous white woman so attractive!
Now that he was married, Baraka could more easily disagree with the majority opinions of his political confreres without becoming an object of suspicion concerning the depth of his commitment to black nationalism. It is difficult to imagine Baraka leaving the confines of black nationalism—as he later did—without first having gained greater security about his ethnic identity. Given the preeminence of his second wife in his life, Baraka is sometimes angered by what he perceives as the media’s attention to his first marriage at the expense of his second one. In 1980 he wrote,
Interestingly, the media has made more of this union [with Cohen] since we split up than while we were together. Biographers never fail to mention it, though they sometimes leave out mention of my present wife of 13 years, Amina, who is Black and our five children. What they are advertising with this slant is the nonexistent “norm” of equality through assimilation rather than equality through national liberation and revolution!9
Despite Baraka’s claim, there is no evidence that the media have spent a lot of time reporting on his life with Hettie. Hettie and Roi were married for only five years and have been divorced for several decades. Certainly, there has been far more time for reporters and scholars to write about his marriage to Cohen since its dissolution. What Baraka cannot acknowledge is that interest in his life with Hettie Jones centers on the fact that his years with her, living among the Village writers and poets, were his most creative. Baraka pretends not to realize that a marriage between an Afro-American male and a white Jewish American female was more exotic than a marriage between a black man and black woman. His case was particularly exasperating inasmuch as he, the black partner in his interracial union, later became a prominent black ethnic chauvinist, racist, and anti-Semite. By treating his marriage to a black woman as normal, the media (whoever they are) silenced his ambivalent identity, denied his desire to return “home,” and overlooked the significance of that desire. Nevertheless, it is not clear why Baraka thinks that his marriage to a black woman symbolizes “equality through national liberation and revolution.”
Baraka’s marriage to a self-assured, ethnically legitimate black woman undoubtedly functioned as a marginality defacilitator. The marriage was a sign of his return to the ethnic fold. Once having returned, Baraka increasingly became a “regular brother.” Nonetheless, we must assume that his identity insecurities had not been completely calmed by his marriage to a black woman, for he continued on his journey to what he now refers to as “the university of false blackness.”10
Besides the assassination of Malcolm X, several events during 1965 fundamentally redefined Afro-Americans and Afro-American politics. First, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed which established federal mandates and mechanisms to ensure the voting rights of southern blacks. America’s political landscape was forever altered as black southerners emerged as highly energized voters. The passage of this law ultimately gave black Americans a more realistic picture of the limitations of voting power. More precisely, only by actively participating in voting could blacks begin to obtain the benefits of liberal democracy and recognize its limitations.
Second, in August 1965, an estimated crowd of 35,000 black Americans rampaged through an area of Los Angeles known as Watts-Willobrook.11 Whether one considers this a riot or a revolt may depend on one’s political orientation. I consider these riots to be moments of insurgency akin to the initial stages of a revolt that never materialized. Regardless of political orientations, most students of American politics agree that what occurred in Watts two years after the March on Washington and one year after the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was one of the most significant events in the recent history of American race relations. Thirty-four people (mostly blacks) were killed, and a thousand were injured. Four thousand people were arrested. Damage to property was estimated at $200 million. Throughout the United States, Americans were glued to their television sets as news reports showed hordes of black looters running across streets and jumping through broken store windows with stolen goods. The work of arsonists added to these images, as more than 250 buildings were damaged or destroyed by fire. The chant “Burn Baby Burn” became the supposed motto of the rioters. Before it was over, 16,000 National Guard and law enforcement personnel had to be called in to restore order.
The Watts riot signaled the end of the Civil Rights movement. No longer would acts of nonviolent civil disobedience capture the United States’ moral imagination. The events in Watts indicated how little legitimacy the traditional black leadership had in predominantly black urban areas. In the aftermath, James Farmer, the national leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, stated, “Civil rights organizations have failed. No one has any roots in the ghetto.”12 Farmer’s observation proved to be true in cities throughout the United States. Riots sprang up throughout the latter half of the 1960s, and only in rare instances were the established black political elites in these cities able to control or defuse the situation.
The next major urban conflicts to attract national publicity occurred in Newark and Detroit in July 1967. In Detroit, after several days of rioting, forty-three people had been killed, more than 7,000 persons had been arrested, and about $45 million worth of property had been destroyed.13 A week earlier, Newark had exploded.
During the 1960s, the two cities most vulnerable to black urban unrest were probably Detroit and Newark. By 1966, Newark’s population was almost two-thirds black and Latino, yet the city’s power structure was not only overwhelmingly white but also openly racist in its policies and employment practices. The Newark political establishment, led by Mayor Hugh Addonizio, was corrupt to the point of even colluding with the Mafia. The mayor and the city protected the racist police force that regularly brutalized black citizens. It was therefore no surprise when rumors of police brutality against a black cab driver brought a crowd of angry blacks in front of the police station where the driver was being held. During the first night of protest (July 12), the crowd dispersed after minor disturbances (e.g., setting fire to one car). The next day, July 13, 1967, the tension rose again as protesters demonstrated in front of the police station. Later that night, the looting started. In the early morning of July 14, the governor of New Jersey, in response to Mayor Addonizio’s request, sent state troopers and units of the New Jersey National Guard into Newark.
The Kerner Commission’s investigation of the Newark riot offers a litany of violent acts of repression directed toward the black citizens of Newark by the city police and the New Jersey National Guard. In one instance, a family was watching the looting from the upstairs windows of their apartment. Three carloads of police arrived at the street corner below and yelled at the looters, who then scattered. The police opened fire. Moments later, the three-year-old daughter in the upstairs apartment began crying. A bullet had entered her eye. After spending the next two months in the hospital, she lost the sight in her left eye as well as the hearing in her left ear. In another documented case, a black man who was in front of his house attempting to fix the brakes in his jacked-up car was shot and critically wounded by a state trooper who took aim at him while he was underneath his car. Another black man standing on his porch was shot in the eye. According to the Kerner Commission, in another incident the national guardsmen and state troopers fired at a housing project in response to what they believed was sniper fire:
On the tenth floor, Eloise Spellman, the mother of several children fell, a bullet through her neck. Across the street, a number of persons, standing in an apartment window were watching the firing directed at the housing project. Suddenly, a federal trooper whirled and began firing in the general direction of the spectators. Mrs. Hattie Gainer, a grandmother, sank to the floor. . . . A block away Rebecca Brown’s 2-year-old daughter was standing at the window. Mrs. Brown rushed to drag her to safety. As Mrs. Brown was momentarily framed in the window, a bullet spun into her back. All three women died. . . . At 11 P.M. on Sunday, July 16, Mrs. Lucille Pugh looked out of the window to see if the streets were clear. She then asked her 11 year-old son, Michael, to take the garbage out. As he reached the street and was illuminated by a street light, a shot rang out. He died.14
Although the commission did not state that the boy was killed by the National Guard or police, this was clearly implied. As if there was any doubt that the New Jersey National Guard and state troopers were racistly motivated, the report noted the example of the owner of a Chinese laundry who tried to protect his store from looting by placing a “soul brother” sign in the store window. Early in the morning of July 16, his quiet neighborhood was disturbed by the sounds of jeeps and gunshots. The owner peeked out of his upstairs window and discovered that the National Guard and state troopers were smashing windows and shooting into every store that had a “soul brother” sign in it. If the black looters were going to spare black-owned and -identified establishments, the white police and National Guard would even the racial score.15 Unlike the black rioters who looted white-owned stores, these white destroyers of private property would not be subjected to potential arrest and death. They were the law.16
During that first night of mass looting in Newark, Jones and two friends piled into his van and drove slowly through the area where the rioting was going on. They assessed both the physical damage caused by the rioters and the responses of the Newark police. There was excitement in the air as black people ran through the streets with goods that they could not otherwise afford. Describing the events twenty years later, Baraka still conveys the frenzy of the moment:
Boxes of stuff were speeding by, cases of stuff, liquor wine beer, the best brands. Shoes, appliances, clothes, jewelry, food. . . . There were shifts of folk at work. . . . Families worked together, carrying sofas and TV’s collectively down the street. All the shit they saw on television that they had been hypnotized into wanting they finally had a chance to cop. The word was Cop & Blow! And don’t be slow. . . . Then the fire setters . . . would get on it. . . . Burn it up! Burn it up! . . . These were the most rhythmic, the fire people, they dug the fire caused it danced so tough.17
Jones and friends were driving slowly down a main thoroughfare when they realized that the police had begun to shoot at the looters. They saw a young man fall who had been shot in the leg. Acting instinctively, Jones and his two buddies picked him up and took him to a hospital.
Later that night when driving home, their van was stopped by a group of Newark police officers. With shotguns pointed at their heads, Jones and the others were dragged out of the van and beaten. Accusing them of being snipers, the police demanded that they hand over their guns. Jones and his friends denied having any. Then Jones recognized one of the arresting police as an Italian American with whom he had attended high school. Upon telling him “I know you,” the policeman hit Jones over his head with the barrel of his revolver. Now semiconscious, Jones was beaten by several police using their nightsticks. Fearing for his life, he screamed, “Allah Akbar. Al Holiah.”18 A black Newark policeman who saw Jones being beaten stated that he
was standing about thirty feet away when they snatched Jones out of that little truck, knocked him to the ground and began to beat him so viciously that I don’t know how that little man is still living today. I started to go over and butt in, but I just knew they were going to kill him from the way they were beating him and I figured they’d just kill me, too. Man, I was crying. That was all I could do without committing suicide.19
Fortunately for Jones and his companions, a crowd of people from apartments that overlooked the scene began screaming at the police to stop the beating, and they began hurling objects at the police. Afraid of making an already explosive situation worse, the police took the three men to the local precinct where they beat them again and threw them into cells. After being taken to the police station, Jones was transported to a local hospital. There a white doctor asked the badly beaten Jones if he was a poet. When Jones said he was, the doctor stated, “Well, you’ll never write any more poetry!”20 He then stitched two large cuts in Jones’s head without giving him an anesthetic.
While Jones was under arrest, the police and National Guard broke into Spirit House several times, trying to destroy anything and everything. They shot out the windows and damaged the printing machines that Jones had stored in the basement. Unknown to the law enforcers, Sylvia and her baby were hiding on the third floor.21
Bail was set for Jones at $25,000, a sum that he referred to as ransom. At his trial, the presiding judge read from one of Jones’s poems that appeared in the Evergreen Review (December 1967) shortly after his arrest. The poem, “Black People,” was used as evidence supporting Jones’ guilt.
What about that bad short you saw last week on Frelinghuysen, or those
stoves and refrigerators,
record players, in Sears, Bamberger, Klein’s, Hahnes’,
Chase and the smaller josh enterprises? . . . You know
how to get it, you can get it, no money down, no money never, money don’t
grow on trees no way, only whitey’s
got it, makes it with a machine, to control you
cant steal nothin from a white man, he’s already stole
it he owes you anything you want, even his life. All
the stores will open if you will say the magic words.
The magic words are: Up against the wall mother fucker
this is a stick up! Or smash the window at night (these
are magic actions) . . . Just take what you want. . . . Run up
and down Broad Street niggers, take the shit you want.
Take their lives if need be, but get what you want what
you need . . . run through the streets with music, beautiful
radios on Market Street, they are brought here especially
for you. . . . We must make our own World, man, our own world,
and we can not do this unless the white man is dead.
Let’s get together and kill him my man . . . let’s make a
world we want black children to grow and learn in do not
let your children when they grow look in your face and
curse you by pitying your tomish ways.22
Although the poem conveys Jones’s support of rioting and looting, that is not illegal. It would be a gross misreading of the social dynamics of the rioting to suggest that a poem written by LeRoi Jones could instigate black mass unrest in Newark. Furthermore, because the poem was not published until after the riot, such charges were obviously ludicrous. What is appalling is that the presiding judge introduced the poem into the legal proceedings. Fortunately for Jones, the judge was so thoroughly committed to finding him guilty that he was unable to sustain even a veneer of impartiality.
On the second day of his trial, a handcuffed and screaming Jones was dragged from the courtroom. The incident began when Jones tried to walk away from the defendant’s table, shouting to the courtroom, “This is not a court of justice and you are not qualified to try this case. I will not be judged by you or one hundred white people. . . . They are not my peers . . . they are my oppressors. I will not be judged by this kangaroo court. I am leaving.”23 In response to his trial for gun possession, a group of his former, Village-based, white literary confreres issued a public statement in his behalf:
We believe LeRoi Jones, not the Newark Police, that the poet carried no revolvers in his car, no revolvers in the car at all; that the police beat Jones up and then had to find a reason, thus found phony guns; that after the double-whammy of his beating and rabbit-in-hat guns, his trial before an all-white jury was triple-whammy. Lo and behold, fourth execrable whammy”—the judge recited LeRoi’s visionary poem to the court, (a butchered version) . . . and gave him a long 2½ to 3 year sentence because of it.
Mr Jones; white kind is that self-same demon we call tyranny, injustice, dictatorship. As poet he champions the black imagination; as revolutionary poet his revolution is fought with words. He scribes that the police carried the guns. Lyres tell the Truth!
We herald to literary persons: Get on the ball for LeRoi Jones, or else get off the poetic pot. LeRoi Jones is not only a black man, a Newark man, a revolutionary, he is a conspicuous American artist imprisoned for his poetry during a crisis of authoritarianism in these states.
The statement was signed by John Ashbery, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Diane Di Prima, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure, Charles Olson, Joel Oppenheimer, Peter Orlovsky, Gil Sorrentino, Philip Whalen, and John Wieners.24 His former white associates from the village chose not to abandon him, even though by this time Jones had denigrated them both publicly and privately.25 In particular, Allen Ginsberg remained resolute in his support of his old friend Roi. Believing that Roi was being framed, Ginsberg helped raise money for his trial and successfully appealed to the members of the PEN Club of New York to issue a statement on his behalf, particularly since the judge was using Jones’s writing against him.26
Jones was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison for possession of the two revolvers that the police claimed to have found in his van. Jones and his friends steadfastly denied this allegation. In any case, the sentence was far too harsh for the alleged offense.27 Although it was not sympathetic to Jones, Newsweek had to concede that it “was plain that Kapp [the judge] had indeed held Jones’s poem against him and given it, in the process, far wider publication than the Evergreen Review.”28 Because of Kapp’s bias in introducing Jones’s poem to the court as proof of his guilt, an appeal was granted, and in the second trial, the conviction was overturned.
Jones initially regarded the riot in Newark and the others that took place throughout black urban America between 1964 and 1968 as the cornerstones of the black liberation movement. The riots demonstrated that large numbers of urban blacks were frustrated with their lives and the pace and direction of those policies supposedly intended to enhance their socioeconomic inclusion in American society. The looting that accompanied the rioting flaunted the widespread black disrespect for American property laws, which many blacks viewed as mechanisms to legitimate their poverty in a land of abundance. The looting also showed that black rioters viewed consumer goods as indices of freedom. Perhaps more important, the willingness of some of the rioters to engage in gunfights with state authorities indicated their rebellious disposition. Accordingly, Jones mistakenly but understandably believed that the riots were indications of an awakening revolutionary spirit in the black urban masses.
What remains awkward about Jones’s trials and the events that led up to them is the ease with which he could claim then, as he emphatically does today, not to have been guilty. Baraka has repeatedly stated that the urban riots of the 1960s, like the one that took place in Newark, were political rebellions and therefore constituted the vanguard of the black liberation movement. Why, then, wasn’t a self-proclaimed black revolutionary like Jones guilty of those charges against him and much, much worse? Like that of Angela Davis, Jones’s revolutionary stature rested in large measure on being viewed as having done something that he claims never to have done. That is, he and Davis were seen as revolutionary not because they behaved in a revolutionary fashion but because they were unjustly charged by the state for acting “revolutionary.”29
During the 1960s and early 1970s, the rite of passage for some blacks into the status of revolutionary required nothing more than to have been pursued by the police. The paranoid racism of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and other functionaries of state repression thus succeeded in granting many blacks the status of “revolutionary.” In effect, we witnessed the creation of state-certified revolutionaries. Yet it was reasonable for Jones to fear that he and other black militant activists had been targeted for death by various levels of the state police apparatus. Indeed, many were targeted, and more than a few were killed. But being targeted for harassment or death by the state does not make one a revolutionary.30
Similarly, Jones’s revolutionary image was exposed as a media posture when he publicly displayed his expectation that the police and legal system would treat him fairly according to his rights as a citizen of the United States. Never once did Jones realize that his bid for justice was predicated on and reinforced the legitimacy of the state that he claimed was illegitimate. This predicament of being simultaneously protected and assaulted by the state was a conundrum faced by many activists during the 1960s. In the case of black militant activists, this paradox confirmed their peculiar insider-outsider status as Afro-American citizens of the United States. Essentially, Jones was a reformer hiding behind revolutionary rhetoric. Fortunately for him, the American legal system occasionally allowed justice to prevail.
I am not implying that Jones should have given up his legal rights and gone to jail. It was reasonable for him to try whatever means were available to remain out of prison. But his behavior and thought exhibit a deeper psychological fusion with the idea of America than he would have us believe. He was not and would never be a true revolutionary. A psychic break, a rational severance from society and its political and ideological infrastructures, is a necessary stage in the psychological development of all authentic revolutionaries. Jones never entered that realm of willed “homelessness” in which the existing state and social order are seen as the “total” enemy.
The so-called black revolutionary who seeks the protection of the legal system is one variant of the victim-status appeal. It is like the child who claims to be old enough to make up her mind but who does so hoping that her mother does not accept her announcement of independence just in case she fails at being independent. One cannot imagine Castro pleading for justice in Batista’s courtroom. Concerning the so-called black revolutionary who was actually nothing more than a protester operating in the confines of established American political expectations and channels, Harold Cruse wrote in 1966:
In America today there has flowered a young black breed in the ghettos of the North who says that Negroes must be prepared to die for their “freedom,” and that they themselves are prepared to do just that. Many of them also talk avidly of “revolution,” but aside from their volatile activist proclivities their “revolution” is a borrowed term abstracted out of the revolutionary ideologies of the “Third” or “Bandung” world. It is the revolutionary sentiments of identification with movements as close as Cuba and as distant as China, but its native methodology is one of pure and simple protest, both non-violent and violent.31
While Cruse does not specifically mention Baraka, the description fits him all too well. Moreover, recall that Cruse had accompanied Baraka on the trip to Cuba that resulted in “Cuba libre.” He might have noticed how Baraka’s subsequent romanticization of that event had mistakenly led him to think that he understood the nature of revolution.
In his autobiography, published approximately two decades after the urban riots of the 1960s, Baraka’s discussion of those events remains mired in romanticism. He did not, and perhaps cannot, deal with the pain and suffering inflicted on the black community as a result of the riots of the 1960s. When talking about the riots, he ignores the plight of the rioters:
Rebellions popped like dearly firecrackers in city after city that summer. But the week after the Newark rebellion, Detroit went up in even more flames. Forty-three dead, over 7,000 people arrested, $44 million damage. They brought in 14,000 paratroopers and National Guard. Yeh, even the airborne, with machine guns, because bloods in Detroit had come up with automatic weapons, not just the pop-pop of 22’s.32
Conspicuously absent from these comments is the recognition that most of those forty-three persons killed in Detroit were black rioters. Many more were maimed. Life for many black inner-city dwellers became a bit more unbearable when the local businesses were destroyed. But little of this mattered to Baraka, for the “bloods” were fighting back and revolution was primarily a question of imagery. Even death could be objectified, romanticized, and marketed as an icon of an imaginary revolution.
On July 20, 1967, the National Conference on Black Power commenced in Newark. Plans for this four-day conference had been made at a meeting called by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (D-NY) in the fall of 1966. At this planning session, Congressman Powell appointed Nathan Wright to chair a “continuations committee” which was responsible for planning the first National Black Power Conference. Wright, the executive director of the Department of Urban Work of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, was a longtime liberal political activist and Episcopal priest. Besides Wright, the planning committee consisted of four other black men, including Chuck Stone, a congressional assistant to Powell, and Maulana Karenga of Los Angeles.
At Wright’s insistence, the Black Power conference was held in Newark, as his position in the Newark Episcopal diocese gave him access to a pool of workers who could help manage the conference. Scheduled to begin on July 20, just four days after the rioting ended, Wright was pressured by the Newark and New Jersey authorities to cancel the gathering. He refused. Against a backdrop of smoldering rubble and the “occupation” troops of the New Jersey National Guard, the conference began. According to Robert Allen, approximately 1,300 people attended the conference, representing 190 organizations from forty-two cities and thirty-nine states. It was the first of several major Black Power conferences held during the 1960s. Allen also noted that the conference was held at a white-owned hotel in downtown Newark, with a registration fee of $25 per participant, and thus limited participation to mainly middle-class blacks or full-time black activists.33
According to Chuck Stone, the driving question behind the conference was how the new wave of black militancy, as expressed by the concept of “Black Power,” could be mobilized into an actionable unity involving the black masses and then translated into constructive programs of black empowerment.34 To answer this question, the conference focused on certain key areas of policy and politics such as urban electoral politics and economic development. Delegates to the conference could choose among numerous workshops.
The range of resolutions that the conference produced represented the diversity of the participants. For instance, to improve economic well-being, the conference decided to (1) endorse “buy black” policies in all black communities, (2) establish neighborhood credit unions, and (3) urge the establishment of a guaranteed income for all people, with the alternative that black people would disrupt the country’s economy. Regarding education, the conference passed a resolution requiring all black educational jurisdictions to be administered and controlled by black boards of education. Concerning politics, the conference agreed to (1) help the blacks of Newark in the recall election of Mayor Addonizio; (2) establish a Black Power lobby in Washington, D.C.; (3) hold a national black grassroots political convention; and (4) demand that Adam Clayton Powell be given full seniority in Congress. In regard to international affairs, the conference endorsed (1) the establishment of an international employment service to serve as a skills bank for exchanges by Africans and black Americans and (2) the support of the freedom struggles of all nonwhite peoples throughout the world against their white oppressors.35 Finally, the conference issued some miscellaneous resolutions such as (1) initiating a national dialogue on the desirability of partitioning the United States into racially homogeneous, separate, and independent nations; (2) assigning only black police captains to predominantly black neighborhoods; and (3) boycotting all sponsors of televised boxing until Muhammad Ali’s title was restored.
This listing does not include all the resolutions made by the conference, but it does show that the gathering lumped the serious with the frivolous. Did the conferees truly think that the federal government would be frightened by their threat to damage the American economy if all Americans were not given a guaranteed income? Although Muhammad Ali had been wrongfully stripped of his title, why was such a inconsequential issue brought up at a conference formulating national black priorities?
What was striking about the Newark Black Power conference is that it was extensively funded by white corporate America. Nathan Wright, the primary organizer of the event, stated that these white-controlled companies had not been pressured into contributing but did so to help powerless blacks obtain greater social and political efficacy. The white corporate sponsorship of radical black gatherings continued throughout the 1960s and early 1970s,36 and the Newark Black Power conference became the prototype for numerous gatherings held during the next decade. Throughout the continental United States, various congresses, conferences, and assemblies developed strategies and resolutions for black emancipation. The participants argued about various positions, voted on them, and then went home. It was as if the mere gathering of black people to discuss politics constituted a radical or militant praxis. All too often, these resolutions were forgotten, discarded in someone’s wastebasket, or superseded by the resolutions made in the next, even more radical, conference.
The theatrical highlight of the Newark conference came during a speech by Karenga. Looking menacingly at the audience, he inquired, “Any white people here who oppose our demands? Any Negroes who want to stand up for their white masters? We’re giving you a chance to die for your white master”37 (my emphasis). Maybe there were no whites in the audience who were opposed to “our demands,” but they could easily have been found just outside the conference doors in Newark. All that Karenga and his thugs had to do was go outside and present their demands to Police Chief Spina and his confreres on the Newark police force. But instead they chose to terrorize those at the conference while remaining a safe distance away from authentic white opposition. Such cowardice, masquerading as militance, was commonplace.
The phony bravado in Karenga’s threats of violence was just one of the many that took root during the Black Power era. These threats were supposed to both intimidate those gathered and enhance Karenga’s image, since he had the power to order a person’s death. But they also showed the degree to which the thug image had come to be seen as revolutionary by black nationalists. Karenga frequently invoked this image during the Black Power era, and the former LeRoi Jones soon adopted the practice.
In his autobiography, Baraka discussed his behavior during the 1967 Newark riots but conspicuously omitted his behavior during the 1968 Newark riots.38 After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, Newark, like many large urban areas, was beset by black rioting, but the riots were not as large as those in 1967. Jones played a crucial role in containing the 1968 riots, not only because he believed in the efficacy of pragmatic black electoral politics, but also because he recognized that the repressive forces of the state were far better armed, trained, and willing to destroy the black insurgents. By 1968, Jones viewed rioting in Newark as hindering black electoral control of the city. He believed that the election of a black mayor would radically alter the living conditions of blacks in Newark.39
Only tangentially related to the community of rioters, Jones used his previous beating and arrest during the 1967 riots as ethnic political capital to “purchase” media attention in 1968 to speak for the needs of those Newark blacks that he did not actually represent. He used his access to the media to install himself as a black political middleman between the black rioting populace and the white power elite while publicly marketing himself to whites and blacks as an indigenous black political spokesperson. This rather clever power play was repeated throughout the United States as bourgeois blacks discovered the political utility in black ethnic militancy. The success of this strategy depended on the white establishment’s recognition of specific black middlemen. This recognition was usually granted when the white establishment determined that (1) the middlemen could control the rioters and (2) the cost of the middlemen’s demands was lower than the cost of responding to the rioting blacks.40
To cultivate a client status with Newark’s white power elite, Jones employed a strategy of tactical acquiescence, discarding political principle. On April 12, 1968, he appeared on a local television broadcast accompanied by Police Chief Spina and Anthony Imperiale, the racist right-wing leader of Newark’s racially recalcitrant white ethnic communities. In partnership with Imperiale, Jones denounced white leftist community organizers in Newark and suggested that white leftists like Tom Hayden had instigated the April 1968 riots.41 Concerning these remarks, a Newark police Department official told the House Committee on Un-American Activities that “it was a very happy occasion for me to find myself in total agreement with LeRoi Jones.”42
Tom Hayden, a nationally known antiwar activist and one of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), had come to Newark in July 1964 to organize the poor. SDS wanted to develop a northern chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and had chosen Newark as the site because it was a large city with a majority-black population. Newark’s mayor, Hugh Addonizio, was known as a liberal, which, given the horrible material conditions of black Newark, spoke to the limitations of white liberalism. Concerning the Newark that greeted him in 1964, Hayden wrote:
White or black city officials were widely perceived as corrupt. Construction costs of city contracts were higher than anywhere in the United States. Gambling was the city’s biggest business and the narcotics trade flourished. . . . With a total population of 400,000 people, Newark ranked highest in the country in crime, maternal and infant mortality, tuberculosis, and venereal disease. Unemployment citywide was 15 percent, and much higher in the black community. One third of the city’s children dropped out of school, and less than 10 percent achieved normal reading levels.43
Hayden and his group of grassroots organizers created the Newark Community Union Project (NCUP, pronounced en-cup) to organize black neighborhoods in that city. Utilizing SNCC’s Southern strategies, NCUP tried to recruit local black residents as leaders. They lobbied for neighborhood traffic lights, better social services in poor neighborhoods, and the like. Members of NCUP attended various local hearings and organized demonstrations. The hours were long, the work was arduous, and the victories were few. It would be difficult to consider NCUP’s efforts as detrimental to black Newark and utterly ridiculous to suggest that this marginal group of organizers and their black recruits controlled the energies of the entire black community of Newark. Nonetheless, Jones made these ludicrous claims and did so in association with the most reactionary forces in Newark.
Thoroughly unprincipled, Jones expediently employed red-baiting tactics to stigmatize the presence of white leftist organizers. He did not want whites influencing the direction of black Newark politics, even if those whites were politically progressive. Jones was now a black nationalist and a separatist black nationalist at that. His antagonism toward Hayden and his leftist peers did not stem solely from their “whiteness,” however. Rather, their group competed with the one Jones wanted to establish and control. LeRoi did not want political competition. It did not matter to him if Hayden and his peers were helping blacks in that community. Jones alone had decided that the white left was not wanted in Newark. Cleverly, he marketed his private desires for power and the elimination of the white community organizers as the collective desires of Newark’s black community. Once again, Jones’s deeply embedded antidemocratic tendencies came to the fore.
In his autobiography, Baraka sidesteps any discussion of how he came to denounce white leftists and close ranks with reactionary racist whites. In this case, the whites whom he chose as allies, the Newark police and Imperiale, were those most antagonistic to the needs of black Newark.44 How did Jones’s black nationalism tolerate a working partnership with Imperiale? Was Jones more antagonistic to white leftists than to white racist reactionaries like Imperiale? In any event, Jones participated in an explicitly racist narrative to explain black discontent: white “Commies” were behind it! We must conclude that the soon-to-be Imamu was not above crass opportunism. In a fit of understatement, Baraka later referred to his behavior on this occasion as “asinine.”45 The opportunistic quality of Jones’s attack on Hayden and his colleagues becomes more obvious when we realize that Jones did not attribute the 1967 Newark riot to them. Instead, Jones proclaimed the 1967 riot as an act of black revolutionary assertion. Had Hayden and his colleagues claimed responsibility for the 1967 riot, Jones would have been among the first to call them racists for assuming that black protests needed white instigation. But in 1968, Jones presented such an argument to white racists all too eager to believe it.
Shortly after Jones had appeared on television with Imperiale, he explained his political agenda:
Our aim is to bring about black self-government in Newark by 1970. We have a membership that embraces every social area in Newark. It is a wide cross-section of business, professional and political life. I’m in favor of black people taking power by the quickest, easiest, most successful means they can employ. Malcolm X said the ballot or the bullet. Newark is a particular situation where the ballot seems to be advantageous. I believe we have to survive. I didn’t invent the white man. What we are trying to do is deal with him in the best way we can. . . . Black men are not murderers. . . . What we don’t want to be is die-ers.46
In exchange for bringing peace to the black community, Jones demanded a black mayor, feeling that this was a price that the Newark establishment could afford. Jones was both right and wrong. The white elite’s toleration of a black-run city came only after a long, hard, black-led struggle against rank-and-file white ethnics who were far less amenable to the idea. In 1970, Kenneth Gibson became the first elected black mayor of Newark. Years later, Baraka expressed shock and resentment that Gibson’s election had not substantially altered black life.47
Jones’s commitment to urban electoral politics as a mechanism for black economic advancement and ethnic self-determination was widely shared in black nationalist and integrationist circles during the middle and late 1960s and early 1970s. A few remaining black nationalists believed that any involvement in electoral politics was tainted. Some black nationalists imagined that predominantly black urban areas would become mini-black nations in the United States. Others, like James Boggs, naively assumed that black city administrators would “naturally” be more concerned about the well-being of black city residents than the white politicians they replaced.48 In a 1968 interview, Jones described black community control: “In the cities it means the mobilization of black people with black consciousness to take control over that space which they already inhabit and to achieve programs so that they can defend and govern that space and survive the onslaughts of white society.”49 Despite what they assumed to be novel and insurrectionary politics, the black nationalists who called for black control of city hall were reminiscent of earlier generations of white ethnic political activists. Many black nationalists, including Baraka, would probably have shuddered at the accusation that they were participating in a rite of American political incorporation. They were attempting to give ethnic political succession a radical veneer by referring to predominantly black urban areas as colonies of the United States. “Internal colonialism” became a frequently invoked description of the power relations between black urban enclaves and white America.
To interpret Baraka’s 1968 behavior as that of a political novice would be to ignore the previous times that he had attached his political/artistic aspirations to the misery of black rioters. I am not arguing that Jones’s behavior in Newark was dictated solely by his peculiar style of self-promotion. Instead, I am pointing to his intellectual and artistic self-interests when analyzing his political behavior. Despite his ever present self-interest, Baraka’s intentions in Newark were far more attuned to the perceived needs and aspirations of the local black community than his Harlem agenda was. His demands for a black mayor, a black city council, and a black board of education were part of a commonly held desire of black Newark residents to improve their lives.
As the director of BART, Jones regularly interacted with other black nationalist organizations in Harlem, including the Yoruba Temple. But the Yoruba religion did not influence his personal beliefs until shortly after his return to Newark, where, in Spirit House, Jones constructed a small Yoruba religious altar.50 The former bohemian in pursuit of race purification had become, in his own words, a “super-African.” Another factor that seemingly influenced Jones’s attraction to Yoruba was its sanctioning of polygamy. While his specific fondness for Yoruba may have ebbed and flowed depending on the number of women in his life, the late 1960s was a moment of general spiritual inquisitiveness for him.
Shortly after the 1967 Newark riots, Jones became increasingly attracted to the Sunni Muslim faith. Malcolm X had been a Sunni Muslim at the time of his assassination, and in 1967, Jones was approached by several Sunni Muslim priests who persuaded him to give their religion a chance. Once again, Spirit House became a religious site, an unofficial jamat, “or gathering place for Islamic believers.” For a short while, Spirit House offered classes on Islam and Arabic. Jones felt deeply honored that he had been approached by Haij Heesham Jaaber, the same Islamic priest who had officiated at Malcolm X’s funeral. It was around this time that LeRoi Jones, then an eclectic practitioner of the Sunni Muslim religion, acquired the name Ameer Barakat (blessed prince), which was later “Swahilized” under Karenga’s direction to Amiri Baraka.51 His wife Sylvia was simultaneously renamed Ameena (faithful) which later became Amina. According to Baraka, “The name change seemed fitting to me . . . and not just the meaning of the name Blessed Prince, but the idea that I was now literally being changed into a blacker being. I was discarding my ‘slave name’ and embracing blackness.”52 The name change is emblematic of Baraka’s dramaturgic approach to politics. In ridding himself of his American name, Baraka tried to eliminate the ambivalence in his Afro-American identity. Like Malcolm X, he would no longer be known by a “slave name.”53 Perhaps, however, Baraka attributed too much significance to changing his name. Jones’s excitement at substituting his white “slave name” for an Arabic slave name and, later, an Arabic-influenced Swahili slave name speaks to the irony and pathos of black attempts during the 1960s to ritualistically create a more thorough outsider identity. At that time, it was necessary just to do something symbolically related to Africa to indicate one’s opposition to the United States or whites in general.
Jones’s adoption of Yoruba and, later, Islam was not undertaken simply to alter his identity. He became, however momentarily, a true believer in these faiths. For instance, in a 1968 interview, Baraka appears to have been momentarily enraptured by Islamic mysticism, arguing that religious beliefs were important to a non-brainwashed black man. The “black man who is an Oriental, an Eastern man, is a naturally religious man.”54 Always Manichean, Baraka claimed that whites were naturally irreligious but that in order to perpetuate their dominance of the world, they paid homage to the god that maintained them in that position. In the 1968 interview, Baraka conveyed his mystical bent:
If you look at the most powerful Masons and Shriners, you will see they are wearing tarbooshes and fezzes on their heads. They understand the scientific utilization of religion and they know how it keeps them in power. The highest-degreed masons make salats (prayers), you know—they face the east and make salats to Allah—and when they reach their thirtieth or thirty-first or thirty-second degree, they are actually praying to Allah. They are actually aspiring to be Muslims! . . . But don’t tell that to the man in the street because it’s not for his advantage to know. Why would a president have to be a thirty-third degree Mason? Even in Kennedy’s case he was a member of the Catholic Knights of Columbus which is analogous. Otherwise he couldn’t rule.55 [my emphasis]
This fantastic and weird commentary on Masonic power sheds light on a tendency in Jones that is rarely discussed. That is, he was quite vulnerable to mystical doctrines, and his Spirit House was home to numerous forms of spiritual engagement as Jones discarded one religious sensibility for another.
Jones first met Ron Karenga shortly before the Newark rebellion/riot of 1967. Karenga had come to Newark to attend a planning session for the forthcoming Newark Black Power conference. Unannounced, he visited Jones at Spirit House with two other men who not only had Swahili names like Karenga but duplicated him in attire (bald heads and an African sculpture hanging around their necks). Even though he said he liked Jones’s book Blues People, Karenga pontificated about the reactionary nature of the blues.56 Jones disagreed but listened to this fascinating character: “He went on, elaborating his theories on culture and nationalism, talking at high speed nonstop, laughing at his own witticisms and having two members of a chorus, yea-saying, calling, ‘Teach’ when Karenga made some point he considered salient.”57
Karenga was born in Parsonburg, Maryland, in 1941, the son of a Baptist minister. His name at birth was Ronald McKinley Everett.58 Like Baraka, he changed his name gradually, first becoming Ron Ndabezitha Everett-Karenga, then Ron Karenga, then Maulana Ron Karenga, and finally Maulana Karenga. According to Baraka, Maulana meant “master teacher” and Karenga meant “nationalist.” The self-named Maulana Karenga was the master teacher of nationalism.59 Armed with a master’s degree from UCLA, Karenga was the leader and “theoretician” for a Los Angeles–based black nationalist group called US (which many believe stood for United Slaves but others say it meant “us,” as opposed to “them”). An extraordinarily talented individual, Karenga displayed many of the traits of the black paraintellectuals who, according to Martin Kilson, emerged as a major force in the black intelligentsia during the Black Power era in the late 1960s and early 1970s:
These “para-intellectuals,” now a major force in the Negro intelligentsia, are largely upper-lower-class, though sometimes lower-middle-class in background. They possess at best secondary schooling, and more commonly are drop-outs from high-school. But they are usually persons of high talent, and they display a high degree of motivation in the context of Negro lower-class culture. In general, they are adept at verbal and other skills, which enables them to become what may be called “cultural celebrities” in the Negro lower class.60
Karenga was certainly better educated than the persons Kilson had in mind, but he resembled Kilson’s paraintellectual in his mastery of a “street rap” rhetorical style and in his willingness to market it as a new intellectual genre. More important, Karenga claimed to be more in touch with the black masses than were the “traditional” black intellectuals. If this claim was true, it was only because the traditional black intelligentsia had virtually no mass base, particularly among nonbourgeois blacks. Karenga excelled in producing clever pop-conceptualizations of a new Afro-American cultural nationalism that would supposedly advance the emancipatory politicization of blacks. Whether or not Karenga was reasoned or informed remains a matter of debate and is perhaps of less significance than the ways in which he simultaneously appropriated and rejected a scholarly air.
The 1960s Karenga had a distinctly charlatan component, as revealed in the ridiculously trite aphorisms that Clyde Halisi, one of his closest followers, collected and published as The Quotable Karenga.61 In the US organization, the collection was viewed as a source of wisdom. Modeled on the popular collection of quotations from “Chairman Mao,” The Quotable Karenga showed Mao-like aspirations toward a cult of leadership. From Karenga’s collected aphorisms we learn:
The Seven-fold path of Blackness is to Think Black, Talk Black, Act Black, Create Black, Buy Black,
Vote Black and Live Black.
All Negroes want to be capitalists—and ain’t none of them got any capital.
The fact that we are black is our ultimate reality. We were Black before we were born.
The only real things Negroes produce are problems and babies.62
It is difficult to reconstruct the sociohistorical context in which these aphorisms were interpreted as profound. We can justifiably wonder whether the “cult of leadership” that informed Karenga’s charismatic hold over his followers created a version of groupthink in which his followers’ repeated collective affirmations of his wisdom deluded them into thinking that Plato was in their midst. This might also explain how Karenga came to view himself as profound.
At a 1967 Yale University symposium on the intellectual viability of Afro-American studies, Karenga argued for a new historiography that would affirm black equality rather than document black inferiority. Instead of proclaiming Marcus Garvey as a “Black Moses,” the new black historiography would not tacitly inferiorize Garvey by granting a comparative priority to Moses. Perhaps this new historiography would generate descriptions in which Moses would be referred to as a Garvey-type figure. He had a valid argument in claiming that a historiography that created black inferiority would have a frame of reference different from that of a historiography that invalidated it. Even though Karenga did not substantiate his claim that in 1967 the prevailing historiography of blacks created a discourse of black inferiority, it was clear to all in attendance that racist historiography had yet to become a memory.63 Karenga’s paraintellectual qualities became evident when he suggested that this reference could be altered merely by modifying the descriptive nomenclature. Karenga’s new historiography was black hagiography.
Now, we have developed another type of interpretation in which we say that none of our black heroes fail. We believe in progressive perfection: they did as much as they could given the time and circumstances. I would never expect Garvey to do as much as I am doing, if for no other reason than that he didn’t have this mike or tape.64
It is astounding that Karenga, an advocate of history-as-functional-mythmaking (otherwise known as propaganda), would be asked to participate in a symposium at Yale University whose stated goal was to address the intellectual and scholarly validity of the emerging discipline of Afro-American studies. His invited presence at the Yale gathering reveals the degree to which blacks and whites in the mainstream liberal academy during the late 1960s accepted black paraintellectuals as a valid sector of the black intelligentsia.65 Responding to black mass insurgency, whites in the liberal academy sought out those blacks deemed to be spokespersons of the restless masses. Blacks in elite white academia probably had similar desires. In addition, black academicians may have had doubts about their ethnic legitimacy, a vulnerability that could have led them to valorize the Karengas in the black world. In both instances, the Karenga who was invited to Yale was probably a creation of their imaginations. After all, who were the black masses that Karenga supposedly represented? How many? Where?
Karenga invented cultural artifacts that were marketed to black Americans as the keys to touching base with Africa and their authentic ethnic selves. These artifacts were supposedly African in origin but were actually the products of Karenga’s fertile American imagination.66 The Maulana believed that the message contained in these cultural artifacts was as important as the function of such artifacts as ethnic unification rituals. For instance, Karenga devised what he considered to be an authentic, normative, Afro-American value system called Kawaida. Kawaida was based on seven principles, the Nugzo Saba, also invented by Karenga. The seven principles were umoja (unity), kujichagulia (self-determination), unima (collective work and responsibility), ujamaa (cooperative economics), nia (purpose), kuumba (creativity), and imani (faith).67 These seven principles were supposed to encompass an emancipatory black way of life distinct from white European cultural norms and grounded in an African élan. The Nugzo Saba thus would be the basis for any program in the black community for emancipating black Americans.68
Karenga also devised the holiday Kwanzaa as an alternative to Christmas celebrations.69 At first, he falsely marketed Kwanzaa as an African harvest festival. When later explaining his deliberate deceit about the origins of Kwanzaa, Karenga stated, “I said it was African because you know black people in this country wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of people would be partying.”70 Perhaps Karenga’s deceit was merely a strategic marketing plan. Nevertheless, it was indicative of a mood of uncritical black acceptance of all things designated as African. But Karenga’s deception may have been an error of youth. After all, the man who invented Kwanzaa and captured the allegiance of LeRoi Jones was only twenty-six years old. Kwanzaa remains extremely popular today, though without the insurgent imagery it originally possessed. Its resilience as an established Afro-American cultural institution testifies, however, to Karenga’s awareness of the psychopolitical needs of Afro-Americans.
Baraka admits to having been somewhat amazed at the ingeniousness of Karenga’s cultural doctrines. Karenga wanted to alter Afro-American cultural rituals because he believed that a “cultural revolution” in the minds of black people was a necessary precondition for the political revolution. Baraka came to share this doctrine. This belief in the priority of “culture” as a political tool lay at the heart of black cultural nationalism. The Karenga conception of culture as reified artifacts allowed for the easy mass production of “authentically black” cultural commodities. It paved the way for undermining the ethnic autonomy that these cultural artifacts were supposed to encourage. Blackness in the guise of “African” cultural artifacts—geles, Kente cloth, dashikis, Afro hairstyles, African jewelry—became profitable commodities for white and black capitalists and hip novelties for white consumers (Bo Derek’s corn rows and terms such as right-on, heavy, and get down).71 Although imported African clothes were quite expensive, one could buy cheap, made-in-America, mass-produced dashikis at K-Mart or Sears. I did.
In his autobiography, Baraka explains his immediate and intense allegiance to Karenga’s doctrines.72 First, Baraka was introduced to Karenga’s philosophy and organization shortly after the Black Arts Repertory Theater School collapsed, mainly because it lacked a working organizational structure and culture. Second, Baraka admired the clearly delineated hierarchy in Karenga’s organization. He envied Karenga’s status as an uncontested leader, the one who issued commands that others followed. Baraka’s antidemocratic sensibilities had earlier been exposed in his romanticization of Malcolm X. Baraka also was impressed by Karenga’s authority to name the advocates,73 marry them, name their children, and even suggest their place of work. Instead of being repulsed by these despotic practices, Baraka felt that Karenga “seemed to me to be the kind of next-higher stage of commitment and organization as compared to the Black Arts or what was going on in the Spirit House in Newark.”74 And Baraka admired the ideological uniformity of Karenga’s organization. Karenga created various lists to facilitate the memorization of his ideological posturings. Such lists included Three Criteria of a Culture, Three Aspects of a Culture, Two Kinds of Revolution, and Seven Aspects of Malcolm X.75 Members of US were drilled on these lists and were supposed to be able to recite them when asked.
Third, Baraka was enthralled by the paramilitary style of Karenga’s organization. The male followers of US were members of Karenga’s paramilitary corps known as the Simba Wachanga (young lions). They provided security for Karenga and punished Karenga’s political enemies (though never the police). Karenga’s intricate organizational infrastructure indicated to Baraka the seriousness of their preparation for the coming revolution. Vulnerable to delusions of grandeur, Baraka must have known that Karenga’s minions were no match for the United States military or even the FBI. Apparently Baraka believed that a “revolutionary appearance” was a crucial component of being revolutionary. Most important to the revolutionary image was the sight of strictly disciplined cadres in “uniform.” For Baraka’s political accomplices, this uniform was traditional African garb. Uniforms were important because they helped distinguish the group from the rest of society and instill in the members the belief that they constituted one collectivity.76 Style was central to Afro-American political efforts during the Black Power era. For instance, the seriousness of the Nation of Islam was conveyed in its members’ neat but unfashionable clothing. Men in “the Nation” had closely cut hair and wore drab suits, white shirts, bow ties, and leather shoes. Women in the Nation wore long dresses/gowns and head wraps. Likewise, the mystique of the Panthers was in part created by their uniform of big “natural” Afro-hair styles (for women), berets (for men), and dark sunglasses, leather coats/jackets, and dark pants for everyone. Black power lay in unity and uniforms.
Mimicking Karenga, Baraka tried to eliminate any spontaneous individuality in his organization by adopting authoritarian forms of decision making. He may have sensed that the antidemocratic ethos of the air force had given him the discipline essential to his development as a writer. Yet it remains baffling that Baraka—or, for that matter, Karenga himself—could find anything edifying about leading a cadre of men who mindlessly took orders and repeated memorized sayings. These cultural nationalists projected a vision of a black community as potentially revolutionary at precisely the moment that blacks chose to repress the possibility for individual critical enlightenment. In the name of revolutionary discipline, thought conformity became black freedom.
During the 1960s, the presence of highly visible bodyguards was de rigueur for any would-be black revolutionary leader. Karenga and, later, Baraka were surrounded by armed security teams. Part of the excitement of seeing these “revolutionary leaders” was the crowd of menacing protectors that surrounded them as they strolled through an airport lounge or down the isle of a lecture hall. A cadre of ominous bodyguards was also clever dramaturgy, for it created a public image of significance for the guarded person.
Baraka and Karenga were deeply critical of the American pretense of egalitarianism and democracy in the face of historical and contemporary Afro-American subjugation. But their nationalist vision did not generate a serious critique of the flawed nature of American democracy, for that would have been tantamount to admitting the possibility of an interracial or multiracial society. More precisely, discussing the possibilities for democracy in the United States would have assumed that the political system, however defective, could be improved. This idea of historical contingency was incompatible with Baraka’s belief that whites were intrinsically racist and immoral. Baraka and Karenga regarded democracy as a white idea and of little relevance to authentic blacks. Whether the political system was called democratic, communist, authoritarian, or oligarchical was inconsequential. The salient issue was that whites controlled black life.
The authoritarian aspirations of Baraka and Karenga were supposedly a response to the chaos evident in the lives of the black lower classes, which provided a sizable number of their recruits. Baraka and Karenga viewed themselves as offering their followers a sense of direction. The discipline would inevitably be reactionary insofar as it required a renunciation of the individual’s critical faculties. Similar to Elijah Muhammad’s agenda in the Nation of Islam, in which total obedience was demanded of the members and used to propel their entry into the world of petty capitalism or the labor market, the total obedience demanded of the cultural nationalists around Baraka facilitated organizational efficiency. This was evident in the crucial role that Baraka’s followers played at the Atlanta Congress of African Peoples and later at the National Black Political Convention in Gary.
The failure of the capitalist labor market to absorb large numbers of the black lower class resulted in the growth of a populace that had never been systematically socialized into modern American society. The absence of market-inspired but self-imposed order in the lives of large numbers of urban blacks hindered their ability to articulate their discontent in a politically viable manner. Marx, we must remember, counted on capitalist exploitation to create a proletarian consciousness. Paradoxically, the failure of American capitalism to homogenize the black lumpen and lower classes made it all the more difficult for them to rebel against that marketplace in an organized fashion. Under the pretense of being revolutionary, Baraka and Karenga attempted to homogenize and rationalize the black urban working classes. Ironically, the successful homogenization of their followers only made them more vulnerable to a predatory marketplace that was willing to sell blacks any “black” identity they so desired.77
Accordingly, the subculture of black militancy that arose during the mid-late 1960s and early 1970s was one that celebrated the gun.78 As if to add black names to the frontier imagery of American heroes, Karenga, Baraka, Huey Newton, and others acted as if bearing arms was the only authentic passport to freedom. The idea of using violence as a means of establishing one’s free identity was just another variation of the mythic American adherence to what Richard Slotkin called “regeneration through violence” and/or a “gunfighter nation.”79
Whereas some of the militant black writers of the Black Arts movement may have been members of gangs during the 1950s, many of the members of the Black Panther Party and Karenga’s US were recruited directly from gangs.80 In many instances, the recruits retained their gang mentality. What Baraka perceived as the discipline of Karenga’s followers was thus both true and untrue. They were disciplined insofar as they apparently acted as a unit. Still, there is little to suggest that they ever gravitated to anything higher than disciplined thuggery masquerading as revolutionary praxis. It is one of the paradoxes of the Black Power era that many of the so-called black revolutionaries were actually murdered by other supposed black revolutionaries. Explanations for such anomic behavior are often shuttled aside in favor of the convenient excuses of COINTELPRO.81 While COINTELPRO did violate the legal rights of many black activists and did coordinate the murder of others, the intense competitive disdain held by one radical black group for another was not only common but deadly. The federal police apparatus could not have instigated such black-on-black fratricide if the tendencies toward that behavior were not already present in the various organizations. Concerning this phenomenon, Baraka wrote:
It is proven now from Freedom of Information Act files that the FBI orchestrated much of this discord between the two organizations. But certainly Cleaver’s arrogance and shallow bohemian anarchism which he passed off as Marxism, plus Karenga’s Maulana complex, helped speed up the tragic collision that finally saw Bunchy and Huggins dead.82
Baraka’s “explanation” for the violence between US and the Black Panthers is disingenuous, the typical Orwellian “doublespeak” that masquerades as honesty whenever American political figures are asked to confront issues they want to elude. The strategy is to invoke clever non sequiturs. What does Cleaver’s supposed bohemian anarchism or Karenga’s Maulana complex have to do with the murder of Carter and Huggins? In many black nationalist and radical circles, Karenga is suspected of having colluded with the state, particularly the Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI. There is, to my knowledge, no definitive proof for these charges. However, at various times Karenga did act in concert with the will of the police agencies.83 First, Karenga was part of a group that met with Governor Ronald Reagan in the aftermath of the Watts riots. Recognizing Karenga’s opportunistic sensibilities, the Wall Street Journal referred to him as “typical of many militants who talk looting and burning but usually are eager to gather influence for quiet bargaining with the predominantly white power structure.”84 Second, the program of US was decidedly nonrevolutionary. That is, Karenga’s organization was more committed to controlling the behavior of other black activists than to confronting the authority of the state. Beyond his desire to be an ethnic autocrat, Karenga had no viable political praxis. Instead of engaging in political actions to improve blacks’ living conditions, Karenga recommended their wearing African clothes and using African languages. He also, as previously mentioned, tried to convince blacks that memorizing and reciting his trite ditties was somehow emancipating, but it is not clear how. Third, various state agencies (e.g., California Social Welfare) allowed Karenga to participate openly in the antiriot, pacification programs that were established after the 1965 Watts riot. As a result, Karenga was not only invested with state legitimacy but had access to financial resources that allowed him to increase his following. For instance, Karenga, as opposed to the Panthers, had ready access to the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission (HRC).85 Why? Didn’t the Human Relations Committee know that Karenga was a revolutionary? His connection to the HRC is all the more perplexing because Karenga was not a community organizer. Instead, one might consider Karenga a secular priest who tried to sell black folks a false, other-worldly blackness and ersatz Africanisms.
It was widely speculated concerning Karenga’s ties to the repressive wing of the state that key figures in his organization were government agents. Perhaps Karenga did not know this, although this seems highly unlikely given his close scrutiny of his followers. In his 1980 doctoral dissertation, “War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America,” Huey Newton quotes a man who had informed on the Black Panthers for the FBI.86 This informant, D’Arthard Perry, claims to have seen three of Karenga’s followers at the FBI offices in Los Angeles. He again saw these same three men, Claud Hubert and brothers Larry Stiner and George Stiner, at the FBI offices immediately following the murder of two Black Panthers. The informant maintained that Claud Hubert was the actual murderer and that he learned from his contacts in the FBI that Hubert was an FBI agent and had been transferred to an East Coast FBI office after the killing.87
Of course, it is possible that this informant was not telling the truth, although the Stiner brothers were arrested and charged with the murders. It also is true that the Stiner brothers were key members of US. They were subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to prison at San Quentin. After four years, the brothers had become such model prisoners that they earned the right to have conjugal visits. During one such visit, they escaped and have never been heard from again.
The story of US and the Stiner brothers would have been forever buried in the paranoia and mystery that surrounds so many incidents from the 1960s had it not been for the guilty conscience of a former FBI agent. In FBI Secrets: An Agent’s Exposé, former agent M. Wesley Swearingen gives credence to Perry’s tale. He reveals that soon after he had been transferred to the Los Angeles racial squad (the FBI had special units in major cities whose mission was to keep blacks under surveillance), he was told by one agent that another agent had arranged for his informers to assassinate Bunchy Carter and John Huggins. According to Swearingen, following FBI instructions, FBI informants George Stiner and Larry Stiner murdered Carter and Huggins on the UCLA campus on June 17, 1969. Swearingen also confirms Perry’s belief that the FBI arranged the escape of the Stiner brothers from San Quentin: “As of 1992 the Stiner brothers were still listed as fugitives. Either the FBI has disposed of them or they are in the FBI’s Witness Protection Program. I know that Darthard Perry was an FBI informant and that he is telling the truth about the FBI.” Swearingen also claims to have found several other cases in which members of US who were informers for the FBI were paid to assassinate members of the Black Panther Party. He does not mention a single instance in which Panthers were paid to kill members of US.88 The crucial point missed by people like Baraka who tried to take the middle ground between the Panther–US conflict is that the state was much more concerned about the Black Panthers than US. Contrary to Baraka’s ahistorical and inaccurate insinuations that the state used US and the Black Panthers to destabilize each other, the truth is that the state used Karenga and his followers to derail the Panthers. There is little evidence to suggest that the state viewed US as a threat. Whether or not the Panthers were actually capable of “going anywhere” politically is another issue but that does not erase Karenga’s complicity in their demise.
In the final analysis, Karenga’s influence in the black community ultimately rested on his control of men, who would threaten, beat, and even murder if it were deemed necessary. When Baraka now comments on Karenga’s activities during the 1960s, he never mentions that this revolutionary black nationalist and his cronies succeeded in murdering only black men.
Following the highly publicized murders of the two Black Panthers, Karenga’s organization went into decline. According to Baraka, Karenga became paranoid at the possibility that the Panthers would try to retaliate, and his paranoia led to drug dependence. During this period, Karenga’s personal influence on Baraka significantly weakened, even though Baraka continued to be a practitioner of Kawaida. It was during this time that Karenga tried but failed to intimidate Baraka into canceling the Atlanta Pan-African Congress.
Karenga finally disappeared from national prominence when he and three of his followers were charged with torturing two black women, Gail Davis and Debra Jones, who lived in Karenga’s home. Karenga had accused them of trying to poison him with “crystals” that had been placed in his water and clothes and throughout his home. In May 1971, Karenga and three members of US were convicted, although Karenga denied all charges. The testimonies of Gail Davis; Debra Jones; Karenga’s wife, Brenda Karenga; and George Armstrong-Weusi, the former head of Karenga’s personal security, were sufficient for a conviction. Afraid for their lives, Jones and Davis fled to Jamaica and returned only to testify at the trial. Brenda Karenga moved to Virginia.89 The Maulana spent the next four years of his life in prison. After his release, Karenga did return to prominence in certain sectors of the black intelligentsia. His return was testimony to both his resilience and the short historical memory of black activists.
While Karenga was absorbed in his various conflicts with the Black Panthers, Baraka became a political organizer on both the local and national levels. Then, when Karenga was imprisoned, Baraka no longer had any challengers to his status as the preeminent black cultural nationalist in America.
Despite the fantasy in elevating Kawaida—a derivative set of practices—to the realm of emancipatory thought, the impetus behind Baraka’s embrace of black cultural nationalism was understandable. Karenga and Baraka believed that their political opposition to black socioeconomic subjugation necessarily contained a cultural component. They recognized that having been damaged by racism, black psyches were probably incapable of sustaining an oppositional political engagement. Following in the footsteps of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, Baraka and Karenga knew that many blacks had internalized racism and were locked in a self-hating mind-set. As true idealists, they thought that the principal barrier blocking the journey from self-defeat to self-assertion lay in the recesses of the black mind. If black people realized their true human value, they would not tolerate or submit to their devaluation by white America.
Unfortunately, Karenga and Baraka mistakenly assumed that an emancipatory psyche could be created anew. They incorrectly believed that the substance of this new emancipatory black mind-set could be based on the recuperation of traditional African cultural beliefs and practices. Their cultural formulation had numerous conceptual shortcomings. First, Baraka and Karenga were imprisoned in a Manichean world in which everything white was bad and everything African was good. In creating this Manichean world, Baraka essentially was reacting to “white” practices and beliefs. He and Karenga were caught in a vice of knee-jerk antiwhite reactionism that prevented them from admitting that some aspects of American society and culture were worth maintaining even after the death of white supremacy. Were black folks to forsake polio vaccine or laser surgery for cataracts? In addition, Baraka and Karenga were insufficiently dialectical in their understanding of cultural change. Evidently, they did not grasp that cultural beliefs could be substantively altered only in an engagement with the materiality of the lives of oppressed blacks.
As stated earlier, their racial essentialism created a severely constrained future. In a world in which blacks and whites could not evolve or change, the potential for viable social transformation was minuscule. It was, therefore, not surprising that racial essentialism gave rise to a worldview in which an apocalyptic intervention by God would be necessary for social change. This simple lesson could have been learned from an examination of the Nation of Islam. Because Elijah Muhammad believed that white people were genetically incapable of treating blacks fairly, he was forced to establish a religious teleology in which white behavior toward blacks did not matter. But where, when, or how could this happen in the United States? Ironically, in confronting white domination, Elijah Muhammad created a theology in which whites were powerless over blacks. He devised various ways in which God would intervene on the side of blacks and destroy the naturally wicked white peoples of the world. In the meantime, he asked the wicked white folks to give him a black nation in the South where blacks could live in peace. But why would wicked white people do anything beneficial for black people?
Bizarre as it may appear to some, it did not take much imagination for many blacks to view whites as innately evil or warped. For hundreds of years, European peoples had tried to control the lives of nonwhite peoples around the world. Their colonization of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and India testifies to this. Hitler’s dream of a world dominated by Aryan people was only one episode in the long history of European desire to control all nonwhite peoples. On those historic occasions when whites settled among nonwhite peoples, their intentions soon turned to domination, for example, the white racist domination of New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Rhodesia, Canada, and the United States. Despite their conceits about who is and is not civilized, white Europeans and their descendants do not have an impressive history of getting along with other peoples. Accordingly, we can perhaps understand why Baraka and Karenga viewed whites as intrinsically antihumanistic. Their error was their inability to distinguish white people as a biological race from whiteness as a cultural construct. Certainly something deeply pathological about whiteness had developed over the last five centuries, but it was not embedded in white genes or skin cells.
Their inability to distinguish whiteness as a cultural construct led Baraka and Karenga to accept a simplistic worldview in which they could not acknowledge the pathologies often found in black societies. Instead, they spent an enormous amount of time trying to claim that any immorality and pathology in blacks was taught to them by whites. In so doing, they created a passive image of blacks. Racial essentialism pretended to explain differences in “racial natures,” but it could not explain racial inequalities. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Karenga and Baraka believed that they were being most radical, they were incapable of escaping their reliance on moral discourses. Simply put, when one scratched below the surface of their rhetoric about black militancy, one discovered pleas to whites for better treatment of blacks.
In their desire to create a nostalgia for a black past that never was, Baraka and Karenga had to avoid confronting the African past or present. A serious engagement with history would not have allowed them to create the innocent black noble savages that saturated their ontology of black people. Had Africans been as loving, peaceful, and communally oriented as Baraka’s and Karenga’s mythology maintained, the African slave trade would have failed. Considering the extent to which the Africanism valorized by Baraka and Karenga was an ersatz Africanism created by Karenga’s Hollywood-influenced mind, Baraka and Karenga never really tried to engage Africa. Their willingness to replace history with myth allowed Baraka to create Islam as a black African religion, free of the evil legacy of Christianity. Ironically, however, Islam had an equally valid claim to the mantle of “slave religion.”
In sum, Baraka and Karenga were unable to escape the identity problem that had ensnarled generations of black thinkers before them. This dilemma was rooted in the peculiarly unstable identity of black Americans. Simultaneously bastards of the West and Africa, black Americans could find true homes only in a hybrid “new-world” American identity, which even for white Americans was the norm, whether or not they recognized it. Baraka’s attempt to embrace a “pure” African identity was a bid to create an uncompromising oppositional identity. He wanted to cleanse himself of the complex identity given to him by an accident of birth. Through the mere assertion of his individual will, he thought that he could walk away from the Du Boisian problematic of Afro-American duality. But appropriating a true black identity made sense only in an environment in which that identity was not protected by existing cultural boundaries. Even those Africans embedded in European acculturation à la Senghor did not have to purchase a black identity. The quest for a blacker self was possible only in a society saturated with norms of whiteness. In this sense, black Americans are descendants of the West in ways quite foreign to black Africans, however culturally Westernized the Africans might be. Ignorance of Hegel, Flaubert, or Bach does not marginalize black Americans from the West in the same ways that knowledge of them granted Senghor access to a francophone identity. Like white Americans, black Americans are inscribed with Westernism, however far they may be from highbrow European culture.