Edifying Debate

An interview with Michael McGehee on Iran

2012-01-06T17:48:00.006-05:00

Yesterday I spoke with MICHAEL MCGEHEE, a writer for the New York Times Examiner ("the antidote to the paper of record") about his article which I found very important on Iran called "For the Times, Iran "threatens" and the U.S. "prepares."

http://www.nytexaminer.com/2011/12/for-the-times-iran-threatens-and-u-s-prepares/

I found this article important because it explains how the mainstream media is selling lies to million person audience in order to justify a military attack on Iran to exploit its oil. In my interview with Michael, we discuss what makes the IAEA report, that U.S. government and mainstream media promotes, including the New York Times, absolutely a farce. We also discuss in Michael's article the stated reasons that government officials have given for military intervention in the "Middle East." These interventions are primarily concerned with exploiting the oil in these countries, despite the technologies we've had for decades that could build industries on renewable energy, instead on non renewable energy that will run out and, thanks to the U.S. & European banks, will precipitate a massive economic crisis if we don't stop our oil dependence. We also talked briefly about Matthew's latest article on the Congo which enumerates human rights atrocities there thanks to the exploitation of natural resources by private American companies. FAIR today has called on readers to write and email the New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane and ask him to investigate and retract the lies in its January 5th article claiming that Iran is a "threat." His email is public@nytimes.com and his office number is 212 556 7652. Call and tell him the New York Times is committing the same errors now that they did in 2004 when they allowed Judith Miller (who was never truly prosecuted for fabricating stories) who reported lies about Saddam Hussein developing "weapons of mass destruction." I just did!!! The only weapon of mass destruction is coming from mainstream American news outlets like the New York Times who support lies intended to justify military invasions of Iran. We have to take a stand and let them know we do not approve of our government's plan to invade yet another country while millions more in this country go without standard education, healthcare, jobs, and affordable housing. About three days following our interview, Michael McGehee provided me with the report proving that the IAEA 'report' used to justify our hostility towards Iran is in fact falsified. This report shows that Amano is basically following U.S. orders by falsifying the IAEA report to claim that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/10/09UNVIEVIENNA478.html -RF.

Challenging Patriarchy: A Full Review of Lydia Diamond's Stick Fly

2011-12-18T01:03:00.002-05:00

Stick Fly is a play about an African American family’s upper class stability. Its biggest drama is concerned with how that stability is shattered by a member of that family who comes to reject the norms on which that stability is based. It is set on the Martha’s Vineyard cottage of the Levay family in 2005. The Broadway version omits the original prologue which has us meeting Kent Levay, the artistically-inclined-aspiring-novelist-son of the family (played by Dulé Hill). In this prologue he comes to a funeral of the famed intellectual James Bradley Scott and meets his daughter Taylor Bradley Scott (played brilliantly by Tracie Thoms). He shares how impressed he is with her father’s work but she is unimpressed. What seems to attract Taylor to Kent is his willingness to listen to her, which we see throughout the play is a need for Taylor. They hit it off and in the next scene where the Broadway version begins, Kent hits it off with Taylor and brings her home. Taylor is in awe of the Levay household. Kent is hoping that his mom, Michelle, will like Taylor and Taylor is hoping likewise. A lot of her energy throughout this play is spent trying desperately to impress the Levay family and “fit in” so to speak. She admires a Romare Bearden painting in the living room. Taylor is a character, like many of us, who is impressed and arguably altered by material items. She comes across a family picture of Kent’s Great-Great-grandfather Whitcomb, “the Great Sea Captain.” Kent tells Taylor he was a shipper, and when Taylor asks “of what,” he says:
“we don’t talk about that. Anyway he saved the mayor’s son from a boating accident. As a reward, the mayor gave him this land on which he built this house, making the Whitcombs the first Blacks to own land anywhere on the Vineyard.”
To this Taylor replies in admiration: “its beautiful.” As Kent and Taylor get to know each other more on the living room couch, we see a young woman enter the kitchen from stage right with groceries to put away and laundry to fold. Kent enters the kitchen and hugs her, whom we come to know as Cheryl (played beautifully by Condola Rashad), daughter of the Levay’s maid, Ellie, who is working in her mother’s place for some reason this weekend. Kent’s older brother Flip (played by Mekhi Phifer) enters the living room and recognizes Taylor, and we see right away that they both recognize and are shocked to see each other for some reason. Taylor seems confused about who Cheryl is, and when Cheryl introduces herself and says “I’m working for the Levays,” Taylor replies: “Oh…you’re the maid” and produces, according to stage directions, a moment of “awkward silence.” This sets up a confrontational relationship between Taylor and Cheryl. Cheryl quickly despises the way that Taylor types her. Taylor is trying to understand the upper class African American family that she is trying to impress and wants to know everybody in this family. By typing Cheryl as “the maid,” Taylor immediately distances Cheryl from the Levay family; Taylor acknowledges the patriarchal structure that she wants to fit into. Cheryl resents this categorization because she wants to be seen more as a human being rather than an occupation. Taylor in this line seems to project her insecurities onto Cheryl, and Cheryl’s words and actions immediately resist this. Cheryl is a character who assumes her humanity and demands that others, like Taylor, see it. She is almost a manifestation of the invisible answer to Taylor’s question to Kent of “what” great great grandfather Whitcomb shipped. We can probably infer that Whitcomb shipped slaves and that his family’s wealth that Kent inherited came as a result of profiting from the slave trade. Lydia Diamond as a playwright seems to be subtly commenting on how upper class stability and prosperity of even affluent upper class Blacks is built on the shipping of enslaved human beings. Human beings that were essentially made invisible for the sake of commerce, and for the sake of the Whitcombs’ wealth and prosperity. Flip is a plastic surgeon and when Cheryl first sees him and asks him about his patients, the stage directions tell us Flip “pushes a couple of buttons on his new, sexy, status phone and starts to put the phone in his pocket.” Kent indulges in the phone and calls it “sweet” and “sexy.” Instead of answering Cheryl’s question about his patients, Flip addresses Kent’s admiration for his phone and shows that he is more interested in profiting from his occupation than in conversing about the humanity of those he works with. Both great great grandfather Whitcomb and Flip Levay men are not so much interested in challenging the colonial economic structure as they are in working within it. Cheryl again presses the humanity issue, this time not of Flip’s patients, but of Flip himself when she is serving the Levay sons drinks and snacks in the living room while they (Taylor, Kent and Flip) play the board game of Trivial Pursuit. Flip talks about how he was followed by a little blonde salesgirl in the Pottery Barn, and Cheryl (whom the stage directions tells us has an “intense and painful crush” on Flip) says to him: “you shouldn’t be harassed because you’re human.” Flip responds to her: “not just a person a well-dressed, well-read, well-traveled person” and seems to miss her point that regardless of how we looks, he should be treated as a human being. Cheryl logically retorts: “so they should follow around a guy who works for, say, the phone company, just not you?” Taylor interrupts so Flip does not directly answer, mainly because she wants Flip to play the game; she later says: “I like the game. You would too if you were invested in winning.” This line is a double entendre as it its referring not only to the literal game of Trivial Pursuit but also the figurative game of social “success” in Western society. The object of “the game” is to develop as much class status and wealth within the materialistic Western society as possible. And more than any other woman in the play, Taylor is most invested in winning a place of approval and acceptance in the Levay family. Kent, however, as the artistic thinker, responds to Taylor in a way that comments on the game and the larger Western society: “it’s trivia…Trivial Pursuit. The pursuit of things trivial.” While he did indulge in Flip’s cell phone and he does play a board game, Kent also understands in a deeper way, how trivial on some level all ambitions for “success” are, which explains his interest as a novelist. When Flip complains that he gets a harder Trivial Pursuit question than Kent, about which South Vietnamese president was assassinated by his generals in 1963, Dad (played awesomely by Ruben Santiago Hudson) enters the living room with the correct answer of Ngo Dinh Diem. He tries to get his point across about Diem however both Kent and Taylor cut him off as if to deny or once again silence the experience of those oppressed cultures in order to try and play “the game.” His point may have been that Diem was a U.S. puppet intended to suppress the revolution in Vietnam against the French. However Dad soon drops his train of thought on Diem when he sees Taylor and charms her. He lets her know of his familiarity with her father’s books, namely, The Bonds of Intellectual Freedom. Taylor tells Dad “the house is beautiful” and Dad turns his attention to Kent saying: “so you’re going to support your beautiful wife writing books now, I hear.” His exchanges to Kent include: “So son, you’re a very talented fiction writer for whom I paid to get a law degree, a business degree, and a master’s in sociology.” When Taylor tries to build Kent up before his dad by telling him that Kent just got a publisher, Dad asks “Random House? Dell?” Kent replies “small” and to that Dad replies “oh. Small…” Taylor sees how Dad insists on exposing the frailty of Kent and changes the conversation to her own pursuits, saying to Dad: “I’m doing a postdoc at Johns Hopkins. Entomology.” Hudson plays the disdain, towards Kent and his career choices, beautifully. He definitely portrays a father who makes a point to let anybody within listening distance know that he is disappointed in his son’s choices and believes he should change them. After the exchange which Taylor calls “intense,” she says to Kent: “you’re shrinking.” Dad later tells Flip in the kitchen, Kent’s older brother about Kent: “the boy’s a fuckup. Hey…I don’t set unreasonably high standards. But I’ve given you boys everything. There’s no need for floundering.” When Kent enters the kitchen and talks only to Dad, Dad tells him:
“its time to step up. You’re about to have a wife, God help you. Maybe start a family? You can’t be out there like you’ve been and trying to find yourself and what not. It’s not about you anymore. [Pulling out his Blackberry] I’ll help you. [scrolling through his address book] Figure out what you want to do with your life and get back to me…I’ll make some calls. But I’m not entertaining this mess about now I’m a writer…Damn boy…man up. Get a job.”
Dad wants Kent to get a lucrative job and make money the exact same way that he did; the way that Kent’s brother Flip has done as a plastic surgeon. Even though Dad appreciates the work of Taylor’s father James Bradley Scott, he cannot envision his own son being able to make a living as a novelist, and dismisses his efforts outright. He expects his son not to find his own way but to find a job for him by making “some calls.” In the third scene of this play is a very interesting exchange between Cheryl and Dad in the kitchen. Before Dad enters the kitchen, Cheryl is on the phone with her mother Ellie, whom we never see. Ellie asks her to ask Dad “if there’s anything he wants to say.” Cheryl says “ok.” When Dad enters and Cheryl tells him that Ellie was talking to her, he also in an indirect way lets Cheryl know that if she wanted to talk about anything she perhaps could. However this scene dramatically changes when Taylor enters. After she enters, when Cheryl says “I don’t know if there’s something you want to say to me” Dad replies “no” firmly, then says emphatically: “I said no. Don’t you have something to do?” Dad is reaffirming the patriarchal structure here, especially now that Taylor has entered the scene. He wants to keep up the appearance that there is absolutely no impropriety in him as patriarch of the Levay family. He does not want to bring any doubt about this role by mentioning whatever he thinks Cheryl wanted to know. Like his son Kent, Dad also has his own weaknesses and frailties, in this case his frailty is fear of being found out about whatever secret he is hiding from Cheryl. In the fourth scene, Cheryl has an interesting exchange with Taylor about her father’s work. Cheryl is able to engage Taylor about her father’s books more specifically than any other character in the play. She says to Taylor: “I liked what he was saying about the economic ramifications of the slave trade. [beat] And how he makes it so specific. [beat] And traces the debt from shippers to traders to banks.” Not only is Cheryl tracing the story written by Taylor’s father; Cheryl is also tracing the history of Kent’s great great grandfather whose wealth, that he bequeathed to three generations, depended on accumulating debt and passing those debts to banks. A debt that is presumably created by turning human beings into objects to be sold and traded as commodities for material profit. Taylor is not interested in engaging Cheryl however about her father’s book primarily because, as she disclosed in the prologue excised from the Broadway version of the play, she is still coping with abandonment from her father. To Taylor, James Bradley Scott could thoroughly articulate the immoral nature of the white supremacist capitalist economy, but could not thoroughly raise his own child forced to live in such an economy. Lydia Diamond is commenting on the role of public Black intellectuals in general via her fictional James Bradley Scott by asking: how could intellectuals care about correcting social structures when they can’t even care enough for their own children? This recalls Norman Kelley’s critique of Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson being “market intellectuals” in his book The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome. He argues in this book that “market intellectuals” profit handsomely by identifying the ills of the white supremacist parasitic capitalist economy, rather than working in a meaningful way to revolutionize such a system. Taylor is a character in Stick Fly who could probably identify her own father as a “market intellectual.” No other character forces Taylor to confront her demons of feeling abandoned better than Kimber, Flip’s white girlfriend.
The fifth scene takes place in the living room, where Dad, Taylor, Kent, Flip, and Kimber are lounging and Cheryl is serving them. Kimber discovers that Flip has been describing her to his family as “Italian” and she makes it clear that she is not Italian, but “straight up WASP.” WASP is white Anglo Saxon Protestant. Kimber is a character that is clear throughout the play about her white privilege. She has no pretensions whatsoever about it. It is also clear that one of her underlying ambitions is to make her material world of white privilege, to those like Flip and Taylor who are not WASPs, more accommodating for them. She catches the interest of Kent when she tells him how impressed she was with his novel: “your imagery is amazing; really out of this world, and the ease with which you segue from one setting to the next. And the landscape, like a metaphor for the fragile state of Michael’s psyche.” Dad meanwhile is trying to get Taylor to finish a story about her junior year in college. In Taylor’s story she is the only Black student in a women’s studies class talking about what makes a perfect society. She asks the class: “is your utopia free of color distinctions?” She says the whole class environment became very racist when “one of the Beckys” said “if it was a utopian society, there would only be one dominant race.” Her professor called her to apologize for the turn the class took and Taylor said that the problem with the class started when no women of color were discussed in a class titled “Feminist Voices of the Twentieth Century.” Kimber responds to Taylor’s story of racism by saying she could be relentless. Taylor says “you can be relentless and keep chipping away at the bullshit, or you can be passive and confused and lose your mind.” Flip interjects that Taylor “lost it,” and asks Kimber and the rest to stop indulging her. He attempts to shift the conversation’s focus away from the racism Taylor’s critiquing by adding: “we’ve all went to good schools.” Taylor insists to Flip that her experience was different from his because him and Kent came from a richer class. Kimber disagrees with Taylor saying how it couldn’t have been much different since Taylor is the daughter of a public intellectual. But Taylor says he was his daughter “just by birth. He had a new family.” An argument ensues between Taylor and Kimber who suggests that Taylor’s plight cannot compare to the inner city kids who suffer from inadequate public education: “there you were at this privileged institution, with your famous dad and your new laptop to soothe yourself, and you’re upset because some stupid sorority chicks are mean to you?” Taylor replies:
“No, Kimber. I was upset because people like you can’t see it. Your inner city kids aren’t supposed to succeed…as long as they can stay ignorant and dependent on you, they won’t have to mess up the white spaces. They let one or two us in who’ve had enough privilege to almost play the game. Just enough to make us feel special. It’s a grand mindfuck. Then Kimmy here goes slummin’ for five minutes and knows all about it.
[To Kimber] You can kiss my black ass is what you can do with you I’m-such-a-Goddman-saint-inner-function-sanctum-of-rebellion-white-liberal bullshit. Don’t you ever come to me like that. You need to get your white ass out of my world, or keep your hippie drivel to your damn self…[mumbling to herself; italicized lines were not in original] Fuckin’ I’ll show Dad what happens when he doesn’t notice me…I’m too deep for cotillions, I’ll fuck black and I’ll show them all, bitch.”
The issue for Taylor is much deeper than the white liberal racism she mentions in this exchange with Kimber. Her base emotions that drive this whole tirade is seen in the lines she says while mumbling to herself. For Taylor, the root issue is being neglected by her father. This neglect is arguably responsible for her becoming attracted to Kent, then seeking approval from the Levay family and now to competing with Kimber for favor in the Levay family. Following this tirade, Taylor excuses herself and goes into the kitchen with Kent who is totally annoyed by her tirade. When he asks “what’s gotten into you,” she replies that Kent did not support her enough. Taylor wants support. She later says her late dad got a place over in Oak Bluffs and she is deathly scared of running into her dad’s family. She shares a story of how her mom asked her dad if Taylor could spend part of the summer with him and he said “it would be too complicated. We’re going to the Vineyard.” Tracie Thoms delivery of this line is especially powerful because at this time she is crying with strong emotion and the stage directions tell us that “Kent pulls Taylor into an embrace.” After his embrace, Kent says he needs a little time by himself and leaves the cottage. Taylor enters the kitchen where Flip is “eating a large piece of chocolate cake with gusto.” We find out in their exchange that Flip and Taylor used to date and that Taylor seemed to want better closure especially when she says: “you never called.” To this eventually Flip replies: “Why do you women do that? Like some damn The Way We Were Sunday flick. You, you’re a beautiful, smart woman, and you’ll lay down with just anyone who’s a little bit nice to you for gumbo and a cheap glass of wine?” Flip knows her weakness of feeling abandoned and consequently being sexually easy as a result of it. He later says referring to Taylor in third person:
“she’s so happy just to be there with me. And I ask her back to my place, really just to talk. ‘Cause I’m thinkin’ she’s…special. But I find that she’s no different. Just so willing to lay down and give herself over, to someone as undeserving as I. I didn’t have to work for it. So yes, I fuck her brains out…and forget all about her. Until this bitter, bitter girl comes home with my brother.”
Taylor says that Flip will never be happy with Kimber and Flip tells her that if she thinks of him when Kent touches her, she’ll have “the most intense orgasm” of her life. Taylor asserts that when she does have that orgasm it’ll be Kent’s name on her lips, “because he knows me. Better than I know myself.” And for the kicker back to Flip she says: “maybe if you weren’t so afraid you’d find that kind of love one day.” While Flip forces Taylor to think about how her abandonment issues cause her to shortchange herself, Taylor also forces Flip to challenge his artificial division between having sex and having a meaningful long term relationship.
The second act of this play begins with Cheryl on the phone with Ellie, asking her why couldn’t another maid work instead of her, especially in light of the revelation here that Dad Levay is not only Kent and Flip’s father. He’s also Cheryl’s. She discovers this on the phone in the presence of Kimber and says to her: “Please don’t say nothing to nobody…” Kimber tries to console Cheryl by telling her that her grandmother’s brother became an outcast by marrying an Irish immigrant: “In my world that’s beyond unacceptable.” Kimber is trying to relate to Cheryl by describing the suffering that her grand uncle faced for marrying a non-WASP Irishman, but as Cheryl tells her, “it doesn’t hold a candle.” Flip calls Kimber into the living room to massage his scalp with hair oil, and Taylor converses with Dad about what’s on her mind. Taylor tells him very directly: “I just find it exhausting never having a space that’s all mine.” Her father never welcomed a space for her the way Dad has for Kent and Flip; plus, in the Levay’s cottage, she is hoping not to run into her father’s other kin that is also not very welcoming. She also shares her love for entomology with Dad, that on some level explains her deep desire for meaningful attention. Taylor’s fascination with studying flies comes from a deep desire to be known and to be studied:
“you can’t just follow a fly around with a video cam, its too fast. Film, even digital, can’t pick up the nuances of a fly in motion. So, we glue a fly to a stick…And we hold the stick in front of a projection screen with three sides, like those Omnimax films, right? And we film his wing adjustments as we project objects coming at him.”
The title of this play comes from Taylor’s need to observe and theorize about a fly’s motion. “Stick Fly” is what Taylor is saying to her specimen in order to observe it. This fascination to observe this fly seems to come from her own personal need for loving attention, which comes from her father abandoning her. Like the fly, Taylor is continually moving to find that place, especially when she tells Dad she’s “exhausted” finding a place. Taylor seeks a place where she is not only noticed but welcomed. The Levay household is one place that just may stick her. This is what makes the truth of the Stick Fly Broadway logo so relevant: it shows a house on the end of a pin holding a yellow strip with a fly. The house in the logo is what pins the strip with the fly down. The house in the play attracts Taylor to essentially stop “flying” and land. Dad does not make the connection to Taylor’s interest in entomology but concludes she’s “freakishly smart.” At the same time Dad talks with Taylor, Flip is talking with Kimber. Diamond shows an interesting similarity between Taylor and Kimber by having both characters in different locations say the same lines at the same time: “I’m not jealous!” Kimber discloses to Flip that she can tell that him and Taylor slept together. Kimber says that she thinks that his brother Kent deserves better. When Kimber also notices that Cheryl’s got “the biggest crush” on Flip, Flip says his most condescending line in the play: “surely you’re not jealous of jailbait?” Flip is a character whose swagger allows him to have sex with women, even when he knows he’s “undeserving.” Kimber tells Flip: “the house, the family, you in this context, it got me.” Kimber is interested in fulfilling the white American dream and its rewards of the white picket fence and two kids. She critiqued Taylor about being “relentless” and like most beneficiaries of this society, she is not interested in the having her acquisition of material gain challenged, even though it came at the cost of oppressing people of color. While she does not talk about it at all, she is a proud carrier of white privilege. Taylor acknowledges Kimber’s white privilege when Dad tells her that the difference between her and Kimber is that Kimber doesn’t care whereas Taylor tries too hard to be liked. Taylor replies: “She’s never had to [want to be liked]. The world stops for women like that.” When Taylor asks if the idea of his family getting “diluted” by Kimber piss him off, he replies: “Don’t you know you know most Black folks got it ‘cause somewhere along the way somebody was raped in the kitchen.” When Dad brings up her dad, she replies: “he tells the white people, ‘you ain’t shit.’ They give him an award. ‘You still ain’t shit.’ Another award. Meanwhile what changes?” Taylor is not only questioning the role of her father; she is also questioning the role of the Black intellectual in American society today as well. Diamond is asking: what are Black public intellectuals doing to change society besides publicly critiquing it? In the second scene of the second act, which is later that morning, Kent surprises Taylor with the galley copies of his new novel in the living room. She notices that his novel’s dedication calls her “the love of my life.” Kimber enters and invites Taylor to go shopping with her: “we’ll be OK if we just talk about clothes and shoes.” Kimber is hoping Taylor will focus on the trinkets of patriarchal society of clothes and shoes, rather than combating the institutionalized racism that exists. Dad told Taylor: “I understand that you can be angry and not crazy. Just be a little more…constructive.” While Kimber is also hoping to smooth out the relationship with Taylor, she is also hoping that this trip can take the edge off of Taylor’s high perception of racism, especially after telling her that she can be “relentless.”
When Taylor and Kimber leave to go shopping, Dad and Flip for the first time identify the key norms of their upper class stability. Apart from Taylor, Dad tells Kent: “you’ve got a handful with that Taylor.” Flip follows with “seems high-maintenance women is a family tradition. That’s why I’m not even trying to…” Kent interrupts at this point, asking “Mom’s not high maintenance. Is she?” Dad answers “No, no. Not if you keep your mouth shut, stay low, and keep the cash coming.” Dad, as patriarch of the Levay family, shows that one key norm to maintaining peace and upper class stability is to “keep [his] mouth shut, stay low, and keep the cash coming.” This norm may work in some respects but not others. Flip thinks the best way to deal with this norm is to date white women, like Kimber, who tells him “we don’t have the kind of thing that makes it OK for me to be jealous.” This “agreement” is a green light for Flip to flirt with any woman he wants, as he demonstrated with Taylor at the end of Act One. Kent appropriately challenges this norm of “keeping [his] mouth shut” when he says “that doesn’t seem fair.” In the next scene, Taylor, Flip, Kent, and Kimber are playing Scrabble. After seeing Flip spell m-o-j-i-t-o, Taylor asks Cheryl to make a mojito. She then spells p-i-t-u-i-t-a-r-y. Kimber claims that her competition is drunk and withdraws from the game. Both Flip and Kent said they’ve tried to call their mother but apparently they haven’t heard from her. Kimber asks Taylor how she got interested in bugs, and Taylor said she was heartbroken about not being invited to a party, and her mother tells her, according to Taylor: “’look, baby, you just have to look at everyone like they’re bugs under a microscope. Like ants. Figure out the patterns.” Flip says “that sounds like a hippie, new-age, psycho Band-Aid.” However this is exactly what Taylor does in her life: she figures out the patterns by getting the fly to stick and by observing it when moving various objects in front of it. She says that advice from her mother worked and she doesn’t think her mother could have done any better because of how difficult it is to raise a little black girl around white privilege. Kimber makes the point that what Taylor went through is not the kind of racism that the kids she’s studied have gone through: “theirs is more institutional, a lack of resources, a general lack of investment from anyone who could make a difference.” Taylor then gives an anecdote about how her mother pulled her from a school because the teachers graded her satisfactory in reading and did not see a need for improvement: “And Mommy says, ‘satisfactory is not Taylor’s potential.’ And that was my last day at that school.” About Taylor’s anecdote Kimber says: “I get that your tale is supposed to be about the struggles to overcome adversity, or something. It’s a bad example. The parent is supposed to be a working part of the school system, to facilitate change.” Kimber in this line belittles the same kind of institutional racism she says that Taylor did not face much of compared to other Black kids, when she calls Taylor’s example of a racist public school system “adversity, or something.” Kimber does not consider the role that institutionalized racism plays in preventing parents from being “a working part of the school system.” This was seen most clearly in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville debacle of 1968 where the white dominated City of New York teamed up with the white dominated United Federation of Teachers to essentially forbid Black and Latino parents from exercising community control over their public schools. And recent mayors including Bloomberg have essentially continued that lack of control. Kimber tries to convince Taylor that she is the exception and because she is the exception, she should stop being so “relentless.” Kimber censors Taylor’s perceptions of racism in ways that mirror her own perceived academic censoring. However unlike the first heated exchange with Kimber, Taylor goes to the other extreme of letting Kimber essentially belittle her experience of racism. This is made complete when Kimber compares Taylor’s experience of racism to the fabricated story of her sister’s experience of being dumbed down because her perceived attractiveness. Kimber changes the thrust of Taylor’s anecdote to talk about her sister in order to leave the specter of institutionalized racism entirely. Kimber’s sympathy of “I feel your pain” comes in the form of her sister being treated a certain way because of perceived beauty. However the two can’t compare; as Cheryl pointed out with Kimber’s earlier example meant to sympathize with Cheryl: “it doesn’t hold a candle.” Not for Cheryl, but for Taylor. Taylor participates in Kimber’s belittling of her own experience when she helps Kimber tell her sister’s story and falsely compares herself to Becky: “Because satisfactory is all Becky needs.” This speaks to Taylor’s desperate need to be loved and accepted. By rectifying her earlier tirade in order to be accepted by the Levay family, she agrees with Kimber. She also agrees with Kimber after Dad told her to be “constructive” in order to fit into the kind of patriarchy which bows to white privilege. She also agrees with Kimber after Kimber was able on some level to seduce Taylor by taking her shopping for material items and divert her attention away from “chipping away at the bullshit.” Instead, Taylor in this second confrontation with Kimber chooses, by Taylor’s own admission to “be passive and confused and lose [her] mind.” Kimber is able to make her point of belittling institutionalized racism after and not before inviting Taylor to go shopping. White characters like Kimber depend on the moral and mental fragmentation experienced by Blacks like Taylor in order to thrive. And Tracie Thoms plays this kind of semi schizophrenia in Taylor, beautifully.
Taylor later pours Kimber tea in the kitchen. Cheryl takes a phone call from her mother and is obviously disturbed by it. Kent and Flip enter the kitchen. Cheryl yells on the phone: “stop…stop! I can’t do this!” When Flip asks for Sleepytime Tea, Cheryl blasts: “You know what. I’m done. You can kiss my ass is what you can do with your tea.” Cheryl is obviously very excited and Kent tries to comfort her, but she pushes him way. The stage directions tell us she is “hyperventilating.” Cheryl says that Ellie told her to ask him something and she did but he didn’t reply. Then she said that Mrs. Levay is calling and wants to talk to Dr. Levay but he won’t. She asks Flip and Kent: “and you two didn’t know?” To Cheryl who is now enraged, they didn’t know “because you don’t think ‘bout nothin’ but yourselves and your damn socioeconomic bantering, and bugs, and relationship dysfunction and shit…the most self-involved, bullshit people.” Cheryl is angry that Flip and Kent did not know that Dad is her father. The calls were ones of urgency from her mother asking that she finally knows who her biological father is. As Cheryl tells the story of how her mother tells her who her real father is, the rest of the entire cast is aghast:
So, this is the thing that’s the craziest. It wasn’t that Mrs. Levay was broken up about a kid who shares her own kids’ gene pool washing her crusty sheets. No, the tragedy was that it got out. She calls my mother, threatens to fire her…calls her out of her name, after Ma’s been quiet about it all these years…and threatens to take us to court for libel. I’m supposed to have a daddy got shot in the Gulf…And you knew…how can you live with yourself?
Flip and Dad ask whether what Cheryl has said is true and he does not deny it. This revelation by Cheryl prompts several meaningful lines from characters that challenge the norm of the Levays’ upper class stability and patriarchy. The first comes from Flip who asks Dad: “but tell me how you did not stop to think about us? While we were sleeping upstairs, you came down here and had your way with the maid? How did you not think about us? Shit.” In the final scene of this play, we see Kent, Cheryl, Kimber, Kent, and Taylor all at the table. Kent compares the previous scene to the Jerry Springer and leaves the kitchen. Flip follows him. He makes another meaningful inference about Cheryl’s revelation:
I just keep thinking of all the stories. How Daddy couldn’t stay in the dorms, or walk in the yard after sundown. How Daddy wasn’t allowed to make his valedictorian speech, or do his residency at Boston. How he got his ass kicked when those guys thought Mom was white. Wouldn’t that make you crazy? Wouldn’t that make you want to stake a claim on anything you could lay your hands on? Shit, even now he can’t play golf where his colleagues do.
Kent seems able to make this inference being the empathetic novelist he is. He reveals that he sees his father as a layered man, who in coping with white racism was trying to “stake a claim” somewhere by sleeping with his maid. Kent sees his father’s conception of an illegitimate child as him reclaiming his “manhood” that was denied to him because of his race. Because he was denied this opportunity, in Kent’s eyes, Dad could finally seize the opportunity to prove his manhood by fathering a child out of wedlock. After realizing the pain of trying to fit into this ideal of manhood has caused Kent comes into himself and more strongly affirms who he is as a man. His father regularly attacked his manhood, and not Flip’s, by dismissing his ambition to be a novelist. However Cheryl’s revelation has allowed Kent to find himself outside the confines of the patriarchy that Dad and Flip closely followed:
All this time, all these years, I’ve been running up under you two. Hating myself because I have no desire to kill deer, or climb mountains, or rate pussy. Dad taught us both that there was something wrong with me for that. And I believed it. I’m fifteen and all I want, just like every other fifteen year old boy, is to have a cute girl like me, maybe get to second base…but I’m thinkin’ I can’t because I’ve got some sort of testosterone deficiency. My daddy made me think that. Why? Because I give a shit about people? Because I don’t put myself first? Because I hear what women say, and actually like them for it? I admire the hell out of you, Flip. I do. You the man. I just wanted you to think the same about me…Dad doesn’t like me because he doesn’t like himself. But it doesn’t matter. That’s his cross. I’m done.
Kent realizes that the ideal his father presented was not real and was an ideal constructed by Dad to cover his paternity to Cheryl, “stay low” and maintain patriarchy. Kent and Flip end up arguing in the living room over exactly Mom’s role in this revelation. Flip believes that Mom played some role in Dad’s infidelity but Kent doesn’t. Kent says about their mother: “She went slumming, got what she was shopping for, and spent the rest of their lives punishing Dad for it.” Kent resents Flip’s simplistic take: “It was cruel. It was wrong. And if he’s really got you convinced that’s the rules, you’re gonna be fucked…or I guess you’ll marry some poor passive white girl with self-esteem issues and torture her.” Kent later punches Flip when he discovers that Flip, like Dad, slept with Ellie. In the kitchen, Cheryl asks Kimber why she loves Flip and she replies: “I want to have the babies of the man I love. They’ll come out whatever color they come out, and I will love them because they will be my babies. You can’t know this. But you will. You will fall in love one day, and you will know this.” At the end of this scene is a final reconciling between Cheryl, Kimber and Taylor.
In the fifth and final scene of the play, Cheryl confronts Dad:
I was really cute. And you couldn’t see me, and love, me, and want me? How come you couldn’t see yourself in my eyes? How come you couldn’t feel like you was put here to protect me?...But I just didn’t matter? And you still don’t see me. Me. Me. Your daughter. The first man who loves you is supposed to be your father. You were supposed to love me first. And best. And how can anyone ever love me right if you couldn’t love me first? And I’m thinkin’ I’m mad at the white girl, ‘cause she took my men…but she didn’t…they just don’t see me. And I’m thinkin’ I don’t like Taylor ‘cause she trying so hard to be seen. But I don’t like her ‘cause she like me. She got the same…holes in her. But all this time, it was you. I deserve to be seen.
Cheryl speaks for the thousands of Blacks who worked as menial slaves, including those who were shipped without thought of their humanity, when she demands to be seen by her biological father. She blames this for hers and Taylor’s low self esteem more than she blames institutional racism. She is expressing her innermost emotions when in anger she calls Kent and Flip superficial, by not seeing how their patriarchal, leisure-based upper class privileges requires rendering those below to not be seen. She is hoping by her revelation and her telling her father that she deserves to be seen that she will upset the norms on which the Levay patriarchy is based, namely the norms that says that those servant classes under them are rendered invisible. Cheryl understands that part of why Dad’s paternity was ignored was because her mother is the maid. Cheryl is hoping that the love for his daughter will prevail over any class distinctions and he will defy “staying low” and defy the patriarchy in order to see her. But we see that he doesn’t. When Dad tells her he doesn’t know what she wants, Cheryl replies: “then I feel sorry for you.” She feels sorry that Dad has essentially bought into American patriarchy. Taylor tells Dad “She wanted you to say, ‘I’m sorry…I love you…I’m here for you.” She then asks Dad Levay the question she always wanted to ask her own father: “how is it someone who’s supposed to be a genius, who’s supposed to have such a capacity for understanding the workings of the human mind, could treat family like this? What kind of sickness lets you just cut the inconvenient pieces out. I just want to know.” Dad eventually replies: “It has something to do with manhood and self-preservation, and struggling to prove yourself all the time.” Dad and Flip plan to leave, but Taylor insists to both men; “you all need to stay!” Then she says: “Please don’t leave me.” Kent restrains her, saying “It’s not your fight!” The stage directions tell us that Kent pulls Taylor into his embrace and soothes her. Dad and Flip argue over Dad’s jabbing comment Kent and Dad ends up explaining his actions:

“There isn’t a single one of you that hasn’t kept secrets or made mistakes. So you kids think carefully if you want to start throwing stones up in this house. Pretty much from the second they bring you ingrates home from the hospital, every waking moment is spent trying to keep your asses safe and provided for. [to Flip] are your teeth straight? I did that. [To Kent] Did you get any degree from any school that you wanted? I followed the rules. I worked hard. I supported the household. I gave you everything. You are equipped. [To Cheryl] Even you. That was my time, my money, my choices. I tell you what, you go out there and find me a mind who hasn’t made mistakes, then you judge.”
The stage directions tell us that Dad later “looks at Cheryl, starts toward her and then backs away. He shoulders his duffle bag. And, without looking back, walks out of the door.” He justifies his rendering Cheryl and all others who are below his class as invisible. He justifies not recognizing Cheryl as a daughter the way she wanted. Kent tells Taylor even after learning about her tryst with Flip that “life is going to be a lot easier, for both of us, if you’ll just accept that I’m not leaving. Ever.” The play ends with Taylor asking a question that more or less defines her character: “do you think they liked me?” She, unlike Cheryl, is hoping to fit into the patriarchal system that renders menial workers like Ellie and Cheryl as invisible. It is a system that allowed Dad to see Ellie as a sexual object to be conquered in order to redeem one’s so called manhood. It is also a system that allowed Dad to see Cheryl as nothing more than a mouth to feed in order to keep the secret of his paternity to Cheryl hidden. In Stick Fly Lydia Diamond is making profound statements about ultimately the need to challenge patriarchy through Cheryl’s dramatic revelation. She identifies issues of low esteem in Cheryl and Taylor coming not so much from institutionalized racism, but more from abandonment by fathers who do not critique the patriarchal society in which they live. A patriarchal society that was based on the “shipping” of human beings whose humanity had to be denied in order for the colonial economic colonial system to thrive.
Lydia Diamond’s commentary on the patriarchal system bears important similarities to the patriarchal system presented in Lorraine Hansberry’s screenplay The Drinking Gourd. The play, according to Hansberry’s former husband Robert Nemiroff, was trying to understand the thinking of the white male master, or white male plantation owner. She explored what it meant to have a mentality that sought to maintain the ignorance of the enslaved. The play’s main characters include the master, Hiram and his son Everett who is trying to convince his father that the only way to keep his plantation running is to increase the number of hours per day his slaves work. The play takes place at the eve of the Civil War and Hiram disagrees with his son. Hiram is convinced that to increase the number of hours of work per day for the slave will only increase the number of runaways they’ve suffered and thus cause the plantation to suffer more. However Everett convinces his father to hire more overseers in order to ensure his increased work output. Everett hires the overseer Zeb who is a poor white farmer. In his first scene Zeb is arguing with his Reverend about the morality of slavery. When Everett asks if Zeb would consider being an overseer despite its inhumanity, Zeb ignores his Reverend’s advice and resolves to be an overseer on Hiram’s plantation in order to provide for his children.
In Robert Nemiroff’s critical background of this play, he writes how Lorraine Hansberry showed how plantation economies towards the Civil War focused on the production of slaves more than they did the production of cotton. Everett was a character who, by hiring Zeb and by proposing the increase in the number of hours worked per day, was more interested in producing slaves than in producing cotton. Hannibal is a slave on Hiram’s plantation who is defying rules of patriarchy by learning how to read. His mother Sarah who is a sort of mammy to Hiram, is trying to secure a place with Hiram for Hannibal to be a house slave. However Hannibal tells his mother he would rather runaway than be a house slave. Unfortunately, Hannibal is caught learning how to read from Hiram’s youngest son Tommy. His eyes are gouged and Hannibal is blinded. In The Drinking Gourd, Everett represents progress which means keeping the patriarchal system intact. In Stick Fly, Flip represents progress which also means keeping the patriarchal system intact. While Sarah wanted to keep the patriarchal system intact so her son could have a role in it as a house slave, Hannibal entirely rejected this system and sought to undermine it by joining the runaways. By blinding Hannibal, Everett and Zeb confirm their making of Hannibal invisible and they hope that he sees himself as such as well. Hannibal was blinded because he wants to read. He will use his knowledge to read in order to navigate the world outside of Hiram’s plantation in order to challenge it and undermine it. Cheryl’s ability to read is part of what leads her to challenge the Levay household. She understands the importance of being loved, receiving attention. She reads and appreciates the point in James Bradley Scott’s book about the debt due to slavery being passed to shippers then bankers and ultimately takes a position that critiques the system that builds debt by rendering indigenous and African bodies invisible and consequently inhumane. Hansberry’s story ends with all of Hiram’s skepticism about Everett’s plan being confirmed. The last scene of this screenplay has Hiram’s enslaved including Hannibal running away with guns, ultimately undermining Hiram’s patriarchal structure. Hansberry seems to show how Everett’s insistence on creating slaves rather than cotton precipitated the fall of his father’s plantation. The last scene of Stick Fly has Dad looking at Cheryl and choosing to continue not seeing her and continuing patriarchy. Diamond ultimately seems to be saying that whether its run by a white plantation owner or whether its run by a Black intellectual neurosurgeon: a kind of patriarchy that renders any human being invisible needs to be weakened if not destroyed. –RF.

my interview with Liza Mundy about Michelle Obama

2011-12-16T20:46:00.007-05:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure of talking with Washington Post reporter Liza Mundy about her 2008 biography of Michelle Obama entitled "Michelle." This book was researched and completed before the Obama inauguration. I loved reading this book and I loved my conversation with Liza Mundy. The book really helped me appreciate the ambition of Michelle Obama. The two major moves in Michelle Robinson's life came about as a result of her writing letters. This is before email became popular in the nineties. She wrote a letter to Sidley Austin when she was in Princeton. It was because of this letter that got her in their Chicago law firm where she met her future husband. While at Sidley Austin, she wrote a letter to Valerie Jarrett, who worked in the Daley mayoral administration who was so impressed with her letter and her conversation, that she invited Michelle Obama to work with her in the Daley administration. Michelle Obama's letter writing is a testament to the importance of reading and writing in the lives of African Americans. Michelle Obama is a descendant of an enslaved people who were persecuted for learning to read, in order to remain psychologically enslaved and enslaved by law. Michelle Obama, however, uses her free will ability to read and to write to advance herself and break the gender norms of domesticity that much of her female descendants were proscribed by. I agreed with Mundy's point in this biography that Michelle Obama is a "radical integrationist" and I am interested in how her role as this is changing American society. Most of all I appreciate how Liza Mundy's writing of Michelle Obama shows how she is so much greater than the domesticated First Lady role that mainstream America wants to proscribe her to. Michelle Obama is much bigger than the role she plays as First Lady. I hope this interview and Liza Mundy's book is a testament to this. -RF.

reflections on the 2011 AUDELCOS

2011-11-15T15:11:00.005-05:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the 2011 AUDELCO awards. AUDELCO stands for Audience Development Company, and was founded in 1973 by Vivian Robinson as a way to consistently recognize outstanding work in Black theater. The play that gathered most AUDELCO awards this year was Charles Smith's play KNOCK ME A KISS. It picked up eight awards including best dramatic production of the year. This is a powerful period piece set in 1928 that focuses on the marriage of Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois, and poet Countee Cullen. This was a production of the New Federal Theater and Creative Arts Legacy from Chicago. I was grateful to see a performance of this play around this time last year and what impressed me most about this play was how sympathetic the character of Yolande was to me. I was able to relate to her ideas about marriage requiring stability but more than anything, I was able to relate to her in the second half of the play when she feels shame for following society's standards about marriage and how that limited her options in ways that it didn't limit Countee's. Knock Me A Kiss was a powerful play for me because it is set in the same year that a play that I wrote is set in: 1928. And it deals with similar issues of marriage and fidelity to one's partner and one's profession and how the two interact. I hope this play gets a very important new life.

Congratulations to all 2011 AUDELCO award winners: lighting design, Shirley Prendergast for KNOCK ME A KISS; for set design, Anthony Davidson for KNOCK ME A KISS; for costume design, Ali Turns for KNOCK ME A KISS; for sound design, Bill Toles for KNOCK ME A KISS; for director of a dramatic production, Chuck Smith for KNOCK ME A KISS; for choreography, Tracy Jack for IT AIN'T NOTHIN' BUT THE BLUES; for playwright, Charles Smith for KNOCK ME A KISS; for supporting actor, Andre Holland for THE WHIPPING MAN; for supporting actress, Marie Thomas for KNOCK ME A KISS; for outstanding female performance in a musical, Toni Seawright for THE WIDOW AND MISS MAMIE; for outstanding male performance in a musical, Tommie Johnson for THE WIDOW AND MISS MAMIE; for outstanding musical director, Ron Granger for THE WIDOW AND MISS MAMIE; for outstanding musical production, IT AINT NOTHIN BUT THE BLUES; for outstanding ensemble performance, the cast of PLAYING WITH HEINER MULLER; for best solo performance, Stephanie Berry for THE SHANEEQUA CHRONICLES; for best lead actor, Andre De Shields for KNOCK ME A KISS; for best lead actress it was a tie: Sanaa Lathan for BY THE WAY MEET VERA STARK and Kimberlee Monroe for NOBODY KNEW WHERE THEY WAS. For best drama, KNOCK ME A KISS.

Congratulations for Jackie Jeffries for her getting AUDELCO'S Board of Directors Award. I had the pleasure of seeing the play Jackie produced called A SEASON IN THE CONGO written by the late great Aime Cesaire. This play bears so much relevance to the tragic ousting of Gadafi that took place earlier this year. Cesaire chose to dramatize a leader with strong popular democratic appeal who was ousted by the U.S. because he would not participate in the U.S. exploitation of African resources. I applaud Jackie Jeffries' choice to produce this important play in 2010 to shed light on how our foreign policies continue to undermine the sovereign rights of other nations. I will continue to support Jackie's powerful work.

I am grateful to see the legacy and vision of Vivian Robinson continue with the AUDELCO awards and I hope that despite our government's very repressive austerity measures, we will still have Black theater to celebrate for years to come. I hope we will put in the work needed to protest military occupations across the world and lobby as a citizen for more funding for arts education in school. -RF.

(PHOTO OF THE CAST OF KNOCK ME A KISS, clockwise from top left: Marie Thomas who played Nina Du Bois, Erin Cherry who played Yolande Du Bois, Sean Phillips who played Countee Cullen, and Andre De Shields who played W.E.B. Du Bois, COURTESY OF WEBSITE: http://www2.journalnow.com/entertainment/2011/aug/04/wsmet03-knock-me-a-kiss-sparkles-as-cast-shines-ar-1267554/)

A Brave Martyr of the Negro Revolution: A Full Review of Katori Hall's The Mountaintop

2011-11-11T17:11:00.004-05:00

A BRAVE MARTYR OF THE NEGRO REVOLUTION: A FULL REVIEW OF KATORI HALL’S PLAY THE MOUNTAINTOP IN THE CONTEXT OF THE PRISON LETTERS OF GEORGE JACKSON

(WARNING: This review explains the whole story of this play so if you do not want to know the whole story because you plan to see this play and you want to be surprised, please don't read this review)
In her play The Mountaintop, Katori Hall presents a very sympathetic portrayal of Martin Luther King, Jr. on his last night alive. Her stage directions tell us: “Lights up. Night. April 3, 1968. Room 306. The Lorraine Motel. Memphis, Tennessee.” While none of us actually know what exactly went through the mind of Martin Luther King the night before he died, it is obvious that the literary imagination of Katori Hall in producing Martin Luther King is one that contains his most important political message of anti imperialism. In about one hundred minutes, all of which take place in a hotel room on stage, we learn so much more about Martin Luther King Jr., namely his mortality but also the brutal world in which he loses his mortality. The play assumes a knowledge about the influence of Martin Luther King Jr. on American society and captures important and threatening words and messages King conveyed, mainly his growing critique of American imperialism. In fact, King’s first words are his reading his own speech saying: “Why America is going to hell…America you are too ARROGANT! [caps in Hall’s original]” This is a direct reference to King’s April 4, 1967 speech at the Riverside Church where he condemns America for killing people of color in Vietnam. He later said in this speech: “the world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of Vietnamese people” (Washington, ed., 239). His speech was so controversial that he was killed exactly one year following this speech on April 4, 1968.
Hall chooses to begin her interpretation of King with this utterance of “America you are too ARROGANT!” He then calls room service and asks for coffee. Soon, a maid Camae, arrives, whom stage directions tell us is “a beautiful young maid.” When she comes in the room and sets the tray on a table downstage from her entrance, and bends down, King “appreciates his view.” Hall shows King as a man who is weakened by a woman’s physical beauty. This is one of known human foibles of King that made up this brilliant thinker and intellectual. Camae tells King “shame I ain’t get a chance to see ya tonight. I heard you carried on a storm up at Mason Temple.” Katori Hall told many news outlets that her own mother, Carrie Mae, was planning to see King on the night of his actual April 3rd speech at Mason Temple. She did not get to attend after talk of a bomb threat. In Camae we see important connections to Hall herself. Through Camae, Hall provides a living breathing character who can more directly attest to the strength of that speech. When King asked how Camae knew about this speech, she replies, “Negro talk strike faster than lightnin.”…I would like to have seen that. Somethin’ to tell my chiren.” We see a desire to have been there on April 3rd, 1968, by the real Carrie Mae like the Camae in the play.
King is impressed by Camae’s choice of cigarettes: Pall Malls. In fact , before Camae even arrives, we hear him yelling outside his motel room to Ralph Abernathy for some Pall Malls. When King sees Camae taking out a pack of Pall Malls, he is impressed. He coaxes her to smoke one with him: “just one. Til my friend come back with my pack.” Camae replies: “you sho’ll do try hard at it,” and joins King in a smoke. They talk. Camae tells King it must be “grand fun” to preach the way he does, then she adds an exclamation: “Must be muthaf—kin’ grand to mean so much to somebody. Shit, GODDAMN must be grand. (Beat) Where a needle and threat to sew up my mouth? Here I is just a cussin all up in front of you, Dr. Kang. I cuss worser than the sailor with the clap…Fallin’ straight to hell.” King replies “No ma’am, ‘cordin’ to your face, you done fell straight from heaven.” Camae replies saying “You lil’ pulpit poet you. I likes you.” King replies to that: “I likes you, too.” The phone rings and its King’s wife, Dr. Coretta Scott King. King converses yet as Camae tries to leave, he motions for her to stay. When King finishes, Camae says: “She’s beautiful. Yo’ wife. I seen’t her on the tv down at Woolworth’s, too. Coretta Scott K—“ but before she finishes the “King,” King interrupts, according to the directions, in a correcting way, with “Mrs. King.” Here Hall introduces the class difference between King and Camae here. Before Camae gains any wild notions of familiarity with Dr. King himself, he makes sure to dispel them by reminding her that his wife is Mrs. King, not Coretta, to Camae. Hall’s King in an extremely subtle way reminds Camae not to expect their encounter to last more than that night. And according to the play and to history, it really doesn’t. Hall in an important way shows King’s upper class status as a trained intellectual who makes sure he does not let the status of working class African American affect what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has described in Righteous Discontent standards of class respectability. In King’s mind, if Camae is familiar enough to call Mrs. King Coretta, then she might be familiar enough to tell others about King’s weaknesses with her which, in King’s mind, may in fact be a familiarity too threatening to the causes that King was fighting for. However Hall shows us that later that Camae has a strong passion for fighting the race and class oppression that King is fighting against.
King asks for Camae’s opinion on a speech he gives and his looks. After he looks in the mirror, he tells her “I done got to looking old.” When King asks Camae whether women prefer men with wrinkles, Camae chooses to mock King by telling him: “I don’t. I likes ‘em young and wild. Like me.” When King says “I used to be young and wild myself,” Camae replies “you a preacher. That’s part a’ y’all job requirement. How you know what you ain’t supposed to do if you ain’t done it, yaself? Folk won’t listen to you otherwise. That what I call ‘work experience.’ More than qualify ya for the position.” King asks Camae for another cigarette and Camae repeats her refrain, “you SHO’LL try hard at it.” As she prepares to leave one more time, King returns her newspaper to her, and notices that the date on it reads “April 4th.” When he asks her how she got the next day’s newspaper, Camae “shrugs” and says “Tomorrow already here.” Hall is obviously at this moment playing with time and using Camae to do so. In her mind while she was writing this, Camae represents for her, like her mother, a reservoir for the living embodiment of King. Camae in this play blurs time distinction for King. Camae is by now he’s concluded an unusual guest in his room. King reads the headline of the paper she brings:

“’King Challenges Court Restraint. Vows to March.’ [he says] They got that right! This Mayor Loeb calls himself not allowing these sanitation workers to march (to himself). Over my dead body. (reading) ‘Yesterday two U.S. marshals sped across town to serve the Negro leaders with copies of the order. They found Dr. King and four other defendants at the Lorraine Motel...the city said it was seeking the injunction as a means of protecting Dr. King…We are fearful that in the turmoil of the moment, someone may even harm Dr. King’s life…and with all the force of language we can use, we want to emphasize that we don’t want that to happen…” (Chuckles to himself) Wish the mayor had jurisdiction over air planes, too. You know, Camae, somebody called in a bomb threat on my place from Atlanta to Memphis? Thank God they didn’t find one.”

To this Camae concludes “civil rights’ll kill ya’ fo’ them Pall Malls will.” Following this, thunder strikes, and King puts his hand over his chest. The stage directions tell us he begins to breathe hard. The thunder is a shock not only to King but also to the unsuspecting audience member, which helps, on some level, for the audience member to feel some empathy for King and the growing fragility of his life. Hall is rightfully calling into the question the Memphis mayor’s promise of security, especially when at this point his life has been threatened in so many ways. Camae tells King that he should not be scared of a “lil’ lightnin.” When King is about to tell Camae what he thinks the thunder really sounds like, Camae interrupts and says the thunder sounds like “fireworks.” Instead of countering this simile, King agrees and spares her his concerns about the real threat on his life. Camae says: “Mama used to take us on down to Tom Lee Park to see the fireworks every Fourth of July.” When King says “Independence Day,” Camae replies “That right, y’all bougie Black folk call it Independence Day. I can’t seem to quite call it that yet.” Here Hall again presents the class difference between King and Camae here again. By calling King “bougie” Hall lets us know that Camae is definitely from the working class ranks in a closer way than King is. King then tells Camae: “You sho’ll is pretty, Camae.” Camae replies: “that ‘bout the third time you done tole me that.” We see how Hall shows again that noticing the beauty of women was one of King’s main preoccupations. When King feels self conscious about this, Camae replies: “Shuga, shush. You just a man. If I was you, I’d be starin’ at me, too.”
He later has an important debate with Camae about the utility of the tactic of marching in the fight for Black liberation. When King says that Negro folks done seemed to have lost their manners in Detroit, Camae says that if that is the case, she needs to move up there. Camae says that “walking will only get you so far, Preacher Kang.” King replies, “we’re not just walking; we’re marching.” Camae then replies: “whatever it is, it ain’t workin.” King says its not working because of “trifiling Negroes who call themselves using a peaceful protest to get a free color television…We’re marching for a living wage…not a damn color tv! It just gives these police an excuse to shoot innocent folks. Like that boy…that 16 year old boy they shot. Last week? (quietly to himself) Larry Payne. Larry Payne. Larry Payne.” Hall powerfully shows the critique King makes against rioting Blacks who ruin his cause when they try to steal material items. This is an incredibly sympathetic King. Hall’s King wants all Black people to relinquish material items for the greater cause of social justice. He finishes to Camae: “Well, we back [in Memphis] and we gonna do it right this time. So Larry Payne won’t have to have died in vain. Douglas Valentine writes that the day King arrived in Memphis on March 28, 1968, then Governor of Tennessee Buford Ellington called out the Tennessee National Guard. At 2PM that day, Larry Payne, a black high school student was shot and killed by Memphis cops (DiEugenio, ed., 515). The policemen claimed that Payne was attempting to loot a service station on South 3rd Street, and that he attacked them with a butcher knife. We have heard similar falsified reports by police justifying their brutality and murder of unarmed Black men. This, according to Hall, is a murder that King feels on some level responsible for. He is marching with sanitation workers so that their cause is not lost. King talks about how much he feels attacked by the mainstream media. When he hands her a cigarette and she takes it, he notices how she inhales and says: “you smoke like a man.” Camae replies: “you smoke a like a fruit,” to which King says: “aww, Camae don’t use those kinda words…” Camae replies: “what, you root for the fruits?” King says: “indeed I do. Alla God’s children got wings.” We see a side of King that is sympathetic towards gay rights, like his wife faithfully was, throughout her life. We get small clues about who Camae really is throughout this play. When Camae teaches King the way she thinks one ought to smoke, “like its going out of style,” she says she wishes she could take a picture of it. King then asks her if she is with the FBI, to which Camae replies: “Naw. Something bigger.” This is yet another clue about Camae’s identity. Camae tells King if he wants to lead the people he has to smoke like the people. We see the intimacy growing between them in this hotel room. King teaches Camae about the very personal ambitions he has for more rights for sanitation workers. And Camae teaches King how to break the mold of upper class respectability in order to accomplish his ambition of acquiring rights for sanitation workers. When Camae says “walkin’ will only get us so far,” King replies by saying “killin’ will get you hung.” King advocates a more moderate approach in the face of wanton white racist violence. Hall shows us a leader who is not willing to see violence as an effective tactic to fight white racism. Hall shows King breaking class norms and gender norms of respectability most strongly when King directly asks Camae “if you were me, what would you do?” Hall shows how King is challenging the traditional patriarchy of the ministerial organization he belonged to, which was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), by showing genuine interest in a woman’s ideological opinion. We know from Barbara Ransby’s biography of grassroots organizer Ella Baker that King like other SCLC ministers had problems seeing women in roles other than secretarial. Ransby writes:

A rhetoric of racial equality marked the public pronouncements of SCLC leaders, while old hierarchies based on gender inequities endured within their ranks. Baker refused to accept the situation in silence. She criticized ministerial leaders who came to meetings late and left early, disregarding the inconveniences they caused for the female clerical staff. They expected the women workers to cater to them, Baker complained. Although she never publicly named names, Baker also alluded to unprincipled sexual behavior on the part of some male ministers involved in the movement. She confided to one researcher that certain SCLC ministers would come into the office in the afternoon "after spending the morning at some sister's house doing what they shouldn't have been doing... you see, I know too many stories." The ministers' arrogant assumption that they stood above the moral rules they preached to others cost them Baker's respect as ministers and as men (Ransby, 185).

By showing King’s interest in what Camae would say, Hall shows how King challenged the traditional hierarchy. Yet we know this was motivated on some level by King’s physical attractiveness to Camae. However this raises the question of whether his motives was genuinely softening her to him, or genuinely wanting to know her ideology on this matter of fighting for racial justice. In order to show him what she would do, Camae asks to borrow King’s jacket and to wear his shoes. She then preaches a sermon reminiscent of one by Mother/Sister in Marcus Gardley’s play Every Tongue Confess. The most compelling part of this sermon is that draws most audience attention is the very end. This sermon is also reminiscent of the one by Meridian Henry in James Baldwin’s Blues For Mister Charlie. It deals with the question of how to deal with white racism most directly. In it Camae preaches:

“We have gathered here today to deal with a serious issue...HOW do we deal with the white man? I have told you that the white man is our brother. And he should be treated as such…But it is hard to do this when our brother beats his fist upon our flesh. When he greets us with “Nigger” and “Go back to Africa,” when he punches us in our bellies swelling with hunger…To this I say, my brethren, a new day is coming. I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired, and today is the day that I tell you to KILL the white man! (sotto voice) But not with your hands. Not with your guns. But with your miiiiiiind! (back to regular voice)”

Camae turns this into a comical moment when she proceeds to curse at the end of this, but the significance of this sermon as a literary piece is not only its theme of how clergy teach Blacks how to cope with white racism, it is also significant because this is exactly the message that George Lester Jackson shares that the only way to kill the violence of white supremacy on the lives of Black people is to use one’s mind. To sharpen one’s consciousness. However this important message becomes lost in the comedy that Camae plays up when she curses at the end of this sermon.
King begins to sympathize with her message of fighting back the forces that violently try to stamp out self-determination of Black people. Camae says “last time I heard you was preachin’ ‘everybody the same.’ Negro folk. White folk. We all alike.” King chooses to explain this by saying “we all scared. Scared of each other. Scared of ourselves. They just scared. Scared of losin’ somethin’ that they’ve known their whole lives. Fear makes us human. We all need the same basic things. A hug. A smile.”
King and Camae end up in a well written, well performed, dramatic dispute about how Camae delivered her sermon. This exchange builds the intimacy between these characters. However when Camae asks King how her oratorical skills compare to his, he says “I’m better…Nobody can make it pretty like me. I’ve been doing this for years, darlin.’ Gonna be doin it till the day I die.” When Camae asks if it was good for a woman, King says yes and once again affirms the patriarchal expectations that subjugate a woman’s place below a man’s when it comes to preaching. However when Camae asks if her sermon was good for a man, King replies: “then you’d be Malcolm X.” Camae plays with King and says: “so you callin’ Malcolm X a sissy?” She runs to the room door, opens it, and yells outside the room that Martin is calling Malcolm a sissy. Camae is playing on the supposed feud between the two. She tells Martin that “God liked Malcolm X. And you woulda liked him, too. He didn’t drank. Smoke. Cuss. Or…Cheat. On. His Wife.” Camae means for this line to sink into Martin. When Camae tells King that Malcolm is in heaven, Martin shows some doubt: “I don’t know, now. He talked a lot of…”Truth?” Camae interjects. To this King replies: “A lot of violence. He had a weakness for violent words. Speak by the sword, die by the sword.” Hall shows a Martin Luther King who believed the mainstream narrative about Malcolm X dying by violence because he supposedly preached violence. Manning Marable’s recent biography of Malcolm challenges this mainstream memory of Malcolm. Camae seems to understand better than Hall’s King, perhaps because of her working class experience, that Malcolm spoke by love when he critiqued the colonial relationship that upholds white racist violence against Blacks. She tells King “speak by love, die by hate. We all have weaknesses, Preacher Kang. I’m sho’ you got yo’ own. Just ain’t never let nobody…know. For what it worth, I know God like you. The real you.” Camae corrects King’s misunderstanding of Malcolm’s murder by saying that Malcolm was speaking out of his love for Black people but died, not by his own hatred, but by the hatred of the powers-that-be that paid mercenaries to kill him because he was threatening their colonial order. George Jackson in an April 4, 1970 letter to his lawyer Fay Stender writes:

We were colonized by the white predatory fascist economy. It was from them that we evolved our freak subculture, and the attitudes that perpetuate our conditions. These attitudes cause us to give each other up to the Klan pigs. We even on occasion work gun in hand right with them. A Black killed Fred Hampton; blacks working with the CIA killed Malcolm X…”

When Camae says “die by hate” she is referring to this betrayal by mercenaries that Jackson discusses. The mercenaries, according to Jackson, gave themselves and Malcolm and Martin, up to the Klan pigs. Mercenaries are those who choose to cooperate with the state in a targeted assassination. By discussing Malcolm’s weaknesses, Camae reduces the magnitude of Malcolm’s strategic use of violence in King’s mind. It is no longer a primary direct cause of Malcolm’s death. Instead it is one of many steps, one of which includes the angering of what Jackson calls the “Klan pigs.” The presence of George Jackson’s writings is especially significant in understanding the gulf between Martin and Malcolm and how they’re being presented by Hall. They represent two different ideologies that strove for the same goal of Black freedom. In the play, Martin faces his death as he is organizing sanitation workers on a strike. Malcolm faces his death as he is about to organize revolutionaries on the continent of Africa against European colonization. Both were fighting for the same goal however within two different streams: a Negro revolution and a Black revolution. In Malcolm’s seminal “Message to the Grassroots” on November 10th, 1963, Malcolm articulated the difference between the two: “revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way” (Marable, 264). What took place since Martin and Malcolm’s deaths in the sixties was in fact a Negro revolution in terms of Negroes being allowed in higher education and public offices like never before. The Negro revolution brought about the end of the segregated buses in Montgomery, the end of segregated bus travel, the end of formal voting discrimination. However this revolution fell short of what Malcolm was trying to achieve in a Black revolution. A Black revolution required a total redistribution of resources and wealth from the current society. Camae seemed to understand the need for a Black revolution in completely securing the rights of Blacks that have been historically discriminated. In a March 1967 letter to his mother, George Jackson writes:

“you know I have grown very, very tired of talking and listening to talk. King and his kind have betrayed our bosom interests with their demagogic delirium. The poor fool knows nothing of the opposition’s true nature and hasn’t the perception to read and learn by history and past events…That nonviolent theory is practicable in civilized lands among the civilized people, the Asians and the Africans, but a look at European history shows that anything of great value that ever changed hands was taken by force of arms…The depressed peoples of the world are very shortly going to grow tired of being wooed and lulled into passivity and quiet endurance by chromium and neon lights…They’ll come out of their coma with a bloodlust and justified indignation for social injustice that will sweep the asphalt right from under the empire builders” (90).

Like Camae, George Jackson sympathizes with the strategic use of violence to fight against white racist violence. She humanizes Malcolm before Martin and reduces him from the stereotype that the mainstream constructed following his death in order to make him appear crazy for wanting to effectively combat white racist violence. Hall continues to humanize Martin when Camae tells him “I don’t like no man wit’ no smelly feet…Who woulda thunk Dr. Kang got stanky feet. Oooo! And you got holes in yo’ socks, too?” King replies: “you make it easy…to make a man forget about it all. About…all…this…” Camae replies prophetically: “that’s what I’m here for.” After hearing another thunder strike, King, we’re told, “stumbles back in a daze.” We then discover he can’t breathe. He seems to be losing consciousness. Desperately trying to resuscitate him, Camae calls him another name, “Michael! Michael! MICHAEL!! Michael, just breathe!” When King slowly regains consciousness, he asks Camae how she knew to call him that: “that is my name. My childhood name. How do you know my real name? My Christian name?” When Camae does not answer directly, he accuses her of being a spy and tells her to get out. The stage directions tells us: “Enraged. King overturns the furniture, searching for bugs he may have glossed over.” Hall shows how concerned King was about being manipulated by the state whom he assumed uses his weakness—an attractive woman—to derail him from his important work of organizing sanitation workers. He tells Camae: “sending tapes to my wife. Tryin’ to break up my family. Tryin’ to break my spirit!” Camae replies: “Preacher Kang, calm down!” He drags Camae to the door in order to push her out but when he opens the door he sees a wall of snow covering the door way. The stage directions tell us: “a huge gust of wind blows in snow that piles at his feet. He lets go of Camae’s arm. He stands in awe. King is now in panic. He rushes to the phone, hears no dial tone, then the stage directions tell us “he backs himself against the wall.” He is apparently at his wits end. He yells at Camae; “How do you know so much about me!?!? Who in the Hell are you? WHO IN THE HELL ARE YOU? The directions tell us that “Camae blows on the end of a cigarette. It lights up. King stands sunned. Looooong aaaaas beat.”
The stage lighting goes from white to lavender in order to suggest a dramatic shift in the story that Hall is telling. It play from now on takes an ironic twist. Camae tells King she is an angel “in the flesh.” King replies: “I’m not going to Hell am I?” To which Camae replies: “Naw. Naw. Naw. Heaven is where we headed…Believe you me I ain’t want this job. First day? Bring over you? The Kang? I ain’t wanna do it. But God been gettin’ these prayers from a littlun named Bunny.” Camae reveals that her role in King’s life is to transition King from the earthly plain to the spiritual plain. The Bunny Camae is referring to is Martin Luther King’s youngest daughter Bernice, who is a preacher based in Atlanta. King then talks about the fear he faces: “I have felt fear…My insides churned and I fought hard to keep them from leaping out of my mouth. You see, a Negro man is not safe in a pulpit. Not even in a pulpit of his own making. Sunday mornings have been the mornings when I am most afraid. Cause in this country a pulpit is a pedestal and we all know that in America, the tall tree is felled first. Tall trees have more wood to born, Camae. We are the sacrifice.” Hall is able to write a King that speaks in the customary metaphors of his memorable speeches. Tall trees are distinguished from other trees because they speak the truth in terms of denouncing imperialist projects, such as the anti-gay legislation that white Americans evangelicals push in Uganda. By typing himself as a “Negro,” preacher, Martin is also affirming Malcolm’s 1963 Message to the Grassroots by suggesting he would rather a Negro revolution than a Black one, which does not fundamentally change the structure, colonial relationship, nor wealth distribution in society, but simply allows more people of color access to it.
Hall shows a very mortal, very human struggle in King when he begins to resist her orders to go with her. Camae says: “Tomorrow. When it time, you gone have to take my hand.” To this King replies: “Tomorrow? But I’m not ready to die.” King fights Camae and God, in order to finish the speech that he quoted at the beginning of this play: “Well, I gots to finish my sermon and I need to be alone to finish my sermon so…you gone have to fly on away.” Camae replies: “Preacher Kang, now you/ gone have to put that down.” To this King issues a reply that George Jackson himself would have made about the inhumanity of the U.S. occupation of Vietnam: “A country that sends its boys to bathe little-bitty brown babies in the blood of our green is headed for a crossroads of conscience.” While he writes and delivers more lines from he wants to be his next sermon, Camae interrupts at each line, once saying: “Preacher Kang, you makin’ my job harder.” Then King replies: “Hard on YOU? What about it bein’ hard on me? On my family? On Corrie? On the movement? HAS GOD THOUGHT ABOUT THAT? [caps in Hall’s original]” Here we see the very real personal battle King has with his own mortality. This is perhaps what makes Samuel L. Jackson’s performance so powerful. As an audience member, I am able to witness and appreciate the very personal struggle King has with leaving his work so soon, leaving his family so soon, leaving the struggle for racial justice so soon. He tells Camae: “We still got work to do. I got more sermons in me, more goals, more…plans!...I wanna make this one a reality! The plan. It’s all in the works. It’s called the Poor People’s Campaign!” After Camae sits and listens to King’s plan to have a poor people’s march on the Washington mall, she says: “Yo men’ll carry it on.” King says: “But I’m the leader of this movement. The head of the body.” To this Camae says: “Well, the body will just have to grow another head ‘cause Memphis is the end of the road for you.” After appealing to her by trying to convince Camae of the importance of his plans, King tries another direction. He points to the plight of society and makes incredibly important connections between the U.S. occupation of peoples of color around the world and the colonized condition of American Blacks inside the U.S.: “how can we fight the war in Vietnam but not the wars against Negroes in our streets? How can we try to put a man on the moon, but not feed starving children in Mississippi? There’s just so much I gotta do. So much I haven’t yet accomplished. So much…I GOTTA FINISH WHAT I STARTED!!” This connection King makes between the oppressed peoples of Vietnam and those in the U.S. is a crucially important one that George Jackson refers to in his June 4, 1970 letter to Angela Davis:

“Do you know the secret police go to great lengths to murder and consequently silence every effective Black person the moment he attempts to explain to the ghetto that our problems are historically and strategically tied to the problems of all colonial people? This means that they are watching you closely…Its no coincidence that Malcolm X and M.L. King died when they did. Malcolm X had just put it together…I seriously believe King knew all along but was holding out and presenting the truth in such a way that it would affect the most people situationally without getting them damaged by gunfire. You remember what was on his [King’s] lips when he died. Vietnam and economics, political economy.”

Katori Hall shows us that this indeed is what was on King’s lips: making connections between the oppressed people in Vietnam to the oppressed people in the cities of the U.S. Despite the power of this important anti-imperialist ambition, Camae, convinces King that her ambition of taking King from the human plane to the spiritual plane is more important. King then says he because he’s had the favor of God this far, that he should be allowed to stay longer instead of leaving the human plane with Camae. Camae agrees: “I done read yo’ blessings file. It bigger than yo’ FBI file and bigga than the Bible. I know it might be hard for you to leave this life…yo family…and all yo plans. But you gone have to pass off that baton little man. You in a relay race, albeit the fastest runner we done ever seen’t. But you ‘bout to burn out, super star. You gone need to pass off that baton…” King still resists. Camae calls, what the directions tell us “a really long phone number.” She first talks to “St. Augustine” and asks him to speak to God, we discover that Hall has genderized God: “What She doing? [Hall capitalizes the “s” in “she”].” Based on the audience’s reaction, this looks like a comic relief of the show. Hall is playing with the audience’s reverence and respectability of God. On one hand Hall challenges the idea that God is so far above that he does not care nor know about the details and inner workings of each of our lives. On the other hand, Hall is supporting the idea that God is compassionate and can take any form, including the form of a Black woman with an attitude who intends to teach humility to an articulate prophet in a Martin Luther King Jr. When Camae tells King that St. Augustine is going to get “her,” God, on the cell, King shows his 1968 sensibilities and asks what a “cell” is. Camae says “it’s like…a phone that ain’t got no cord.” When God comes on the line to speak to Camae, she tells God: “Well, there’s a bit of a problem. He say he ain’t ready. That what I told him. I know…I know…I KNOW.” When Camae gives the phone to King to speak to God, King says:

“you don’t sound like I thought you’d sound. No, no, no. Pardon me, if that offends. I like how you sound. Kinda like my grandmamma…You see I have always listened to you, honored your word, lived by your word…(he lowers his voice) for the most part (raises it back to normal) God, please don’t strike me down for asking this, but…I want to live. I have plans. Lots of plans in my head and in my heart and my people need me. They need me. And I need to see them to the Promised Land. I know that’s not what I said earlier tonight, I know, but…I wasn’t lying exactly (he looks at Camae) I just didn’t know she was comin’ so, so…soon…There have been many a nights when I have held my tongue when it came to You. But not tonight, NOT TONIGHT. I have continuously put my life on the line, gave it all up. Gave it all up for You and Your word. You told me, that I’d be safe. Safe in your arms. You protected me all this time, all this time! Glued a pair of wings to my back, but now that I’ve flown too close to the sun I’m falling into the ocean of death. God how dare you take me now. NOW! I beg of you. I plead—God? Ma’am? God?”
Long heavy silence.

Camae asks King what God said and King said he thinks she hung up. Apparently Hall’s God is not ready to hear or condone non compliance with King. King concluded: “God hung up on me. She forsook her servant.” Camae replies: “She ain’t forsake you neither. She just ain’t wanna hear yo shit. She got the right. She is God, ya know?” King and Camae descend into a playful pillowfight. Here we see what an hour within a room does for physical intimacy between King and Camae. The directions tell us: “he finally somehow pins Camae onto her back. He is on top of her. They stop. Gazing into each other’s eyes. Out of breath. A bit sweaty.” King soon says to Camae: “Hold me.” The next stage directions tell us: “Beat. King’s eyes well with tears and this strong grown man dissolves into the child no one ever saw. He slides down on top of her. Crying. Crying his heart out. Sobbing. And Camae holds him. And rubs his back as if he were a child.” Here King seems to realize his own mortality at this moment. Especially when he tells Camae: “I never wanted to do this. I just wanted to be a minister in my small church.” We know this is true, especially from Timothy Tyson’s biography of Robert F. Williams, which tells us that E.D. Nixon was largely responsible for recruiting Martin Luther King to preach at the Montgomery Bus Boycott (116). Camae shows an understanding of this however tells King clearly: “when your maker calls you, you must heed the call.” To this King says: “I just wanted to be a minister. That was enough. That was enough…” Camae replies: “But God had bigger plans for you.” When King asks why him, Camae says to him: “why not you?” King then tries to do all important things in his mind that he deems important, from leaving his men instructions to calling his wife. He starts going over in his mind all the things that he thought he should have done to be a better father or a better husband. This is perhaps my favorite part of the play. Because you see the powerful within the most personal thoughts of King that Hall imagines. Camae consoles him: “you did what you had to do. We needed you. The world needed you.” King is moved by his doubts: “I don’t know for what! I’ve sacrificed my marriage, my family. My health, for what?” Camae then calls King a saint but he does not accept the title and says that if Camae is an angel, then “God must ‘a been impressed with how you’ve lived your life.” Camae said that no, God wasn’t. We then get a beautiful monologue, by the end of which not only is the actress Angela Bassett crying, but so is some audience members. We now discover how Camae gets to the place where she is at the moment now, of having to take Dr. King to the other side:

“I’ve cursed. But what I’m ashamed of most is I’ve hated. Hated myself. Sacrificed my flesh so that others might feel whole again. I thought it was my duty. All that I had to offer this world. What else was a poor Black woman, the mule of the world, here for? Last night, in the back of a alley I breathed my last breath. A man clasped his hands like a necklace ‘round my throat. I stared into his big blue yes, as my breath got ragged and raw and I saw the Hell this old world had put him through. The time he saw his father hang a man. The time he saw his mother raped. I felt so sorry for him. I saw what the world had done to him, and I still couldn’t forgive. I hated him for stealing my breath. When I passed on to the other side…I was just a cryin’ weepin’ at her feet. Beggin’ her not to throw me down. All that sinnin’. All that grime on my soul. All that hatred in my heart. But then I looked up and saw that She was smilin’ down at me. She opened her mouth, and silence came out. But I heard her loud and clear. ‘I got a special task for you and if you complete it, all your sins will be washed away. I opened my file. And I saw my task was you. What could little old me, give to big old you? I thought you was gone be perfect. Well, you ain’t, but then you are. You have the biggest heart I done ever knownt. You have the strength to love those who could never love you back. If I had just a small fraction of love you have for this world, then maybe, just maybe I could become half the angel you are” (65).

King then asks Camae whether he will die at the at the hands of a white man too, and she says: “yes. Speak by love. Die by hate.” Hall speaks to the ways that individuals allow themselves to be used by mercenaries to carry out hateful acts of murder, the way Camae’s murderer did. Memphis citizen Olivia Castling, who heard the fatal shot that killed King and witnessed the escape by the murderer said that the man she saw running from the scene of the crime was NOT James Earl Ray, “because the gentleman [she] saw was heavier than Ray” (DiEugenio, ed., 492). While Hall’s play does not challenge the mainstream narrative we get about King’s murder committed by James Earl Ray, it does raise issues about how King’s murder was motivated by hate. James W. Douglass’ investigative work challenges this mainstream narrative particularly in his article “The King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis.” He writes that in December 1999, a Memphis jury concluded that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that involved a Memphis bar and grill owner named Loyd Jowers and “others including governmental agencies” (479). Jowers said that he had been asked to help in the murder of King and was told that there would be a decoy in the plot. The decoy was apparently James Earl Ray. Jowers said that the man who asked him to help in the murder was a Mafia connected produce dealer named Frank Liberto. Liberto had a courier deliver $10,000 for Jowers to hold at his restaurant…Jowers said he was visited the day before by a man named Raul, who brought a rifle in a box. Douglass quotes Lavada Addison who said that Liberto told her that he “had Martin Luther King killed.” Jowers said that the meetings to plan the assassination happened at Jim’s Grill. The planners included undercover Memphis Police Department officer Marrell McCullough, who is African American. According to witness Coby Vernon Smith, McCullough had infiltrated a Memphis community organizing group, the Invaders, which was working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Andrew Young, who witnessed the assassination, can be heard on tape identifying McCullough as the man kneeling beside King’s body on the balcony in a famous photograph. Later in the April 4, 1970 letter to his lawyer, George Jackson writes:

“We are so confused, so foolishly simple that we not only fail to distinguish what is generally right and what is wrong, but we also fail to appreciate what is good and not good for us in very personal matters concerning the Black colony and its liberation. The ominous government economic agency whose only clear motive is to further enslave, number, and spy on us, the Black agency subsidized by the government to infiltrate us and retard liberation, is accepted, and by some, even invited and welcome, while the Black Panther is avoided and hard pressed to find protection among the people.”

According to Douglass’ investigation, the Black agency subsidized in this case appears to be the Memphis based Invaders group, through which the larger government agency was able to send McCullough, and direct McCullough to direct King to be in the right position to be shot on April 4, 1968. By Jackson’s standard, McCullough is definitely one of those who are “so foolishly simple” that he failed to distinguish what is generally right and wrong. By participating in the killing of King, McCullough provides truth to Camae’s claim to King that he would die by hate.
A more interesting story I think would be a play exploring the motives and spiritual forces behind those who assassinated King himself. Because then audiences can be prepared an important way to fight those forces which seem to dominate this world. James Douglass interviewed an FBI agent Donald Wilson who said that “H.L. Hunt, an influential Dallas oil billionaire had been a friend of J. Edgar Hoover since the early 1950s. Both men hated Martin Luther King…Hoover argued that the only way to stop King would be to ‘completely silence’ him. After King’s murder, Hunt told Curington [his chief aide] that Hoover had won the argument” (486). George Jackson writes in Blood In My Eye that that “the ruling class in the U.S. is composed of one million men and their families—the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Morgans, Mellons, Du Ponts, Hunts and Gettys, Fords and their minions and dependents. They use ivy league universities and elite law schools as private schools for their offspring and as training grounds for their corporate hirelings. They rule with iron precision through the military, the C.I.A., the F.B.I., private foundations and financial institutions. Their control of all the media of education and communication comprises an extremely effective system of thought control” (Jackson, 169-70). David Murphy in King’s 1999 Memphis trial said that his close friend J.D. Hill had confessed to him that he had been a member of an Army Sniper team in Memphis assigned to “an unknown target” on April 4th. A lot of what George Jackson has written, even while he was in prison, about the death of Martin Luther King, has panned out to be true. King’s prophetic anti-imperialist message was threatening the wealth expropriated by Hunt through white racist violence of indigenous people. Therefore, the powers that be, namely Hunt, wanted King dead and that’s what they got. The powers that be including Hunt also got an extraordinary narrative to cover up the truth behind the murder of King.
Hall’s play teaches us that Martin Luther King, Jr. took his death in a brave way that teaches all of us about the importance of humility regarding our own mortality. Hall’s play also exposes the white racist violence motivated by a hatred that wishes to continue white racist violence by killing Blacks who resist the white supremacist system and leaving alive only those who will happily work within it. The 1999 case in Memphis which rightfully concluded that King was killed by a government conspiracy was in effect carried out in a way that George Jackson accurately articulated no less than two years after King’s actual murder: “with iron precision through the military.” In an April 11, 1968 letter to his father George Jackson wrote about King:

“I never really disliked him as a man…It is just as a leader of Black thought that I disagreed with him. The concept of nonviolence is a false ideal. It presupposes the existence of compassion and a sense of justice on the part of one’s adversary. When this adversary has everything to lose and nothing to gain by exercising justice and compassion, his reaction can only be negative. The symbol of the male here in North America has always been the gun, the knife, the club. Violence is extolled at every exchange: the TV, the motion pictures, the best-seller lists. The newspapers that sell best are those that carry the boldest, bloodiest headlines and most sports coverage…The Kings, Wilkinses, and Youngs exhort us to ‘put away your knives, put away your arms, and clothe yourselves in the breastplate of righteousness’ and ‘turn the other cheek to prove our capacity to endure, to love.’ Well, that is good for them perhaps but I most certainly need both sides of my head.”

In a later 12/28/69 letter to his brother Jonathan, Jackson rejects belief in “backward stuff about God…It is a labored, mindless attempt to explain away ignorance, a tool to keep people of low mentality and no means of production in line…a thing for imbeciles and only women and, of course, Negroes.” Hall’s play certainly rejects this. Hall’s play assumes a knowledge and respect for a God who has finite time for each of us to be on this planet. Both works make important analyses about the times in which we live. Hall’s play encourages to accept our own mortality whereas Jackson’s letters encourages to fight very hard to make that mortality meaningful for the rest of humanity. We cannot simply assume and condone white racist violence.
The play ends with King eventually getting his wish of seeing the Promised Land, up on the Mountaintop. In his April 3, 1968 sermon King says “I may not make it there with you.” But in Hall’s play, we as the audience go exactly there with him and it is Camae who tells us as a refrain at the end of each stanza that: “the baton passes on.” Hall imaginatively creates the Promised Land, this Mountaintop, “made of the dreams of men and women who have paid the ultimate price with their lives.” Hall addresses directly young people of color within the Negro revolution producing-Broadway audience when she has King say: “The children of Nile you must rise, as you can no longer walk weary through this world with willowed backs. Your time is now, I tell you NOW!!!” This resonates with Judge Joe Brown’s remarks made in 1998. Brown ruled on the case of the King murder in Memphis in the mid nineties. This is the same Judge Joe Brown with a television show, who concluded that the cartridge case that the state claims killed King, actually didn’t. Brown said: “The reason we must go forward and resolve this murder is for the children…to protect this new generation from this type of response by the system we must expose” (DiEugenio, ed., 470). Hall’s play aims to empower young people by showing the dear sacrifices, the dear personal costs one must give up in order to fearlessly speak truth to power. At the end of Hall’s play, King is at the mountaintop imploring young people to come by “passing the baton.” The baton represents continuing the anti-imperialist cause. We continue King’s message by speaking out against a nation that chooses spiritual death by choosing to spend more on military programs than on programs of social uplift. It also includes not paying homage to the ways in which this anti-imperialist message is watered down by the corporate powers that be that erect monuments. These monuments distract us from fulfilling King’s message of opposing military interventions at the cost of “starving children” in the United States. These corporations like GE, Bank of America, JP Morgan and others believe they could advance their imperial agenda and pay homage to King by erecting a monument all at the same time. A close examination of King’s life, Hall’s play and George Jackson’s letters tell us this is not true: we cannot avoid the terror that waits us while we continue an imperialist path. We cannot avoid it by erecting monuments without addressing the root cause that King died. We can only address this by ending all military occupations in foreign countries.
King fought for sanitation workers, but his life and death also allowed the place for many Negroes to enter public office and higher education. He was a martyr of the Negro revolution. Katori Hall tells us he was brave because he boldly, consciously decided to accept the end of the task that God called him to. He was choosing to trust God to in fact to have vengeance in God’s way, and not his own way. This is an important lesson. However this Negro revolution we’ve seen since his death has still fell short of Malcolm X’s Black revolution that would have opened the door for meaningful change that both worked towards. Since King’s death, the powers-that-be like Hunt have propagandized their mainstream narratives about Malcolm X and King, and have continued their path, in King’s prophetic words “to hell.” Each of us must decide which role we will play on this path. –RF.

The completion of this review was made possible by many. Originally, Cynthia McKinney for mentioning James DiEugenio to me on August 26th of this year. Kim Holder for mentioning the importance of George Jackson’s writings to me on October 14th of this year. And for Chelsea Nachman for the opportunity on October 22nd to see and read Katori Hall’s play.

REFERENCES
James M. Washington, ed. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986.

James DiEugenio and Lisa Peace, eds. The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X. Introduction by Judge Joe Brown. Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003.

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. Introduction by Jean Genet. New York: Bantam, 1970.

George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1990.

my interview with Richard Newman about Richard Allen

2011-11-03T21:18:00.007-04:00

This evening I had the pleasure of interviewing Richard Newman, Professor of History at the Rochester Institute of Technology about his very important biography FREEDOM'S PROPHET: BISHOP RICHARD ALLEN, THE AME CHURCH, AND THE BLACK FOUNDING FATHERS. You can hear our interview in the embedded MP3 player below. This book has special significance to me because as a soon-to-be official member of Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, I am honored to be part of an institution by a founding father like Richard Allen who took Black self-determination so seriously. He really saw the beauty of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and rightfully divorced it from racism in the American context. In an important way. The Gospel of Jesus Christ for Richard Allen is not and should not be influenced or adulterated by American white racism. Newman's discussion of how Richard Allen fought very hard to keep his original church out of the grip of white racism is remarkable to me; a brilliant testament to the power of God and the power of the Gospel, and what the Gospel can do. I was intrigued to learn about Richard Allen's Pan African beliefs, namely his support of Paul Cuffee and his support Black emigration to Haiti. I think fondly of a February 28th, 2011 sermon by Reverend Mark Kelly Tyler where he talked about how our Black founding fathers and mothers (like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper) planted seeds to trees that they would not see the fruit of. This is true for Richard Allen. He fought very hard to see the abolition of slavery come to fruition. While he did not see it in his lifetime, however, he did plant the seeds necessary for abolition happening thirty to forty years after his transition in 1831. Perhaps one of the most important sentences Newman writes in this biography, which I read in its entirety, is WOULD INTERRACIAL ACTIVISM EVER LEAD TO BLACK EQUALITY, OR WAS BLACK AUTONOMY AN END IN AND OF ITSELF? I think Newman in his biography believed that Allen on some level believed that interracial activism would lead to Black equality, as Newman's research on Allen's work with the Pennsylvania Abolition Society shows. However Newman's writing of Allen's support for African American emigration to Haiti and Canada also shows how he still believed that Black autonomy an end in and of itself. We see Richard Allen in all his complexity and power. Thank you, Richard Newman. -RF.

My review of Elizabeth Nunez's Boundaries

2011-10-08T00:39:00.003-04:00

In Boundaries, a sequel to Anna In-Between, Elizabeth Nunez presents an important story about a protagonist’s professional struggle to publish literary fiction by Black writers in a commercial book industry that is more interested in pushing white supremacist propaganda than in actually selling books. The protagonist, Anna, is editor of Equiano books. Equiano is an imprint of Windsor, a large publishing company devoted to printing books by and about Black people. Anna fights the assumptions Windsor makes about their “niche” audience when her boss at Windsor Tanya Foster decides to market to a Black audience by using sexually explicit advertisements that degrade the meaning of the novel. Nunez’s narrator tells us: “she has been disregarded, disrespected. They did not consult her…It’s the same book, Tanya said. But it will never be read as the same book, Anna knows. Readers who are interested in literary fiction will pass over a book with such a sexually explicit cover. Readers who simply want to be entertained and not challenged will discard it after the first page when the sentences become too complex…when the ideas they are invited to ponder are too complicated” (57). Nunez shows how the publishing industry represented by Windsor assumes their Black readership belongs in the latter group and creates a niche market more by their arbitrary choices to create that market rather than trying to cater a market for literary fiction.
Along with her professional life, Anna as a Caribbean migrant in Brooklyn, New York, also manages a personal life in ways that mirror her struggle against the publishing industry. She tries to maintain a healthy relationship with her parents Beatrice and John who are coping with the diagnosis and treatment of Beatrice’s breast tumors. After much resistance, Beatrice is convinced to leave her island home, which is described (but not named) as Trinidad, for treatment of these tumors. However Anna has reservations about Beatrice and John staying with her in New York, mainly because she still struggles with resentment over her mother Beatrice never showing her any affection: “They are kind to each other, but they do not touch, they do not say affectionate words to each other…She [Anna] blames the colonial times. The Queen of England was not demonstrative” (108).
Anna also tries to retain hope in the possibility of a committed loving relationship with surgeon Paul Bishop even while she reflects on the reasons for her bitter divorce from her ex-husband Tony. The narrator tells us: “it’s hard to be stylish or to laugh when in the third year of your marriage your husband loses his job, when your income spirals down and you can no longer keep up with the payments for the expensive condo your husband bought, or the Benz he liked to drive” (95). Her friend Paula has long decided that “the bridge between immigrants and Americans born in America is a wobbly one” (115). She attributes Anna’s divorce to her not heeding her advice that she “should not have married out of her culture” (146). Paula also explains Beatrice’s lack of affection to being part of a time “when women rarely revealed their true feelings…too much coddling will give their daughters false expectations of opportunities that in reality will be available only to men” (146-7). However Anna’s reflection on her experience with Alice, another immigrant with whom Anna stayed in the States for the first time, convinces her that Paula is wrong: “She had stuck with her own kind and her own kind was not good to her. Lisa [a white co-worker of Anna’s], far removed from her own kind, had been good to her” (198).
Beatrice tries to develop a relationship between Anna and Paul Bishop, surgeon and son of Henry Bishop the beloved union organizer who holds Anna’s father John in high regard. They develop a relationship however, as Nunez suggests, not strictly because they are from the Caribbean, but because of Anna’s growth that came about from her struggles against the demands of the publishing industry, her mother, her ex-husband, and her friend. As relationship with Paul develops, Equiano is being dismantled because Windsor is merging with another company and has now become TeaHouse Press. Anna learns that Tim Greene, the African American co-worker who was initially assigned to be her assistant editor by Tanya at Equiano, is now her boss at TeaHouse. Nunez shows a fundamental issue of integration when Black men and women like Greene are placed in positions that uphold white supremacy with a Black face. Tim Greene justifies the use of these sexually explicit advertisement to a “niche” Black audience: “We can design print, electronic, and television advertisements targeted to specific groups” (169). Anna resents Tim’s participation in the white mainstream industry’s plan to create a “niche” Black audience by turning the art of reading into strictly an act of entertainment instead of potential reform. The narrator tells us that according to Anna: “He [Tim] and too many like him seem to lack faith in the possibility of remedying an inferior education, of resetting the clock for young men and women whose deficiencies in reading and writing have accumulated after years of neglect…these are the underprivileged youth whose notion of the good life will remain limited unless expanded by good books that could open the way for them to the beauties of the world” (220).
She concludes that if she stays at the now TeaHouse press, she will have to yield to Tim Greene’s racist vision. When Anna considers leaving TeaHouse press and relays her struggles with Tim to her father John and Paul, they both advise her to stay at her job at TeaHouse. This response to me however seems like a cop-out and neglects the various possibilities, especially with the Internet, that Anna could have used to engage a Black literary authorship and readership. Anna’s struggle for reaching this authorship and readership is representative of the need for such audiences especially after the end of the periodicals Emerge and Black Issues Book Review. Nunez ends the novel on a hopeful note with Anna’s personal life being salvaged; Paul proposes marriage, and she says that while she has to wait longer for racial justice in publishing industry, her kids, conceivably with Paul, will not have to wait. I personally don’t know about that. The relationship between Nunez’s Equiano and Windsor reflects several actual publishers we see today between Amistad and HarperCollins; OneWorld and Random House; Atria and Simon & Schuster. The larger publishers that own these imprints have significant holdings in other media industries. What Nunez shows in Boundaries is the potential for any of these mainstream publishers to do what Windsor has done and by allowing a merger with a larger company in order to neglect a Black literary authorship and readership.
In my mind, the boundaries that Nunez is referring to the boundaries within the white mind about the capacity of the Black mind, which has resulted in her struggles with her ex-husband Tony and an intraracial struggle with her new boss Tim Greene. The struggles against these boundaries are what make Anna a sympathetic, complete character. I happen to disagree with the responses of John Sinclair and Paul Bishop to Anna’s situation with Tim Greene. I thought that John Sinclair was absolutely too deferential to the so called way things are in the U.S. He told her that African Americans “paid a heavy price for the opportunities immigrants of color have today” and because of that, Anna should not challenge Tim Greene (240). I agree with the heavy price. Charlayne Hunter Gault and Hamilton Holmes opened the way for my father, a Jamaican immigrant to attend and graduate from the University of Georgia in 1975. However I do not agree that because of this Caribbean immigrants like Anna should shut their mouths and go along to get along the way that John Sinclair has told his daughter in Nunez’s novel. I disagree with John Sinclair’s advice very strongly. I thought that John should have told Anna to continue seeing authors on her own dime and to start a new venue for creating an authorship and readership that respects our rich Black literary readership and authorship. People from the Caribbean have been influencing racial justice work in the United States for a long time, and I would hope that John Sinclair would have been more sensitive to such influence, such as that of Malcolm X, whose mother came from Grenada; such as that of James Weldon Johnson and Rosamond Johnson, whose mother came from Bahamas; such as Marcus Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey and Amy Ashwood Garvey whose parents came from Jamaica; such as Hubert Harrison, whose mother came from Barbados and whose father came from St. Croix; such as Z. Alexander Looby and Stokely Carmichael whose parents came from Trindad. And the list goes on. These are people who came to this country and developed very sophisticated opinions about race and used them to advance the struggle for racial justice in this country. And I don’t agree with John Sinclair that just because African Americans paid a heavy price that his daughter Anna should defer to Tim Greene just because he is African American. No. Wrong is wrong. Anna in my opinion was entirely in her right to challenge his attempt to condone what apparently was the larger mainstream publishing company’s attempt to force a niche market of oversexualized Black people that turn reading into solely a pleasurable or entertaining act rather than a more literary one. I was a bit miffed by Nunez’s ending of this last novel, but more than anything, I applaud her on a phenomenally written novel that exposes the problem of the mainstream publishing industry and its insistence on creating rather than respecting a Black audience. –RF.

Reflections on Ahmadinejad, Democracy Now, Libya, and the Dangers of Liberalism

2011-09-28T22:34:00.006-04:00

Reflections on Ahmadinejad, Democracy Now, Libya, and the Dangers of Liberalism.

ON AHMADINEJAD

I was honored to be invited by former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney to attend a dinner hosted by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran last Tuesday, September 20th at the Warwick Hotel on 56th Street in New York City. There was an opportunity for various American groups to speak after Ahmadinejad spoke. I took notes on the statements by various groups represented at this dinner, which included the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, and Black Agenda Report. At this dinner was a very important cross section of the Black or African American press, particularly the anti-imperialist press that works to resist foreign military occupations that deprive those occupied peoples of basic needs such as education and healthcare. Before groups from this important cross section spoke, Ahmadinejad himself spoke, in Farsi with an English translator. He spoke on how the humanity of this world is facing a crisis and how leadership in particular countries should be in the service of humanity.

Then on behalf of the International Action Center, Ramsey Clark spoke about the role of the U.S. in dominating Iran. He said we have a huge war machine that we its citizens have permitted our country to build: “the U.S. has to reduce its budget by 90% or there’ll be no peace on earth.” Finally Clark said that the machine right now is replacing the leader in Syria with one more friendly to their interests and next up, was Iran.

Brenda Stokely, president of AFSCME Local 215 in New York City said: “when we went to Durban, we represented a fight for peace.” This was important for me to hear because the U.N. Conference Against Racism is taking place this month in New York which the White House has boycotted, due to Israeli pressure. She also said that we must have a movement that is connected to people’s human rights, and that we must make the heads of state know that they must talk to the people everyday who are laboring for peace and justice. Just because the mainstream American media ignores people like myself and Brenda Stokely does not mean that we are not here.

I next heard Orthodox Jewish Rabbis who are against the state of Israel speak. A representative of this group, whose name I did not catch, said that “one of the commands of the Torah is to reside in peace with others. Iran is a most exemplary example of this…Judaism and Zionism are different. True Jews have nothing to do with Zionism.” I had a conversation with a dear friend of mine about the support of this group of rabbis days after this dinner, and she said that their protest of the U.S. interests in invading Iran is disingenuous because while they critique the state, they still reap all of the benefits of it. This reminds me of liberalism, and its perils. As Lorraine Hansberry said, it is not enough to live in American society and simply be a liberal. To live a meaningful life, it is necessary in American society to be a radical. At this point in my life at 31, I feel like if I am a liberal, I am still reaping the benefits of the exploitative colonial relationship this American society sets up between whites and Blacks. Whites who are able to enjoy employment, census counts, tax benefits, at the expense of Blacks, an increasing number of whom are incarcerated. Governor Corbett is showing me more clearly, than maybe any other governor, that white wealth is based on control of Black bodies, very much like the time of the Middle Passage. Republicans make no bones about wanting to expand the industry of incarcerating bodies of color and consequently push vouchers and charter schools that will leave the majority of children of color without an adequate education that will set them up to eventually get incarcerated.
My listening to this September 20th talk by Ahmadinejad taught me that I cannot in good faith be a liberal because its way too close ideologically to the forces intending on sending this empire to a speedy decline via their capitalist greed and hypermilitarization. I’ll pass, thank you.

Also in this group that spoke before Ahmadinejad was a member of the Mennonite Church. He said that one of their central tenets is their refusal to participate in wars. I appreciated his point that our religions have frequently been used to justify wars, hatred, violence and terrorism. As a Christian, I believe that by not speaking out against these wars, our government will continue to kill thousands or millions more for the expansion of the American empire. This Mennonite Church members also said that God is above all nations: “the prophets have taught us that God will judge us according to how we treated the poor.” One of those prophets is Malcolm X who, according to Marable’s recent biography, challenged the imperialism of Truman when he wrote to him protesting the Korean invasion in 1950. He also continually spoke about how the U.S. would lose in Vietnam because of its imperialist tendency.

The issuance of all the Pentagon Papers this year proves that the nation’s stated reasons for bombing Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin Resoultion, was essentially false. Another one of those prophets Martin Luther King Jr. said at Riverside Church in 1967 that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Obama has pledged more money than ever to the Pentagon and though he claims to be a Christian, is in practice betraying the message and the Gospel of Christ. I wish Obama would stop trying to put Jesus back on the cross.

Saladdin Muhammad from Black Voices For Justice also spoke. One of his points was that this culture of war has impacted the thinking of our young people. He later said that one of these tests to prove how American you are, is whether you will fight in a war. Muhammad questioned the whole purpose of fighting a war for the U.S., especially as a person of color being pitted against another person of color, so a white man can reap the profits from a natural resource from an indigenous people. His comments seem to bring to mind this root basis of American imperialism. He ended his words by calling for a reaffirmation of the Durban Declaration Programme of Action. This seems to be the only document in Western history, according to Naomi Klein’s article “Minority Death Match” that has called slavery and the transatlantic slave trade a “crime against humanity.”

See: http://www.zcommunications.org/minority-death-match-jews-blacks-and-the-post-racial-presidency-by-naomi-klein

Barbara Lee went to great gains to modify this document to a version that she thought the U.S. would approve: she eliminated all references to Zionism especially those that equated it with racism. Yet the U.S. still declined to attend in 2009 in Switzerland at a conference recognizing this Durban Declaration. I am grateful that Muhammad reaffirmed the importance of this document.

At this dinner Eleanor Ommani, on behalf of the American Iranian Friendship Committee spoke on the importance of Iran reserving a right to purchase nuclear energy under the supervision of the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] and she also called for the “the ending of unjust sanctions.” She later said “the U.S. must cease in interfering in Afghanistan.”

I especially appreciated the words of Nihad Awad from the CARE who called for a group of American journalists to work together to prevent the demonization of Islam and Iran. I believe that this was particularly important.

I also appreciated hearing the words of Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement speak. There was a previous comment apologizing for Obama’s warmongering on behalf of the U.S. nation. Yeshitela responded by saying we should not be apologizing for Obama any more than Ahmadinejad should be apologizing for the behavior of the shah of Iran. Yeshitela spoke to the importance of continually fighting imperialism and mentioned what I believe will be a very important antiwar protest on November 5th here in Philadelphia: http://www.blackisbackcoalition.org/nov5)

When Ahmadinejad spoke, he mentioned the Iranian hiker hostages and said they will be freed very soon. In fact they were freed within the week since I attended this dinner. However they’re being freed overshadowed the mainstream media coverage of the painful murder of Troy Davis by the state of Georgia. I think Troy Davis is a reminder of the fundamental white racist struggle in the U.S. and how the racial struggle continues to trump every other struggle. Obama declined to intervene; in a similar fashion he declined to participate in the U.N. Conference Against Racism; and declined to support Palestine in their U.N. bid for statehood. Ahmadinejad in his statement said that the most fundamental shared value—for all humans—is humanity: “we will only be left with one truth—the truth of humanity.” He was speaking in my mind to what constitutes “humane behavior.” Allowing a war industry to thrive the way myself and other Americans have done is not humane behavior. Dropping 30,000 bombs on Libya is not humane behavior. Condoning the deaths of at least 50,000 Libyans is not humane behavior.

See: http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/02/30000-bombs-over-libya/

Ahmadinejad was not naming any country in his talk but he essentially was. He said: “there are only two currents: divine and evil. The divine tool used against evil is the human being. The chance was given to humans to absorb all that is divine: kindness, mercy, love.” As a Christian, I can relate to this, and I can respect the Islamic values that bear almost all in common with Christianity. I respect many people of the Islamic faith, particularly Malcolm X. I saw Ahmadinejad’s speech as an implicit and necessary critique against the rapacious foreign policy of the United States. He said: “Anyone who wishes to be divine must be committed to humanity.” He then compared Christianity to Islam and showed how the first standards of being a Christian or Muslim is basically the same: one must show that one is committed to humankind or how they handle the dignity of humans. It is obvious if we heed the words of the prophets who lived among us that the United States has not handled the dignity of humans especially people of color very well at all. He said the way to God is only one: “Prophet Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad…showed the one path which is the divine path. Respect for human beings which is respect for divine power. Anybody who chooses to love the Almighty is to love humanity. The greatest triumph of evil is to break the dignity of humanity.” As I type these words from my notes, and I remember seeing him say these words, and I am constantly reminded as to how this country has broken the dignity of Libyan people by bombing them this year. I am constantly reminded of how much a strong contradiction that news sources are engaged in by not raising the human rights abuses that this country’s bombings constituted, and how these bombings served not really U.S. empire but European empire, in the service of European imperialism. According to a cable from U.S. Ambassador Gene Kretz to the State Department on June 4, 2009, made public by Wikileaks, Libya caught the attention of U.S. forces when it forced European oil firms, mainly France’s Total, to agree to take a much smaller percentage of oil and gas yielded from their wells, under threat of nationalization.

See: http://openoil.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Wikileaks-summaries.pdf

According to my July 1, 2011 interview with Cynthia McKinney who reported first hand on the situation in Libya as of June, Libyan citizens have free healthcare, free education, and free higher education. She describes “resource nationalism” as the use of the Libyan resources to benefit the Libyan people as of 8:45 in the following interview:

See: http://rhoneedifies.blogspot.com/2011/07/interview-with-cynthia-mckinney-about.html

Why was Gadafi’s threat of nationalization so dangerous? Because apparently he was doing what the West does not do, nor want others to do, which is providing basic services for its citizens. Based on this reporting by McKinney, Gadafi was more interested, than any other U.S. president in what Ahmadinejad called the “dignity of humanity.” At this September 20th talk, Ahmadinejad said that “if they [Christian or Muslim] recognize their humanity, they will not oppress.” Based on the imperialist oppression in Libya and in Afghanistan and every other place of U.S. military occupation, the U.S. by this definition has not recognized their humanity. This reminds me of James Baldwin’s explanations for the need of the term “nigger” in America. He said it reflected white American culture’s hatred of itself, its own refusal to recognize its own humanity. Ahmadinejad said that “today our combined mission is to save our humanity from evildoers.” He then asked: “do we know of an animal who has killed one million animals of its own kind?” And this raised a small laugh in the audience. It raised in my mind the inhumane foreign policy of the United States who seems bent on trying to use colonial domination to solve its own ills. However I believe that because of this nation’s apparent belief in the need to “niggerize” peoples of color across the world, previously Vietnam and now Libya, this American empire will fall as our prophets have told us. Ahmadinejad said “we’re not in a conflict against humans. There is a war against evil which comes in the form of other humans. We’re noticing a war against humans, against human civilizations.” As a Christian, I was able to appreciate this statement, particularly this last point because I believe the truth behind Paul’s letter to the Ephesians which is something Fannie Lou Hamer said in protesting the Vietnam War in 1970, particularly chapter 6 verse 12 which says: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

I certainly believe that those forces who pushed for the bombing and military displacement of Gadafi are those ruled by the darkness of this world, those ruled by Satan. It is my duty as a Christian to shed light on this truth and to work against evil. Darkness and light cannot exist. I thought much of what Ahmadinejad was saying here was the truth of light. Because Ms. Hamer as a Christian, was fighting against this country’s use of military power to bomb or shoot the Vietnamese into submission (which failed), I have to, as a Christian, fight against this country’s use of military power to bomb or shoot Libya into submission. To turn them into a country like the United States where the banking elite “niggerizes” all its citizens by taking away their jobs, then daring them to pay with income they don’t have, for their housing, education healthcare and education. So the moment African leaders like Gadafi want to use his nation’s resources to actually help his people with “resource nationalism,” he is immediately turned into a “nigger” or a despised group and demonized and replaced by a long bombing campaign and by arming so called revolutionaries who, in Malcolm’s terms, are actually mercenaries, defenders of Totale oil company and European imperialism. Those who armed and who depend on the gun for imposition of European colonial domination are those who, in my Christian theology, are ruled by Satan. They would rather not see an African leader develop too much power that will threaten their new world “order.” What this “order” basically consists of is keeping the majority in any nation poor and subservient from top to bottom, to Western interests.

Ahmadinejad later said that the same forces who claim to bring “freedom” do it at the “cost of bombs and destruction.” Ahmadinejad ended the talk coming back to his premium on dignity of humanity. He said that with this version of “freedom” touted by the U.S., “the truth and dignity of humanity is in danger.” However for those who are ready and willing to resist and stop the propaganda machine that is prepared to steamroll Iran, we have to know within ourselves that “eternal life has not been destroyed.” I happen to believe that eternal life is capable within reach by striving for Jesus Christ, who resisted the policies of the moneychangers who today represent the old white European families who own the banks that run the Federal Reserve. Dealing with the money changers was the only time in the Bible when Jesus used physical violence to make a point. Charles V. Hamilton defined a revolutionary as one who uses calculated acts of instrumental violence to bring about social change. Malcolm X had a close relationship to Ben Bella who helped push the French out of Algeria. They did so by instrumental violence. Ahmadinejad finished by saying that saving humanity is a big task, but “we must believe that humanity will prevail.” He said specifically to those at this dinner, which I agreed with, that:
“All of us have gathered here tonight to join the tone of humanity and to fight the forces of the Devil. They seem insurmountable but they are extremely weak and vulnerable. We must join forces and believe in the power of the Almighty…Why do they wish to occupy countries for their oil wealth? My belief is that victory is near. When truth seekers are all over the world, a day will come when the world all over will be filled with truth and justice.”

Yes, to me the U.S. imperialist machine, which kills as many of our citizens as it does foreign citizens, seems insurmountable. However, like Ahmadinejad, I believe in the power of the Almighty ultimately. He said in his speech that there is one way. I believe that one way is Jesus Christ and I know that Ahmadinejad as president of an Islamic Republic who is Muslim, does not believe that Christ is the one way, however in principle, we agree that we have to take all steps necessary to fight oppressive U.S. imperialism that has already proven it is willing to do anything to stop nationalization and use military power to occupy countries for their oil wealth. I’ve learned that as a writer and journalist I have to do anything to oppose this imperialism in order to work with the majority of the world who is against this imperialism.

ON DEMOCRACY NOW, LIBYA, AND THE DANGERS OF LIBERALISM

Since Cynthia McKinney returned from her fact finding mission in June of 2011, I have been frankly appalled by her being ignored by Amy Goodman’s program Democracy Now. In fact, ever since Goodman’s coverage of Iran in 2009, I have had serious questions about Goodman calling her news source as “independent.” In my opinion, Goodman raised a bit too much questions about the legitimacy of the 2009 presidential election in Iran, especially claiming that protesters numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Who’s to say that those protesters were not there in support of Ahmadinejad? Matthew Weaver seemed to be asking the most important questions:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/09/iran-twitter-revolution-protests

In the Introduction to his book The Black Aesthetic, Addison Gayle Jr. reminded me of what I heard of Ahmadinejad. He writes that “to be American is to be opposed to humankind, against the dignity of the individual, and against the striving in man for compassion and tenderness; to be an American is to lose one’s humanity.” Certainly Ahmadinejad’s talk reminded me of this painful truth in terms of all of us on this landmass condoning the wanton slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians on the other side of the Atlantic. However what he said about the purpose of the Black Aesthetic speaks strongly to me as an artist and as a writer: “the Black Aesthetic…is a corrective—a means of helping Black people out of the polluted mainstream of Americanism…” I am a faithful follower of Democracy Now! But I am afraid that Goodman’s pro-imperialist coverage of Libya this year has proven their willful entrance into the “polluted mainstream of Americanism” which includes cooperating with American imperialism. In her 2004 book The Exception to the Rulers, Amy Goodman wrote that Judith Miller’s false reports “played an invaluable role in the administration’s propaganda war,” however by only talking to Juan Cole about the U.S.-armed NATO led replacement of Gadafi, Goodman is playing an invaluable role in the Obama administration’s propaganda war meant to justify the military ouster of Gadafi. John Walsh wrote that Juan Cole is a consultant to the CIA who, along with U.S. Ambassador Gene Kretz, is interested in stopping Gadafi from nationalizing his oil and continuing to provide free healthcare and free education for his citizens.

See: http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/08/30/meet-professor-juan-cole-consultant-to-the-cia/

Walsh said that Cole “is anxious to promote himself as a man of the left as he spins out his rationale for the war on Libya.” He parrots the same lies we’ve heard from the mainstream media about the evils of Gadafi, while our evils of bombing tens of thousands of Libyans are ignored. This is why I say that I cannot in good faith be a liberal especially when among its ranks are those who consult the CIA on how to infiltrate foreign cultures for private profit. These so called liberals are those who will deny a nation and its leader its sovereign right to provide free healthcare and education to its citizens, while leaders here in this country glory in the poverty of its citizens we force to make unfair choices between healthcare and education. As long as I promise to die and stay Black, I can no longer be a liberal in good faith. I cannot critique the empire yet uncritically reap benefits from the empire without demanding a fundamental restructuring.

Goodman writes that we form “opinions based on the full range of views that you hear. But you’ve got to hear from all sides, and that was what was so deeply compromised by what happened with the embedding of reporters during the invasion of Iraq” (174-5). But in reporting on Libya, Amy is only providing the pro-imperialist side on Libya and by doing so she can no longer claim to be an “independent” source of media. She has now become unfortunately part of the polluted American mainstream. I can no longer trust Democracy Now to provide what Goodman claims to provide in an “independent” media. This is why I have begun a petition demanding from Amy Goodman an explanation as to why she will not host former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney to talk about Libya on her program. You can sign here:

http://signon.org/sign/demand-from-democracynow?source=c.url&r_by=116151

Goodman reported yesterday that the U.S. continues to back Abdul Raziq, a warlord who did the bidding of the U.S. in Afghanistan. This bidding included targeted assassinations and torture of civilians. Given this report, is Goodman not at all concerned about the role Democracy Now is playing in doing the bidding of the U.S. in Libya? The problem with liberalism is that it justifies oppression by substituting one form of it for another instead of getting rid of it altogether. Democracy Now seems to goad its listeners into believing that occupying Afghanistan is wrong however occupying Libya is right. To that I say a loud and resounding NO. Wrong is wrong.

The U.S. imperial state should not have been backing Raziq any more than they should have been arming rebels in Libya, just because European leaders wanted to stop Gadafi’s resource nationalism. However this kind of reporting, emerging apparently from the liberal mind of Goodman, is trying to oppose imperialism in Afghanistan yet condone imperialism in Libya. And that kind of liberalism is unacceptable for those who care for humanity. To Goodman’s credit, she interviewed Horace Campbell who said rightfully that the Egyptian revolution may prompt a U.S. occupation in a neighboring country (or countries) in order ultimately to quell the Egyptian revolution. The NATO bombing is proof of Campbell’s correct prediction.

See: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/2/prof_horace_campbell_peace_justice_movement

Despite featuring Campbell, Goodman’s reporting on Libya is too complicit with the imperialist ambitions of this country, and that is egregious. Especially as this country faces increasing poverty and is telling its citizens that there is no more money for the social services such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, that help us meet our basic needs today. Well imperialism even wants those services ended. According to Carolyn Cutrone and Steve Rendall however, the main cause of the federal budget deficit are the capital gains tax cuts and not the social services.

See: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4384

Imperialism is desperately trying to expand itself by making Americans more poor, so Goodman’s support of imperialism in Libya must be checked. I am writing this not at all to embarrass Amy Goodman but to reach a greater understanding of how the American state can and will influence “independent” media to become no longer “independent” but polluted and eventually meaningless.
I sincerely hope Amy Goodman can respond to my query about her coverage of Libya and not sink any further in to the polluted mainstream of Americanism. –RF.

A Talk With Cynthia McKinney about Libya and Gordon Barnes about Malcolm X

2011-08-19T22:14:00.006-04:00

Yesterday I had a powerful conversation with former U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney about Obama in 2012 and her reporting of Libya that has been ignored by the mainstream media. I am circulating a petition to demand from Amy Goodman, a leader in the progressive American news, AN EXPLANATION for why she has ignored Cynthia McKinney for over two months now. Since June 1st, Cynthia McKinney visited Libya and reported on their events, as she expressed in my interview on my July 1st post.

PLEASE JOIN ME IN SIGNING A PETITION TO DEMAND AN EXPLANATION FROM DEMOCRACY NOW ABOUT WHY THEY WILL NOT COVER CYNTHIA MCKINNEY'S REPORTING IN LIBYA.

Following my interview with Cynthia Mckinney was another powerful interview with Gordon Barnes about chapters 10 to 13 in the biography of Malcolm X, by the late Manning Marable. At this time in the biography, Malcolm is leaving the Nation of Islam, begins his historic hajj where he learns not to hate white people only because of their skin color. Our discussion ended in December 1964 when Malcolm X speaks in New York with Fannie Lou Hamer.

AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE ABOUT TOLERANCE:

2011-08-18T13:29:00.001-04:00

A discussion of chapters 7-9 of Marable's biography with Bill Fletcher

2011-07-22T13:45:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure of discussing chapters 7, 8, and 9 of Manning Marable's biography of Malcolm X. In the studio with me were two readers of the book, Abdul-Aliy Muhammad and Christopher D. Weaver. We discussed the changes in Malcolm and the changes happening to Malcolm throughout 1961, the year of the Freedom Rides. These three chapters chronicle Malcolm's life from January 1961 to November 1963. We talked about Malcolm's effort to have an interfaith dialogue with African American Christians. And we discussed his Malcolm's serious issues with Elijah Muhammad's orders not to retaliate against the LAPD for their 1962 murder of Rodney X Stokes.

In the second hour of this discussion, we talked with labor activist Bill Fletcher Jr., author of SOLIDARITY DIVIDED and former editor of the BlackCommentator.com. He wrote what I thought was THE BEST review of Manning Marable's biography at the following link:

http://www.blackcommentator.com/434/434_aw_marable_malcolm_controversy_share.html#.ThWRMGyQSlk.facebook

We discussed how a lot of the controversy with Marable is based in the fact that Marable in his extensive research tampered with the icon of Malcolm X. What was most refreshing in Professor Fletcher's review and discussion yesterday, was that more than anything, Marable shows Malcolm as a man for whom answers were not black and white but included some grey. Fletcher's review is as important as Marable's biography. Both are a must read. To hear our conversation, click the play arrow below.

my interview with Kathy Perkins about Alice Childress

2011-07-15T08:13:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure of talking with Kathy Perkins, Professor of Theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, about a book she edited called SELECTED PLAYS: ALICE CHILDRESS. Published by Northwestern University Press. To me, Alice Childress (1916-1994) along with Lorraine Hansberry is one of the most important mentors to me as a playwright. Her artistic vision in all her plays fearlessly confront racism and sexism in powerful ways that I try to emulate as a playwright. Before we interviewed, I had the phenomenal opportunity of reading this entire book including Kathy Perkins' introduction where she describes Childress as a writer who is "resilient, vocal, no nonsense...uncompromising." We discussed each play in this book in-depth, starting with FLORENCE (1949), GOLD THROUGH THE TREES (1952), TROUBLE IN MIND (1955), WEDDING BAND (1966), and WINE IN THE WILDERNESS (1969). Professor Perkins is so familiar with each of them and what enhanced this interview was hearing her personal experience with Ms. Childress herself, and hearing her work on some of these plays, most recently WINE IN THE WILDERNESS. I also loved reading an excerpt with Professor Perkins of Childress's most popular play TROUBLE IN MIND where I read the role of Al Manners and she read the role of Wiletta Mayer. I hope this interview enhances our appreciation and understanding of the incredibly bold and relevant artistic vision of Alice Childress. I hope more of her plays are read and produced as a result of my interview with Professor Kathy Perkins here. Thank you Professor Perkins for editing this book, and for personally making a fulfilled promise to Ms. Childress to write an anthology dedicated to just her. -RF.

An interview with Jerrell about PEANUT BUTTER AND JEALOUSY

2011-07-07T21:21:00.002-04:00

Today I had a powerful interview with Jerrell Johnson, minister and rap artist extraordinaire. I believe he is an anointed rap artist and anointed minister of the Word. I appreciate Jerrell's teachings on a lot of topics. In this interview we chopped it up about each track (except the Outro which I wish we had more time for) on his 2010 album PEANUT BUTTER AND JEALOUSY, available at http://jerrelljohnson.tumblr.com. Some powerful messages are in each track, mainly THE BACKGROUND which is a song that encourages listeners to tune out the background music or anything we substitute as background music in our life--specifically anything that prevents us from hearing clearly from God. I appreciate Jerrell trying to live for God and using his music to get others to hear from God clearly. I truly appreciated this interview.

An Interview with Cynthia McKinney about Libya

2011-07-01T00:18:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I talked with Cynthia McKinney about the reality on the ground of U.S. policy in Libya. While we spend millions and billions of dollars on military occupation of Libya and Afghanistan, we neglect the public education of our own communities. I appreciated the knowledge that former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney shared in this interview. -RF.

An Interview with Cheril Clarke about Keesha and Her Two Moms

2011-07-01T00:15:00.003-04:00

This interview took place on Thursday, June 30, 2011 on WPEB radio. I had a very important talk with Cheril about her book KEESHA AND HER TWO MOMS and her holiday coloring book called MY FAMILY! These works recognize children of same sex loving parents of color. We later talked about the importance of more media that recognizes children of such partnerships. -RF.

A Discussion of Chapters 4-6 of Malcolm X

2011-07-01T00:05:00.003-04:00

This discussion took place on Thursday, June 23rd, 2011 at WPEB West Philadelphia Community Radio. It features fellow readers of the new biography of the Malcolm X biography: Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, Christopher D. Weaver, and Anthony Thomas. In this interview we discussed chapters 4 through 6 of this very important biography.

my interview with Aimee Allison

2011-05-23T12:34:00.004-04:00

On Thursday, May 19, 2011, I interviewed Aimee Allison of RootsAction about her efforts to begin looking for an independent progressive presidential candidate to run for U.S. President in 2012. Click on the play button of the video above to learn about RootsAction.org. My interview with her is below: click on the PLAY arrow below the video box. Since the International Association of Fire Fighter's break from the Democratic Party, it is essential for those dissatisfied with Obama's work in his first term to galvanize citizens to run a more progressive candidate in 2012. -RF.

In Honor of Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965)

2011-05-19T23:58:00.003-04:00

In honor of the 81st anniversary of the birth of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, on May 19th, 2011, above is the audio of a May 8, 1959 interview of Lorraine Hansberry by Mike Wallace who asks her some very socially relevant questions about aspirations of the Negro middle class and Black Nationalism. This interview is available on the LORRAINE HANSBERRY AUDIO COLLECTION (cover photo available from amazon.com) produced by Caedmon, an imprint of HarperCollins. An incredibly important collection. -RF.

A Dialogue About Bradley Manning

2011-05-15T04:57:00.002-04:00

It was my pleasure this past Thursday, May 12, 2011 to talk about Bradley Manning with Emma Cape, of COURAGE TO RESIST. We discussed Ellen Nakashima's recent article about Bradley Manning in this month's Washington Post Magazine.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/who-is-wikileaks-suspect-bradley-manning/2011/04/16/AFMwBmrF_print.html

I first heard Ellen on Michel Martin's Tell Me More, and became interested in how Nakashima presented Bradley Manning. I read Nakashima's article and was grateful to learn so much about Manning, including his time in Oklahoma, to his time with his Aunt Debbie, to his time in Wales. It was interesting to learn how he was initially pursuing a Ph.D in Physics, and how he learned a lot in computer programming from his father. However there were two mainly troubling points in this article to me, each of which frame Manning as though what he did was 'unpatriotic' when, assuming he in fact is guilty of what he's accused of, this act is nothing short of patriotic. It forces us to look exactly at what our taxpayer monies are used for in U.S. foreign policy. First, is a statement by Nakashima that Manning tells his boyfriend that he's gotten his hands on sensitive material that he's considering passing to WikiLeaks. There is no evidence that Nakashima provides for this claim. Second, Nakashima writes that based on "a second source," the chat logs on Adrian Lamo's hard drive matched those on Bradley Manning's hard drive, but Nakashima does not identify this source. This to me seems to be the whole article's attempt to declare Manning guilty before his trial and it is denies him his right to a fair trial that, also Troy Davis never got as he faces execution. My dialogue here with Emma Cape of COURAGE TO RESIST (www.bradleymanning.org) mentions the latter point as well as President Obama's reaction to Manning case.

My interview with Paul Street

2011-04-21T23:19:00.002-04:00

It was my pleasure to talk with independent journalist, policy adviser, and historian Paul Street about his book BARACK OBAMA AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN POLITICS. I read this book because I am very very interested in the role of Barack Obama in U.S. history. I think he is meant to continue the growing divide between rich and poor and I am frankly fascinated with how his skin color is a scapegoat that allows him to do this. The richest 1% in this country profits immensely from the social construction of race which arguably tempers or stifles a lot of meaningful progressive criticism about the policies of the Obama administration. This aired on Thursday, April 21st on my show Freedom Readers, a book talk show that airs on 88.1 FM WPEB, West Philadelphia Community Radio. This was a delightful interview because Paul's scholarship is not only extremely dense and important to know, but his conversation in these approximate two hours was extremely dense and contained more information that is important to know. It is honor to have this conversation. Check out his website at PaulStreet.org. I told him I plan on reading his latter two books, THE EMPIRE'S NEW CLOTHES and his upcoming CRASHING THE TEA PARTY with Paul Di Maggio very soon. What he writes in his book is information we should all be aware of. To hear this interview, click PLAY below. -RF.

Reflections on Bradley Manning

2011-03-20T21:13:00.001-04:00

Reflections on Bradley Manning

Today Bradley Manning has been detained for two hundred and seventy nine days. He is a government whistleblower now held in solitary confinement at the Marine Base in Quantico for leaking documents that supposedly “threaten” national security. It is reported that he is forced to stand naked for hours in solitary confinement. Daily. For over two hundred days now. If Bradley Manning could be detained for over two hundred days standing up for truth and justice; if he can get arrested for demanding that the American empire not manufacture any more traitors of foreign cultures via torture, then I can endure a simple forty day Daniel fast. This is what I have been doing to seek clarity and direction from the Lord. I already see events happening in my life that are pointing me in the direction I should go in. A direction that is closer to the Lord Jesus. For me, this is a direction that is increasingly in support of Bradley Manning. Yet this is a direction that is, in some ways, farther and farther away from the parents I love yet still respecting and cherishing the culture in which they raised me. I made a commitment today on Sunday, March 20th, one day after my mother’s birthday to show my support for Bradley Manning. To show my support for truth and the degree to which one will lose their personal freedoms for telling the truth. So I joined the protest just outside barricades at Quantico to tell Bradley Manning THANK YOU. It is the least I could do since Manning’s decision to defy empire has rendered him in solitary confinement. I also went to Quantico today to tell President Obama that he has ample time to fulfill two campaign promises of stopping torture and protecting government whistleblowers. Bradley Manning willingly and bravely leaked thousands of documents to WikiLeaks who then distributed it to the New York Times, Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El Paix. I think its only a matter of time before history reveals how this leak inspired the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt and other very important events that arguably inspired the protests in Wisconsin among other things. The documents detailed America’s sordid plans to grow their empire through military conquest. They detailed this country’s expansive spy network through its embassies. They detailed the enormous corruption in the Afghanistan government funded by the U.S. They exposed corrupt Arab leaders wrestling each other for the trinkets of this empire, to the peril of their nation’s majority. We can only hope that more Bradley Mannings in this world can help expose and calm the destructiveness of our hypermilitarism. According to Daniel Ellsberg in a November 2010 Democracy Now! interview, Manning was formerly responsible for administrating the arrests of people who issued “scholarly critiques” against the current administration. As an Army soldier, Manning was part of the U.S. military empire that helped to torture people who would not accommodate its demands in the hopes they would do what they empire wanted. Ellsberg describes Manning who, like Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar, resisted empire. Of Manning vis-à-vis the U.S. empire, Ellsberg says he “chose to say no to it, to expose it, to resist it, to do what he actually should have done. One person out of hundreds of thousands who did that.” This reminds me of Daniel’s refusal to bow down to the King that Nebuchadnezzar demand he worship. The U.S. empire in its hunger for control through militarism is very much like Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel. I am grateful to live to see brave young twenty three year old Bradley Manning bravely resist this empire by refusing to participate in these arrests of people that do not cooperate with this corrupt American empire. Bradley Manning’s commitment to truth and justice is so strong and has rung such a strong chord within me, especially during this Daniel fast I’m on now, that I think of the verse in Mark chapter 10 verse “Can you drink this cup with me?” I have been asking this question about myself and potential friends and partners in my life. Can you endure this cross with me? Can you endure suffering for the cause of truth and justice with me? After joining and hearing the protests in support of Bradley Manning, I believe I can imagine Manning in his confinement asking me, ‘can you endure a suffering for the cause of peace and justice? Can you endure torture when deep down you know you did the right thing to undermine the aggressive over-militarized American empire?’ Manning is answering this question in the affirmative, and if he can answer in the affirmative, then so can I. Manning makes me think directly of Jesus. Not in any sort of Mormon way at all. Just the way of Jesus. When I think about what Manning is going through, I think about what Jesus went through on the cross. Turning over the tables of the money changers. Declaring that the peacemakers are called the children of God. Demanding that the wealthy give up their riches and follow him. I don’t know if Bradley Manning is Christian, but I do know that he has done the most Christian act I’ve seen in my thirty one years so far on this earth. Manning makes me think of Jesus who asks: “Can you drink this cup with me?” Manning has said yes. This reminds me of the fact that some people want the crown but not the cross. They want to reap the benefits of heroism but don’t want to sow the hard work it takes for many to become a hero or heroine. As he is being tortured and forced to stay naked in solitary confinement in a military prison in Quantico, Bradley Manning is enduring the cross right now. Manning leaked the information to WikiLeaks in order to show the inhumane machinations of the American empire that, if not checked, will lead to its downfall. And I applaud him one hundred percent for it. We need to check our excessive ballooning military spending. We need to create more jobs. And stop cutting programs that helping people contribute to a healthy economy. Manning has inspired me to challenge empire in my own way. While Manning challenged empire by releasing documents to WikiLeaks, I choose to challenge empire by lobbying my elected officials as a citizen. Mainly by attending a lobbying conference this weekend. I have to do something. So I choose to lobby my elected officials to NOT support our increasing militarism, among other things. I am sad to say that my U.S. Representative, Chaka Fattah, has supported two supplemental bills for war funding. I am here in the DC area not only to learn from Manning but also to learn from the Quakers. They constitute what I think is the most important religious citizen lobby or, a citizen lobby of faith in their organization, the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL). Although my father taught me very hard not to think in racial terms, I can’t help but look at Bradley Manning, and ask why can’t African American soldiers be arrested for crimes like this? A crime that reflects this extraordinary level of political consciousness? And as I look at the FCNL, I ask why can’t African American churches create a strong religious lobby like the FCNL? Why can’t they work like Dr. King in a concerted, coordinated effort to fight militarism by lobbying elected officials in Washington, the way the FCNL does? The FCNL was founded during the protest of World War II and have continued to speak truth to power in Washington against our increasing militarism. They have a powerful lobbying conference this weekend and I’ve learned so much, particularly from Ruth Flower, their Associate Executive Secretary. She says that in Quaker teachings, we are called to “answer to that of God in everyone…and so we talk with—and listen to—everyone, including people with whom we don’t expect to agree. We converse, trade ideas, share experiences, and leave ourselves open to the possibility that we ourselves will be changed by each encounter.” This is something that I have to practice when I tend to get very angry talking with elected officials or their staff who justify their support of war funding. The Word of God tells us we should be slow to anger. My being here at this conference has given me so much insight about HOW to lobby and that includes NOT dismissing or judging people who seem GIVEN OVER to supporting military intervention but to listen then as soon as I can get my point in and, as Ruth Flower suggested, to leave myself open to the possibility that I might be changed by each encounter. I do not work in the military and do not have the capability to challenge empire the way that Manning did, but I can do what I can and arm myself with information, try and live as the Lord would have me to live and challenge empire the way Jesus did. The way Daniel did. His fasting helped him hear from the Lord and cleared a path between him and God and on today, day #279 of Bradley Manning’s detention who is being denied the niceties of seeing the sun and clouds and conversing with friends and family, I can feel just a portion of what Bradley Manning feels. Manning is being persecuted for telling the truth the way Jesus was persecuted. When I think about Manning’s sacrifice and how such a well-meaning person can be detained, then I can take my life a little more seriously. And so do something. So I choose to ask how I can reduce military oppression and advance work for the kingdom of God. I can support him in this very trying time for him. I continue to pray for his health and sanity, and that he reaches a fair trial where he will expose the inhumane and illegal practices of U.S. empire. In an effort that will ultimately shed light on our unhealthy, increasing militarism in order to put an end to it. Manning is challenging empire. Daniel’s deliverance and the Lord’s ascension shows us the supernatural rewards from God for challenging empire. We don’t do this for the reward, though. The Lord says we have to give without expecting anything in return. We have do right because it is right. Thank you, Bradley Manning, for doing what is right.

Sincerely,
Rhone Fraser

my review of JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK

2011-02-22T11:54:00.005-05:00

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to see the original play that helped motivate Lorraine Hansberry to write A RAISIN IN THE SUN. It is Sean O'Casey's 1923 play JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK and I recently saw an awesome production of it Friday at the Washington Shakespeare Company, hosted by the Artisphere in Arlington, Virginia. My hats off to the director of this production, Shirley Serotsky. And a phenomenal cast which included Joe Palka (Jack Boyle), Cam Magee (Juno), Jay Hardee (Johnny), Melissa Marie Hmelnicky (Mary), Christopher Henley (Joxer), Kathleen Akerley (Mrs. Madigan), Slice Hicks (Needle/Furniture Removal Men), Rebecca Herron (Mrs. Tancred), Sam McMenamin (Jerry Devine), Colin Smith (Bentham), Evan Crump (Irregular/Vendor/Furniture Removal Men/Neighbour/Policeman), Daniel Corey (Sewing Machine Man/Vendor/Furniture Removal Men/Neighbour).

To buy tickets go to: https://robot.boxofficetickets.com/800-494-TIXS/WebObjects/BOTx2005.woa/wa/inspectProgram?id=132285&passKey=242ff77658

Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey is a play that explores the struggle of one’s fidelity to principle within an environment designed to kill that fidelity. Its set in a 1922 Dublin tenement and its main characters, the Boyle family, each had their personal principles affected in some way by Ireland’s fiery civil war. The war was fundamentally about independence of Ireland from Britain but, by 1922, was specifically over the Anglo-Irish Treaty, a controversial treaty signed between Britain and Ireland. The treaty caused a split between within the Irish Republican Army (IRA) between those who supported it and those who didn’t because of what they saw as it falling short of Ireland’s complete independence. The treaty did not concede an all-Ireland Republic, as many demanded, but instead established a “free state” with near sovereign powers for Ireland. The powers were near sovereign because they required parliament members in Ireland to swear an oath of allegiance to the British crown to the disgust of many in the IRA. Supporters of this “free state” clashed with those in the IRA who opposed the treaty and adopted guerilla tactics and were known as the “Irregulars.” This civil war has created a hostile environment outside the Dublin tenement in which this play takes place and the strong feelings on either side of the war, for or against the Anglo-Irish Treaty, threaten to ravage anything in its path, especially the fidelity of this play’s characters to their own principles. In O’Casey’s play, the son of the family, Johnny Boyle, was fighting for the Irregulars and by the play’s start is in infirm at home, after losing an arm in battle with them. Johnny’s fidelity to principle is one that uncompromisingly fights for an independent Ireland without any concession to the British crown whatsoever. At the same time, however, Johnny has very understandable reservations about his own level of commitment when one of his own comrades, Tancred, is killed and he subconsciously feels responsible for it. We see him needing consolation from his mother after he is haunted by an image of a bloodied Tancred. In Johnny we see the cerebral commitment to principle at odds with an emotional commitment to self-preservation. After losing his arm, he questions the need for the killing and maiming in the civil war. His sister Mary also begins the play with her own fidelity to principle. She is striking, as part of her labor union, to protest a fellow female worker’s victimization on the job. Her extra time at home concerns her mother who herself challenges the decision of her daughter’s labor union to strike: “Wan victim wasn’t enough. When the employers sacrifice wan victim, the Trades Unions go wan betther be sacrificin’ a hundred.” She questions the morals and principles of the Trade Union’s strike especially when it makes it more difficult for striking families to make a living. This matriarch of the family, Juno Boyle, is dedicated to the principle of keeping her family together yet is in charge of a Dublin tenement whose environment makes every effort to weaken her family. This environment either threatens the life or the livelihood of her loved ones: from her son’s struggle with the Irregulars, to her daughter’s solidarity with her Trade Union, to her husband’s struggle with his alcoholism. Keeping this family together requires caring for her injured son who suffers from some post-traumatic disorder; it requires minding her daughter which becomes a growing task as the play closes; and it requires keeping her husband, Jack ‘Captain’ Boyle, out of the pubs where he drowns his sorrows in the spirits of the local snug. Juno tries to get Jack to take more responsibility as a father and provider of the family. This includes challenging the role that Jack’s friend, Joxer, plays in his life, which seems to be nothing but dead weight. A kind that makes no effort to break Jack out of the alcoholic stupor long enough to help maintain fidelity to a principle or help Juno maintain her fidelity to principle. By the end of the first act Mary’s suitor, Bentham, informs Jack that according to the will of his descendant, he is entitled to a large sum of money. By the beginning of the second act, we see materially where that large sum of money goes: for more extravagant furniture including a new couch and new gramophone. His friend Joxer indulges in these niceties with him however when their neighbor Mrs. Madigan and tailor, ‘Needle’ Nugent, demand that Jack pay them and he doesn’t, we see the real issue of Jack’s alcoholism that masks a deeper issue caused by their environmental poverty. Johnny worked for a principle that on some level tried to alleviate the poverty and alcoholism that his own father was slave to. His principle however was hindered by his father’s own alcoholism which Johnny laments, when he berates his own father for not handling his newfound money responsibly. Jack assumes every thing that Bentham says is true and gains material items with the assumption that his inheritance will replace his expenses he incurred getting these material items. Jack later discloses that the money he was promised by the will according to Bentham was essentially gobbled up by other competing families, presumably part of the British empire, who also claimed their lineage to Jack’s descendant. If we are to believe what Jack says about why the family could not claim their money they inherited, then we see that the Boyle family’s loss of money represents a greater loss of autonomy by Ireland vis-à-vis Great Britain. The fate of their inheritance is like the fate of many soon-to-be colonies of the British: its gobbled up too quickly by the British to be enjoyed by anybody else. Like British colonies, the Boyle family is relegated to an inferior place by other British in order to allow British citizens first dibs or first helpings on their inheritance. This is especially true of Bentham who impregnates Mary then disappears to England to escape responsibility of raising the child. Mary’s sexuality becomes an object of colonization for Bentham who can enjoy the pleasure of conception and escape the responsibility that comes with conception, the way a colonist can escape the responsibility that comes with helping maintain a colony. By the start of the third act, one by one, members of the cast including Nugent and Mrs. Madigan reclaim their material items that Jack felt he needed to have to be the ‘paycock’ that Juno knows him as. He loses them because of his belief that they indicated his elevation in social status, which is definitely a result of British colonization, where Victorian values that make strong distinctions by class, are taught and solidified in its colonial subjects. The material items would suggest that the Boyle family is in a higher class than they are, but they are an illusion as O’Casey shows us very clearly. What enhances the living room in the second act is gone by the third act and certainly dramatizes the deep level of poverty that the Boyle family and many others are truly in, essentially as a British colony, in the eyes of the anti-Treaty Irish. The family we see is undone by the illusion of wealth that the American habit of speculation is based on. Paycock gets these material things, including the chairs, couch and gramophone based on the idea that he would have money that he never really had, much less earned. O’Casey suggests that it took people like Paycock, whose materialism fuels the civil war between free-staters and anti-Treaty Republicans, to prevent the Irregulars from recruiting more members. His materialism is a distraction for die-hard Republican cause because it buys material items that only strengthen the pro-free-state economy instead of supporting the Irregular cause that his son Johnny is part of. Johnny Boyle represents the strife of Ireland’s civil war. On one side he fights the Irregulars, after losing his arm, and denies his role in Tancred’s death. On the other side he fights the shiftlessness and alcoholism of his father who waits and exploits others’ labor for material gain. John O’Riordan writes that Johnny is a test of real acting strength: his political guilt lies behind the whole momentum of the play.
The younger members of the Boyle family, Johnny and Mary, represent not only the younger generation, but a newer opportunity to break the sexist, oppressive colonial norms that the older generation is still crippled by. Johnny battles with the Irregulars yet at the same time battles against them when two of their soldiers in the play’s third act accuse him of setting Tancred up and ultimately kill him. Mary befriends an Englishman Bentham who impregnates then abandons her. Juno vows that despite his flight, the two of them will raise the baby and thereby breaks an oppressive colonial norm of Dublin that tended to shun unwed mothers by sending them off to a convent to have the baby without their involvement, putting an unfair onus on the women to handle the responsibility of childbearing. The play ends with Johnny’s death, Juno’s commitment to help Mary raise her baby, and at the very last scene is Jack and Joxer in a drunken stupor. Most of all, it ends with the Irish civil war that remains unresolved; a war that has taken a toll on each and every member, especially Johnny, whose fellow Irregular fighters kill him, presumably out of a belief that he betrayed his fellow comrade. In reality O’Casey shows how Johnny gave more than anybody in his family for the anti-Treaty cause, his limb and his life, which included his fight against his father’s materialism caused by his alcoholism. This ailment distracted his son and his family from addressing the main cause of the anti-Treaty Republicans that Johnny fought for: the cause of full sovereignty from the British. These Republicans no doubt attributed their poverty to their status as a colonial subject of England and fought against every ailment that stood between them and their fidelity to unconditional independence, including the ailment of alcoholism, which we see in Jack. O’Casey shows the fidelity of the Irregulars who in the third act demand that Johnny go with them. In their presence he denies their request, yet by the play’s end is killed by these same forces. Juno delivers a searing monologue, lamenting the death of her son, asking God to replace our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh. Despite his mother’s care, he is not able to escape the demands of an all consuming civil war that demands sacrifices from those who’ve sacrificed the most.
This play has been credited as the piece of creative art that helped inspire Lorraine Hansberry to leave the University of Wisconsin and become a full time playwright. In her biographical play To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, Hansberry writes:
I remember sitting there stunned with a melody that I thought might have been sung in a different meter. The play was Juno, the writer Sean O’Casey—but the melody was one I had known for a very long while. I was seventeen and I did not think then of writing the melody as I knew it—in a different key; but I believed it entered my consciousness and stayed there…(65)
The melody that stayed in Hansberry’s consciousness is the tragedy of the Boyle family, which she relates to members of her fictional Younger family in A Raisin in the Sun. The tragedy of the Boyle family is the loss of their son to an unforgiving civil war that demanded uncompromising, unconditional love of country. The tragedy of the Younger family is the loss of their inheritance to a son who trusted an unforgiving friend with a ten thousand dollar inheritance because of his belief in the American business model. The melody that O’Casey shows us is the enormous sacrifice that one mother makes, to bolster her husband, her son and her daughter despite a world that is prepared to shatter that family. The melody that Hansberry shows us is the enormous sacrifice one mother makes to bolster her son, her daughter, and her daughter in law despite a world that prepared to shatter that family. Both playwrights are obviously concerned with the role of a mother within a family of an oppressed culture: O’Casey shows how Juno fights ultimately against British colonization which is a force formidable enough to demand supreme loyalty from her son that is enough to kill him. Hansberry shows how Lena Younger fights against American individualism, when she laments Willy Harris’ selfish theft of her husband’s money. These playwrights are making profound comments on the importance of fidelity to one’s own principle and the cold environments that try desperately to kill that fidelity. They both suggest that the role of the caring, loving mother is crucial, and her fidelity to keep that family together is perhaps the most important role that there is in a family within an oppressed culture.

Special thanks to Melissa Hmelnicky who invited me to see this important play; John O’Riordan for his book A Guide to O’Casey’s Plays; and to Jane Horwitz for background on Dublin in 1922. –RF.

My interview with Norman Marshall on John Brown

2011-02-12T03:01:00.005-05:00

Despite all the sudden technical difficulties that arose, it is my pleasure to present my February 10, 2011 interview with actor Norman Marshall about his play JOHN BROWN: TRUMPET OF FREEDOM running at the Moonstone Arts Center this Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7PM. To buy tickets go to:
http://www.moonstoneartscenter.org/moonstone-arts-center-events/john-brown-trumpet-of-freedom/

This excerpt did not include a lot of what Marshall said because of technical difficulties however he begins here talking about how Brown's abolitionist cause attracted different people from very different walks of life. At top is a photo of Norman Marshall as John Brown courtesy of his website http://www.wbworks.com/johnbrown/play.html. Below is a famous rendition of John Brown by John Steuart Curry called "Tragic Prelude" referring to his hanging at Harper's Ferry after his raiding a Confederate arsenal. Special thanks to DJ Champe for clearing up major technical difficulties in the studio, that made my conversation with Norman Marshall possible.

my interview with Loretta Vasile & Davon Williams

2011-02-12T02:57:00.003-05:00

The following is an interview I conducted Thursday, February 10, 2011 with dramaturg LORETTA VASILE about the STRENGTH poetry night on Friday, February 25th at 7PM. Joining this conversation is playwright Davon Williams about his two plays OUR FATHER and THE BOY WHO SEES.

My interview with the 2011 cast of THE NIGGA FILES

2011-01-07T13:12:00.005-05:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing the cast of the 2011 production of the play THE NIGGA FILES written and directed by Donja Love, co-directed by Heather Thomas. In the studio was Donja, Heather and the actors, which included: Salina Yasmine as Martha, Stan Dixon as Eddy, Jamarr Hall as Jamal, Aaron Thornton as David, and Keith Illidge as Spencer. We discussed the writing process, the acting process, the rehearsal process and read a scene from this powerful play. Listen to this powerful interview. BE SURE TO ATTEND WHAT WILL BE A POWERFUL PRODUCTION OF A POWERFUL PLAY, FROM TUESDAY, JANUARY 11TH TO SUNDAY, JANUARY 16TH @ 8PM WITH SATURDAY AND SUNDAY MATINEES AT 2PM AT THE SHUBIN THEATRE AT 407 BAINBRIDGE (ONE BLOCK SOUTH OF SOUTH STREET AT THE CORNER OF 4TH STREET). For tickets go to: http://gokashproductions.ticketleap.com/theniggafiles/

An Interview with Jamila Capitman about the December 2010 production of Love, Queens

2010-12-03T01:51:00.003-05:00

After seeing Love, Queens, Who Suffer From Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a choreopoem by Jamila Capitman and Heather Thomas, at CCP, I interviewed Jamila Capitman about the meaning of the play the following day on December 3, 2010. This choreopoem was inspired by Ntozake Shange's profoundly successful 1976 play called For Colored Girls Who've Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf I was profoundly moved by Jamila's statement about the function of one of the women in this play, Woman in Lime Green, whom Jamila says represents LUST. She said she wants this character to encourage women, who particularly identify with this character, to ask WHY they do what they do? What makes the unique use of sex so valuable? I thought this was important and following the Lorraine Hansberry-Amiri Baraka path of theater that is supposed to change the way we think about our society. While my September 2010 interview with Heather discussed the need for the audience to challenge the normality of gun violence, my recent interview with Jamila seemed to challenge the normality of male exploitation of female bodies. The Woman in Lime Green is one who puts her sexuality to a very clear use that ensures the audience that her men, her clients will not exploit her without her being able to get back something useful in return. This is challenging the conventional ways we normalize the objectification of women the way that Tyler Perry did with Thandie Newton's character in his film based on Shange's words. We also had a powerful reflection on Ms. Shange after hearing her interview with Harriette Cole and having a live reaction to this interview. I hope this play grows and prospers and becomes the functional art. Jamila I think wisely said that this play is not so much depressing as it is teaching the reality of the difficulty of urban life ULTIMATELY IN ORDER to motivate its audience to do something about it. Ultimately art is functional in this case. I hope this interview enlightens you as much as it did me. -RF.

My Interview with Cheril Clarke and Heather Thomas about their plays at the 2010 PUTF

2010-09-24T13:39:00.006-04:00

On the September 23, 2010 show of Freedom Readers, I talked with playwrights Cheril Clarke and Heather Thomas about their plays featured in the Philly Urban Theater Festival. Cheril's play is Intimate Chaos, playing Thursday, September 30th; Friday, October 1st; and Saturday, October 2nd at 7:30PM at the Adrienne Theater. Heather and her fellow co-writer Jamila Capitman's play is For Love Queen Who Suffer From Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder playing Sunday, October 3rd and Sunday, October 10th at 7:30PM at the Adrienne Theater near the corner of 21st street and Sansom. We had an important conversation about their work. -RF.

My Interview with Ronald Walters (1938-2010)

2010-09-17T17:46:00.001-04:00

I chose to interview Dr. Ronald Walters after learning about his role in one of the first nonviolent sit-ins in this country in 1957 from Dr. Aldon Morris’ book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing For Change. Walters cites being part of the NAACP Youth Council as a reason for choosing to stage a sit-in in a Dockum lunch counter in Wichita, Kansas. Ella Baker was instrumental in inspiring not only the NAACP Young Councils across the country that Dr. Walters was part of; she was also instrumental in inspiring the 1960 sit-in movement that followed Dr. Walters sit-in and produced the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). I talked to Dr. Walters about why he was not part of the larger sit-in movement and later asked him to assess my master’s thesis which as you’ll read he thoroughly trounces. He finally mentions his role as a campaign manager in Jesse Jackson’s Presidential Campaign of 1984. Based on the votes of Congressional Black Caucus members mentioned in my thesis since Obama’s inauguration, Dr. Walters’ assessment of my thesis I think has proven correct. His analysis and perspective is greatly missed. This phone interview took place on October 16, 2006. I was and am incredibly grateful for his time. Rest in peace, Dr. Walters. –RF.

FRASER: My first question is about your class background. You talk in the book African American Leadership about the importance of the factor of class. Could you describe your own personal class background, and what class background you were raised in America?

WALTERS: I am from a working class family in Wichita, Kansas. Born in 1938. The 1930s was a period where the aircraft industry…was the main employer of working class blacks. I shouldn’t say the main employer because the main employer was the low income jobs, and people were working as janitors and yard caretakers in peoples’ homes. So if Blacks wanted the stable jobs, they had to work for something like the post office or the aircraft industry. Boeing was the main employer of African Americans. The fortunes of the Black community pretty much rose and fell depending upon whether or not Boeing had a contract. When they did have a contract people worked, when they didn’t have a contract people were laid off. My dad was a military man. And he came out of the Army from the McConnell Air Force Base as a civilian employer, as a clerk. So he had a stable job. He was also a musician. So he played music on the weekends. So my family more or less had a stable income. My mother did work and we were part of a large extended family that offered all kinds of support. I was the first child in the second generation and I therefore had kind of a special status. So the fact that we were working class or poor…was somewhat beside the point because my upbringing was one in which I had free reign on a very large extended family. And a lot of things went along with that.

FRASER: Like James Lawson [who] was the first child of…four boys altogether…you talk about the support of the extended family and being the first child seems to be a factor in working in the movement…my next question is about your time in the sit-in at the Dockum store in Wichita, Kansas [in 1957]. And you said in an article called “Standing Up in America’s Heartland:” “No flash of insight led me to confront this humiliation. It was like other defining moments in that era; the growing political consciousness within the Black community, born of discrete acts of oppression and resistance. That consciousness told me that my situation was intolerable. That it was time at last to do something.” My question is: could you talk about that consciousness that led you to do what was maybe the very first sit in the country? [Belinda Robnett in her book How Long? How Long? writes of a Howard University student named Ruth Powell leading an earlier sit-in, in 1948]

WALTERS: Well you know this is a very important question that I as a scholar have puzzled over. For many years. Finally I had the opportunity to describe [this] in a piece I did for a law journal. This was the Washburn University Law School Journal. And…they asked me to come back and do a keynote speech for a conference they were doing for the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education a couple of years ago. I said to myself: what I would like to do in this paper is to look at the various sources that were responsible for the development of Black political consciousness that actually lived. I wasn’t so much concerned with Brown as I was concerned with this question. That has multiple answers here. So first of all, let me say that I [started] with oppression of Black people. You have to start there. Most people don’t understand that in the 1930s and 40s that the oppression of Black people was rife, where there’s still pockets of slavery in the United States. That’s the first thing and I’m partial to slavery because I’ve had a graduate student who’s been looking a year now at documents that Blacks are writing to the NAACP talking about we’re still not being paid and the last case the Justice Department prosecuted about chattel slavery was in 1950. So that reality is on the ground. There were Blacks in the South that were beginning to rebel to the point where some social scientists believed it may be a national race riot given that situation. So start with the race thing. Secondly, second world war. Coming out of the second world war, you had a very interesting institution like the United Nations. It promulgated a set of humanitarian values that were very important to Black people: self-determination…and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for example. Now these things, all of them…as early as 1941…Roosevelt and Churchill sat out on that boat in the Atlantic and [endorsed] the Four Freedoms that those two thought would carry on going into World War II. The Four Freedoms were not meant to apply to Black people. And so it is very interesting that W.E.B. Du Bois and these people say “yes they do” so we will write some tomes and some of them we will deliver to the United Nations, when it was finally formed talking about how people fit into these new values that were coming out of the war. So that’s a big one. Now the third one is the international scene. The Cold War. The United States was embarrassed, because it was all of a sudden faced with the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union was saying, well since our revolution in 1917, we have been trying to pursue a non-racial line and yet you [the U.S.] have racial discrimination among Black people in your country. So which one of us should have plane to be a world leader? American diplomats backed the United States in saying we have a tactical problem here. We’ll get beat up in international forums by these people because racial discrimination is a problem in the United States, so we have to do something about that. That’s another stream. All of a sudden there was pressure in the U.S. government. Within the elite, they began to think about doing something about racism. Another one had to do with the Roosevelt legacy. 1948. Democratic convention. First of all you had the Roosevelt legacy. Then as a result of that it affected the Democratic Party to the extent that at the 48 convention, Hubert Humphrey said, ‘we’ve got to put the first plank in our platform having to do with non-discrimination.’ Well that was elected. The Dixiecrats bolted the election. Strom Thurmond led them out. Formed their own party. And Strom Thurmond ran for president. That was a signal moment because it told Blacks the Democratic Party just might be willing to hear them out…These things were going on in forties and thirties and readily build sort of backdrop slowly but steadily for the political consciousness that emerged in the post war period. The Brown versus Board of Education Supreme Court decision was the match that ignited all that. Because what that said to Black people was that ‘hey, we’re on the right side of history.’ So if the Supreme Court said we’re on the right side of history, then we must be. We got validation for that. So lets now take the next step and begin to knock down these walls. So that’s where that consciousness came from. A deep and abiding resentment of the oppression of Black people. But it built…to the point where I just felt when I was working downtown in Wichita, Kansas, I saw Black people lining up behind a board. To get their meals. That was wrong. There had to be something done about that. So we began to plan, an NAACP Youth Council, to break it down. The Civil Rights Movement is important in the stream of things because you had the Montgomery Bus Boycott…from 1955 to 1957 but what I point out on this piece is that Brown versus the Board of Education focused on Kansas. Right next door you had the Little Rock Crisis. Central High School. Right next door. So you had to two or three things there in the mid 1950s that were extremely important. You had the Brown decision. You had the maturation of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and you had the crisis of school integration right in our neighborhood. There’s no way you could escape that. So those three things right in our neighborhood.

FRASER: Thank you. I talk about venues of nonviolence and I argue in my thesis that the U.S. House is a venue of nonviolence. I characterize Barbara Lee’s vote against the war in 2001, September 13th as a significant act of nonviolence that I compare with Rosa Parks refusal to give up her seat in December 1955. I compare Daisy Bates’ work with the Little Rock Nine to Congressman Chaka Fattah’s turnaround of the Philadelphia Public Schools over the past five years so I’m just covering similarities within the past five years of Congressional Black Caucus members, comparing them to nonviolent activism…in the late fifties and early sixties. Please assess the argument as to whether the House is a venue of nonviolence. And I remember reading in your book African American Leadership where you talk about Maxine Waters who in 1997 led a protest against the House subcommittee when they were threatening to end Affirmative Action. So could you talk about the ways in which the U.S. House can be a venue of nonviolence, continuing the nonviolence that was from the movement?

WALTERS: Well, I don’t think nonviolence characterizes the story because nonviolence would have more I think of a value, in the conceptualization of your paper, if it were in the nonsystemic realm. Which is to say, if it were not in the institutions of American government. King practiced nonviolence outside the American political system against the American political system. When you go within the American political system, it is by definition not nonviolent. That’s its whole character. So to characterize someone within the system doing nonviolence doesn’t give you much analytical power. Because that is the nature of the arena. So that to say Barbara Lee did something that particular of a nonviolent nature doesn’t characterize it correctly, because that is the nature of the entire arena. That’s why that arena was established in the first place. To give people a nonviolent way. They call it a civil way of taking a political position. So you don’t get much credit for that. For the nonviolent aspect that is. I don’t see what that adds to the analysis. Because that is the nature of the House.

FRASER: Do you think that it is significant, the vote against the war and the invasion in 01?

WALTERS: Yes, that was an act of courage on her part. Totally an act of courage. But it had very little to do with nonviolence. That’s the point I’m making. Because nonviolence really is the character of the political system in which she acted.

FRASER: Very good. Describe if you could your arrival at Fisk and American Universities and how eventually you worked for Charles Diggs and William Gray.

WALTERS: Well I arrived at Fisk really as a result of the sit-in. An interracial organization in my city, a progressive Black and white one, gave me a fellowship to go down to Fisk in the summer of 1959, to attend the Race Relations Institute which was a very popular institute and it was started by Professor Charles Johnson…and when he died it was being run by his son. And I went down there and was just bowled over by the Institution which was [full of] historical culture of Black people. And I had never been to anything like that before in my life. I decided to go back. In 1960. I had spent one year and a half at Wichita University. And so I transferred and I was very successful at Fisk. John Lewis was my classmate. Diane Nash, some of these people were all involved in the Nashville movement. Jim Lawson was down there. And the people were coming through all the time. And Nikki Giovanni was there. So it was a rich group of people there. I didn’t become as involved in SNCC then because for one I took umbrage of the fact that they started the sit-in movement and I said, ‘what is this? Not really.’ And secondly, they placed sort of a religious barrier in my way. I was very strong in the religious. But they were connected in some way to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which was heavily religious, heavily Southern, charismatic. Well, my mother was Episcopal. And so I tried to go in that direction. And that didn’t connect as well with the civil rights movement.

FRASER: They were more charismatic rather than according to the Episcopal tradition?

WALTERS: That’s right. And so there was a deep Southern culture involved in that. And many became a part of that for movement purposes and I didn’t quite fit in. And so, I spent a lot of time supporting movement from this [academic] side. I became very involved in student government. Vice president of student government. President of Kappas. And I was an ‘A’ student. Graduated with a fellowship to Columbia University. Another fellowship to American University. I selected American University because I was excited by John F. Kennedy and his coming into office, his wanting to do something having to do with African Americans. And at least one person came to campus seemed to solidify that for me: Senator Rockefeller. The young man. A Kennedyite. He was going around the country, talking on college campuses for Kennedy. He came to Fisk and I was just inspired by the Kennedys. And so I wanted to come to Washington and saw trip through a fellowship to American University. So that’s how I got there. My major was African studies. And I got an M.A. in African Studies and a Ph.D. in International Studies. And my main discipline was Comparative Politics. Politics allowed me then to look at national political systems. And that’s how I got involved in African American politics. First job, Syracuse University. Second job, Brandeis. I became founding chair of Afro-American Studies. And the students there wanted more African American politics, so I teach it. And so I’ve carried these two fields all my life. African American politics, political science. Boston University was alive, involved in the movement in those days. Black Studies was just starting and became one of the principal pursuits and the keeping all the Black students. So it was quite a period.

FRASER: Yes it was. Could you describe how you became an advisor for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign?

WALTERS: Well in 1983 I was invited to a meeting at Howard University. And they were looking into the possibility that Jesse would run. And they asked me if I would consider briefing him on public policy. Because they thought he could win. And I said well I have to think about that. I’m not hot about Jesse across the board. He’d come to Howard when I was Political Science Chair at Howard since 1971. I left Brandeis and went to Howard. And he came to Howard a couple of times to speak and I crossed words with him. I wasn’t that enamored. But in any case I had become a little bit closer to him because that spring, this is the spring of 83, I was part of a group that Walter Fauntroy put together called the National Black Leadership Forum. I was secretary. The question came up, this was a group of…national black organizations, and I have a chapter on the Black Leadership Forum in my book African American Leadership, whether or not [we could have a] Black presidential campaign. So what I did was a survey of leadership to see if this was feasible, and the answer came back yes. So then I was invited to the Black Leadership Forum. The Forum is a group of heads of twenty five national organizations. The group that Fauntroy founded was the Roundtable which was the largest of heads of national Black organizations. I was secretary of the Roundtable. But I was invited to a meeting of the Forum in the spring of 83 and there they wanted to take up the idea of a Black Presidential Candidate. And I was invited to present a survey. And so I made my report, they discussed the issue, and they decided that yes, there should be a National Black Presidential Campaign. They didn’t say who was going to do it. Obviously the presumption was that Jesse might…He said ‘come out and go with me.’ So I hung out with him after that meeting. And I had a chance to talk to him. And we developed a comfort zone. But that was a very important meeting. Because that meant that at least some of the members of the National Black organizations had approved of a campaign, knew it was going to happen and so forth, so I came in that fall to the meeting…and I finally decided that I would be one of the briefers. But the other person was Hank Richardson. Two of us were his main briefers. In the Fall of 1983. In January as the campaign kicked off, he asked if I would be the deputy campaign manager. And I did it without any salary. The whole campaign. While teaching at the same time. Jumping on and off planes. Very costly. But in any case, that’s how it happened.

FRASER: Thank you very much.

PHOTO OF WALTERS COURTESY OF EVAN VUCCI, AP.

An Interview with Charles Fuller - Part 2

2010-08-13T12:13:00.001-04:00

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An Interview with Charles Fuller - Part 1

2010-08-13T12:03:00.003-04:00

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This is part one of my interview with writer Charles Fuller about his new novella Snatch: The Adventures of David and Me in Old New York. This novella or children/young adult story is Fuller's first children's book and is an adventure story about two brothers, David and Charles, 'free' black kids living in the Five Points neighborhood of antebellum New York City in 1838. A powerful story. I appreciate Mr. Fuller's previous work, having read and seen A Soldier's Play and Zooman and the Sign. This work Snatch along with his plays is definitely a tribute to a theme he discussed in this interview: the importance of community. A powerful story that I was honored to read and interview the author of. Book photo courtesy of http://www.davidandmeinnyc.com/ and audio courtesy of Vania Gulston, WPEB Radio, and Box.net. -RF.

A discussion of Dr. McWilliams part 2

2010-06-04T09:32:00.002-04:00

mcwilliamspart2.mp3

On Thursday, June 3rd, 2010, I talked with Dr. Weldon McWilliams about the second half of his recent Ph.D dissertation (the fourth through sixth chapters) entitled TO PROCLAIM LIBERTY TO THE CAPTIVES. In this discussion we have an interesting exchange about how the the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church sees Paul (author of the most books of the Bible, in the New Testament) differently from the mainstream American church that tends to overemphasize his teachings on individual salvation to ultimately accomodate the Western individualism that is a cover for further neocolonial exploitation. An edifying conversation indeed. -RF.

A discussion of Dr. McWilliams' dissertation--Part one

2010-05-30T16:36:00.003-04:00

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On Thursday, May 27th, 2010, I interviewed recent graduate Dr. Weldon McWilliams about the first three chapters of his Temple University Ph.D dissertation, TO PROCLAIM LIBERTY TO THE CAPTIVES: THE PAN AFRICAN ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN CHURCH AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO BLACK LIBERATION THEOLOGY. This is an important discussion about American Christians who were willing to lay their lives down on the line for the cause of liberating others and spreading the Gospel. A special thanks to Vania Gulston for production assistance. -RF.

Addison Gayle & The Power of Literary Criticism

2010-05-22T01:56:00.004-04:00

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This past Thursday, May 20th, 2010, from 7-9PM I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Nathaniel Norment Jr., editor of an important book: THE ADDISON GAYLE JR. READER. Addison Gayle Jr. is perhaps one of the most important literary critics of our time. He wrote primarily about the art within the Black Arts Movement and truly provided an important framework for understanding and analyzing works of art in our time. Probably the most important essay to me was his preface to the book Black Expressions: Essays By And About Black Americans in the Creative Arts. In this preface he writes that 'the Negro critic should explicate a work of art in terms of its contributions to humanity.' This is something that I look for in quality criticism. In my attached interview with Dr. Norment, I discussed two critics that do the important work of providing quality literary criticism which, for Gayle, included being well versed not only in the critiqued author's entire body of work, but also the genre of that work by different authors. In this interview I shared how much Gayle himself has explicated the contributions of Richard Wright's novel Native Son to humanity by exposing the contradictions of Northern liberal racism. There are three other important literary critics that do the same with other writers' works. The first literary critic that explicates a work of art in terms of its contributions to humanity is LAVINIA JENNINGS, who wrote a biography of the very important writer ALICE CHILDRESS. In this biography, Jennings writes that in her novels intended for a younger audience, "Childress offers no easy solutions, no contrived happy endings, and no quick fixes to the identity crises confronting her teen protagonists...To Childress' adolescent readers, these uncertain endings transmit no false security and no life-as-a-fairy-tale interpretations. Each story accepts the reality that the road toward self-hood, adulthood, and acceptance by others is rocky with rejections, disappointments, and failures. But with the personal stamina and adult support, it can be safely traveled" (115). Here Jennings shows that Childress' contributions to humanity includes showing the importance of having some amount of personal stamina as well as a supportive community. Another powerful literary critic is JOYCE PETTIS who in her discussion of the novels of PAULE MARSHALL, truly shows how Marshall's works are contributions to humanity by exposing the pitfalls of individualism and materialism in Western Culture. In her book Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall's Fiction, Pettis writes: "Marshall's characters illustrate the unlikelihood of spiritual rapprochement for people who are mindlessly captivated by the allure of materialism and enticed by Western values antithetical to their cultural properties. The author frequently appropriates symbols of Western industrialization to suggest the disruption perpetrated on unsuspecting populations"(90). Pettis elaborates (like Barbara Christian in her book Black Women Novelists) on how Marshall's characters are affected because of this 'disruption' and mindless captivation, hence the fates of Vere in The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and Primus in Daughters. A third literary critic I think that profoundly fulfills this call by Gayle is SUSAN NEAL MAYBERRY in her book of criticism on TONI MORRISON'S male characters called Can't I Love What I Criticize? Her description of what Morrison does with her first novel The Bluest Eye is emblematic of what Morrison does in all her novels. Mayberry writes: "The Bluest Eye examines the destructive effects on black males of Western-imposed concepts of repressive sexuality, competitve ownership, physical beauty, and romantic love. It shifts the 'gaze' away from the black figures to focus on the white power structures that cause those figures to battle each other for predominance" (16). Here Mayberry exposes how Morrison's works are contributions to humanity by problematizing these aforementioned Western-imposed concepts. These concepts are further complicated by the trauma that people of color uniquely endured in the West, and literary criticism that fufills Gayle's call of explaining an artist's contributions to humanity at the very least helps us conquer this trauma in order to obtain deliverance from the oppressive concepts. Thank you Michael Roux of the University of Illinois Press for my own copy of the Addison Gayle Reader; thank you Dr. Norment for allowing us to read Addison Gayle, and thank you Professor Gayle for pure, unadulterated, life-saving RIGOR. (Photo of the Addison Gayle Reader cover courtesy of the University of Illinois Press) -RF.

Part 2 of my interview with Keith Gilyard

2010-05-09T10:06:00.001-04:00

keithgilyardpart2.mp3

Part 1 of my interview with Keith Gilyard

2010-05-09T10:03:00.002-04:00

keithgilyardpart1.mp3

On Thursday May 6, 2010, I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Keith Gilyard, Distinguished Professor of English at Penn State University, about his new biography, John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism in the studio, at WPEB Community Radio, for my show FREEDOM READERS which airs Thursdays 7-9PM on 88.1 FM WPEB. Special thanks to Nathaniel Norment, Sara Rude, and Vania Gulston for helping make this interview happen. Special thanks to Dr. Gilyard for all his work. This interview is about one hundred minutes. Click to hear parts 1 and 2. -RF.
PHOTO OF BOOK COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS.

Invitation to FREEDOM READERS

2010-03-01T21:41:00.003-05:00

Greetings Bloggers. It is my pleasure to introduce to you FREEDOM READERS, a weekly book talk show on WPEB 88.1 FM, Thursdays 7-9PM. You can listen to archived shows at www.livestream.com/freedomreaders

Thanks to my first four guests for this show in February 2010: Tanya Barfield, Professor Mary Frances Berry, Professor Nikhil Pal Singh, and Dr. Warren Maye.

Please join me this month as I interview the following authors about their works: March 4th: Professor Elizabeth Nunez about her latest novel Anna In-Between, March 11th: Professor Daniel Black about his new novel Perfect Peace, March 18th: Professor Alan Singer about his book New York and Slavery, March 25th: Donna McDaniel about her book co-authored with Vanessa Julye, Fit For Freedom, Not For Friendship (tentative), and April 1st: Professor Bettye Collier-Thomas about her book Jesus, Jobs and Justice.

Tune in Thursdays 7-9PM on 88.1 FM Philadelphia or listen live at www.livestream.com/freedomreaders

Photo of Lorraine Hansberry courtesy of Bettman/CORBIS.

A Full Review of "Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918" by Jeffrey B. Perry

2009-11-06T11:57:00.002-05:00

Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 by Jeffrey B. Perry.New York: Columbia, 2009.

Jeffrey B. Perry has established himself as perhaps the single most scholarly authority on the life of autodidact Hubert Henry Harrison, having written his 1986 Ph.D. Columbia University dissertation on him and edited A Hubert Harrison Reader, published in 2001 by Wesleyan University Press. He has confirmed such a role with the publication of the first comprehensive biography of Hubert Harrison, subtitled The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918. It is the first of a two volume biography and covers Harrison’s life up to the beginning of his leadership of the growing New Negro movement, not to be confused with the popular New Negro artistic movement that Alain Locke is given credit for. According to Perry, his biography “offers a missing vision that fills major gaps in the historical record” and “enables us to significantly reshape our understanding and interpretation of the first three decades of the twentieth century.” To underscore the lack of previous scholarly attention to Harrison, Perry includes a 1990 photo of Harrison’s unmarked grave in Woodlawn Cemetery, evidencing how “Harrison’s activism, brilliance, and intellectually potential has not been given sufficient recognition.” Perry in this biography significantly reshapes our understanding of this early twentieth century figure by showing a man who in words most articulately challenged American capitalist white supremacy. He shows Harrison’s battles as a proverbial David versus Goliath duel, where throughout Harrison’s life, this Goliath morphs and grows more formidable, manifesting itself first in the press (in battles against the New York Times), second in a political party (the Socialist Party), and later within Harlem in the “Negro” press (New York Age and the Amsterdam News). Harrison was born on April 27, 1883 in Concordia Estate on the Caribbean island of Saint Croix which was later sold from Denmark to the United States in 1917. Before we read his birth, Perry in his first chapter entitled “Crucian Roots,” provides a comprehensive history of Saint Croix, with particular attention to those who united with others to fight their economically exploited status, such as “Queen Mary” Thomas. In 1878 she helped organize a massive sabotage of fifty three sugar plantations fifteen stock estates to oppose the oppressive labor contracts, low wages, wage inequalities, unequal employment opportunities, vagrancy laws, lack of upward mobility, and reduced medical services. He includes a sketch of her and fellow Saint Croatian “Buddhoe” who thirty years earlier staged a nonviolent demonstration demanding their freedom.[1] Perry’s attention on these figures places Harrison in his proper historical context of organized resistance against oppressive colonial and neocolonial policy. It anticipates Harrison’s demand to challenge not only Dutch colonial policy but United States neocolonial policy in the Caribbean: “it behooves all those who vote to use it to bring effective pressure to bear against the horrifying brutalities which black people are now compelled to endure from the cracker in the Caribbean.”[2] It also anticipates his writings that laud his fellow Saint Croatians in their twentieth century battles against colonial policy:

“by organizing the workers the union was soon able to pull up wages to fifty cents, seventy-five and finally a dollar a day…These black Danish workers began to give evidence of a social vision far in advance of that which was being exhibited by white workers in the United States. They organized a bank of their own, secured a printing- press, published a newspaper and bought up seven of the estates on which they had formerly been employed. It became evident that they meant to try conclusions with the capitalists of the islands on their own grounds. Against such organized economic co- operation the planters could not hope to compete successfully. They realized that transfer to the United States, in which racial subordination was most effectively organized and intrenched in the politico-economic structure of the actual government, would redress the balance and restore their effective control over wages and working conditions.”[3]

The United States eventually restored the “control” that Harrison refers to, despite the institutions that Saint Croatians built to challenge exploitative capitalism. The “printing press” referred to here included the Herald edited in 1915 by David Hamilton Jackson, leader of the Saint Croix Labor Union and one of Harrison’s lifelong friends. These battles like the ones that Queen Mary, Buddhoe and David Hamilton Jackson fought are not intractable from the current battles against Caribbean and Latin American leaders like Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti and Manuel Zelaya in Honduras who, in trying to raise the minimum wage of their country’s masses, are forced to fight military coups either supported or allowed by neocolonial powers. Perry in providing this “rich history” shows how Harrison is predated by a strong legacy of colonial resistance that he continues in his writing. This first chapter includes a careful analysis of Harrison’s genealogy guided by a close reading of primary sources including Saint Croatian church registers and records from the Saint Croix African Roots Project (SCARP). While the arrival of Queen Mary set the stage for his birth on Saint Croix, the departure of his mother set the stage for his migration from there to the United States. Perry writes that on January 30, 1899, at age fifteen, Hubert lost his mother, and immediately his sister who then lived in Manhattan sent for him. In the summer of 1904, he moved further uptown and according to Perry who was given exclusive access to his diary by Harrison’s family, Harrison: “was a true autodidact—self-motivated and purposefully self-directed in his study, inspired by other autodidacts, and free to roam.”[4] According to his diary entries and Amsterdam News articles, Perry writes that Harrison’s participation in lyceums, as a listener, lecturer, and debater “provided a true scholarly training for his developing intellect.”[5] It is this participation that seems to train him to fight his first battle against Goliath; by the end of 1910, Perry writes that Harrison had twelve letters to the editors published in the New York Times, an extraordinary feat for an immigrant, especially an immigrant of color. One of these letters was a 1904 response to comments from Mississippi’s newly installed white supremacist governor James K. Vardaman who wrote in the Times that Negroes are “more criminal as freeman than as slaves” and those that “can read and write are more criminal than illiterate.”[6] Harrison challenged the assumption in Vardaman’s argument that crimes by Negroes were necessarily manifestations of Negroes vying “for social equality.”

Based on letters like these and diary entries of Harrison, Perry writes: “Harrison was consumed by his community based intellectual work and not the lack of money.” At the post office, he convened a study circle known as the Press Committee that intended “to reply to aspersions and misrepresentations of our people in the newspapers of New York City.”[7] This is what Harrison largely did in his several letters to the New York Times. Perry writes that this circle discussed race matters, books, and readings including those related to a history project on the “Negro in America.” Another of his projects included a textbook on Reconstruction and the more ambitious work on “Reconstruction and the Negro,” which was apparently not completed. His study included exhaustive study of books, two of which were written and sent by W.E.B. Du Bois. Up to 1910, he developed a race history class and a literary club at the White Rose Home for Colored Working Girls, the only exclusively colored settlement in New York. During this time he writes:

“my haunting of the YWCA, YMCA, the White Rose Home, disreputable clubs, streets of evil and sordid associations; my social work with the rest among the children of 62nd Street, my attendance at revival meetings and prayer meetings which but for the psychological interest would disgust me—all this by putting me in full-touch with the life of my people will aid me in understanding them better than many another and fit me to write their history.”[8]

By the end of 1909, Perry writes that he married Irene Louise Horton and began living up to severe limitations: “the conflict between family responsibilities and intellectual pursuits would affect his remaining years.”[9] His most influential letter was not in the New York Times, but the New York Age, a paper that would later contribute to his own paper’s demise. On December 8, 1910, he publicly critiqued Booker T. Washington by stating that Washington had lied in stating that whites were fair and honest in dealing with Negroes and that essentially “the right of Negroes to buy what they can pay for must be restricted in the interests of white people.”[10] This critique of Washington is related to Harrison’s larger and more relevant critique of the Republican Party being “the most corrupt influence among Negro Americans…Republicans subsidized these Black leaders [like Washington] who often posed as independent radicals and [who] were, in Harrison’s words were ‘intellectual pimps’ selling out the influence of any movement, church, or newspaper, with which they were connected.”[11] Perry writes that New York City’s leading Black Republican politician, Charles W. Anderson, a close personal and political friend of Booker T. Washington’s met with him and based on his letter, removed him from his position at the Post Office. Perry writes “on July 1 [1910] he was ‘failed of promotion,’ and on September 1 he was charged with leaving the floor of the work room before his tour of duty ended. Perry calls the action of Washington’s Tuskegee Machine dastardly: “on a personal level, its impact on Harrison and his family was extremely difficult.”[12]
Perry exposes the hierarchical tiers of white supremacy that function to silence people who challenge or sanction it, as Washington did. Charles W. Anderson is on one tier; above him is Booker T. Washington who seeks to ignore atrocities of lynching and race discrimination; above Washington are his white philanthropists who fund Washington to essentially restrict Negroes within their own capitalist interests. Harrison’s journey here is very much like that of the narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man who is confronted with this multi-tiered white supremacy: first in the college president, Dr. Bledsoe, who expels the narrator from his livelihood as a working student in order to vindicate a white supremacist on a higher tier, Norton, the college philanthropist. Charles W. Anderson functions very much like Dr. Bledsoe in appeasing Booker T. Washington when Harrison critiques him. Both Bledsoe and Anderson ultimately appease white philanthropists and the functions their money are intended to maintain: keeping Negroes “restricted” to either conceding the pure benevolence of all whites like Harrison or to vocational trades and not to a greater liberal arts education like Ellison’s narrator. This is a kind of social order that allies of Washington believed was part of God’s natural “order.” In fact, Perry quotes Anderson saying of Harrison: “God is not good to those who do not behave themselves.”[13]
Very much like Ellison’s narrator, Harrison’s next foray is into politics, within the Socialist Party, where he battles white supremacy in a similar manner that Ellison’s narrator battles inside the “Brotherhood.” While it plunged him into poverty, Perry writes that “it was Harrison’s removal from the Post Office in September 1911 that freed his time for socialist activity.”[14] He used his experience in the Post Office to demonstrate in his writings the effectiveness of nationalization. In a world without television and internet, Harrison relied on “the tremendous power of special addresses” to convince listeners of the utility of socialist principles. Perry writes that Harrison’s work was so effective that the Socialist Party vote increased by six thousand, and they designated him “permanent organizer to be appointed for work among Negroes.”[15]
Ellison’s narrator was told by Brother Jack: “Get as many to join as possible. You’ll be given guidance by some of the older members, but for the time being you are to see what you can do. You will have freedom of action—and you will be under strict discipline to the committee.” As part of the Socialist Party, Harrison was also under “strict discipline” to the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party. Along with following their commands, he made in own independent voice known in a five part theoretical series called “The Negro and Socialism.” In it he responded to Socialist Party members who claimed that African Americans were a hindrance to social change. Like his 1910 analysis of Washington’s claim and like Du Bois’ recent sociological data suggests, he pointed in the other direction for the real problem. His second and perhaps most searing article as a Socialist Party organizer was entitled “Race Prejudice” where he argued that racism had economic causes; that capitalists consciously fostered race prejudice; and that capitalists benefited and workers lost from racial discrimination.[16]
As a Socialist Party speaker he pinpoints two essential issues. First was the central weakness of American unions which is relevant up to today, particularly the “protected group” among unionists that demanded for itself a larger share of its product than other unionists.[17] The large gap between rich and poor encourages this demand. Even without appealing to racist beliefs, Harrison exposes the problem of union organization. The second essential issue that Harrison focused on was how the work of Socialism should be carried among Negroes. His third part of the series called “The Duty of the Socialist Party,” made clear that “the Socialist Party was not a white man’s party or a black man’s party, but the party of the working class” and its historic mission was to unite the workers of the world. Harrison suggested that the Socialist Party reach across race lines by simply treating fellow Blacks as human beings. George Frazier Miller and W.E.B. Du Bois suggested they do this by avoiding altogether racially segregated locals of the Socialist Party. In response to these comments, Harrison defended the Socialist Party and insisted that no segregation was intended within it, although it recruited members through what they called a Colored Socialist Club. On some level, Miller and Du Bois could argue that Harrison was defending an organization whose direction was dictated by whites, under their discipline, as Ellison’s narrator was, just like Ellison’s Bledsoe was. The primary difference with Harrison however is the kind of work they were aiding: Harrison believed that through this work the fundamentally oppressively racist mores of society could be challenged if not broken, whereas Ellison’s Bledsoe, modeled on some level after Washington, were trying to accommodate such mores.
In the sixth chapter entitled, “Socialist Writer and Speaker,” Perry details Harrison’s battles with a Goliath in the form of a Socialist Party that, after funding a “Colored Socialist Party” would retreat closer to the political right that separated itself from the pro-sabotage wing of the International Workers of the World (IWW). They catered to the “protected group” that Harrison previously identified as the culprit of weakening American unionism. In addition, the Socialist Party refused to route their own candidate, Eugene Debs, to the South during the 1912 presidential campaigns because, according to Harrison, they were willing to betray “by silence the principle of inter-racial solidarity which they espoused on paper.”[18] This is yet another blow by Goliath to Harrison whose efforts were stopped by the intractable racial segregation of the American South. Harrison in a 1911 Call article asks: “I am wondering what the Socialist philosophy would be if Marx had been a Mississippian;”194 this is a veiled critique of the potential racism within Marx that white American Socialists do not interrogate, then and today.[19] According to Perry, Harrison reasons that if race and racism are sociohistorically derived, then racial oppression and racism can also be subjected to eliminative social action and strategies for change that challenges white supremacy. This is how Harrison lived his life; unlike Ellison’s narrator (and Ellison himself according to Rampersad’s biography of him), Harrison sought to develop the eliminative social action, as a Biblical David-like figure to challenge the Goliath-like white supremacy.
By the end of 1912, he began his separation from the Socialist Party with his support of Frederick Sumner Boyd, who was arrested for advocating sabotage, violating New Jersey state law. On principle, Harrison supported Boyd declaring that every blow struck by labor against capital is a blow for labor. Perry points out the hypocrisy of the Socialist Party in its hiring people to violently beat up scabs in strikes yet punishing Boyd and his supporters. Perry presents Harrison’s support of Boyd as part of a long line of vehement Crucian protest against private industry by any means necessary. This kind of protest is like Queen Mary Thomas’ protest where she supported the sabotage of sugar plantations when owners refused decent wages. Perry writes that Harrison’s personal leanings were more toward the IWW (International Workers of the World) because of their more advanced stand on the race question. The Executive Committee soon brought charges against Harrison for disobeying orders not to debate antisocialist Frank Urbansky. Around this time Harrison wrote a letter intended for the New York Call where he provided his rationale for leaving the Socialist party. Harrison was brought to trial and suspended for three months.
The Socialists, like the “Tuskegee Machine” and the Post Office would tolerate only so much outspoken independence. For the second time in three years Harrison lost his principal means of livelihood for expressing his views. Harrison’s experience with the Socialist Party is similar to Ellison’s narrator’s experience with the Brotherhood in that their experiences were based on ideas but on their speech. Brother Jack, leader of the Brotherhood tells the narrator: “You were not hired to think.”[20] This is essentially what the Executive Committee (EC) of the Socialist Party tells Harrison in his support of Boyd: that they, the EC, thought for the Party and not Harrison. Like the narrator, Harrison is confronted with the reality that the Socialist Party, like Ellison’s Brotherhood was more interested in cosmetic changes, in name, that included a “Colored Socialist Club,” rather than substantive changes that would require ending exploitative capitalism and truly challenging racism within the party and the greater society. In trying to reach the black worker, Harrison is determined to be “in full-touch with the life” of his people. While his withdrawal from the Socialist Party meant another victory for Goliath, it also freed him up to gain experience as a lecturer in New York City. Perry quotes Theodore Vincent stating: “the man most responsible for building the tradition of [Black street oratory] was Hubert H. Harrison.”[21]
Harrison started his own Radical Forum which would include lectures on Sunday afternoon on popular science, sociology, economics, history, religion, literature and drama. He delivered lectures for the Radical Forum six days a week at the New Harlem Casino to a largely white audience. A overarching point in his talks among a largely white audience was the fact that twelve hundred of the seventeen hundred million people of the world were “colored—black, brown and yellow” and were at peace only until the white minority determined otherwise:

“No capitalist employs a worker for two dollars a day unless that worker creates more than two dollars’ worth of wealth for him…therefore, every nation whose industrial system is organized on a capitalist basis must produce a mass surplus of products over and above, not the need, but the purchasing power of the nation’s producers. Before these products can return to their owners as profits they must be sold somewhere. Hence the need for foreign markets, for fields of exploitations and ‘spheres of influences’ in ‘undeveloped’ countries whose virgin resources are exploited in their turn after the capitalist fashion. But, since every industrial nation is seeking this same outlet for its products [such as oil in Iraq and Africa], clashes are inevitable and in these clashes beaks and claws—armies and navies—must come into play. Hence the exploitation of white men in Europe [such as the Cold War and its attendant battles] and America becomes the reason for the exploitation of black and brown and yellow men in Africa and Asia. And, therefore, it is hypocritical and absurd to pretend that the capitalist nations ever intend to abolish wars.”[22]

Along with his speaking stints, Harrison worked at the Ferrer Modern School as an adjunct professor of Comparative Religion. Up to 1915, his work at the Modern School seemed a welcome refuge from the white supremacist Tuskegee Machine and the Socialist Party. After his Harlem Casino lecture series ended, Gertrude Cohen, a librarian at the 135th Street Public Library suggested that he concentrate his efforts in the Harlem community. By the end of 1915, he seemed to synthesize his experiences with the Machine and the Socialist Party to develop in his lectures the need for race consciousness, which was basically a call for African Americans to recognize the racial oppression they faced and to use that awareness to unite, organize, and respond as a group. As long as the United States remained a white supremacist society, a needed and necessary corrective interest, was for African Americans to develop race consciousness. Harrison’s “race consciousness,” which well preceded Garveyism, encouraged a philosophy of self reliance that was marked contrast form that of New York’s two leading civil rights organizations, the NAACP, and the National League on Urban Conditions, whose work was premised on the idea of interracial cooperation. Harrison suggested that “white” support, allegedly necessary in financial and organizational efforts was in fact more a fetter than an aid. It was a fetter to Harrison’s resentment of rich and powerful white philanthropists who with their money expected a certain designation of Negro inferiority. However it was not a fetter to editors of Negro presses who were intent on remaining editors by any means necessary.
Harrison’s race consciousness message included developing a healthy skepticism of these kind of editors, some of whom would brag about controlling the Negro vote. By March of 1916, Harrison began his literary criticism by looking at drama in a searing piece he sold to the New York Times entitled “Leaves Torn From the Diary of a Critic.” In it he criticized the Lincoln Theater plays written by Billie Burke as “beneath contempt in structure, plot and dialogue.” Due to his criticism, the proprietors of the Lincoln Theatre, instead of seeing it as an opportunity for productive growth to expand their audience, the Lincoln Theater advertisers withdrew all their advertising from the Amsterdam News.[23] The Amsterdam News did not publish another review or article by Harrison for seven years according to Perry. This slight still plunged him into providing examples of peoples who utilized the race consciousness he described: “the Negro people of America would never amount to anything much politically until they should see fit to imitate the Irish of Britain and to organize themselves into a political party of their own whose leaders, on the basis of this large collective vote, could hold up Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, or another political group of American whites.”[24]
This “political group of American whites” included the proprietors of the Lincoln Theater who withdrew their funds by taking offense at ideas that challenged normal, white supremacist depictions of the Negro on stage. In response to editors that were powerless to these white supremacist actions, Harrison founded his own press. On June 18, 1917, he presented the first issue of The Voice, a newspaper that “agitated for intellectual and political independence…race first priorities, internationalism…mass appeal, and good editing.” This organ was founded after a well attended rally of over two thousand people at Harlem’s Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church on 52-60 West 132nd Street, six days earlier on June 12, 1917. The attendance indicated Harrison’s apparent appeal in the Harlem community at this time. It is at this rally that Marcus Garvey gets his first public introduction, according to both Perry and Tony Martin, author of Race First. At this meeting, Harrison founds the Liberty League, whose mission included demanding that the federal government enforce the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.[25] The Liberty League also called for federal antilynching legislation. Harrison during 1917 clarified not only a race consciousness but the “new Negro,” who will not tolerate the injustices of the past:

“the new Negro is demanding elective representation in Baltimore, Chicago, and other places…He is demanding as a right that which he is in a position to enforce…the old idea of Negro leadership by virtue of the white man’s selection has collapsed. The new Negro leader must be chosen by his fellows—by whose strivings he is supposed to represent.”[26]

Harrison in this year identifies the same problem he faulted Washington for: allowing white men to select Negro leadership. His founding of the Liberty League and defining of the New Negro, could not have been more timely. In the month following his launching of the Liberty League, East Saint Louis, Missouri, endured violent race riots, precipitated by the return of black soldiers from World War I, who were thought to give white workers “unfair” job competition. Perry writes that officials of organized labor served as prominent apologists for ‘white’ labor’s role in the rioting. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, placed principal blame for the riots on ‘the excessive and abnormal number of negroes’ in East St. Louis, while W.S. Carter, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, maintained that ‘the purpose of the railroads in importing Negro labor is to destroy the influence of white men’s labor organizations.’”[27]
White men in this case are too often what Harrison identified as the “protected group” that apparently depended on their protection so much they resorted to violence. In response, Harrison called for armed self-defense and related to the definitions of being a New Negro, and did it within a press that is not beholden to people without the race consciousness he has described. According to Robert A. Hill, The Voice was the radical forerunner of the periodicals that would express the developing political and intellectual ferment in the era of World War I. It was followed in November 1917 by The Messenger edited by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen and in August 1918 by the Negro World edited by Marcus Garvey and The Crusader by Cyril Briggs. These four publications, led by The Voice, Perry shows us, manifested “the principal articulation of the Negro mood.” The Voice sold out 3,000 copies after its first issue and sold 5,000 copies on its second issue. Perry writes that Fred R. Moore, editor of The Age, a staunch Republican and a former associate of Booker T. Washington declared that “the representative Negro does not approve of radical socialistic outbursts, such as calling upon the Negroes to defend themselves against the whites.” Harrison responded in The Voice by stating that the real difference between The Age and The Voice was whether Black people have a right to defend themselves against whites. The Voice’s answer was yes and The Age’s answer was no. Perry writes that because of the paper’s firm position of political independence, it lacked consistent support from the established political parties and political machines. The Voice explained that its policy was to take virtually any political advertisements, while simultaneously maintaining the right to openly criticize any advertiser. The main source of income came from the low-paid Black masses, whose resources were limited. However, Harrison moved in a way thought impractical by prominent supporters of The Voice when he tried to have the paper come out more frequently in the face of competing pressure from The Age and Amsterdam News. He faced even more frustration with the Socialist Party when they pitted A. Philip Randolph and Owen against two “electable” Black candidates. He withdrew permanently from the Party as a result of this. Perry writes that by June 26, 1918, major steps were taken to undermine his organization: “According to the Bureau of Investigation agent Joseph G.C. Corcoran, [his] surveillance is one of the earliest instances of the Bureau of Investigation’s monitoring of a Black radical.”[28] By next month, W.E.B. Du Bois had published probably the most controversial editorial of his life, known as the “Close Ranks” piece where he calls on African Americans to forget their special grievances and close ranks while fighting alongside white American soldiers. After being prompted by Walter Howard Loving in the Department of War, Harrison took Du Bois to task over this idea, and exposed Du Bois’ reasons for calling on African Americans to close ranks: “to secure a position as a semi-civilian captain under Major [Joel] Spingarn to carry on in that spirit.”[29] Harrison’s organs of Liberty League and The Voice served a huge proverbial blow against Goliath, mainly because these organs inspired extraordinarily influential radical thinkers such as Marcus Garvey, one of whose followers was Earl Little, father of Malcolm X, a symbolic figure of the Black Power movement. Harrison also inspired A. Philip Randolph who charted his own publishing path in The Messenger, winning a war of attrition against Jim Crow employment. Randolph’s work with E.D. Nixon lay groundwork for both the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington movement, both of which popularized Martin Luther King, Jr, symbolic leader of the Civil Rights movement. This influence presented by Perry underscores his point in the introduction that “Harrison is the key link in the ideological unity of the two great trends of the Black liberation movement—the labor and civil rights trend, associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. via A. Philip Randolph who was influenced by Hubert Harrison and the race and nationalist trend associated with Malcolm X via Marcus Garvey who was influenced by Hubert Harrison. Perry ultimately accomplishes his unprecedented task of filling in major gaps that reshape our understanding of the first three decades of the twentieth century. These gaps need to be accounted for in the authoritative texts of African American Studies, such as Introduction to Black Studies by Maulana Karenga. The biography concludes with a Perry noting the legacy that his Liberty League intended to carry: a legacy against white supremacy. This legacy sought to teach people how to use their education, formal or not, to improve their living conditions. This is what the Crucians born before Harrison’s birth and after did: Queen Mary Thomas practiced this legacy on the sugar plantation, Arturo Schomburg practiced this legacy by his founding of the Schomburg Center in Harlem. And Canada Lee continued on the dramatic stage helping to humanize the Negro character while breaking the back of Jim Crow.
Perry in Hubert Harrison shows us the bare machinations of white power, more than any other thinker in his time. He had an ability to command the attention of not only pedestrians on Harlem street corners, but also those who were the most willing administrators of white power: Booker T. Washington in the Tuskegee Machine, W.E.B. Du Bois in the United States War Department, or the Lincoln Theater proprietors. Each of these administrators is jarred if not shattered by Harrison’s forceful critique, ultimately railing against capitalist white supremacy, more than white supremacist capitalism. Harrison showed in his writings that it was the idea of racism that preceded the economic system, not the other way around. If the egg did come before the chicken, then the egg must be white supremacy, according to Harrison. His writings challenging white publishers refusal to sell black books prove this as well as his biting sarcasm of A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, critiquing their complicity in the Socialist Party’s plan to use them to run against two “electable” Black Republicans. This was a move that would weaken Harrison’s own race consciousness and ultimately advance white supremacy. His writings teach us to challenge the racist subconscious assumptions of not only print media as was in his time, but now the more pervasive television and internet media; they teach us that it is only by organization that oppressive forces in society can change. Instead of Ellison’s protagonist’s retreat into the underground, Harrison’s life encourages the kind of work that protagonists in Caribbean novels have done like Angel in Merle Collins’ Angel or Manuel in Jacques Roumain’ Masters of the Dew: organizing among the masses, seeking people with similar concerns and commitment against injustice and then acting as a group to correct the exploitative nature of capitalism.
Rhone Fraser

[1] Perry, Jeffrey B. Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918. New York: Columbia, 2009, p. 25-27. Henceforth referred to as “Perry.”
[2] Perry, Jeffrey B, ed. A Hubert Harrison Reader. Middletown (CT): Wesleyan, 2001, 157.
[3] Perry, Jeffrey B, ed. A Hubert Harrison Reader. Middletown (CT): Wesleyan, 2001, 245.
[4] Perry, page 57.
[5] Perry, page 72.
[6] Perry, page 67
[7] Perry, page 48
[8] Perry, page 99.
[9] Perry, page 110.
[10] Perry, page 128.
[11] Perry, page 102.
[12] Perry, page 133.
[13] Perry page 133.
[14] Perry, page 151.
[15] Perry, page 155.
[16] The legal foundations that encouraged upper classes within the private industry to divide lower classes by race is brilliantly laid out in A. Leon Higginbotham’s legal history called In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process, The Colonial Period (New York, Oxford, 1978).
[17] At the writing of this review, New York Post reported on September 1, 2009 that members of SEIU Local 1199 say their union leadership has already spent too much money on a dispute that includes a trustee of United Health Care West, a private insurance company. This trustee is part of the protected group that Harrison mentions being a roadblock to union solidarity. In Solidarity Divided, written by Fernando Gapasin and Bill Fletcher (Berkeley: University of California, 2008). The point is made that: “most of today’s unions have been shaped by the Gompers’ legacy and anticommunism. The early movement under Gompers generally combined decentralized authoritarianism with racism and sexism. The purge of Left-Led unions strengthened by a corporate culture within the official union movement that discouraged creativity, democracy, and any broad sense of class struggle” The trustee of a private insurance company like United Health Care is part of a corporate culture that benefits from using union dues on this publicized dispute that members are concerned about.
[18] Perry, page 194.
[19] Perry, Jeffrey B, ed. A Hubert Harrison Reader. Middletown (CT): Wesleyan, 2001, 194. American Socialists today still apply principles of Marxism without fundamentally critiquing his fundamentally racist notions of “progress” towards an ultimately Western nation-state that cooperates with the European exploitation of natural resource footnote to predates many critiques of Marxism, articulated by Cedric Robinson in The Anthropology of Marxism and Ama Mazama in The Afrocentric Paradigm.
[20] Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International, 1953, 1995, p.469.
[21] Perry, page 230.
[22] Perry, page 232.
[23] Donna Walker-Kuhne in Invitation to the Party: Building Bridges to the Arts, Culture and Community (New York, TCI, 2005) has written effective strategies for theater production groups to increase and diversify their audiences; however many productions choose not to follow them and continue with inadequate, incomplete plot lines mainly because their white supremacist ideas that would limit a more developed play take precedence over their economic interests. Harrison has written a similar critique of white publishers, choosing to prioritize white supremacist ideas over profit, such as the idea that books by black authors or about black people simply will not sell.
[24] Perry, page 266.
[25] Perry, page 288. Perry called The Liberty League’s demand that the Fourteenth Amendment be enforced “instructive” because the amendment was previously used as a principal weapon in the service of big business and white supremacy. Misuses of this amendment is described in Charles Ogletree’s brilliant legal and personal history called All Deliberate Speed (New York, W.W. Norton, 2004). In it, he describes an originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. According to the originalist constitution applications, the Fourteenth Amendment is still not being applied according to its original intention in the recent U.S. Supreme Court case of Ricci v. DeStefano, where Justice Kennedy who writes the main opinion claims that the city violated the Fourteenth Amendment rights of a white citizen being denied, not employment, but promotion, on a job. Fourteenth Amendment cases generally applied to African Americans seeking protection for more basic living rights which included employment and not promotion the way the Ricci used the amendment for. The Liberty League’s work is instructive here and suggests a whole new demand for judicial branches applying their originalist interpretation to Fourteenth Amendment cases.
[26] Perry, Jeffrey B, ed. A Hubert Harrison Reader. Middletown (CT): Wesleyan, 2001, 139.
[27] Perry, page 297.
[28] Perry, page 384.
[29] Perry, Jeffrey B, ed. A Hubert Harrison Reader. Middletown (CT): Wesleyan, 2001,172.

Why I Was Arrested and Jailed Yesterday

2009-10-31T17:19:00.004-04:00

For the first time in my life on Friday, October 30, 2009 I was arrested because the “public option” has been mangled, compromised by President Obama on September 9th of this year and most recently on Thursday, October 29th of this year by Nancy Pelosi. The definition of the public option has changed drastically during the course of this year. At first it was closer to its actual name, being “public,” meaning available to everybody. Since Obama’s September 9th speech so many specific conditions apply to this “public option” that its availability is severely restricted. It is not public anymore. Neither is it an option. According to their income, people are either penalized for or restricted from switching from their employment-based healthcare to it. However the final nail in the coffin for “healthcare reform” is Nancy Pelosi’s fateful decision Thursday to remove what would have been a very important condition of this celebrated healthcare bill: the Kucinich amendment. This amendment would have allowed states such as Pennsylvania to enact their own single payer healthcare system instead of relying on private insurance, which is trying to profit from healthcare by denying claims. Psalm eighty two verse three says Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. In order to do this, it is essential to try and stop the continued exploitation by private insurance.
It is absolutely unconscionable that in this country there are billions to be spent on war yet private insurance profiteers insist on making money from a person’s health. Over forty seven million people in this country are now without health insurance. Obama and Pelosi more than anything are truly vested in keeping private insurance pleased; making sure they continue to make profits at the expense of others’ healthcare. The largest private insurer in Pennsylvania is Independence Blue Cross (IBC) who regularly denies life-saving doctor requested care based on “pre-existing conditions.” IBC continually wastes money on excessive CEO salaries and advertising that could go towards care. Their CEO Joseph Frick was paid $2.7 million in 2007. They’ve spent over $5 million on advertising. In 2004, they charged 3,100 low-income families $45 a month even though they were eligible for free government health insurance. Last year they’ve spent over $16 million in lobbying to keep this broken system alive, instead of using it to actually provide people meaningful healthcare. So yesterday with a group organized by Student Healthcare Action Network, Healthcare NOW!, Healthcare for All Philadelphia, I sat in front of the headquarters of Independence Blue Cross Blue Shield near the corner of 19th & Market Streets and demanded to meet with the CEO Joseph Frick who said in an Inquirer op-ed that “we support health reform that builds on the current employment based-system.” Why is that the case when we’re in the worst job recession since the great depression? When an IBC representative said he could not allow that, we sat down right in front of their headquarters’ doors. And stayed. Because I was tired of Obama compromising healthcare to private insurance, while more children go uninsured. Because I was disgusted by Pelosi’s ultimate compromise to remove the Kucinich amendment, certainly at the behest of private insurance. Because so many more people will be forced to have money in order to have healthcare. Because two people with incredible potential to do the right thing, capitulated to corporate interest yet again.
I will not cooperate with two people who have on an individual level allowed capitalist materialism to remove their conscious regarding healthcare for people without jobs. For children. Two people who probably have families of their own and on an individual level are absolutely covered, but have been swayed by powerful industry to ignore the masses of people who make drastic, fateful decisions for their healthcare. I often convince myself that if I was in their position, regardless of my income, I would not care how much money was being thrown my way, I could not allow, first of all, a public option, to be eliminated from being an option. And second, I could not allow an amendment to allow states’ rights, in a culture created and dominated by people who championed such rights, to remove the ability for states to enact their own single payer system. So I sat. And thought that if Obama and Pelosi, allowed private insurance to have its way and do absolutely anything to us as a nation, then I wouldn’t. So I sat with the knowledge of the historical function of insurance in the United States of America.
That word was the reason that so many enslaved were thrown overboard slave ships, because traders deliberately overestimated the number of Africans they had. And those landed buyers, also known as insurers, refused to pay these traders any more than what they paid according to their documented insurance policy. So traders would very deliberately capture hundreds more enslaved Africans than these documented policies agreed to. Some decided that if they had hundreds more Africans than what their landed buyers were willing to pay, you might as well throw the enslaved Africans you don’t need overboard. They’re expendable. They’re more like pieces on a checkerboard than actual human beings. They are property to profit off of, and nothing else. Markus Rediker in The Slave Ship writes:

“Captain Luke Collingwood sailed with his crew of seventeen and a ‘cargo’ of 470 tight-packed slaves from West Africa to Jamaica. The ship soon grew sickly: sixty Africans and seven members of the crew perished. Fearful of ‘a broken voyage,’ Collingwood called the crew together and told them that ‘if the slaves died a natural death, it would be the loss of the owners of the ship; but if they were thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss of the underwriters’ who had insured the voyage. Some members of the crew, including mate James Kelsal, objected but Collingwood prevailed, and that evening the crew threw 54 slaves, hands bound, overboard. They threw another 42 over the side two days later, and 26 more soon after. Ten of the enslaved watched the hideous spectacle and jumped overboard of their own volition, committing suicide and bringing the number of deaths to 132. Collingwood later pretended a lack of water was the cause of his action, but neither crew nor captives had been put to short allowance, and indeed the ship still had 420 gallons when it docked. The case was tried in court when the insurer refused to pay the claim and the owners sued in response” (Rediker, 240, 241; italics in original, underlines are inserted).

The owners believed they could profit from what the insurers promised to pay them. If they were paid by the insurer amount X for Y number of enslaved Africans, yet the owner took more enslaved Africans than Y, then the owner figures he is liable to more than X for the enslaved he brings. Rediker’s case here shows how Collingwood saw these enslaved Africans as simply means to make profit from the insurer and nothing else. The insurer thought likewise and went to court based on his capitalist decision to make money. This case was not over the atrocity of throwing human beings overboard. It was over two capitalist pigs at one trough trying to barrel each other over for more food, in this case more money. The owner sued the insurer because the owner wanted his money. It is doubtful that the owner and the insurer here were suing for anything else besides money. Certainly not the humanity of those thrown overboard. Decisions like these are the basis of U.S. society. In a very real way, this is exactly what private insurance companies today are fighting each other for, pouring billions of it into Washington to secure the favor and protection of Obama and now Pelosi. And they have succeeded in seizing such protection. People are insured in order to profit from them, says the insurer. Like the insurers who sued Collingwood, private insurance today figures that if they pay an entity something like Washington, they should get something in return. Obama and Pelosi have made sure that, like Collingwood’s insurers, they got back what they put in. This is the American way. However, at what expense? At the cost of millions more being uninsured and people making unfair, inhumane decisions all in order to pay money for their own or loved ones healthcare? Like Collingwood, private insurance sees people as just pieces on a checkerboard to be moved around. Private insurance, Obama and Pelosi have proven the triumph of capitalism, and shown us citizens of the world that there’s definitely a piece of Luke Collingwood in Obama and Pelosi. It just needs some priming, some pruning, facilitated by money. This is why I sat. Because insurance has been, is, and continues to play with people’s lives, treat their lives as expendable, all for capitalist profit. For private insurance CEOs to get rich.
I was arrested and taken to what is called the Roundhouse where I was fingerprinted, photographed and jailed for about fourteen hours. In most of those fourteen hours when I was not fingerprinted or interrogated, I had a lot of time to think about why I am on this earth, about how my ancestors endured so much so that I could be here, in this cell, aghast at how private insurance is protected by the state. Looking at those bars I understood and felt the cold power of private insurance to make money. Their ability to confine me if I do not tow their line, follow their order by continuing to ignore the millions that are uninsured was made crystal clear. I have been encouraged to ignore Psalm eighty two verse three and essentially the Gospel that Jesus came to bring. Their ability to confine me and encourage me to be happy was cynical then. Especially since, as a black man, I should be psychologically more at ease, since after all, Obama is president, and is black and, like Dr. King, he won the Nobel Peace Prize; these conservative Republicans just want to see him fail and as a Democrat, we as Americans just have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and support him against the Republican attacks one hundred percent. My reply to that argument is a resounding no. Not when insurance continually puts profits before actual healthcare. Not when millions continue to go uninsured. Not when people try and profit off of others’ bodies in the name of insurance, the way that slave ship insurers tried. I thought about Rosa Parks who was arrested. Martin Luther King. But more close to me right now, I thought about A. Philip Randolph who with Chandler Owen was arrested in Cleveland in 1918 for violating the Espionage Act by encouraging blacks in downtown Cleveland to resist World War I conscription and fight at home to “make America unsafe for hypocrisy.” Their bail was set at $1,000 and they were held in jail two days. For refusing to fight a war on principle that, like the “public option” debate, is concerned with forcing this country to have the moral, political will to do the right thing. Despite the money. This is a test of moral courage that both Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi have failed in their unthinking approval to the financial principle of infinite profit at the expense of American lives. It is time that Americans begin believe that the profit of a few should not come at the expense of millions. And act on it. To end this destructive legacy of private insurance.

The Lesson of Corbin Teal: A Full Review of "Things of Dry Hours"

2009-08-16T17:35:00.004-04:00

August 1, 2009
A full review of Naomi Wallace's Things of Dry Hours by Rhone Fraser

In a three hour, two act play, all of which takes place within the home of an Alabama Communist Sunday school teacher named Tice Hogan, playwright Naomi Wallace manages to invert traditional Western power structure in the United States. She presents a setting that is reversed from the world we have come to allow and accept, where whiteness means weakness instead of power; where lust is subdued instead of overindulged; and most important, where the question of whether human nature can change is engaged instead of ignored. Tice (Delroy Lindo) is a recently laid off steel mill worker who actively attempts to change human nature through his Communist teachings, as a dues paying member “and unit leader of the Communist party of Alabama.” To be Black and Communist in Alabama was a dangerous thing to be, especially during the Great Depression. Tice is both at this time and seeks to expand Communist membership. He opens this play detailing how industry and the state can unite to crush labor organization:

“It is 1932. In Birmingham, Alabama. And the world is a furnace. For a while the fat of fire drips down the monstrous chains of a few small pale gods, iron ore workers, steel workers, coal miners, black and white, are out of work, out of world. National Guard shoots diamonds into the backs of strikers in the park. The Red Cross waves cold pistols over angels on relief as the Share Cropper Union smokes in gun battles with police. Bollweevils grow so fat they use them for tires and judases bloom. And all the while, T.C.I., Tennessee Coal and Iron, cathedral of steel and smoke, leans down over the city’s crib from all directions and smothers her in her sleep… I, Tice Hogan, have two books. And I am alive to all things that bind us.”

Wallace’s poetic language shows how people who lived in this time relied on nature and used it to understand the world they lived in. Tice’s description of T.C.I. as one that “smothers” a city exposes the ways that business interests persistently tried to undermine or destroy organized labor. The “two books” that Tice relies on to be “alive” are the Bible and the Communist Manifesto. He uses knowledge from both to fight the “things that bind us.” From Tice we learn not only the power of private industry, but the need to choose specific causes to fight for. One of the fights Tice wages is the fight to be paid actual wages rather than in scrip, which was a document that could easily be manipulated by industry to deprive workers of their earnings. We are introduced to his daughter Cali (Roslyn Ruff) who works as a washerwoman for the Alabama elite. She seeks female companionship for a father who busies himself in book learning, telling him: “that’s what reading a book so long does to a man: thins the muscle. A bird could land on your arm just like a wire.” Tice urges his daughter to socialize and seek a husband. Yet like her father, Cali also dodges a romantic relationship: “I just want to be left alone.” She however secretly longs for the kind of relationship her father had. While he’s sleeping in scene three, she asks how it feels to be loved up “’til you couldn’t stand it anymore.” Both father and daughter have lost their spouses and have resigned to focusing on their work: Tice to his teaching and Cali to supporting the two of them. In order to provide the money required for Tice’s teaching, Cali endures the predatory behavior of her white male bosses. Wallace portrays her dealing with this in a very sensitive way. She role plays her bosses molesting her by using shoes as puppets, imitating the voice of her sexual predator boss: “Touch my seams, they’re so hot they’re burnin’…Kiss it, you whore.” Wallace credits several academics for providing the historical information “crucial” to the making of this play, one of them being Tera Hunter, author of To Joy My Freedom, who in it writes that “Black women were the victims of sexual abuse in their workplaces, yet accused of being their aggressors” (106). Cali deals with such abuse by role playing, to Tice’s disapproval. We see here the helplessness of Black men at this time in being unable to protect their daughters because of their unemployment; Cali depends on her income to help support her and her father’s teachings, despite her bosses’ sexual abuse.
Wallace provides the catalyst of this plot through the actions of a white runaway foundry worker, Corbin Teal, who arrives one night, claiming he’s running from the police for striking a foreman and needs a place to stay. From the moment Tice meets him, he is extraordinarily suspicious, questioning everything about him, refusing to divulge even the smallest bit of information, and demanding he leave immediately for his own daughter’s safety. Corbin (Garret Dillahunt) is convinced that Tice is a ‘dirty Red,’ and threatens to leak his Communist work to the police if he does not let him stay. Tice lets him stay, but only on the condition that he leaves by the end of the week. Tice takes the opportunity in these days to teach Corbin, despite his illiteracy, Biblical and Communist principles. He teaches Corbin that “Jesus Christ says the poor…are brothers;” that our minds are broken, and the Communist Manifesto puts it together. More importantly however, Tice teaches Corbin the need to resist labor exploitation by uniting across race: “We’re a party of black and white. And black and white must unite.” This is a similar lesson that Denzel Washington’s portrayal of Melvin Tolson in The Great Debaters was trying to teach, and unlike the film, Wallace’s play ultimately shows how fidelity to the white race destroys potential for labor organization and can ultimately kill working class whites like Corbin. Tice uses the metaphor from nature of the apple to illustrate the importance of uniting across race:

“TCI and work relief want us to shrink up so small we forget we’re apples and think we’re just the…shriveled sum of our seeds…”We’re the apple, branch and the whole damn tree as well. We will not be divided in to our parts. We will be whole or nothing…Therefore, we jobless…apples got to demand a minimum work relief of ten dollars a week, paid in cash, not scrip, and free car fare, free coal. So we’re going down to city hall at dusk and we’re going down together, as a…bushel to get what we need.”

Corbin defiantly says to Tice: “You want to make us believe that we’re equal, me and you.” Tice replies: “I’m not here to teach you to see me as an equal, to behold my humanity. You’re here to learn why you’re so small..all squashed up in the back of your nex, your eyes, your big blue eyes, like two assholes holding their breath.” He tells Corbin of the “smothering” of T.C.I. when he tells the fate of Clyde Johnson who had his fingers broken, J.W. Davis who was lynched, and Ralph Grey who was shot to death, all due to T.C.I’s intimidation of labor organizers. Tice says to Corbin: “That’s where the bosses want us to be, face to face, rather than…” Corbin interrupts: “side by side.” By this time, Cali has noticed Corbin by himself, rehearsing a plan to cut Tice’s throat, saying “Think you’re smart?” Here we see how Corbin as a white man is threatened not only by Tice’s intelligence as a Black man, but his fidelity to Communist principles. In the first scene that Corbin appears, he begins spouting ignorant slogans, about Communists being anarchist, that Tice grammatically corrects in a belittling way. Earlier Corbin asks Cali to call him “sir” twice for the simple fact that he liked it. Wallace shows how Corbin depends on his privilege of whiteness as basically one of the few shreds of dignity left in the refuge of Tice’s household. He tells Tice: “you will teach me to read. And that way I’ll know everything you know.” When Corbin is alone with Cali and tries to convince her of his decency, she tests whether Corbin is the good citizen he claims to be by taking her role playing to a whole new level. She wraps one of her bed sheets around him, rubs soot on his face in order to make him play her, while she rubs porridge on her face in order to play her sexual predator. She then taunts him, saying: “You want it all. I see the lust in your eyes, bitch. I smell the sex on your breath. You’re just waiting for me to take it, aren’t you? You ought to be ashamed. Wet as you are. I could turn you inside out.” Wallace’s stage directions read after this point: “Corbin violently frees himself from the sheet, he pins Cali to the floor and kneels over her. He unbuckles his belt. It seems he is ready to force her. Cali strikes him in the face. He freezes.” Cali says, vindicated: “I see you clear: a decent man.” Cali’s slap represents the serious inversion of power within Tice’s household: a place where Corbin is forced to subdue his own lust in order to prove his decency; a place where a white man can earnestly apologize for his sexual assault of a Black woman; a place Black women are able to have agency over their own body. Cali tells Corbin: “you will not dream on my body” and mean it. This act frees Cali and for the first time she seems able to perceive sex with a white man as one that is not oppressive but potentially loving. Cali’s slap also frees Corbin because it teaches him other meaningful modes of communication besides aggression. Corbin’s later dialogue with Tice proves this when he says that all Tice knows how to do is talk: “I think a man’s natural state is to bleed not to talk.” Before this line, he takes out a razor and cuts his own arm. Tice replies “you’ve got it backwards. We talk so we don’t have to bleed.” Tice sees the importance of diplomatic negotiation whereas Corbin questions its use by cutting himself, expressing his comfort in his language of aggression. Tice proceeds to make extra clear Corbin’s privilege of whiteness, a concept popularized by academic David Roediger in his work The Wages of Whiteness. Whiteness becomes a barrier that prevents many workers like Corbin from uniting across racial lines. When Tice teaches Corbin that whiteness is a matter of “seeing,” a mere social construction, Corbin goes to extraordinary lengths to renounce this privilege by planning to take off all his clothes in front of Tice and Cali. Tice calls this “a test to see what lengths” Corbin will go through “to make himself a new man.” Corbin undresses entirely in an attempt to reconcile, but in a symbolic and not substantive way. He tells Cali: “I’ll stop being what I am. Your father says its possible.” Later, Corbin’s persistence pays off and he develops an obvious physical attraction for Cali who lets him kiss only the hand that she holds up to her lips. When Cali tells Tice that Corbin wants her, Tice tells her “there’s no meanin’ to it.” He is convinced however that what does have meaning is his effect on Corbin: “he’s going out of this house a changed man.” When Tice says he thinks him and Corbin could work together, Corbin resorts to the same level of racism he had before entering Tice’s household: “I don’t want to work with you. I don’t want anything to do with you. I just want to walk out of this house and forget it all.” Tice tells him that he is “no longer the same man,” because he is aware of the way the race struggle is used to perpetuate the class struggle of rich over poor. Corbin in frustration, resorting to his comfortable racism, grabs Tice by the neck and pulls a razor on Tice in what is the climax of this play. Corbin demands that Tice leak the names of the core of the party. Tice gives him three names. Cali suddenly arrives and threatens to kill him with her axe unless he releases her father. He retreats when she gives him three pages that she says are the “inner workings of the Party.” When Corbin leaves, Tice tells Cali that the names he gave were those of T.C.I. board members, and Cali reveals that T.C.I. has in fact killed Corbin. Cali tells Tice that the pages she gave him were pages of his Bible, knowing Corbin could not read.
Corbin serves as a catalyst for both Tice and Cali to get in touch with their emotional sides. After Corbin arrives and leaves his household, Tice renounces his book knowledge and decides not to return the party. After Corbin has lit a flame in Cali, she finally takes her father up on his plea to socialize and she joins the Joy Boy Club. She also starts seeing the world more like her father, when she sees the crack in their ceiling as a map, which was how Tice saw the Manifesto. Wallace reverts the racist theory spouted by France’s prized colonist, former Senegalese president Leopold Senghor who said “to feel is African, to reason is Greek.” Corbin is a white man who admittedly is more carnal than Tice and Cali and who in their company starts to reason in a way he’s never done before. Conversely, Corbin and motivates Tice and Cali to become more carnal in their own way. Tice changed Corbin while Corbin changed both Tice and Cali. However Tice, by changing Corbin made him as a working class whiteman unable to maximize the privileges of his whiteness, for the simple reason that he thwarted Corbin’s function as a scab or Communist spy. Corbin was too vested in and blinded by his own contempt of Tice, his own racism, to notice how T.C.I. was using him to further his own exploitation. He leaves his house arming himself with the racism he needs to wear and claim in order to report the names to T.C.I., except he reported fake names resulting in his death at the hands of T.C.I. Private industry has successfully used the issue of race to divide labor organization, and plays on Corbin’s allegiance to the cause of demoralizing labor instead of strengthening labor. Tice concludes through Corbin’s ultimate betrayal that human nature cannot be changed, and is ultimately limited by its own defection. In Corbin’s case, his own whiteness. Ultimately the kind of human nature that Wallace is suggesting we challenge is the human nature specifically of exploitative business leaders that will do anything at all costs for maximum profit. Corbin has proven that his fidelity to those business interests are more important than his fidelity to the friend in Tice he’s gained over the past few days. This, according to Eric Williams, was the engine of the European slave trade.
The issues presented in this play are relevant to issues today, particularly two: issues regarding the current debate in the Congress over the American Clean Energy and Security Bill and the Employee Free Choice Act. Forces derived from those such as T.C.I. represent the coal industry in Alabama which diligently lobbied to heavily weaken the American Clean Energy and Security Bill earlier this year. In his talk with Amy Goodman, Tyson Slocum from Public Citizen reported that there were several closed door meetings between House Representatives and coal industry lobbyists to make the bill more favorable to coal industry emissions that add to our global warming crisis. Coal-fired power plants are the single largest source of global warming pollution in the U.S. The closed door meetings that were not visible to the public are similar to the closed door meetings, away from the audience’s view, that went on between Wallace’s Corbin and other spies like him whom T.C.I. used to weaken labor. T.C.I. succeeded in using Corbin the way that the coal industry uses some elected officials in the U.S. House to insert incredibly weak targets in this “Clean Energy” bill. According to Carroll Muffett of Greenpeace, “These weak targets are made even worse by 2 billion tons per year of allowable offsets. Offsets allow polluters to put off for more than a decade of real cuts in their emissions. The offsets are so high that they will exceed the actual pollution reductions required until at least 2026. That’s time we don’t have!” U.S. Representative Artur Davis in a June 26, 2009, C-SPAN interview that the bill would “wreak havoc” on the coal industry because of the cap and trade provisions that he claims would cost jobs in the short term. This short term “loss” would hurt maximum short term profit for the coal industry, which Davis as a congressman is fighting for. He is not considering long term advantages of cutting carbon emissions that could ultimately restore jobs. It allows a domestic manufacturing market for more green jobs, besides the decades-old coal burning-energy. Davis’ stated reasons for opposing this bill favors pollution over economic and environmental progress. The loyalty to big business, despite its destructive effects, that Corbin represents is still present in the twenty first century. Very much like the “Clean Energy” bill, the Employee Free Choice Act was weakened behind closed doors for the benefit of industry. Perhaps the most important provision of this bill was the “card check” that would have required employers to recognize unions if a majority of workers signed cards saying they wanted a union. Steven Greenhouse reported in The New York Times that “moderate” Democratic Senators such as Blanche Lincoln said were swayed by business’s vigorous campaign. How exactly were they swayed? By only money? Do we know exactly how Corbin was swayed to serve the interests of T.C.I.? By money? His whiteness? Both? Was it by the belief that people of color cannot be allowed to “cheat the system” at all costs? What we learn from Wallace’s play is that despite these sways or campaigns, industry has the power to crush and silence oppressed people by playing on their most illogical fears, fears rooted in a fundamental racism or irrational concern for “cheating the system.” American government’s laissez-faire, hands-off regulation free policy towards private industry has been the biggest cheater. Such open influence of industry on lawmakers will only further industry’s ability to keep organized labor under their thumb. This same issue is seen in the current healthcare debate. Private insurance uses money, lies and racist fears to stoke some of America’s suburban or rural residents to deny healthcare and voice opposition at the Health care town hall meetings that have been going on in the country over the past month. Most importantly, Wallace's character of Corbin Teal suggests that white Americans will be killed by the business interests they serve unless they resist identification as a pre-sixties privileged white person (as Corbin couldn't in his wanting Cali to call him sir, and in his calling Tice arrogant) or a post-sixties taxpaying citizen. The latter identification is merely a mutation of the former. Americans engage in the same racist politics as Corbin Teal, that benefit the coal industry and the private insurance industry in their protest against cap and trade and the public healthcare option. Like Corbin, they will be prematurely killed because they will be unable to think of themselves other than the taxpaying citizens whose issues of concern must be chosen by the mainstream media. Private insurance has learned how to restrict health coverage along racial lines, as Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s July 21st entry shows, and today’s vocal opponents of the public option are basically present day manifestations of Corbin Teal that work to deny healthcare against other racial groups(http://earlofarihutchinson.blogspot.com/2009/07/blacks-and-hispanics-biggest-losers-if.html). These vocal opponents are used in a cynical way by private insurance the way that Corbin Teal was used by TCI. Even if the public option were made available, there would be less people who could afford to pay for it due to the deepening recession. But private insurance uses money which they could actually use to do what they claim do, provide coverage, to instead pay people to disrupt town hall meetings and advance racism. This play suggests we think outside the box. Corbin Teal represents this inability to do so. However up until he leaves the Hogan household, he is at least offered an alternative way of thinking and being, where people suppress their feelings and work together to accomplish serious gains against oppressive business interests. Robin D.G. Kelley in Hammer and Hoe writes that “like their enslaved ancestors of the antebellum South, black Alabama Communists understood the terrain of struggle and relied primarily on evasive, cunning forms of resistance” (101). Wallace shows how both Cali and Tice resorted to cunning forms of resistance. Cali plays on Corbin’s illiteracy to save her father and Party members; Tice resists divulging the names of Party members and decides to leave the Party in an effort to ultimately save it and help maintain its force for serious change in Depression Alabama. Kelley writes that by the 1940s, the Alabama Communist Party had become a kind of loosely organized think tank whose individual members exercised considerable influence in local labor, liberal, and civil rights organizations such as the SNYC (Southern Negro Youth Congress), Alabama Committee for Human Welfare, the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), the AFU (Alabama Farmers’ Union). The kind of work that Tice and Cali did laid the ground for influential events and organizations in Alabama that led to even more influential events such as the Montgomery bus boycott. In about three hours, we learn from Naomi Wallace how the work, the cunning resistance of Tice and Cali Hogan has helped us get closer to these organizations, trying to achieve “a nonracist, democratic South.” Wallace shows change can most reliably come by categorically reversing the status quo of power structure in the United States to the point where whiteness and sexual abuse is renounced, where feelings are subdued for the purpose of fighting for a greater, more important cause. Wallace suggests that one must not only engage the oppressive ways of human nature, but do as much as within you to unite with those who are as concerned.

Message to President Obama on July 3rd

2009-07-03T14:22:00.003-04:00

On the day before Independence Day 2009, Obama's first Independence Day as U.S. President, I sent him the following e-mail asking that he allow the safe delivery of the supplies that the FREE GAZA MOVEMENT including former U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney sent for Gaza. What better way to celebrate Independence Day than to fight for the Independence of Palestinian people (and us who are also killed by violence of guns made in the U.S., this country's apparent precoccupation with locking people up, and what King called the "deadening complacency" of the MSM and all the trinkets (Blackberries, iPods, video games) we have now)?! An increasing number of Americans and world citizens have been repeatedly disappointed with Obama's lack of action on the belligerence of the Israeli military in seizing and detaining the FREE GAZA MOVEMENT shipment. I sent this e-mail and will continue to do what I can to support the FREE GAZA MOVEMENT and fight against Israeli aggression. As a descendant of people who survived the Middle Passage, chattel slavery, and Jim Crow discrimination, it is my obligation to fight for the true Independence of the people of Gaza. I feel like reading Frederick Douglass' "What To The Slave Is The Fourth of July?" now. What does the celebration of this day as an American mean when so many people across the globe are oppressed by the hand of this country, including Palestine? I must look to my ancestors for counsel, guidance, wisdom, protection. I hope Obama gets this. I just e-mailed it today.

July 3, 2009

Dear President Obama: Peace. I am e-mailing to ask that FOR THE SAKE OF THE OPPRESSED PEOPLE OF GAZA that you please mean what you say when you're "easing" the humanitarian aid into Gaza. Please allow the aid that the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY has brought for the people of Gaza actually get to Gaza. This is yet another statement that when it comes to Israel, you are all TALK and no action. Israel can wantonly murder Palestinians using U.S.-funded and manufactured weapons while the United States turns its back. PRESIDENT OBAMA, PLEASE INTRODUCE THE CHANGE THAT YOU SO HEAVILY CAMPAIGNED FOR, AND ALLOW U.S. EFFORTS TO HELP THE PEOPLE OF GAZA TO BE COMPLETED. PLEASE DELIVER THEIR AID AND CONDEMN WHAT ISRAEL IS DOING: REPEATING THE HOLOCAUST AND THE LEGACY OF NAZI GERMANY ON PALESTINE. YOU HAVE THE POWER TO STOP THIS OPPRESSION AND TRAUMA: PLEASE USE IT WISELY. Sincerely, Rhone Fraser.

A review of Tracy Letts' play "August: Osage County"

2009-06-10T02:09:00.002-04:00

Review of August: Osage County by Rhone Fraser

This review is meant to be read by those who have already seen this play. –RF.

Tracy Letts says that he hopes his play August: Osage County “speaks to people about their families, about navigating the rocky water of family life.” Letts has definitely provided a blueprint for doing so through thirteen characters in this play. In this play, he challenges the virtues of the American nuclear family, something that other writers have done in their popular works: novelist Toni Morrison in her first novel The Bluest Eye and screenwriter Alan Ball in his first feature film American Beauty. He frames this play in ways that provide important clues about how to navigate the rocky water of family life. It takes place in a large country home outside Pawhuska, Oklahoma in August of 2007. It opens with the patriarch of the family, Beverly Weston (John Cullum), telling his hired help, Johnna Monevata, her responsibilities for running the house. Here the audience is introduced to Violet Weston (Phylicia Rashad), a prescription drug-addicted wife who according to Beverly has “struck a bargain” with him. Beverly tells Johnna the effect of his resigning to alcohol and his wife to pills: “these facts have over time made burdensome the maintenance of traditional American routine: paying of bills, purchase of goods, cleaning of clothes or carpets or crappers” (11). Letts present Violet and Beverly as a married couple who would rather anaesthetize themselves in prescription drugs and alcohol than deal with the reality of their marriage, which includes the monotony of these traditional routines and some damaging family secrets revealed later. Beverly depends on Johnna to take care of the house while he plans to leave. For good. This first scene is the first and last time we see Beverly in this play. Letts brings into question the cost at which the supposed comfort a marriage can bring to an already dysfunctional situation that was produced as a result of the genocide of a particular group. His character Johnna, is Native American, and when Bryan Appleyard of the Sunday Times (of London in their December 14, 2008 article “Tracy Letts on August: Osage County”) asks what she is doing in this play, Letts replies: “She is watching, waiting. I believe in collective guilt, and Oklahoma is a more focused example of what country is founded on—manifest destiny and all that...But we still have Indian reservations and, growing up in Oklahoma, I grew up with Indians…Anybody who lives in that state can look around and say, this is the result of genocide committed long ago; and if you can see that in one states, you can see it in the whole country. There’s not only oil in that land, there’s blood. I think there’s a kind of karmic price to pay for that.” Letts placement of Johnna in the beginning and ending scenes of this play shows his understanding of how Europeans applied a uniquely possessive ownership of land that, to Native Americans, belonged to everyone. Letts shows ultimately, in the relinquishing of control from a European (Beverly) to a Native American (Johnna) and the finalization of such control in the last scene of the play where Johnna tells an anaesthetized Violet who seeks refuge in her lap: “this is the way the world ends.” The world Johnna is referring to here is obviously that of American control. Letts tells Appleyard that the actress playing Johnna, Kimberly Guerrero, told him a story that Native Americans were there before the white people, and that they were going to be polite and help them and nurse them and do what they had to do. But they would still be here when the white people had gone. Letts’ plays shows us exactly this: the transient yet dynamic glimpse of white people on land they named Oklahoma. In August: Osage County, we get this glimpse of European control, framed by Johnna, made very dramatic by family issues and individual addictions. No character’s line exemplifies this transience more than Barbara’s, one of Beverly and Violet’s three daughters who tells Johnna: “This country, this experiment, America, this hubris: what a lament, if no one saw it go. Here today, gone tomorrow. (Beat) Dissipation is actually much worse than cataclysm” (124). Letts shows in this play the dissipation of an American family due to its strong need for the concept of blame and the even stronger need to assign it to a single person. He frames this family as a sort of quintessential midwestern American family, suffocated by their own maintenance of patriotism and family. They are supposedly patriotic because they followed without question Dick Cheney’s supposedly fool proof method for guarding against terrorist attack: duct tape. Charlie asks Ivy when they started taping the shades. The taped shades of the Weston home are a representation of secrets within the family that, like the tape, keeps the family in the dark, ignorant of the nurturing sunlight that exposure and honesty can provide.
Each member of the immediate Weston family verbally abuses another because of the need to cast blame away from themselves, to cope with their own shame, or to defend against others who do the former two. The family comes together in the Weston home after the disappearance of Beverly, the family patriarch. We are first introduced to the eldest Weston daughter Barbara as she is blaming her husband Bill (Frank Wood) for their daughter Jean’s (Anne Berkowitz) smoking habit. Barbara is dealing with a husband who has left her for a younger woman and the guilt for leaving her mother and father that her mother and sister remind her of. She deflects these feelings with a very strong exterior and a profane vocabulary. The sympathetic portrayal of Barbara by Amy Morton is in my mind the most memorable of all performances, because she of all the characters is trying hardest to hold this family together: Barbara is the moral compass of the family. She is the only one to ask perhaps the most difficult questions that break other characters out of the mold of the “narcissistic generation” her husband says we’re part of. She challenges Violet’s material preoccupations with the safety deposit box; she questions Jean’s respect for her grandfather; she is the only one willing to identify her father’s drowned body; she is the first to challenge the authority of Violet; she challenges Ivy’s morbid proclamations that their father may have never liked any of his children; she is the only daughter willing to take responsibility after all other family leaves. Finally, she is also most sensitive to “the karmic price” that Letts suggests that Midwest America is paying for. As they enter the household, Barbara asks her husband: “Who was the a—hole who saw this flat hot nothing and planted his flag? I mean, we f---ed the Indians for this? (20). While Barbara handles blame, the thrust behind her doing so is intended usually for some greater moral purpose, best seen in her line lamenting her father’s apparent suicide: “I believe he had a responsibility to something greater than himself; we all do”(105). This moral compass was not true for the younger two Weston daughters. In the first scene of Act Three, Ivy tells the youngest daughter Karen and Barbara about her decision to leave her ailing mother: “nobody gets to point a finger at me. Nobody” (105). Ivy responds to charges about her lack of concern for her parents by vehemently deflecting blame. She is so concerned about expressing her love for Little Charles that she sees Violet’s revelation of Bev’s paternity of her lover, Little Charles, only as a plan to “change her story”(134). The youngest sister Karen also acts to shift blame away from herself when her fiancé Steve (Brian Kerwin), like a military contractor just out for a good time, is accused of making a pass at Jean. Karen tells Barbara: “You better find out from Jean just exactly what went in there before you start pointing fingers, that’s all I’m saying. ‘Cause I doubt Jean’s exactly blameless in all this. And I’m not blaming her. Just because I said she’s not blameless, that that doesn’t mean I’ve blamed her. I’m saying she might share in the responsibility.” Where Ivy and Karen seem preoccupied with blame and telling their side of the story, Barbara as the oldest seems more interested in correcting a problem than assigning blame. She thinks this way, apparently to a fault according to Karen who says that things are not cut and dried, black white, good and bad; that things are more often than not “somewhere in the middle. Where everything lives, where all the rest of us live, everyone but you” (121). Here Karen recognizes Barbara’s higher moral standard that does not compromise in trying to correct an issue. Barbara’s own possibility of romance is redeemed through her relationship with sheriff Deon Gilbeau (Troy West) who helps her remember her own attractiveness. Of all individual characters, it is through the character of Barbara that Letts shows best how to navigate the rocky water of family life.
Violet’s sister, Mattie Fae (Susanne Marley) does not seem to depend on pills as much as Violet, however she copes with the pain of a long-kept secret through the verbal abuse of her husband and particularly her son, Little Charles (Michael Milligan). She and her husband Charlie (Guy Boyd) follow the opening scene, which takes place five days after Beverly’s permanent departure. Mattie Fae warns Charlie that if he leaves without apparent notice the way Beverly did, his books would be burned, if he had any. Mattie Fae inflicts special abuse on Little Charles whose physical likeness plausibly reminds her of the shame she may feel for her affair with Beverly, whose fatherhood of Little Charles is the deep dark secret of this play. She tells Little Charles: “I suppose you wouldn’t like TV then, not if watching it constituted getting a job” (111). Charlie verbally threatens to kick her out of the car on the way back if she continues berating Little Charles. She reveals to Barbara: “I don’t know why Little Charles is such a disappointment to me” (114). Mattie Fae is Violet’s support, and between the two of them is the family’s deepest secret whose concealment maintains the appearance of a stable American family. The direction of the play is largely dictated by the decisions of the matriarch Violet Weston. She waits five days before alerting influential family members like Barbara of Beverly’s absence. She was more concerned about getting money from the safety deposit box than she was about trying to prevent her husband’s death. She curses Beverly even after his death: “You want to show who’s stronger, Bev? Nobody is stronger than me, goddamn it. When nothing is left, when everything is gone and disappeared, I’ll be here. Who’s stronger now, you son-of-a-b—ch?!” (137). It is this line that makes her crawling on all fours, seeking Johnna, so dramatic at the end of this play. In this play, through the Weston family, Tracy Letts has provided a survey of American history on Native American land, beginning with the patriarch, brought down by his burden of paternity, ending by the matriarch who is brought down by the pain of her own codependency which she refuses to acknowledge. At the beginning at the end of this play, like in Guerrero’s story is the Native American waiting to reclaim the land they intended for everyone and not one person. In this play, the concept of blame or personal responsibility is forsaken or unwanted the current way that the land on which the Weston household rests is. Its something most people (not Barbara) are trying to get rid of, instead of handle responsibly. Learning how to handle it responsibly is one way to navigate the rocky water of family life. One can read this play as a critique against the pharmaceutical industry, however on a deeper level it is a play about how individual choices can either help or hinder one’s navigation of family life. What makes one decide to douse their concerns in pill-popping seems to be a more important question that Letts is asking.
This is the play from a literary perspective. From a performance perspective, the most emotionally moving moments happened during the dinner scene when Violet berates her daughters for not making the most of the things that her generation never had. This is yet another example of Violet shifting blame from herself for the problems her daughters face. Rashad’s Violet is definitely a detached matriarch, one that is preoccupied with not having to think deeply as long as there’s a pill to pop somewhere. The fight scene where Barbara is trying to take Violet’s pills away from her needs much more work. There is definitely commotion by the cast at this part, but no real physical confrontation between Barbara and Violet that would drive such a commotion. Overall, the staging of this play that will soon tour will hopefully cause more people like Barbara not only to say, “that madhouse is my family,” but this play should hopefully cause people to ask: how can I make this madhouse less mad? Letts seems to suggest that an answer may be to either confront whatever shame affects our behavior, or to accept responsibility without fear or shame. –RF.

Three Powerful Plays Part Two

2009-05-30T03:49:00.004-04:00

TOP: my friend Bianca (right) with Diana, grand-niece of Broadway pioneer Diana Sands.

BOTTOM: Me and Diana (photos courtesy of Diana).

This past week I had the opportunity to watch two amazing plays by two amazing playwrights: Leslie Lee and P.J. Gibson. The first play I saw was by Leslie Lee on Saturday, May 16th was Sundown Names and Night-Gone Things written by Leslie Lee and performed at the Castillo Theater on 42nd street between ninth and tenth avenues. I was truly able to empathize with the main character of this play, Cairo (Stephen Tyrone Williams), who works at an insurance agency in Chicago. I talked with Mr. Lee who said that this main character is loosely based on the experiences of Richard Wright, soon after he moved to Chicago from Mississippi. What strikes me about this play, as a writer myself are the historic nuances of the time period that Lee expressed in this play. Two of which specifically struck me were the numbers lines that Cairo’s co workers talked about and the different numbers books that they played from. I have to make sure that if I am writing in a historic period, that I capture everything, including the popular pastimes of people those days. I read a review of this play in Backstage by Mark Peikert and in some ways, Peikert definitely explicates this play in terms of its contributions to humanity, according to Addison Gayle’s stated role of the critic. Peikert writes that this play deals more with issues of class and misogyny than with race. I wholly saw that in this play. In fact the way that Cairo deals with these issues of misogyny and race is what made his character absolutely so appealing, so sympathetic to me. Lee begins the play showing a passionate intimacy with Cairo and Ruby (Deanna Wise) his girlfriend, and Ruby shows her very sensual side. However their very first interaction is fraught with mistrust when Cairo discovers that Ruby is wearing a dress another man gave her. He immediately challenges the “good time girl” or tramp stereotype that Ruby is falling into. As a playwright, Lee shows the difference between the individual and the stereotype. We get brief glimpses of Ruby’s resistance against this stereotype, when she asks Cairo to read to her, but we also get that fact that Cairo’s working obligations disallow him from spending time that is sufficient to separate Ruby from this tramp stereotype. Ruby understands this and ultimately shatters this tramp stereotype by deciding to move away from Chicago altogether. Lee is raising important questions about the employment possibilities of black women in the urban areas towards the latter end of the 1930s. Where Peikert writes that Ruby is simply a good time girl, a closer examination of Ruby will reveal that she wanted to be more than this stereotype, hence her fateful decision to move away from Chicago, when she discovers that she is pregnant, but unsure about who the her baby’s father is. The play’s action changes between two scenes: those between Cairo and Ruby and those at Cairo’s workplace. It is here that Lee challenges misogyny through the character of Cairo in the criticism of his co-workers’ behavior. His co-workers R.J. (Nathan Purdee), Travis (Marcus Naylor), and Boyd (Ralph McCain) are life insurance agents who arbitrarily charge their female clients hefty premiums depending on their clients’ willingness to sleep with them. Cairo rightly chastises co-workers for capitalizing on their female clients’ weaknesses. It is here I believe that Lee makes his most profound his contribution to humanity, through Cairo’s verbalizing of the ethical problems behind taking sexual advantages of their clients. But also, Lee makes an even stronger statement through the character of Mae Ann (Crystal Anne Dickinson), a client of Travis’s who pulls a gun on Travis after she realizes his game. Lee writes a searing monologue of Mae Ann who says she could not even look her children or husband in the eye after sleeping with Travis. She threatens to shoot Travis and serves as a cautionary tale to men about the dangers of taking unnecessary advantage of clients that one works with. This scene is a very exciting, suspenseful scene that precipitates Cairo’s decision to leave. Lee also shows the imbecility of colorism within the African American community through the exchanges between R.J. who wants to swap clients with Boyd in order to get more lighter-skinned clients since, according to R.J., lighter skinned ladies are “nicer.” Lee said that he was encouraged to end the play with Cairo leaving however he changed it to allow Cairo’s ethic to influence R.J. when R.J. describes his deceased father-figure from the South who slapped him across the face for not respecting a woman. As Cairo is preparing to leave their office for good, R.J. is on a phone call trying to arrange another rendezvous with a client when all of a sudden he feels a slap across his face; R.J. takes this as yet another warning against mistreatment of women, and Lee makes yet another attack on misogyny, he also brings the redeeming qualities of the American South to our attention. The South is a place where Ruby goes to flee the dangerous stereotypes leading her into prostitution and drug abuse; it is also a place where R.J. thinks about to stave himself from the vices of urban life.

During intermission, I had the opportunity to talk to Lee about the play; I shared how stuck Ruby seemed to be in the tramp (or jezebel) stereotype and Lee agreed. In this play, I was struck by the romance between Cairo and Ruby; how much he wanted to love her, and how unable and incapable Ruby was of loving Cairo. I definitely empathized with his feeling of isolation due to his voracious reading, which immediately set him apart from not only Ruby but from his co-workers, who tried to use alcohol to challenge his ethical claims. Essentially R.J. was trying to suggest that the alcohol was a cure for Cairo’s problems, however Cairo knew this was not the case and resisted. Cairo’s understanding of his manhood in this play is concerned with the need to be a father. He hated his father’s abandonment and tries not to repeat such abandonment when he discovers that Ruby is pregnant: he tells Ruby that he wants to raise her child. However when even Ruby does not know who the father of her baby is, Cairo is still insistent on being a father, a more attentive and better father than Cairo’s father was to him. Here Lee also extends the alienation of the educated black man in the late 1930s, an issue that was written about in Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. He is not only alienated by his woman but by his co-workers. We get that in Cairo. We get him resisting the stereotype of the whore and of the womanizer, the same way the narrator in Invisible Man resisted the stereotype of the black nationalist demagogue, corporate pawn of the HBCU, and the black token-trophy of the white Left. Lee is challenging these stereotypes in this play. Through R.J., Cairo presents the importance of remembering one’s heritage in treating a woman correctly, and not following the stereotypes that urban life can encourage. We get this in Cairo.

The second play I saw last week that absolutely changed my life was presented at a staged reading at the Schomburg Center in Harlem, last Wednesday, May 21, 2009. The play is tentatively titled The Diana Sands Project and is written by P.J. Gibson. I am grateful for the efforts of Diana Sands’ niece, Kathryn Leary in organizing this staged reading. It was searing. I truly hope this can be produced. Like my first play, this play is a biographical play about the pioneering Broadway actress Diana Sands, who lived a short yet full life. She stands out in my mind as the actress to originate the role of Beneatha in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Her career blossomed after this role, and I think P.J. Gibson shows all the important marks and the interesting back stories in this play. I liked hearing the back story of how Diana braced herself for the indomitable slap that Claudia McNeil, who played her mother in A Raisin in the Sun gave her each and every night. McNeil seemed to take a bit too much pleasure in doing that. What brought Diana to life for me was the woman reading the role of Diana herself: Kim Brockington. I remember seeing Kim Brockington in her portrayal of Zora Neale Hurston in Kristy Andersen’s 2008 film Jump At The Sun. She portrays one of the back stories of Diana Sands’ story in such a powerful way, particularly the back story of the pain Diana felt when her then husband Lucien Happersburger leaves her for writer James Baldwin. Gibson writes a very painful part for Diana in going through this. In my mind, this part is one of the main reasons that this play should be produced because that kind of pain of adultery, particularly men leaving wives for other men is so relevant today. It was a pain suggested in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and it is a pain made more relevant after the popularity of J.L. King’s book. And it is a pain that Gibson writes so clearly in this play. Brockington is actually crying “Jimmy!” She is in sheer unbelief that her husband would leave her for another man, yet Gibson has her state very clearly that it is not because Lucien left her for another man why she’s so angry, but the fact that she found out from other people talking about it, rather than Lucien telling her directly. We get this so clearly from Gibson’s play. I like how Ms. Gibson frames this play. It begins with Sands in a dressing room, seeming to have a casual conversation with an audience about her life. According to the stage directions I heard at this reading, there is a screen on which important images are shown. Some of these images are the different people and plays and productions that Sands was involved in. I am sure it will be fun for the production to collect and project all those productions. There were many and they were influential. The most influential production Diana Sands was involved in I think was the Broadway production of The Owl and the Pussycat where Sands starred with Alan Alda. I am appreciative for Gibson including in this play the New York Times review of The Owl and the Pussycat where Alda tried to temper the then old-fashioned, racist attitudes that were uncomfortable seeing a stable black woman-white male couple on stage. In this script, Gibson quotes Alda saying that kissing her was no big deal, she’s just a human. To me, this revealed a high level of discomfort on Alan Alda’s part. Sitting behind me at this reading was the actual friend of Diana Sands, Dee! I was so humbled to meet her and hear more about Sands’s life from her at the reception following this meeting. Sitting in front of me at this reading was none other than the actress who originated the role of Ruth Younger in the original Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun: Ruby Dee. In her important memoir she co-wrote with Ossie Davis, edited by Sydne Mahone called With Ossie and Ruby: In this Life Together, she writes of Sands: “there are some spirits that stride boldly over the horizon and claim life with gusto. Diana Sands was one of these people. She came sure and laughing, taking hold of what she came for with both hands. She played Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun, giving us the essence of Lorraine Hansberry, the author, in her portrayal.” Dee says also in this memoir that when she was in Hansberry’s presence, she felt she was in the presence of “a superior intellect.” I am so excited to see this play read, and see it have the opportunity to be produced. I was invited to this reading by my dear friend Bianca Lavern Jones, an actress who read the role of Dee, Diana Sands’ best friend who was sitting behind me at the reading. Bianca is sitting to the left of Kim in this reading. In the following video clip #1, you see a pink hat, which is the hat of one Ms. Ruby Dee.

In the second video clip, you see the reception that Ms. Leary held in the Reading Room of the Schomburg Center with Diana Sands’ best friend, Dee, talking about her friend Diana. In the third video clip, you see Ms. Leary leading Ms. Dee to read about Diana Sands from her memoir My One Good Nerve:

In the third video clip, is accomplished stage actress Mary Alice discussing Diana, followed by Diana’s best friend in London:

In the fourth video clip is accomplished stage actress and writer Micki Grant discussing Diana:

In the fifth video is what Ms. Leary described as the “village” of Diana Sands:

In the sixth video clip is Kim Brockington discussing how she received this role of Diana:

What I thought was remarkable in this sixth video clip of Brockington is the fact that every role she truly wanted to play, she played. I am fascinated at how some things, roles, seemed to be destined for certain people. Brockington said in this clip that the first role she got when she was at Morgan State was the lead in The Owl and the Pussycat which was also a breakout role for Diana Sands. Brockington in my mind is the closest facial resemblance to Diana Sands among any accomplished actor out there. I was so pleased to see this production come to fruition. In this seventh video clip is director of this reading, Regge Life.

In this eighth video clip is the first part of the playwright of the Diana Sands project, P.J. Gibson, Professor of Creative Writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. What is fascinating about what Ms. Gibson says is the fact that she had a photo of Diana Sands with her in college, brought it to graduate school, then to Brown University, then to New York. I am fascinated with how people seem to be predestined to do powerful things. The photo of Diana Sands that she kept was a symbol or a testament to the long relationship that Gibson had with Diana Sands. However no relationship seemed more important to Gibson than that between Diana Sands and her friend Dee, whose interviews with Gibson she said were instrumental to writing this play, and interviews with her niece Kathryn Leary.

In this ninth video clip, P.J. Gibson talks about how the piece she wrote on Diana Sands was completed and how different people met each other. Gibson said: “things come when they come.” I truly appreciated hearing this, because, for me, for me, it shows the power of God and how he will line people up with the right resources in the right places for things to happen. In this clip Gibson talks about internalizing and getting as close to the actual Diana Sands as possible, which meant learning that she had a taste for pineapple from Dee (and Brandy Alexander, Diana’s favorite drink which was served at this reception) and also learning a lot from Kathryn Leary.

In this tenth video clip, P.J. Gibson says about Diana: “this is a woman who has been walking with me for a long time.” This speaks to the spiritual perceptiveness of writers, and how spirits such as Diana’s might not have been literally walking with Gibson, Diana’s aura, presence, and essence remained and remains with Gibson. Brockington also spoke to this when she explicitly said she asked Diana to come and she did. I think that was evident in the reading in Brockington’s very vivid portrayal and in Ruby Dee’s reading where all Ruby Dee described about Diana was being portrayed by Ruby Dee herself. I am also fascinated with the connections between Diana and her best friend Dee. I thought the fact that they came from different worlds yet had a strong abiding love was powerful. My friend Bianca played this extraordinarily well. I remember Bianca and Kim giving each other a very very warm hug at the end of the reading. I appreciated hearing Gibson’s writing process. She says she writes everything up in her head. This is how novelist Edward P. Jones writes, according to my interview with him that aired on WBAI two years ago. Gibson is asked how long it took her to write this by my dear friend Bianca Lavern Jones. In the reading, the men in Diana’s life were masked.

Later in this eleventh video clip I asked Gibson where she got the idea about the masks from. After I asked this, an actor in this reading thanked P.J. Gibson

Finally in the twelfth video clip, my dear friend Bianca Lavern Jones shares how she learned about Diana Sands and playing Dee. If it were not for her, I would not have attended this important reading. Thank you, Bianca.

The last play I saw this past week was a searing play by Naomi Wallace entitled Things of Dry Hours. I was most humbled by this play. I thought more than anything it is a role-reversal of the white supremacist world within the home of one Sunday School Communist teacher, Tice Hogan. Tice is played by the legendary Delroy Lindo who sticks out in my mind as the indomitable West Indian Archie in Spike Lee’s film on Malcolm X. His daughter Cali Hogan, played by Roslyn Ruff, is a laundress and cobbler who works to support herself and her father. When Corbin, played by Garret Dillahunt, seeks refuge in Tice’s home in order to avoid the Klan for being a Communist sympathizer (I think), the tables are turned in terms of his power relative to the outside world. Corbin demands that Tice gives him the names of Communist members. Tice demands that Corbin learn how to read the Bible and the Communist manifesto by Marx. Cali resists the demands of both, veering from Tice’s communist teachings and from Corbin’s sexual advances. I think Wallace turns the tables in quite a convincing way. More than Lee and Gibson in their plays, Wallace takes more poetic licenses, with Tice in particular who makes comparisons of mankind to appleseeds. I had the opportunity to ask Wallace why the apple of all metaphors for Tice and she replied that it is something he likely sees a lot. I appreciate the poetic lines that Tice has, particularly being a student of the Bible which uses very vivid metaphors to teach its lessons. Perhaps the most powerful character in this play is Cali. I like the way Wallace writes her coping mechanisms for dealing with male sexual abuse. When Tice is away, Cali forces Corbin to play a game where he puts black cream on his face while Cali puts white cream on her face in order to mimic her sexually abusive white masters. After Corbin plays with her, Cali develops an attraction to Corbin, perhaps because this is the only man whose circumstances even as a white man in 1930s Alabama has forced him to actually not see her as an object of sexual conquest (not until the second act, that is). This play is a must see. –RF.

Three Powerful Plays Part One

2009-05-30T01:04:00.017-04:00

FIRST CLIP:

SECOND CLIP:

THIRD CLIP:

FOURTH CLIP:

FIFTH CLIP:

SIXTH CLIP:

SEVENTH CLIP:

EIGHTH CLIP:

NINTH CLIP:

TENTH CLIP:

ELEVENTH CLIP:

TWELFTH CLIP:

Why I Don't Support Obama's Ignoring the U.N. Conference on Racism

2009-05-04T13:13:00.006-04:00

I was recently very disappointed with Obama's refusal to even consider attending the 2009 U.N Conference on Racism, considering his rhetoric about change. I respect that decision but with very strong reticence. I wrote this reaction to such a decision according to what Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin stated in their fiction and their nonfiction. This entry is not an effort to critique the relationship between Blacks and Jews, but more an effort to understand the various nuances of the relationship, nuances that are covered up. It is my effort to reconnect with a history that many have tried to separate me from.

The Obama administration’s censoring of the 2009 United Nations Conference Against Racism marks a dangerous allowance of power to the Israeli lobby that would only further the sentiment, believed by the world, that the United States is still the largest purveyor of violence. It is an unwise decision that may please perhaps the strongest lobby in Washington, AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee), but it will continue to isolate the U.S. from the world population and encourage "terrorist" activity. Martin Luther King, Jr. stated that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere. Tim McGirk writes in a January 2009 Time magazine article that “Hamas cannot be beaten militarily,” but should be “engaged politically.” By demanding that the U.N. Conference Against Racism avoid reference to Israel, Obama is condoning a threat to justice everywhere in the world by ultimately endorsing the violent policies of the Israeli state towards the Palestinian people. The rich legacy of African American writers, particularly James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, provide an important framework for interpreting the Israeli colonization of Palestine. Baldwin and Hansberry were aware of the dilemma of colonization for Europeans not only in their non-fiction but in their fiction, which dismantles colonization by displaying its sheer ugliness. In defending Andrew Young in Jimmy Carter's public chastisement of him (as U.N. Ambassador) in 1979, Baldwin wrote, “the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews’ it was created for the salvation of Western interests…The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.” Baldwin suggests to the reader that Israel is a European or Western construction and as such pinpoints a significant injustice of occupation that continues to this day. According to a 2003 commission organized by Israel’s own government , Israel behaves in a “neglectful and discriminatory” manner towards Arabs. The Israeli government is notorious for their anti-Arab racism. Even McGirk writes that a “tectonic shift in demographics [in Israel from European to Arab]…scared…hawkish Israelis.” By censoring the U.N. Conference Against Racism, Israel is ignoring their own racism against Arabs and continuing the trauma visited upon European Jews by Nazis. They should at least confront Israeli colonization and make an effort to curtail the cycle of violence that their racist oppression against Palestinians perpetuates. Baldwin’s essay in defense of Young was published one month before I was born, and one month after a very important Black Leadership Summit at the NAACP’s national office in New York. Out of this summit came a “Declaration of Independence” from Jewish control of Black organizations. Julian Bond read the meeting’s statement on “Black/Jewish Relations.” It was unanimously adopted and it said in part: “within the past 20 years some Jewish organizations and intellectuals who were previously identified with the aspirations of Black Americans…became apologists for the racial status quo…Powerful organizations within the Jewish community opposed the interest of the Black community in the DeFunis, Bakke, and Weber cases up to the United States Supreme Court.” Tony Martin, Africana Studies Professor at Wellesley College and author of The Jewish Onslaught shows how the historical relationship between Blacks and Jews do not in fact provide justification for blind support of Israel and the United States in their demands to censor the U.N. Conference Against Racism. Martin points out that the judge who sentenced influential leader Marcus Garvey (Julian Mack) before his deportation was a Zionist and co-founder of the American Jewish Committee. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville debacle which removed public school control from the predominantly Black community and placed it in the hands of the mainly white Jewish teachers unions produced the kind of soft bigotry of low expectations that we see up to this day. Based on this history, the relationship between African Americans and white American Jews has not provided a basis for blind support of AIPAC or a lack of critique against it. According to an article by Steven Carter, in one of Lorraine Hansberry’s notes for an unpublished play, she wrote: “the Europeans will always underestimate us since they will be fighting free men thinking they are fighting slaves, and again and again—that will be their undoing.” By censoring the U.N. Conference Against Racism, they show that by the exclusion and treatment of Palestinians, Israel insists on undoing itself. Baldwin pointed out in the same 1979 essay that Israel was the main arms supplier of white South Africa. In fact, South African Jews were beneficiaries of apartheid, and were the world’s richest community and the world’s highest per capita contributors to Israel. How much of the wealth owned by Jews was in fact created at the expense of South African labor? Lorraine Hansberry’s character of Tshembe Matoseh in her posthumous play Les Blancs, laments his brother Abioseh’s conversion to the Catholic Church by detailing how African labor produced material wealth, saying: “I know the value of this silver, Abioseh! It is far more hold than you know. I have collapsed with fatigue with those who dug it out of our earth! I have lain in the dark of those barracks where we were locked like animals at night and listened to them cough and cry and swear and vent the aching needs of their bodies on one another. I have seen them die!” If we as African Americans have seen another victim of a gun shooting die, we have also seen some part of the billions of dollars given to the European Israeli state instead of given to legislation that could have paid for some preventive measure. Baldwin, Martin, Hansberry and many other important writers have shown that because race trumped religion, it is essential for African Americans to demand that other injustices not be carried out with impunity on any other nations, including Palestinians. Those who know better must do better. The proposition that literature is a moral force for change was articulated by Addison Gayle in his 1970 text Black Expressions. Baldwin and Hansberry have proven their nonfiction and fictional works are moral forces for change, to not only educate but inspire American citizens to ensure that injustices by Israelis do not create threats to justice anywhere. We need to rely on their moral compass, based on their experience as African Americans, and not on AIPAC. -RF.

An Homage to James Bevel (1936-2008)

2009-04-17T15:41:00.003-04:00

James Bevel is one of the most influential people in the civil rights movement. Not only did he originate the idea to march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 following the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson (an event which precipitated Bloody Sunday and the important passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act), but he also gave a very inspirational sermon on the night of Monday, August 27, 1962 at Williams Chapel Missionary Baptist Church (a church I took a picture of, that I’d like to post soon) that inspired one Fannie Lou Hamer to join the movement and become an instrumental force for social change. The milieu was introduced by biographer Chana Kai Lee in For Freedom’s Sake, who writes:

One hot day in August 1962, an individual in Hamer’s Ruleville [Mississippi] church stood up and announced that a group of young people would be visiting the area to teach people how to register to vote. The visitors were members of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an umbrella coalition of major civil rights organizations—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League (NUL), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]. The council was established in 1961 for the purpose of promoting cooperation and less competition among organizations with different civil rights agendas in Mississippi. A series of meetings between town folk and COFO representatives, mostly SNCC members, was scheduled to being…Monday, August 27, at Williams Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, the only house of worship in the community that allowed voter registration workers in a forum…
At this COFO-sponsored meeting, the Reverend James Bevel, staff member with SCLC, and three SNCC members, James Forman, Bob Moses, and Reginald Robinson, informed a fascinated audience of its constitutional rights as citizens of the United States and of the state of Mississippi. Specifically, they told the audience that as adults they were all eligible to vote, and more important, eligible to vote out of office those individuals most responsible for keeping them down. Not the least of these was Senator James O. Eastland. Bevel then delivered a stirring sermon, entitled “Discerning the Signs of the Time,” based on a Bible passage, Luke 12:54. The sermon called on everyone to recognize the signs of the times and to act on them much as one would see clouds forming in the sky and prepare for coming rain (Lee, 24-25).

When I wrote a biographical play of Ms. Hamer in 2005, I tried to write the sermon that James Bevel gave that night. This I think is a difficult task because I am trying to reconstruct or present the truth, which is so incredibly unknown, and getting more unknown as the folks who were there on that night are moving farther and farther away (like all of us) from that night on Monday, August 27, 1962. Like the biographies that Dr. Lee and Ms. Mills have written, my play on Ms. Hamer’s life is still largely speculative. I am speculating on what happened and as such, this biographical play (with the exception of documented speeches that were Ms. Hamer’s actual words) is ultimately a work of fiction. I do not know what exactly happened on that night of Monday, August 27, 1962. I do know however that based on Dr. Lee’s biography, that was a night that changed Ms. Hamer’s life forever. It was after that night that she became dedicated to the cause of registering fellow black Southerners to vote. And I know based on the excerpt from Dr. Lee’s biography who was there, and what the topic of the sermon was. In writing this I tried to accomplish what Toni Morrison mentions in her 1984 essay “Rootedness: The Ancestor As Foundation” about “major characteristics of Black art.” She mentions that one of the major characteristics of Black art is something that “should try deliberately to make you stand up and make you feel something profoundly in the same way that a Black preacher requires his congregation to speak, to join him in the sermon, to behave in a certain way, to stand up and to weep and to cry and to accede or to change and to modify—to expand on the sermon that is being delivered.” In the following passage, I tried to write James Bevel’s sermon that I thought would make the Ms. Hamer then in my mind “stand up” or “change” and modify. The following excerpt from the biographical play I wrote is the scene in which I thought Ms. Hamer was changed by James Bevel’s sermon.

Scene 4: Williams Chapel, August 27, 1962.
[The setting is a small church chapel, humid and packed, eager in anticipation for an important sermon by SCLC member and leader, Reverend James Bevel. Fannie Lou is sitting next to Mary Tucker singing with the congregation and join the overall aura of praise in this church. The spiritual, “Jesus Is A Rock In A Weary Land” is being sung. There are random shouts of praise and exultation in the congregation; Fannie Lou and Mary are completely indistinguishable from the overall spirit of worship in the church. After the song, Reverend James Bevel approaches the pulpit.]

Reverend: A weary land, yes Lord, you are a rock in a weary land. Let’s give God some praise right now [congregation applauds]. Lord Jesus [shouting], we worship you, we thank you for health! For strength! We thank you that you’ve allowed us to gather here safely in this chapel for this prayer meeting, ‘cause Lord, you know, we live in a weary land! We need you, Lord! We can’t make it here without you. Amen. [voice gets quieter, as speech becomes casual]. I’m so glad to see all you folks here tonight. I’m a tell you right now, there’s no better place for you to be than here [Mary looks at Fannie]. And I guarantee that you will not be same after tonight. I said you will not be the same after tonight. Grab somebody by the hand [congregation grabs each other’s hands] bow your heads, and lets pray. Father God, we come to you tonight because Lord you know we live in a weary land. There are forces out there Lord [Reverend pauses; random folks in the congregation exclaim their agreement] that try to kill us Lord, and we need your help [much of congregation responds with ‘yes Lord’]. We have been troubled and menaced by the people among whom you have set us down, Lord. And still, we have sung the Lord’s song, Lord, your song, in a weary land! Lord Jesus help us! [even louder exclamations of agreement come from the congregation; Fannie Lou says “Yes Lord.”] We need you here, right now, LORD. Help us, LORD, to do the work you created us here to do. Bless all the members of this congregation, bless SNCC, the NAACP, CORE, the National Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as we try to vote and help those like us who are in a weary land, LORD, among people who try to stop us from votin’, Lord, who try and stop us from getting registered[i]. Lord, bless them too. Lord, help us to fear nobody but you Lord. Nobody but you. Bless the understanding of this message tonight, bless the words that come out of my mouth, and bless them as they register, have your angels of protection around us, covering us from any harm, evil, and danger all this we ask in Jesus name, Amen.

Congregation: Amen.

Reverend: Ladies and Gentlemen, please understand, it is no coincidence that we are here speaking to you tonight. It is not by random chance that you decided to come here now, nor is it by chance that the Freedom Riders caught the attention of not only Senator James Eastland but also the Attorney General of the United States Bobby Kennedy. [much slower] Ladies and gentlemen, it is not by mistake that there are people in this here community of Ruleville who have decided—they made up their mind—that they would give shelter and refuge to the freedom riders. You see all these things are happening because they are meant to happen. I need to talk to you about the signs of the times[ii]. Every person in this congregation must be able to discern the signs of the times. Turn your bibles with me to Matthew Chapter sixteen, Matthew chapter sixteen. [The congregation, including Mary, turns to the chapter while Fannie looks on]. Verse one says, “The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired him that he would show them a sign from heaven. Verse two says, He answered and said unto them,” wait, let’s stop right here and look at this. Now the bible in verse two says he answered, but what was the question—it didn’t mention the previous question, so what was it?
[The congregation varies from “signs” to “the signs” to “signs of the times” in their responses]

Reverend: Right. What are the signs of the times? That’s the same question a lot of us are asking. We want to have the answers in our way and in our time, but…the answer’s been sitting there in front of our face.
[Congregation exclaims agreement]

Reverend: You see, in order for Jesus to have answered, like the Word says he did, there had to have been a question. The question that the Bible doesn’t explicitly tell us was, ‘what are those signs?’ Folks, Jesus already knew what they were going to ask before they even asked him. The rest of the verse says, ‘He answered and said unto them, when it is evening, ye say, it will be fair weather: for the sky is red. Verse three says, “And in the morning, it will be foul weather today: for the sky is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?” In other words, why ask such a question when the answer is staring you in the face? I’m here to tell you tonight, we got to wake up and look at what has been done and start praising God! [Congregation exclaims agreement] Those silly Pharisees and Saducees were asking Jesus for even more signs when he done already multiplied the bread and fed five thousand, he made the blind able to see again, he made the dumb able to speak, he healed the sick! The signs were right in front of their eyes! And tonight I’m telling you all the changes, all the miracles you seein’ round here: the arrests, the Freedom Riders coming through Nashville, Alabama, Mississippi, the sit-ins we havin’, the integration of all some of these places…it’s the signs of the times. You better move with it or get left behind. You go out and you register to vote. Get involved. Start acting like real citizens. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments said you can vote. So stop lettin’ the White Citizens Council stop you. Don’t let them people take away our schools. Stop lettin’ just the white folks vote so that they get all the federal funds. You go out and vote too. Don’t let them steal what you gotta right to. We got people in this neighborhood, in this church, still fussin’ ‘bout everything goin’ on and then got the nerve to ask, “What we gon’ do?” Fool, don’t ask that question! [Congregation laughs]
You just like the Pharisees! With your stupid question! The answer is right in front of your eyes! Look around! Notice how slowly but surely we gettin’ our rights. We got Brown v. Board just a few years ago. Now we got Bob Moses and Jim Forman down here helpin’ folks get registered. We got our own people helping each other. Stop living in bondage! Stop living in bondage! The Word of God says in Matthew chapter ten verse twenty eight, ‘fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.’ You fear nobody but God. You hear me? [Congregation exclaims approval] Nobody but God! Stop worryin’ about what white folks gon’ do and start givin’ God praise for what He did and what He gon’ do. I done learned that for myself. When the world tried to put fear in everything else except God. I wanna tell y’all a story if I could. You know, for the rest of my life, I’ll never forget the time my brother in SNCC John Lewis and I sat in one lunch counter on one afternoon, of November 10th of 1960.

Congregation:Go ‘head preacher!

Reverend: John grabbed me to go stage a sit-in at the Krystal Restaurant on Church Street in downtown Nashville. This is the same restaurant where Elmyra Gray and Maryann Morgan who took seats and asked to be served at a white counter, got a bucket of water poured over their heads and detergent poured down their backs and a hose turned on them. [congregation silenced slightly while Reverend gets louder] Then the demons turned on the air conditioner on full blast to try and freeze them out! Just for sitting and asking for service. So me and John saw the signs of the times and took action! As soon as we arrived, the manager came out from the back, wearing his white uniform and chef’s hat. Bernard and the women left, and John and I took two seats. “I’m closed,” the manager told us. “You’ll have to leave.” We glanced at each other. John looked at his watch, a gesture that said it was mid-afternoon, nowhere near closing time. The man pulled out a mop, went over the floor with a couple of wipes, then walked to the front door and locked it. By then the two or three other employees in the place were gathered behind the counter. The manager told them to head out the back and he followed, stopping for a moment to flip on a machine before he left. [Long pause.] The machine was a fumigator. A white cloud of insecticide began filling the room. Within seconds it was so thick we could not see out the front window. I tried the front door. It was locked. The back was locked as well. The fumes were getting thicker by the minute. I kept sittin’ there prayin’ for God to save us. Then the spirit of the Lord came on me and I started preaching, praise God! [congregation increases in volume] How many of you know that when you in the midst of the fiery furnace, you gotta press yourself into the word of God and speak that word! I tell you, I spoke the book of Daniel, where the angel appeared before the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar and warned the people to bend before God or be thrown into the fire and smoke of hell. I said, ‘and whoever falleth not down and worshippeth,’ my eyes squeezed shut, ‘shall the same hour be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace.’ Then I started singing. How many of you know like Paul and Silas you got pray and sing to the midnight hour to get your deliverance? Paul and Silas prayed so that the suddenly there was an earthquake, so the immediately the doors were opened, and I tell you as I praying and singing in that restaurant, we could start to hear someone banging on the window and suddenly, hah, praise God, the front door burst open. A rush of cool air came through, along with the shapes of bodies—firemen dressed in full gear[iii]. Give God some praise for deliverance! I said you got to pray to midnight hour to get deliverance! Praise God! Don’t you know that restaurant is serving more black customers, now! Know the times! Know the times! Go with the change! Change! The Lord has called us to change! [Congregation erupts in praise; Fannie hears a distinctive ‘Hallelujah.’ While the environment silences while Fannie speaks in an aside]

Fannie Lou: Tuck, you heard that?

Mary: Heard what? [whispering]

Fannie Lou: Aunt Ella.

Mary: Who?

Fannie Lou: Aunt Ella. Momma.

Mary: No, why? You heard her?

Fannie Lou: Yeah, you ain’t?

Mary: No, but that probably don’t mean she ain’t here [laughs to herself].

Fannie Lou: [Fannie Lou turns around to see her mother, who is invisible to everybody else, dressed in all white standing behind her and identifies her as the woman who just said, “hallelujah.” Lou Ella is dressed in white, from top to bottom, worshipping God with her hands outstretched; however she quickly turns back around before Mary notices staring at her and decides to pretend not seeing her as she continues being enthralled by the sermon.]

Reverend: Stop sittin’ round just expectin’ things to change. You gotta change them! Or else you end up just like the Pharisees, so closed minded they can’t even see what’s in front of them. You got a duty to respond! Ain’t nothin’ gon’ change until you change things! They ran that man Clinton Battle outta town, the best dentist in this part of the world that man was, Clinton Battle. Don’t let him run you out. You see ‘cause he know what he was doing. He knew once we got the vote, that changes everything. We can put in charge, who we wanna put in charge, that meant the end of us gettin’ the worst of everything. The word of God says in Hosea chapter four, verse six, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge.” Don’t let God destroy you! You go out there and run with those times. Get what belongs to you! Make a difference and be the agent of change God called you to be [congregation increases in exultation and excitement]. The word of God says in John chapter 8 verse 32, ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free! [congregation in exultation and excitement and begins clapping loudly] Stop living in bondage! [begins clapping and shouting louder] Get yourself free! [is at is loudest in clapping and shouting] Amen. Amen. Thank you tonight. We want to extend tonight the invitation of voting as I turn it over to my dear brother, SNCC member James Forman.

James: [speaking to the congregation] Good evening everybody.

Congregation: Good evening.

James: We have got to make a difference and get involved. Enough is enough. Everyone one of us in this room is capable and able to vote these people out there out of office. Now what Reverend James said is true: we have the power to vote these racist white leaders out of office. We have the power to do so. If we work together and get registered and vote, you would be surprised to see the difference you can make. Tonight I want to invite you to get registered and brother Moses will explain how you can do that, brother Moses…

[i] Lee, Chana Kai. For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999: 24.

[ii] Moye, J. Todd. Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004: p.97
[iii] Lewis, John with Michael D’Orso. Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998: p.121-122.

My reason for writing this whole biographical play is what Toni Morrison says in a 1987 essay, “The Site of Memory:” She writes: “how I gain access to that interior life is what drives me and is part of this talk which both distinguishes my fiction from autobiographical strategies…It’s a kind of literary archeology: on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site [Williams Chapel on August 27, 1962 in Ruleville, Mississippi] to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.” I was also driven by the personal wish of mine to have been born at least thirty years earlier, so I would be part of a generation of people that were willing to change the destructive mores of the society in which they lived. I needed to gain access to that interior life of Ms. Hamer that helped her become the staunch civil rights advocate that she became. I think I needed this because I was so shocked by the way the then Bush administration was rolling back civil rights and liberties in brazen ways that I thought went unchallenged by most people I knew. While going to the physical structure of the church in 2005 helped me on some level, there was nothing like getting the actual scripture from Dr. Lee that Bevel based his whole sermon on. I found this more helpful than anything because I’ve heard a lot of sermons in my life and did not mind trying to write a sermon that would be the sort to influence one Ms. Hamer to join the work that SNCC was doing. Lee writes later that:

“the civil rights workers’ presentation contained new and exciting information for the group. It certainly lit a fire in Hamer, apparently to the point of helping her to ignore or forget her initial response to Tucker’s initial invitation. ‘Until then, I’d never heard of no mass meeting and I didn’t know that a Negro could register and vote.’ The COFO representatives told the eager group that they would have to fill out voter registration applications, which they were taught todo that night. The SNCC members then asked who would be willing to go to the county courthouse in Indianola to secure this most precious of rights. Eighteen people raised their hands and expressed an interest in testing a longstanding practice of excluding blacks from southern politics and thereby limiting their control over their destinies. Before leaving the church, the organizers made sure the volunteers signed their names on a list of those who were going to make that historic step the following Friday, August 31, 1962” (25).

While James Bevel deserves a lot of credit for preaching the sermon that drew Ms. Hamer into the civil rights movement via SNCC, a lot has been made over the past forty year about James Bevel’s encounters with the law, most notably the sexual abuse of his younger daughter that put him in prison several years up to his death. While these issues raise questions about Bevel, they should absolutely not obscure or replace recognition of the very influential and important work he has done in the civil rights movement, including the drawing of Ms. Hamer to the movement as well as originating the Selma-to-Montgomery march. My deepest sympathies extend to all those who suffer sexual or verbal abuse. Certainly if each of us were recognized according to our consistent morality, we would be found failing, just like James Bevel. Nobody should be defined by their weaknesses only. I appreciate James Bevel's strengths, as they allowed forums of creative protest against the Jim Crow South. His actions have taught me that my faith and pursuit of social justice are one in the same, and are inseparable, and I thank him for his work. –RF.