6

WASHINGTON PARK

He sat in the sun.1 On a bench in Washington Park with a dozen books bearing strange titles splayed spine up or open around him: Egyptian Magic, Anacalypsis, God Wills the Negro, Flying Saucers Have Landed. He liked the park on a Saturday. It was packed with people, kids in strollers or short pants, old ladies carrying sacks of stuff, guys hungover from last night’s spodie, maybe a couple on a blanket trying for some sugar while the world watched. Or didn’t. Everybody seemed to be in motion, even people standing still. He liked the faint touch of cheap perfume that lingered after certain ladies passed, fake roses tattooed on the sinewy afternoon light. Now and then a breeze picked up and fluffed long skirts or jacket vents. Pigeons strutted the walkways in forced haste, resisting flight with iridescent head bobs. Grass and trees and sky and space. Walking the two blocks from his apartment and crossing busy Grand Boulevard, he felt like a traveler to another world. Things seemed possible here.

Washington Park was full of black people dreaming out loud—and not just kids squealing for penny candy or lovers longing for the night. Serious dreamers, too, with aspirations of uplift or salvation. He looked up from the old book balanced on his knee, pages riffling in the breeze. Far down the walk he could see the Communists with their table and their pamphlets. They usually drew a small crowd, some of them hecklers, but others hungry for promises. He had passed a clutch of Presbyterians on his way into the park, their hair groomed and shoes polished, touting a coming social in their church’s basement. The local Democrats had a forum up the park a ways, and they loved to mix it up with hapless Republicans who strayed into range, as many had during the summer of conventions a few years back, when both parties had descended on Chicago. He liked the Black Muslims best. They took everything so seriously, from their skinny black ties and creased pants to their denunciation of white devils. He understood their fervor. They wanted a better world. He did, too—just not theirs. He wanted a world where the vibrations were different, not like planet Earth’s. Washington Park made him feel good: preachers, hucksters, and visionaries haggling for the future. It was wonderful, a true democracy.

He returned to his book, studying in the sunlight. Clean green pants and a crisp shirt, sometimes a red fez: he liked to look presentable. He was a scholar. An intellectual. People should respect a student of wisdom. Occasionally a few curious passersby, intrigued by his pile of books and studious manner, would gather around and ask a few questions. He was happy to oblige but preferred reading to conversation. Sometimes when the spirit moved him, he would stand up and preach, at the ready a thick manila envelope of mimeographed handouts he had typed himself (he loved capital letters!). But now he was absorbed in Anacalypsis, pondering the greatness of Ethiopia and the blackness of so many ancient nations. If antique blacks once ruled great civilizations, why were their descendants living cooped up in segregated cities?

“My brother.” A man leaned over the bench near his left shoulder. He wore the white shirt, dark trousers, and shiny shoes of the Black Muslims. “I notice you attract people. Just by reading—all by yourself on this bench. What you reading so hard?”

The voice in his ear was a faint buzz. A sixty-cycle-per-second hum.

“What? You talkin’ to me? I ain’t nobody’s brother.” He spoke softly and looked up from his book. A few people milled about, watching with curiosity: a lady with a pin in her hat, an old man with a grocery bag crumpled in his fist.

“Yessir, I’m talkin’ to you. Why you read all them books? Why people interested in you if you only reading?”

“I don’t want people interested. I don’t pay them no mind.”

“Well, they mind you. You come out in the park, like today, people see you just sittin’ there readin’, and they get interested. They leave where we set up down the walk a ways,” he pointed a crooked finger, “and they come along here. I’d like to know why.”

“Maybe cuz I don’t want ’em. I don’t care if they listen or not. Not much to hear when I’m readin’ anyway.” He turned his eyes back to the page.

The man in the suit leaned in a little bit farther. “It’s the way you read. Like you in a trance. Like you know something they don’t.”

“Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. I’m just concerned with my research.” He ran a finger down the page he’d been reading until he found the word he was looking for. “There.” He resumed.

“You ever talk to people? Like we do, about Muhammad? You ever try to tell them what you believe?”

He looked up again. “On occasion. Yes. I communicate what I know. But I don’t necessarily want to. I don’t need to. You need to. I suspect.”

“Yes, we do.” The man walked around the bench in quick, nervous steps and sat down. A few onlookers took interest. “We offer hope to the black man, pride and dignity. We demand respect. In the name of Islam.”

“You lookin’ for people to lead. I’m looking for . . . nothin’. I’m studying, you see.”

The well-dressed man looked at the books on the bench between them, put a finger on Egyptian Magic like it might bite. “We study too. The Koran. The words of Muhammad. Other books too. Secret books. Maybe like this one.” A couple more people stopped to listen and nod.

“But that’s what I mean. What good’s the words of Muhammad or any other book if they ain’t true? How do you know they true?”

The man twisted his ass and sat up straight, like he was in church. “They the words of Muhammad. Even older than that, too, go back to Egypt and Ethiopia, when blacks was on top. They teach us we should reject the white man’s world. Utterly and completely. Look what it done to us. Look how we be forced to live.”

“Black people ain’t nothin’, I realize. How’d they get that way, I wonder? Who’s responsible?”

“It’s the white man did it. We got to live proud and apart. A nation apart. Of Islam.” A murmur of approval flitted through the listeners.

“Maybe. But I’m just trying to see what’s wrong with this planet. Maybe I can correct it.”

“But who you?”

“You can call me Mister Ra. You can call me Mister-y. Makes no mind. I’m nobody. Gonna get back to my research now. Thank you for your conversation.” His eyes returned to Anacalypsis.

The questioner rose and looked hard at the books scattered over the bench, feeling indignant without knowing why. He turned and walked toward the cluster of his cronies in the distance, working their little crowd of the bereft and the needful.

Nobody else moved. The sun poured down its warmth while birds swooped from branches to grass. Kids squealed. A faraway game hurled occasional faint shouts into the air.

It might have stayed like that all afternoon, him reading on the bench, the park pulsing with life. But the man returned, stepping right up to him and looming.

“My brother. Why don’t you come and talk with us? My colleagues and I would like to hear your views about what’s wrong with this planet. Maybe people need to hear what you have to say.”

“I know they do, but do you think they want to?”

“Why don’t we find out?”

“All right. I’ll come. Help me with my books.” They picked up a stack each and walked toward the cluster of white-shirted Black Muslims.

He wasted no time on introductions and stepped up on a park bench. “You want to hear what I have to say?” His voice was high and quiet. “You want to know what the Negro needs to do to improve the conditions of the Negro’s life today? I’ll tell you.” He had the attention of the Muslim brothers, but of others, too. People stopped and gathered, intrigued by the quiet conviction of the man in the green pants and fez.

“Start with the Bible. I know many of you have read it your whole life—since you were a child—or heard it read at home and in church. It’s the word of God, you’ve been told. But what kind of word is God? I can tell you: it’s a bad word, one of the worst in the language. The God of the Bible created a world of death. How can he be anything but a bad God? How can you believe that his Bible is true?”

The size of the crowd grew as he talked, drawn in by his scandalous words, a few older folks stopping by, and then a family or two, a couple of Presbyterians from up the path.

“You been reading a bad Bible, a Bible of death. Is death your salvation? How can you believe it? How can you believe your creator wants you to die in order to live? You been taught to read the Bible in a way that makes you love death more than life. Who did that to you? Who taught you such things? Who keep you ignorant from the truth and the life that comes with it?”

Someone shouted, “The church! It’s the church taught us how to read the Bible.” Excitement grew and so did the crowd. This man was saying outrageous things.

“That’s right. It’s the church.” He pitched his voice to the bystanders. “The leaders of your church want you to die. And you will if you stay ignorant—of the truth, of the true way to read the Bible.”

“Who you call ignorant?”—“I know the Bible. I know Jesus.”—“Praise Jesus.”

The people roiled. Their numbers doubled, trebled.

“I say you’re ignorant. And if you stay that way, you gonna die. You won’t get credit for livin’. Look at you, don’t nobody care what you done, how you lived. You’re nothin’. You say Jesus cares, and maybe he does, but think about this. Jesus didn’t get no credit when he was alive. He worked wonders, performed miracles—and what credit did he get? Crucifixion and the cross, death for his trouble.”

Turbulence: the more people listened, the more they convulsed.

“Jesus saves!”—“They killed Jesus.”—“‘God so loved the world . . .’”

“You folks just like Jesus. You don’t get no recognition, you see. The one who came here and wasn’t recognized, who healed the sick and raised the dead, was the one they call Jesus.”

“Yeah!”—“Say it!”

“But who was it didn’t recognize Jesus? It was you that would not recognize him. And you are over here in America and you gettin’ no recognition for your good works ’cause he didn’t get nothin’ for his. Like Jesus. You get no credit and you the ones who refused to recognize him!”

“What?” The crowd, a hundred strong, began to seethe in confusion. “Who killed Jesus?”

“You killed Jesus. You the Jews who killed him and you the person they killed. And that’s why you sufferin’ today. You refused to recognize Jesus. So you not recognized today.”

“But Jesus is my personal savior.”—“He loves me.”—“He died for my sins!”

By now a couple hundred crowded in to listen, maybe more. A fierce resistance was boiling up, anger in search of a target.

“You ignorant of the truth. And until you admit you didn’t recognize Jesus, you won’t be recognized by nobody, not the white man, not no one.”

A chorus: “No!”

“Until you take responsibility for failing to recognize Jesus and condemning him to death, you will suffer likewise. And nobody will help you.”

“No!”

“You must take responsibility.”

Five hundred black people milled around as this man preached. They jumped up and down and shook the earth, shouting, “No, no, no, no!”

“Yes. It was you, all right.” The crowd twisted and bucked. Fists clenched and teeth gnashed. The Black Muslims looked one to another in alarm, astounded.

“Brother,” shouted the one who had invited him to speak. “We ain’t never seen black folks worked up like this. You might be in danger. We don’t know what’s happening.”

“The truth is what’s happening,” he said. But the Muslims gathered his books and, linking arms and beckoning him down from the bench, led him across Grand Boulevard and out of Washington Park. The crowd howled and clawed the air and slowly dispersed.

And the sun spilled its glory over the earth.

Washington Park runs from Chicago’s Fifty-First Street to Sixtieth, ten blocks of green space bounded on the east by Cottage Grove Avenue and on the west by Grand Boulevard, now called Martin Luther King Drive. It lent life on the South Side a little openness and buffered the University of Chicago from the harder world due west. In the fifties it attracted people of all kinds, including those interested in debating problems and imagining solutions, whether religious, political, or just plain visionary. Sun Ra took pleasure in the scene, as he would later remark: “When I was in Chicago I would always listen to black people talk different things. I was in the park when the Black Muslims were talking. Everybody would be in that park. It was really wonderful in Chicago. Everybody was expressing their opinions. A true democracy in the black community.”2 Sun Ra was a full participant in that true democracy. A manila envelope marked “One of Everything,” found years later among memorabilia in Abraham’s house on the eve of its demolition, attests to his activism.³ It contained a sheaf of typed papers, broadsheets meant for public distribution or declamation. Later edited by John Corbett and published as The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra’s Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets, these homemade handbills illuminate Sun Ra’s whole creative and political enterprise.

They are screeds from the sun. They bespeak a searing, searching intelligence devoted to transforming the lives of Chicago’s blacks. In keeping with Thmei’s political theosophy, the broadsheets offer a corrective to black reality grounded in esoteric reading and occult wisdom. They’re maniacally typed, often in capitals, with occasional annotations in pencil or ink that, as Corbett suggests, probably indicate cues for oral delivery.⁴ Ellipses and exclamation points dot the pages like secret code. Sun Ra took Thmei’s wisdom directly to the people in Washington Park. He had considered himself a teacher since the year he spent as an education major at Alabama A&M. His tone shows him to have been a prophet, too, willing to declaim unpopular truths in the service of a higher vision. He uses a host of strategies to advance Thmei’s agenda in the broadsheets: denunciation, shock, mockery, humor, wordplay, textual analysis, biblical midrash, and “equation” (in his idiosyncratic sense of the term—“THE MATHEMATICS OF WORDS,” as he calls it).5 Some broadsheets he signs in various ways, including “THE SUN,” “RA,” “We—Ra,” “Raphael,” or “EL RA.” In Washington Park, Sun Ra became the public voice of Thmei’s radicalism, calling South Side blacks to forsake ignorance and embrace a wisdom that might renovate their world.

However incendiary in tone, the broadsheets advance a surprisingly coherent if unusual vision for black uplift. Even Sun Ra’s unorthodoxy is unorthodox. Sites shows how the broadsheets inhabit a legacy of antinomian critique that runs back through the American jeremiad to the English dissenting tradition of William Blake, Christopher Smart, and, before them, John Milton.⁶ Indeed, if there is one artist whose vision most closely approaches Sun Ra’s, it is Blake. Both men responded to a reality of rationalized confinement with a vision of creative excess. Both grounded their critique of that reality in a radical rereading of the Bible. And both praised art as a means of transforming the world, turning death into life. Like Blake, Sun Ra and Thmei understood the Bible to constitute the ideological superstructure of contemporary Western society, with the difference that Thmei directed its critique most pointedly toward black society, whites having gone the way of secular rewards, consumerist consolations, and imperialist dreams. “THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD IN WHICH NEGROES LIVE IS THE BIBLE”; this claim comes from a broadsheet bearing the title “humpty dumpty.”⁷ If blacks live in misery, and if the Bible is the foundation of their world, then it might be worth turning a critical eye on holy scripture.

And Sun Ra does precisely this, mercilessly. “THE BIBLE IS A DANGEROUS BOOK,” he announces, “A DESTRUCTIVE FORCE PREPARED TO ENSNARE THOSE WHO HATE UNDERSTANDING OF WISDOM.”⁸ The problem lies not with the Bible per se but with how its readers interpret it: “MISINTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE IS THE CAUSE OF THE WOES TROUBLING THE WORLD TODAY.”⁹ Contemporary social suffering, then, originates in the misinterpretation of scriptural truth. The critique here is troubling, for if the Bible is the foundation of black life, then blacks who read and teach it innocently appear to be implicated in their own subjugation. This point might be the hardest for Sun Ra’s listeners to swallow, but it’s fundamental to his vision. Blacks must accept some responsibility for their condition, in this instance for failing to plumb the Bible’s true wisdom. “I MUST TELL YOU THAT THE BIBLE HAS MADE A FOOL OUT OF YOU, IT IS WRITTEN IN AN IGNORANT MANNER TO DISCOURAGE YOU FROM READING IT.”10 The Bible is secret rather than sacred scripture, and blacks have been bamboozled by a long line of gullible readers, a tough judgment to pass on a Christian tradition that for many conjures the hope of salvation and social uplift. But Sun Ra’s position promises hope of another kind: “THE PROPER INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE IS THE TRUTH, THE TRUTH WHICH WILL AUTOMATICALLY FREE NEGROES”—and not only Negroes “BUT THE WORLD.”¹¹ And what is this truth? What is the secret meaning of the Bible? The answer is simple, but only to those capable of interpreting truly: “AT THIS TIME IT IS DANGEROUS FOR ANY PERSON WHO IS TEACHING THE BIBLE NOT TO KNOW ITS SECRET MEANING, NAMELY, THE MEANING OF DEATH.”¹²

For Sun Ra and his associates, the Bible is a book of death, at least as the text is traditionally interpreted. Thmei’s target here is the black church, the institutional authority that sanctions a lethal misreading of scripture. It is the church and not the state that most directly and ruinously regulates black life: “THE FOUNDATION OF THE NEGRO IS AT PRESENT HIS CHURCH AND THE CHURCH IS RULING NOT THE GOVERNMENT NOR THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. THE NEGRO IS A PRODUCT OF THE CHURCH BECAUSE ALL OF HIS HOPES ARE PLACED IN THE WORDS OF HIS SPIRITUAL LEADERS.”¹³ Thmei and Sun Ra direct attention away from traditional targets of critique—whites and their various regimes of subjugation—and toward authorities that blacks can address directly and maybe dethrone. Little wonder, then, that neither Martin Luther King Jr. nor Elijah Muhammad would provide much inspiration for their radicalism. For Thmei, organized forms of black religion, whether Christian or Muslim, have failed to promote black life. On the contrary, they trade in death as the only means of salvation.

Sun Ra calls Christian doctrine a “monstrous creed.” He accuses his audience of spreading it like a contagion: “Why are you telling the world that Death is the way to salvation?”¹⁴ Such a belief makes Jesus a corpse to be swallowed, a human sacrifice to be mimed, a cadaverous dead god hawking a lethal salvation. “Jesus was the firstborn of the dead,” Sun Ra declares.15 A dead god is no more use than a dead man. What blacks fail to acknowledge in worshiping this dead divinity is their own responsibility for killing him: “The Black man is in torment and misery everywhere on the face of this earth. Why? Simply this. You are accountable to God for the death of Jesus.”¹⁶ To believe that the death of Jesus is the way to salvation is to kill him all over again—in the name of righteousness and truth.

Sun Ra advances an unusual historical explanation for this confusion. Christianity, he says, has stood divided into two churches since the Crucifixion, churches distinguished by their differing interpretations of Christ’s death. One descends from Caiaphas, the Jew who wanted Jesus dead for political reasons. The other descends from Peter, the Gentile who defended Jesus at the risk of his own life. The former promotes “THE SALVATION DOCTRINE,” which identifies death with heavenly reward.¹⁷ Sun Ra prefers the church of Peter, a church of life where the simple force of living is salvation. Black suffering began with this division of churches: “THE NEGRO CHURCH ITSELF IS THE BEGINNING OF SEGREGATION AND SEPARATION.”¹⁸ Vanquishing “the salvation doctrine,” then, might put an end to the belief that death offers a consolation for life’s misery. Far preferable for Sun Ra and Thmei Research is the impossible imperative of life, life as its own salvation, here and now: “WE MUST SET OUR MINDS TO ACHIEVE THE ABSOLUTE IMPOSSIBLE . . . WE MUST CONQUER DEATH. IT IS OF THE UTMOST IMPORTANCE THAT WE CONQUER DEATH HERE AND NOW. WE MUST TAKE THE FIRST STEP FORWARD BY MAKING LIFE REAL.”¹⁹ Life against death: Thmei’s social agenda is as simple, as harrowing, as impossible as that. But of course the possible has already been tried. Sun Ra urges his black listeners to recant familiar interpretations of the Bible in favor of a living wisdom.

Why should they reject something so historically central to their culture? Because “THE NEGRO RESURRECTED FROM HIS STATE OF IGNORANCE IS THE ONLY MEANS OF SALVATION LEFT FOR AMERICA.”²⁰ On this view, ignorance is the condition most detrimental to contemporary blacks, and Sun Ra rails across many broadsheets against their acquiescence: “IGNORANCE IS THE CAUSE OF THE NEGROES PLIGHT IN AMERICA.”²¹ Sometimes his indignation lapses into rough humor, as in a broadsheet entitled “wake up! wake up! wake up!” when he proclaims that “NEGROES ARE DEFINITELY THE PEOPLE OF THE BIBLE BECAUSE THE BIBLE STATES THAT WISDOM WOULD DIE WITH THESE PEOPLE AND THE AMERICAN NEGRO IS THE DUMB DORA AND THE BIGGEST ASS ON THE PLANET EARTH.”22 Bible-thumping blacks cannot perceive their own alienation from biblical wisdom. Their ignorance begins in a lack of self-awareness, which Thmei’s street-corner activism tries to correct.

To foster this self-awareness, the broadsheets advance a new genealogy for American blacks and with it a new history to transform their understanding of themselves. Their ancestors obviously came from Africa, but according to the broadsheets, not its western coast, as has been traditionally believed. The truth (of which blacks remain ignorant) is more surprising: “IN FACT VERY FEW NEGROES KNOW THAT THE PEOPLE THAT MOSES LED OUT OF EGYPT WERE BLACK-BROWN PEOPLE: THE ANCESTORS OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO.”²³ This unsettling account has the historical appeal of associating American blacks with both Israel and Egypt, grafting Judaism onto a more ancient, austere—yet still African—past. In a move now familiar from Rastafarianism, Thmei insists on the blackness of the early Jews: “TO THIS VERY DAY THE RULER OF ETHIOPIA IS KNOWN AS THE LION OF THE TRIBE OF JUDAH, THIS TITLE IS A HEREDITARY ONE AND IT POINTS TO THE FACT THAT THE ORIGINAL JEWS WERE BLACK AND THAT THE JEWS IN THE BIBLE WERE BLACK.”²⁴ On Thmei’s account, the ancient Israelites were black people, and their culture owes a debt to Egypt: “these people called negro, are the flesh and blood descendants of the original ISRAEL.”²⁵ American blacks remain ignorant of this history.

This account enjoys a twofold appeal. First, it positions blacks at the beginning of a culture—one based on Judeo-Christian underpinnings—that the white West claims for its own. White beliefs have black beginnings. Second and perhaps more important, it dislocates American black identity from whiteness as its defining condition, a condition that would remain in place as long as slavery and the slave trade continued to define what it means to be black in contemporary society. Thmei’s proposed history as Sun Ra declaims it recovers for blacks a noble and unfathomable antiquity (passing through Israel and back to Egypt) that mitigates centuries of subjugation by whites. The broadsheets define being black not against being white but beyond it, a situation Sun Ra would later describe using the term “outer blackness.” American blacks must no longer think of themselves as a subjugated people. Their history antedates that of whites and Western culture and in fact gave rise to that culture (as well as its horrors) through the errant destiny of the Jews. To remain ignorant of this history is to accept a legacy of subordination as a defining truth—in fact, to remain complicit in that legacy by failing to acknowledge (or imagine) an alternative.

From the perspective of this legacy of subordination, American blacks amount to very little. In a broadsheet bearing the date (typed in reverse) 11–14–1955 and signed “WE-RA,” Sun Ra provides a surprising answer to the question, “Does the Bible contain anything about the Negro?”

Yes. Jesus said, “Let the Negro bury the Negro.” At least that is what he said in the original Greek Version of the New Testament. But according to Genesis C and G are interchangeable and for this reason the words of Jesus also reads [sic], “Let the Negro bury the Necro.” . . . In present day language, the sentence just quoted reads: “Let the dead bury the dead.” [. . .] Unfortunately for the Negro the word Negro means dead body.26

Unfortunate indeed. This passage is pure Sun Ra, from the bogus but provocative etymology to the demand that blacks take responsibility for transforming their lives. In scriptural terms, he says, blacks are already dead. In racial terms, they are nothing at all.

Playing mirthfully in another broadsheet with the phrase “Spo-dee O-dee,” made famous by the blues guitarist and songwriter Stick McGhee’s 1949 bowdlerized version of his song “Drinkin’ Wine,” Sun Ra runs it backward to make a remarkable discovery: “SPOITHE-OITHE is EHTIOPS. ETHIO-ETHIOPS. . . . (read it backwards). [. . .] ETHIOPS is the true identity of the American negro.”²⁷ Even popular music, it seems, contains wisdom to edify black Americans, if only they have ears to hear it. In a related broadsheet, he pursues this insight further, tracking sound associations to a disturbing conclusion: “ETHIOPS IS OUDE . . . OIHTE . . . OIHTE IS HOITE. . . . . HOOTE. . . . HOUT. . . . NOTHING. I DON’T GIVE A GOOT MEANS “I DON’T GIVE AN ETHIOPS” . . . ETHIOPS ARE NOTHING. NEGROES ARE NOTHING BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL NATIONS. ALL NATIONS ARE AS NOTHING TO GOD.”28 Sun Ra assaults conventional rationality and the bigotry it sustains through willfully associating sounds and substituting signs. The multimillennial African heritage of contemporary blacks comes to nothing if it yields only a fashionable nationalism. Nations mean nothing from a spiritual perspective, and from a cultural perspective, blacks don’t even exist: “NEGROES ARE NOTHING. . . . . there is no such thing as a negro therefore negroes are symbolical of nothing.. [. . .] there is a common expression ‘A nigger ain’t—[shit]. Less than that is nothing. Zero.”²⁹

Fade to black.

Sun Ra will exploit this empty status in his later poetry, myth, and music, attributing a positive content to “nothing” that associates it with infinity. In the broadsheets, he anticipates this move by pondering yet another name for “negro”: “STOP! LOOK! LISTEN! WHAT PEOPLE ON EARTH CALL THEMSELVES SPOOKS? WHAT PEOPLE CALL THEMSELVES SPOOKS? IN WHAT COUNTRY DO SPOOKS DWELL IN WHAT COUNTRY DO THE SPOOKS DWELL? . . . IN AMERICA OF COURSE.”³⁰ Blacks may be nothing, but they call themselves spooks, and in doing so, they unknowingly affirm a richer life than America allows them: “NEGROES ARE SPOOKS (SPIRITUAL PEOPLE). AND THERE ARE NO LAWS IN THE CONSTITUTION GUARANTEEING THE EQUALITY OF SPOOKS (SPIRITUAL BEINGS) TO MEN WHO ARE CREATED EQUAL. A SPOOK IS NOT A CREATION NEITHER IS A SPIRIT. ACCORDING TO THE DICTIONARY, SPIRITUAL MEANS IMMATERIAL, UNIMPORTANT, DISEMBODIED. WHITE PEOPLE KNOW THAT GOD IS A SPOOK.”³¹ Negroes = spooks = spirits = god. Listen to the words. Follow the equations. American blacks are spirits, and in this they incarnate a heritage leading back from their current subjugation through Israel, Ethiopia, Egypt, ultimately to the Creator. Blacks are NOT created equal. “EQUALITY IN A WORLD OF THIS KIND IS EQUALITY WITH CONFUSION.”³² They are spirits. Their better life lies elsewhere. In spiritualizing black experience—without recourse to scriptural authority—Thmei and Sun Ra announce a radicalism as ideologically extreme as it is spiritually absolute. Spooks shall inherit the earth.

But only if they heed Sun Ra’s pronouncements and exchange ignorance for wisdom. To the question, “How can one stop being a Negro?” Sun Ra answers, “By the simple act of studying and understanding true life-giving wisdom.”33 Or again: “ONLY WISDOM OF THE FUTURE CAN SAVE THIS UNFORTUNATE RACE CALLED NEGRO.”³⁴ Sun Ra’s prophecy, this wisdom of the future, answers the death and nothing that blacks endure with an eschatological devotion to life: “It is time that you seek life not a life after death, but a real and true life here and now.”³⁵ But how? How might life be made real, here and now, for South Side blacks? The answer for Thmei and Sun Ra is simply, audaciously, to create. Not religion, not politics, but culture offers the best means to transform a world of death into life: “WE MUST MAKE LIFE BEAUTIFUL. WE MUST CHANGE EARTH FROM THE HELL THAT IT IS AND MAKE IT THE HEAVEN THAT GOD INTENDED.”³⁶

This stress on beauty, on its almost apocalyptic potential, sets Thmei’s radicalism off from most contemporary black activism. Here is resistance at its most creative, aiming at neither assimilation nor revolution but wholesale reinvention of reality. In a broadsheet entitled “what must negroes do to be saved?,” Sun Ra describes Thmei’s program for political activism as creative resistance. He begins by denouncing the complacency of black leadership: “NEITHER THE NAACP NOR THE NEGRO CHURCH HAS DONE ANYTHNG TO TEACH THE NEGRO AN APPRECIATION OF BEAUTY.”³⁷ Nor does all the contemporary talk of brotherhood do much to make that beauty a reality: “SUCH A REALITY CAN BECOME REAL ONLY IF APPROACHED FROM THE POINT OF CULTURE AND ART.”³⁸ Culture and art are the true means of Sun Ra’s activism, and beauty becomes his index of a better world: “THE LOVE OF BEAUTY IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM.”³⁹ So necessary is this commitment to creating beauty that relations between races depend on it utterly: “IF NEGROES WANT TO BE EQUAL TO WHITE PEOPLE THEY MUST PROVE THAT THEY ARE EQUAL BY PRODUCING SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL.”⁴⁰ Not politics, not morality, but only art asserts equality. Thmei’s radicalism turns art into activism.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of such a stance, however, is its racial agenda: “I DO NOT APPROVE OF LEADERS WHO CAN NOT WIN THE FRIENDSHIP OF WHITE PEOPLE BY CULTURE AND SINCERE GOODWILL.”41 The reason: “ART KNOWS NO COLOR LINE IN ITS HIGHER FORMS.”⁴² Sun Ra will not always appear so clear an advocate of a postracial reality, but art, culture, and the beauty they create nevertheless open a pathway to unknown worlds where black and white merge into a greater chromaticism. “THE TRUTH WILL FREE NOT ONLY NEGROS BUT THE WORLD.”⁴³ Thmei’s activism and Sun Ra’s prophetic message begin with blacks on Chicago’s South Side but open up to include all: “Proper wisdom is enlightment. It is the LIGHTNING that will ENLIGHTENEN THE WORLD.”⁴⁴ Not enlightenment but enlightment will enlightenen the world. Sun Ra works old words in new ways to make space for better wisdom.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that Thmei took rapprochement with whites as a goal of its activism. On the contrary, it advocated black art for blacks’ sake in the effort to transform the South Side from a racial death row to a place of life and beauty. Sun Ra betrays few illusions on the subject of black subjugation: “Negroes are in the low places,” he says unapologetically; “that is what white people mean when they say for a Negro to stay in his place. They mean stay in your ‘low’ place.”⁴⁵ Thmei’s radicalism, however cultural its aims and artistic its means, sought to redress the wrongs blacks have suffered and continue to suffer in a white world. Sun Ra puts the point more pungently in an interview conducted much later: “Now white people telling black people, stay in your place. Sure, but where is that place? So now I have to get a place for them other than the cemetery.”⁴⁶ Thmei’s cultural activism and Sun Ra’s creative resistance offer ways to resuscitate the dead. In Thmei’s view, the South Side is one big cemetery. Blacks deserve a better place—to live. Sun Ra devoted the energy of his activism—his research, writing, and preaching in Washington Park—toward that simple if visionary prospect. Blacks must create a better world.