Tuesday, October 13, 2015

In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program-Ten – A Peace Treaty Of One's Own

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program-Ten – A Peace Treaty Of One's Own

Click below to listen to Stanley Nelson speak about his latest documentary –The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution on the Terry Gross show Fresh Air on NPR (Sept 24, 2015)  





Jamal Pratt, English High School Class of 1965, was crazy to go into the military right after high school. In addition to that intense desire to prove his manhood, his righteous black manhood, to prove that he had what it took, he was having troubles with Ma at home (rolling stone Pa was long gone), you know the steady drumbeat of what are going to do with your life, why were you hanging out with who you were hanging out with, don't you know those corner boys of yours will just get you in trouble, the universal mother drill. Moreover he had no steady girlfriend since Sheila had moved back down south with her grandmother after her parents split up and he was just keeping his head above water when it came to that corner boy midnight shifter stuff his mother kept harping on. He was desperately in need of a change of scenery, no question.
Besides he wanted, English High proud wanted, to do his duty for his country against the communist menace that it was facing from a place called Vietnam, a place where, from all the reports, the citizenry was growing wild, and getting wilder and would take down the whole region with it. That, of course was part of it, part of what any red-blooded American, black or white, feared and Jamal thought rightfully so, although he was loose, pretty loose, on exactly what the hell was happening there. The big part though was that Jamal Pratt was smitten by a John Wayne Army Special Forces action film, The Green Berets, having seen it several times and having bored, bored there was no other word for it, his corner boys as they hung around in front of his apartment house over on the corner of Washington Street and Geneva Avenue in the high Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.

What got to Jamal was how smooth these guys were, these Special Forces guys (and how they he heard also got plenty of action from the girls around North Carolina and places like that who were ready to do just about anything to get their kicks with a Green Beret), how they were able to take on about ten gooks (yes, that was the term he used for them and a term of common usage, Charlie only came later when the deal went down in–country) and whip their sorry asses before they knew what hit them, about how they saved village after village when those crummy cowardly commie bastards tried to stake out their claim, and about how cool their weapons were that made quick victories possible. He wanted in, wanted in bad on that action, and since he had not planned to go to college anyway for lack of money and interest he figured that when he signed up down at the recruiting station he would try his luck as a Green Beret recruit even though his physical aspect (thin and short) was just inside the stiff Special Forces regulations. He figured if that didn’t work out, although he was pretty sure he had the stuff that the Green Berets were made of, he would pick a skill school and be all set for when after he got out.

Well Jamal’s dream, like a lot of things, and not just black things, in this wicked old world, didn’t pan out, the Green Beret part (strangely he couldn't pass the hearing test, although, strangely it did not disqualify him from the military as a whole), although he did gain a skill school, not exactly the one he had planned on, partly any way. He was assigned to be 11-Bravo, a grunt, a foot soldier, cannon fodder (although that thought term only came later, grunt was the word his used to his friends back on the block when he came home on leave the first time). He did take advantage of an opportunity to go to jump school, paratrooper school, down at Fort Benning in Georgia and was thereafter sent to Fort Bragg (where the Special Forces units were also located) down in North Carolina to be part of the 82nd Airborne Division.

As luck would have it 1966 was a year that the action was getting hot and heavy in Vietnam and so units, including his unit, of the 82nd were ordered to that hot spot. As stories started coming back in about the actual fighting situation in Vietnam and from the training he had received in how to kill gooks by the score (although that Mr. Charlie designation and constant rumors about how the night belonged to him was becoming more and more the term of usage among his fellow soldiers) Jamal started getting more anxious, anxious for a very good reason since he had met a girl, Tonya, from Fayetteville, the town outside the fort, and they had plans to marry and all. (Apparently girls, girls around Fayetteville anyway, were just as happy to get their kicks with airborne guys as with Green Berets or any other elite military units but that attraction is a question for another time).
Jamal did his time in 'Nam, did his rotation (a year and a month’s R&R), although he never did want to talk about it that much, about the killing, about the burning down of villages to save them, about having black sweats every night every single fucking night on the perimeter waiting for Mr. Charlie to come back and take his, and a few things he swore he would never tell anybody about what he had done there, about what had seen done there, and about who these peasants really were anyway.

What he did want to talk about was the sea-change in his own attitude, him and some of the brothers (a few white guys too but not from the 82nd they, the white guys anyway, were still gung-ho), about how Cassius Clay turned Mohammed Ali was right-“that no Viet Cong ever called him nigger,” that he had no quarrel with those yellow-skinned people, that this red scare thing was a white man’s idea, a white man’s war, taking down poor black, brown, yellow-skinned peoples and making them like it, or trying to make them like it.

Well, when he got back to the "real world" he and a few brothers decided, after hearing their unit might be going back, that they didn’t like it, didn’t like it enough to say something about it, say it out loud, and say it in public. At that point, that 1968 point, especially after Charlie went wild during his Tet, a number of guys, dog soldiers like him, were raising hell, white guys too, but mainly brothers because wouldn't you know the brothers were taking an immense amount of the burden in all those hellish fire-fights. And so they wound up, fistfuls of service combat decorations and all, in that dreaded Fort Bragg stockade for a while before some publicity-conscious general decided that the best thing was to get him and the brothers out, give them undesirable discharges and be done with it. He didn’t like the deal but he took it (he would later fight to change it, get it upgraded when that was possible). He had had enough of Mister’s war, enough of killing, and enough of losing everything he held dear (his Fayetteville girl heeding her army father left him in the lurch too) but he had made his peace, his personal peace treaty with the world…
 
The Ten Point Program

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:[39][40]



1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.


We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME


 

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

The new police brutality law that Congress and the Department of Justice refuse to enforce

On December 18, 2014—in the immediate aftermath of the police killings of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, and Akai Gurley—Congress passed a law entitled the Death In Custody Reporting Act. you can see it here. President Obama signed it… Here's the thing: Our government is refusing to enforce this law. Attorney General Loretta Lynch all but said that the collection of this data, as mandated by law, is a very low priority for her and that she will not push it.  More

 

Now he tells us. . .

Former Fed Chair Bernanke Says Bankers Should Have Been Jailed For ’08 Crash

The former Fed chair told USA Today, “It would have been my preference to have more investigations of individual actions because obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm.” Bernanke did not name any specific individuals he thought should have been prosecuted, though given how intimately familiar he was with the inner-workings of the firms at the center of the 2008 financial crisis, he likely could have.   More

 

Image result for cartoon jail corporate criminalsCorporate criminals cheat because they don't fear jail time. That must change. Now.

The change we seek is simple: Throw corporate criminals in jail—every time one of them breaks the law, every time one of them commits fraud on the rest of us by cheating or covering up. No more slaps on the wrist. No more getting off with a fine, which is typically levied against the corporation rather than the individual criminal. We need to put the fear of prison time into every suit who is even thinking about cheating… The question we really want percolating in the mind of a would-be corporate lawbreaker is this: If I cheat, am I likely to get caught and end up doing hard time behind bars? The only way to make a real dent in corporate crime is to make sure the conclusion they come to is yes.   More

 

 

The Trans-Pacific Free-Trade Charade

You will hear much about the importance of the TPP for “free trade.” The reality is that this is an agreement to manage its members’ trade and investment relations – and to do so on behalf of each country’s most powerful business lobbies. Make no mistake: It is evident from the main outstanding issues, over which negotiators are still haggling, that the TPP is not about “free” trade… It should surprise no one that America’s international agreements produce managed rather than free trade. That is what happens when the policymaking process is closed to non-business stakeholders – not to mention the people’s elected representatives in Congress.   More

 

Forty years of increased productivity = lower wages

Between 1948 and 1973, productivity and compensation went hand in hand. As productivity increased so did compensation. The gap grew during the turbulent economy of the 1970s, and then in the 1980s the gap increased and there was no looking back as wages went down while productivity went up.   While we are bringing more money home than we were 40 years ago, that money does not have the same buying power. Take the minimum wage: In 1967, the minimum wage was $1.40. Today, the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour—which when adjusted for inflation is 12.1 percent lower than it was in 1967… Measured in 2014 dollars, the median male full-time worker made $50,383 last year against $53,294 in 1973, according to new U.S. Census Bureau figures.   More

 

How Did the Democrats Become Favorites of the Rich?

The gulf between the two parties on socially fraught issues like abortion, immigration, same-sex marriage and voting rights remains vast. On economic issues, however, the Democratic Party has inched closer to the policy positions of conservatives, stepping back from championing the needs of working men and women, of the unemployed and of the so-called underclass. In this respect, the Democratic Party and its elected officials have come to resemble their Republican counterparts far more than the public focus on polarization would lead you to expect… the share of contributions to Democrats from the top 0.01 percent of adults — a much larger share of the population than the Forbes 400 list — has grown from about 7 percent of total campaign contributions in 1980 to more than 25 percent of contributions in 2012. The same pattern is visible among Republicans, where the growth of fundraising dependence on the superrich has been moving along the same trajectory… The practical reality is that the Democratic Party is now structurally disengaged from class-based populism, especially a form of economically redistributive populism that low-to-moderate-income whites would find inviting.   More

 

I wrote this in the Dorchester Reporter four years ago. . .

Obama needs to confront ‘malefactors of great wealth’


 

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http://raiseupma.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Join-Campaign.jpgTuesday, October 13

Fight for $15 at the Massachusetts State House!

11am @ Massachusetts State House

LEGISLATION TO PROMOTE FAIR WAGES and Better Working Conditions

 

State House Hearings on:

a bill to create a $15 per hour minimum wage at fast food and big box stores;

a bill to ensure fair scheduling for workers;

a bill to raise the tipped minimum wage; and more.

These potential laws are the next step in our campaign fighting for fair wages and worker dignity in dozens of industries. The Fight for $15 has been racking up victories across the country this year, raising wages and improving working conditions from San Francisco to New York. Now it’s our turn to keep the momentum going. Each and every one of these bills has a chance of being passed, and that’s because legislators are responding to the pressure our movement has put on them. Sign up to attend the hearing and keep that pressure on.

 

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https://gallery.mailchimp.com/6b5886ea0520c2ab620ae443a/images/d17264c7-1609-4890-81ad-5835a8c23cc1.jpgWednesday, October 14 . . .  JOIN US!

Justice Reinvestment Act
Rally and Public Hearing
11am, At the State House in Boston


The Justice Reinvestment Act will improve justice and safety, reduce
incarceration and invest millions of $ to create jobs for struggling families.

The entire Justice Reinvestment Act, S.64/H.1429, will be heard for the first time by the Joint Judiciary Committee. This will include Reducing Certain Low Level Felonies to Misdemeanors; Ending Collateral Sanctions at the RMV;
and Extraordinary Medical Placement (compassionate Release).  Our bill includes a Repeal of Mandatory Minimum Sentences, but that part was heard previously on June 9th.

We hope to capture the excitement and demonstrate the sheer volume of support the June 9th hearing generated. Your involvement is key to the success of ending mass incarceration in our state!  RSVP online HERE

 

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RAISEUP MASSACHUSETTS is also asking for support for its

Campaign To Fund Our Schools and Transportation

 

New revenue is necessary to improve our public schools, rebuild crumbling roads and bridges, make college affordable, and invest in fast and reliable public transportation.  To move forward, the campaign must gather 64,750 certified signatures in 2015 and get at least 50 votes in the state Legislature in two constitutional conventions before going to the ballot in 2018.

 

What Our Constitutional Amendment Would Do

Our proposed constitutional amendment would create an additional tax of four percentage points on annual income above one million dollars. The new revenue generated by this tax could only be spent on quality public education, affordable public colleges and universities, and for repair and maintenance of roads, bridges, and public transportation. To ensure that the tax continues to apply only to the highest income residents, who have the ability to pay more, the one million dollar threshold would be adjusted each year to reflect cost-of-living
increases.

 

To find out more or to volunteer to work on the Constitutional Amendment Campaign see here.

 

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

It’s a sad state of affairs when Stephen Walt, a highly respectable establishment figure from Harvard, is a rare voice in our country’s political class to argue for the importance of “Peace.”  This comes at a time when our permanent War Party spans the mainstream political spectrum from Republican Neocons to mainly Democratic Liberal Interventionists  -- and whose demands for more US military deployment around the world are endlessly trumpeted in the mainstream media. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton agrees with John McCain and nearly all the major Republican candidates that the US should “do more” in Syria – as if it weren’t glaringly obvious that the problem is that we have been doing too much. 

 

http://cdn.theatlanticwire.com/img/upload/2011/04/27/us-middle-east-cartoon.jpgThe latest scheme is the newly resurrected idea for a US-imposed “No-Fly Zone” in Syria.  Clinton supports it. Retired General Petraeus supports it. Liberal columnist Nicholas Kristoff is in favor. The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post are all on board. Nobel Peace Prize candidate John Kerry is said to be pushing for it. The idea is even backed, somewhat surprisingly, by one of the Members of Congress representing Dorchester, Stephen Lynch. What’s not to like? Remember how well that idea worked out in Libya! Thankfully, the new Russian presence in Syria probably makes the No-Fly Zone option unworkable, as President Obama seems to understand.

 

Meanwhile, the “Left” and the peace movement are rarely given any voice in our public discourse. Even in the progressive Bernie Sanders campaign, the issue of peace is at best an afterthought or a footnote. Oddly, the only consistent public voices for non-interventionism we are allowed to hear come from Donald Trump and the libertarian fringe of the Republican Party:  A few days ago, Tennessee Republican Rep. Jimmy Duncan made an impassioned plea on the House floor against wading further into the Syria quagmire; and it took Sen. Rand Paul to point out that the proposed No-Fly Zone “could lead to World War III.”  But mainstream Republicans, who always argue that “government is the problem” at home, seem to believe that military intervention by the US government abroad is the universal solution. Many elected Democrats agree with the second assertion.

 

STEPHEN WALT: Give Peace a Chance

The long march to November 2016 is now well underway… But there’s one important concept about which we won’t hear very much: peace.

Oh sure, it will get mentioned to justify additional military spending or even preventive military action — as in the phrase “peace through strength” — and Republican candidates will try to argue that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton endangered world peace from the moment they took office. But I don’t expect to hear any of the candidates say very much about peace itself or explain why they see it as a central objective in and of itself. There isn’t going to be a serious “peace candidate” in this election. Not even Bernie Sanders, whose website tries to reassure us that he’s no sandal-wearing Vermont peacenik… I suspect it is because we mistakenly confuse a desire for peace with weakness and we assume anyone who exhibits a passionate commitment to peace is some sort of “Kumbaya”-singing idealist who just doesn’t understand how the world works and is therefore not tough enough for the Big Job.   More

 

Top U.S. Commander: American Troops Need to Stay in Afghanistan

The U.S. Army general leading the 14,000-strong NATO force in Afghanistan made a plea on Tuesday to leave American forces in Afghanistan longer to train the faltering Afghan security forces, a move that would require President Barack Obama to scrap his December 2016 timeline for withdrawing the last U.S. troops from the country.  Afghans still “cannot handle the fight alone” without American close air support and a special operations counterterrorism force to hit Taliban leadership, Gen. John Campbell told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “It will take time for them to build their human capital” in logistics and managing their forces in the field, meaning Afghan forces will need international assistance “well beyond this year.” Campbell said he has provided the White House a variety of options on troop strength, but he hedged when asked specifically how many of the 9,800 American troops should remain in Afghanistan and for how long.   More

 

Billions From U.S. Fail to Sustain Foreign Forces

With alarming frequency in recent years, thousands of American-trained security forces in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia have collapsed, stalled or defected, calling into question the effectiveness of the tens of billions of dollars spent by the United States on foreign military training programs, as well as a central tenet of the Obama administration’s approach to combating insurgencies… The American military has trained soldiers in scores of countries for decades. But after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that mission jumped in ambition and scale, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the ultimate goal was to replace the large American armies deployed there.  The push to rebuild the Iraqi Army that the United States disbanded after the 2003 invasion had largely succeeded by the time American troops withdrew eight years later. But that $25 billion effort quickly crumbled after the Americans left, when the politicization of the army leadership under Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki eroded the military’s effectiveness at all levels, American officials said.    More

 

One Day After Warning Russia of Civilian Casualties, the U.S. Bombs a Hospital in Afghanistan

This strike on a hospital in Afghanistan comes days after the Saudi-led coalition bombed a wedding in Yemen that killed more than 130 people. After days of silence from the U.S. Government – which has actively participated from the start in the heinous bombing of Yemen – Ambassador Power finally acknowledged the wedding massacre, but treated it like some natural disaster that has nothing to do with the U.S.: “Terrible news from Yemen of killing of innocent civilians & aid workers. Urgently need pol solution to crisis,” she tweeted… The formula by now is clear: bombing whatever countries it wants, justifying it all by reflexively labeling their targets as “terrorists,” and then dishonestly denying or casually dismissing the civilians they slaughter as “collateral damage.” If one were to construct a list of all the countries in the world based on their credibility to condemn Russia for using this exact rhetorical template in Syria, the U.S. would literally be last on that list.    More

 

Why Bombing the Kunduz Hospital Was Probably a War Crime

Hospitals enjoy special status protecting them from deliberate attack, and they are generally filled with protected persons — medical personnel, civilians, and sick or wounded soldiers, enemy as well as friendly — none of whom may be willfully wounded or killed.

“While hospitals can lose that protection if they’re being used for military purposes, the standard is very high,” says James Ross, the legal and policy director at Human Rights Watch. What if the unsubstantiated Afghan claims about Taliban fighters being deployed at the hospital are true? “Even if this were the case it would have not have allowed for the kind of attacks that struck the hospital.”   More

 

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has published a factsheet on the bombing here

 

Afghan Doctor Slaughter Pulls Back Curtain

Senior U.S. military officers have told Dana Priest of the Washington Post that more than 50 percent of U.S. special forces night raids target the wrong person or house. But that didn’t stop President Obama making them a central tactic in his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, boosting the number of night raids from 20 raids in May 2009 to 1,000 per month a year later… Maybe the attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz will force more Americans to confront the ugly reality of the devastating air war our country has waged across half a dozen countries for 14 years.   More

 

http://www.sott.net/image/s10/215418/full/saudi_isil_cartoon1.jpgWhy the U.S. Owns the Rise of Islamic State and the Syria Disaster

By November 2012, al-Qaida’s Syrian franchise, al-Nusra Front, had 6,000 to 10,000 troops—mostly foreign fighters—under its command and was regarded as the most disciplined and effective fighting force in the field. The CIA’s Gulf allies armed brigades that had allied themselves with al-Nusra—or were ready to do so. A Qatari intelligence officer is said to have declared, “I will send weapons to al-Qaeda if it will help” topple Assad.  The CIA officials overseeing the covert operation knew very well what their Sunni allies were doing. After the U.S. shipments from Benghazi stopped in September 2012 because of the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post there, a CIA analysis reminded President Obama that the covert operation in Afghanistan had ended up creating a Frankenstein monster… If the Bush administration destabilized Iraq in order to increase U.S. military presence and power in the Middle East, the Obama administration has countenanced a proxy war that has destabilized and Syria because of his primary concern with consolidating the U.S. alliances with the Saudis and the other Sunni regimes.   More

 
 

In Boston October 14- Film and Discussion: “WHITE LIKE ME”

DPP Event

http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/.a/6a010535ce1cf6970c01b8d06105e4970c-piFilm and Discussion: “WHITE LIKE ME”

Wednesday, October 14

ADAMS STREET BRANCH LIBRARY

(690 Adams Street), 6 pm

 

It’s the cameras that are new.

It’s not the violence that’s new.

Ta-Nehisi Coates (source)

 

In response to the growing awareness of police violence against African Americans, Dorchester People for Peace invites you to a film and discussion about the unspoken but continuing “white privilege” which underpins race relations in our country. Please join us for an important dialogue with your neighbors. Free and open to all. Refreshments

 

The one-hour documentary film “White Like Me,” based on the work of anti-racist educator and author Tim Wise, explores race and racism in the U.S. through the lens of whiteness and white privilege. In a stunning reassessment of the American ideal of meritocracy and claims that we've entered a post-racial society, Wise offers a fascinating look back at the race-based white entitlement programs that built the American middle class, and argues that our failure as a society to come to terms with this legacy of white privilege continues to perpetuate racial inequality and race-driven political resentments today.

 

(You can share this event on Facebook here)

*Busting The Liberal Myth Of The 1960s Black Civil Rights Movement- A Short Note

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" entry for the Selma to Montgomery (Alabama) marches in 1965. In the mist of time I still say- Alabama-goddam.




Click below to listen to Stanley Nelson speak about his latest documentary –The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution on the Terry Gross show Fresh Air on NPR (Sept 24, 2015)  



Markin comment:

I am on my “soap box” today. (For those who do not remember, or are too young, the soap box used to be the standard platform, literally, that street orators like the Wobblies, Communists, Socialists and, frankly, just plain cranks used to get their messages across in the public square. Yes, I know, before “Facebook,” etc.)

My peeve of the day: I am sick and tired, make that heartily sick and tired, of hearing about the good old days of the black civil rights movement in the early 1960s and about that, admittedly, high-water mark struggle’s place in the American liberal mythology. This coming from black and white liberals alike. I will not even mention the many radicals and revolutionaries who, on this one, seem to have created another one of those never-ending popular fronts with the liberals, and their myths, that they are so keen on trying to consummate on every issue from Afghanistan to health care. And then, presto, case closed on the subsequent less “sexy” saga of that on-going black liberation struggle-the next almost half century of hard racial, class and gender oppression, under various guises, in this benighted land.

I should add that this feeling has been brewing in these old bones for a while but has taken a turn for the worst by some personal social experiences of late that need not concern the reader. More specifically, what has got my body temperature up is a rasher of folk-oriented music that I have been hearing lately. Now this is not a new feeling. In fact during 2008 and the early part of 2009 as American President Obama bathed in the praise and sentimentality of being the first black president, there, seemingly, was not a liberal dry eye in the house to think back to those old days and see “how far we have come”. And brought out the old folk standards about "we shall overcome," "blowing in the wind," and the like, including newer material based on that old liberal mythology. No question that Obama is a child of that civil rights struggle but remember this-he is only one child, one black child. I am interested in the fate of the rest.

I am going, simply for example’s sake, to highlight one song (see lyrics below), Emma’s Revolution’s “Bound For Freedom” (see below) to illustrate my point. Not because it is any worst than some others but because it actually has some good parts, some very good parts (concerning Pennsylvania death- row prisoner and “voice of the voiceless” commentator Mumia Abu-Jamal). But note the frame of reference back to Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery. Key places in the 1960s civil rights saga.

Every left-wing liberation movement needs its musical anthems both to unify its supporters and to carry a broader message to the world, the political world at least. Thus, the international workers movement has long sung the message in the “The Internationale” as a way to draw attention to the class line and to highlight the vices of wage slavery. Other songs of liberation solidarity also come to mind but this little note is not about the vices or virtues of the songs so much as about the limitations of the liberal take on such efforts.

I cut my left-liberal political teeth on supporting the black civil rights struggle when I was nothing but a kid, seemingly, on the road to some bourgeois political career. I did support work, North and South, long before I even got out of high school so I am very familiar with what and what did not get done in that movement. I have also written a number of entries in this space about the qualms I had about various strategies and about various figures, black figures, in the liberation movement. What I have not done is gotten all misty-eyed over it. Not by a long shot. And that is going to be my point here. Plenty of those who also did support work did, and do, get misty-eyed over the experience. As if that time was the end, rather than the beginning of the struggle.

With rare, and seemingly rarer exceptions, the struggles after Selma (1965), or Birmingham (1963) or Montgomery (1956) from the riots in the black ghettos of the Northern cities over many issues, including police brutality by the armies of occupation in the late 1960s, the rise and fall of black nationalism and various social programs connected with those experiences, the systematic elimination of the Black Panthers and other leftist black militants when they moved beyond Uncle Tom politics, and the various “wars on drugs” (read: wars on minorities) that have decimated the black (and other minority communities) are all given short shrift.

Sure, those earlier, mainly southern located, events and movements were the tip of the iceberg, the political high-side in the liberal pantheon. Okay, fair enough. But then let us speak of the liberals’ abandonment of busing as a way to integrate the now resegregated public schools. Look at rates of incarceration especially young black males, unemployment, underemployment, residential segregation. Yes, the “talented tenth” (now, probably the “talented sixth”) has made it. The social basis for liberal social friendships but we are a long, long way from being able to, with a straight face, say that the masses of black people are better off today. So instead of Selma think about Harpers Ferry. Instead of Birmingham think about Fort Wagner. Instead of Montgomery think about Petrograd 1917. We’ll then let the liberals have the old timey songs and faded memories. Just stay out of our way.

*************

©1997 Pat Humphries
Moving Forward Music, BMI
www.emmasrevolution.com

In Montgomery and in Selma and the streets of Birmingham
The people sent a message to the leaders of the land.
We have fought and we have suffered but we know the wrong from right.
We are family, we are neighbors, we are black and we are white.

Chorus:

Here I go bound for freedom, may my truth take the lead
Not the preacher, not the congress, not the millionaire but me
I will organize for justice. I will raise my voice in song.
And our children will be free to lead the world and carry on.

From a cell in Pennsylvania, from an inmate on death row,
Mumia had the courage to expose the evil show.
From the court room to the board room in the television's glare
How the greedy live off poor and hungry people everywhere.

Chorus

Bridge

Here I go though I'm standing on my own,
I remember those before me and I know I'm not alone.
I will organize for justice. I will raise my voice in song,
And our children will be free to lead the world and carry on.

From the streets of New York City 'cross the ocean and beyond
People from all nations create a common bond.
With our conscience as our weapon, we are witness to the fall.
We are simple, we are brilliant,
We are one and we are all.

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program-Seven- A Shop Of One’s Own

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program-Seven- A Shop Of One’s Own 




Click below to listen to Stanley Nelson speak about his latest documentary –The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution on the Terry Gross show Fresh Air on NPR (Sept 24, 2015)  

 
 



“Doc” Jackson (first name William but nobody, including his wife, Lucille, ever called him anything but Doc, so Doc) had been dispensing pills and sundries and notions (not one knew what that mean, including Doc, but it sounded good, good to the tongue, when one said it reading it off the front door sign) at his corner drugstore for over thirty years in that spot at the intersection of First Avenue and Grand Boulevard and Third Street in the high Detroit Southward neighborhood, what some called the “colored section” when he first started out back just a few years after World War II, others, black and white, called “niggertown” showing some contempt or self-contempt in the snarly way that they pronounced it, still others, reflecting the new sociology of the 1960s called it by some seemingly pathological name, “ghetto,”and he called just plain ordinary vanilla home. See Doc had lived over that drugstore of his for all the time that he had been dispensing those pills, those sundries, and those notions. That apartment’s value and an adjacent rented one had helped when money was tight, when things were slow, or when the neighborhood and the times changed. He was proud that he had held on, held on tight.

He had seen some changes, from the high side money coming in during the “golden age of the automobile” when everybody was looking, looking hard to upgrade to a new car every few years (he had even caught the bug going from an old Packard, to a Chevy, to a high-end Buick, the one sitting out in the back of the store just then) to the hard time’60s when they, those bastard black brothers, burned everything they could get their hands on after Doctor King was assassinated, and almost got the drug store and its environs but the neighbors, his black and brown neighbors, had drawn a line in the sand and said, no, no more. And now, he was seeing some very disturbing signs that the town was going to be further devastated because they, as a result of some world oil situation which even he didn’t understand, were going to close Dodge Main, a place where in good times and bad, a lot of the neighborhood worked, or had somebody working.

Worst though, much worst, was that his old clientele was pulling up stakes, or was dying off he hated to admit and so his old seven in the morning to ten at night speedy service of those in need of their medicines (or their liquor, which he carried for those with prescriptions, and those without, but the less said about that the better) and he was being squeezed out, squeezed out by the new chain drugstores, the new one they want to build right on his corner spot. And there was nothing that he could do about it. See, despite what everyone believed, even Lucille, he didn’t actually own the building, the apartments or anything but had leased them from Mister Reed long ago, a good white man who had run the drugstore before him and seen the neighborhood change and seen that Doc was someone who could be trusted to keep the place going. Mister Reed, who had recently died, had a son who, as sons will do, wanted to convert his legacy to cash and was willing to sell out to that Osco Drug chain. So here he was now with nothing much to show for a lifetime of work, of sweat, of service except to rekindle his dream of a shop of his own somewhere, anywhere to close out his days…

*******

The Ten Point Program




The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:[39][40]



1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.