In celebrating Black revolution-icons and movements throughout history that have fostered revolutionary thinking and encouraged social progress.
Black history is filled with an abundance of brave, Era-defining artists, writers, politicians and more who have embodied a spirit of boldness and progressive thinking in the face of adversity. In today’s rocky political landscape of hate, misogyny, and anti-blackness, these thinker’s teachings, words and ideas are invaluable.
There’s no shortage of literature from the likes of MalcomX to SteveBiko, Thomas Sankara and more that continue to spark fire in people and encourage a revolutionary spirits years after they were written.
Below are the most explicit books about Black Revolution and Resistance;
1)THE BLACK JACOBINS: TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE AND THE SAN DOMINGO REVOLUTION by C. L. R. JAMES
This 1938 book by Afro-Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James tells the under-appreciated history of the Haitan Revolution, focusing of the leadership of Toussaint L’ouverture. This book is significant for obvious reasons, it’s a stiring account of how the “FirstBlackRepublic” came to be the face of adversity and a commentary of the effects of slavery and racism in America.
Painting by January Suchodolski, depicting a struggle between Polish troops in French service and the Haitian rebels
THE HAITIAN Revolutionwas the first and only successful slave revolution in human history.The slaves’ struggle produced heroic leaders, especially Toussaint L’Ouverture. He and his revolutionary army of self-emancipated slaves defeated the three great empires of the eighteenth century—Spain, England, and France—and finally won independence after a decade of struggle in 1804.
THE HAITIAN Revolution was the first and only successful slave revolution in human history. The slaves’ struggle produced heroic leaders, especially Toussaint L’Ouverture.He and his revolutionary army of self-emancipated slaves defeated the three great empires of the eighteenth century—Spain, England, and France—and finally won independence after a decade of struggle in 1804.
While historians have written tomes on the eighteenth century’s other great revolutions—the American, and French—the Haitian Revolution has been buried under calumny or simply suppressed. Why? Our rulers of course minimize the role of revolution in history, even the ones that brought them to power, for fear of highlighting the fact that fundamental change comes from social revolution. But they hold a particular animus toward the Haitian Revolution. In its time it directly threatened the slave empires in the new world. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it offered hope of insurrection for independence to the colonies subject to the European empires. It has always been a challenge to liberals and their counsel of piecemeal reform and gradualism, which rarely if ever delivers change, and instead promises a counter-model of class struggle and revolution.
Even on the left, the Haitian Revolution does not get the recognition it merits. For example, most left-wing histories of the French Revolution, often marred by a Stalinist French nationalism, fail to understand the centrality of the Haitian colony and slavery in the development of French capitalism and the consequent strength of the bourgeoisie to overthrow the absolutist monarchy.
C. L. R. James’s brilliant book, The Black Jacobins, rescues the Haitian Revolution from repression. James wrote it in 1938, making this year the seventieth anniversary of its publication. As he composed it, fascism swept Europe, Stalin imposed slave labour in his gulag, and Europe held the peoples of Africa and Asia in colonial bondage. James’s history both celebrates the triumph of Toussaint and the slaves and also uses it as a beacon call for national liberation and international proletarian solidarity against imperialism.
Like Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, on which James modelled his book, The Black Jacobins is not academic history, but one written by a proletarian revolutionist using theory and history as a guide to revolutionary struggle. Throughout his book he highlights the dialectical interaction between the revolutions in France and Haiti, particularly the interaction between the Parisian masses, the sansculottes, and the slaves. For James that international solidarity is the secret of both revolutions’ success, and necessary for human emancipation.
CAPITALISM, COLONIALISM, AND PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION James opens The Black Jacobins by surveying the European conquest of the New World and their occupation of the island that would become Haiti:
The Spaniards, the most advanced Europeans of their day, annexed the island, called it Hispaniola, and took the backward natives under their protection. They introduced forced labor in mines, murder, rape, bloodhounds, strange diseases, and artificial famine (by the destruction of cultivation to starve the rebellious). These and other requirements of the higher civilization reduced the native population from an estimated half-a-million, perhaps a million, to 60,000 in 15 years.
This plunder of the New World was part of what Marx called the “primitive accumulation” that fertilized European capitalism within the womb of feudalism. In Europe, the process was marked by the expropriation of peasants from their land, creating a “free” population that would form the basis of a wage working class. Meanwhile in the early colonies, merchant capitalists turned to chattel slavery to work the plantations that produced commodities and surplus for the system back in Europe. The emerging capitalist classes amassed fantastic fortunes and power that brought them into conflict with the feudal regimes, triggering the great bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century.
Spain, England, and France battled over control of Hispaniola as part of this plunder and exploitation of the New World. Finally in 1679, France and Spain agreed to divide the island between themselves.Spain retained control of the eastern side of the island and called it San Domingo, while the French won control of the eastern half and named it San Domingue. In the space of one hundred years, French merchants and planters turned San Domingue into a site of boundless horror and seemingly limitless profit that fuelled French capitalism.
At the time, France was ruled by an absolutist monarchy, which represented the feudal nobility but also facilitated the emerging capitalists. The lesser nobles, squeezed by the centralizing dynamics of the absolutist state, looked for new sources of wealth and became planters in the colony. The monarchy gave French merchants a monopoly on trade, the infamous exclusive. The merchants used the trade and consequent profits to develop the port cities, the heart of early French capitalism, like Nantes, Bordeaux and Marseilles that would generate many of the early leaders of the French Revolution.
French merchants and planters turned San Domingue into, as James puts it, “the most profitable colony the world had ever known” . By 1789, its plantations produced half the world’s coffee, 40 percent of its sugar, and a host of lesser commodities like indigo. Over two-thirds of France’s trade flowed in and out of San Domingue. The colony became the envy of all the other imperial powers—Spain, Britain, and Holland.
Based on this wealth, the French bourgeoisie would overthrow the monarchy, transform all of Europe, and (inadvertently) trigger a slave revolution that would remake the New World and lead to the eventual abolition of slavery. As one liberal Frenchman named Mirabeau put it, the colonial system was “sleeping at the edge of Vesuvius”.
The Black slave laborers The eruption would begin among the 500,000 slaves that laboured on San Domingue’s plantations. To fulfill their insatiable demand for workers, the European powers plundered Africa for slaves (12 million total), subjected them to the horrors of the Middle Passage, and compelled them into the backbreaking toil of plantation labour.
In San Domingue, the slaves worked in giant labour gangs in the fields and sugar factories. The slave drivers whipped them through the course of eighteen-hour days to squeeze every ounce of labour out of them. The plantation masters often encased the slave’s heads in tin masks to prevent them from eating the sugar cane. Under criticism, the French monarchy attempted to regulate the brutality. The state imposed the Code Noir, a vast rulebook for implementing “humane” slavery, but it was honoured more in the breach than the observance.
San Domingue became a vast killing field, sacrificing life for profit. The labour conditions were so brutal that half the slaves died within ten years of arrival. The slaves tended not to reproduce, and when female slaves became pregnant they would often give themselves abortions to prevent their potential children from being enslaved. The slave masters therefore had to continuously replenish their labour gangs with new slaves, buying an estimated 30,000 new laborers from the slave merchants each year. Thus, in 1791 on the eve of the revolution in San Domingue, more than two-thirds of the slaves had been born in Africa and known relative freedom within the last decade of their lives.
Like every exploited class in history, the slaves resisted their exploitation. They struggled at every step from capture to transport to the plantation. They fled to the mountains to form what became known as maroon bands, attempted to organize rebellion, and dreamed of revolution. The very conditions of labour brought them together in a fashion that made class struggle more possible. James writes, “The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors. But working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar factories which covered the Northern Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time”.
The very divisions that the planters used to control the slaves provided them with the means for organization and coordination. Within the slave gangs, the planters appointed commanders from among the slaves to oversee their work. It was this layer of commanders that would organize the revolt and provide slaves with military leadership. The merchants and planters were creating their own gravediggers.
The booming colony nevertheless seemed stable. But, as James argues, “economic prosperity is no guarantee of social stability. That rests on the constantly shifting equilibrium between the classes. It was the prosperity of the bourgeoisie that started the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. With every stride in production the colony was marching toward its doom”. Newly enslaved, angry, restive, envious of the prosperity built on their whipped backs, the Black masses would soon rise up and smash their masters’ carefully cultivated barbarism.
Some sensed the coming explosion and hoped for the leadership from among the slaves to organize the fight for emancipation. One French abolitionist, Abbe Raynal, wrote:
Already there are established two colonies of fugitive Negroes, whom treaties and power protect from assault. Those lightnings announce the thunder. A courageous chief only is wanted. Where is he, that great man whom Nature owes to her vexed, oppressed and tormented children? Where is he? He will appear, doubt it not; he will come forth and raise the sacred standard of liberty. This venerable goal will gather around him the companions of his misfortune. More impetuous than the torrents, they will everywhere leave the indelible traces of their just resentment. Everywhere people will bless the name of the hero who shall have re established the rights of the human race; everywhere will they raise trophies in his honour.
Toussaint Breda, a literate freed slave and overseer on the Breda Plantation, read this passage over and over again, dreaming of freedom for his slave brethren.
The capitalists and planters Everywhere, even in the towns, the Black slaves outnumbered their white masters and overseers. There were only 30,000 whites in San Domingue amid half a million Blacks. They lived on their plantations scattered throughout the colony and in small towns of about 20,000 like Port Au Prince, the capital, and Cap Français in the North.
The whites were bitterly divided. At the pinnacle of power stood the governor, the representative of monarchy in the colony. The merchants and planters comprised the white ruling class of the colony, the so-called grand blancs, the big whites. Beneath them as their managers and enforcers were the petit blancs, the small whites—the functionaries and the rabble.
The planters hated the merchants and the governor because they enforced and benefited from the exclusive, the French monopoly on trade. The merchants also hated the governor and the restrictions of the feudal order back in France that constrained their economic and political advancement. And the small whites hated everyone above and below them.
The final players in the colony’s ruling class were the gens de coleur, the free men of colour. Numbering some 30,000, they were the illegitimate children of the merchants and planters and their slave mistresses. They vacillated between the rulers and the exploited slaves. While racially oppressed—famously divided up into an absurd hierarchy of 128 categories based on skin colour—the free men of colour had limited rights under the Code Noir.They were allowed to hold military office, acquire property, and purchase slaves for their own plantations.
They were a subject part of the ruling class in the colony. They aspired to join their fathers among the big whites. But the white rulers hated them for driving up the price of land and attempted to restrict their rights. The free men of color in turn resented the big whites and also despised the monarchy and its representative for enforcing a racial order that excluded their full rights as rulers. Yet as rulers, however racially oppressed, they were no allies of the Black slaves whom they exploited, and from whom they attempted to distance themselves in the colony’s racial hierarchy.
The impact of the French Revolution The bourgeoisie, including the merchants tied to slavery in the colonies, grew frustrated with the king and his regime’s feudal restraints on the economy and their political rights. They especially resented how he attempted to solve the regime’s financial crisis, ironically the result of debts incurred by its war with England over control of North America and its support for the American Revolution. The king’s taxes fell disproportionately on the bourgeoisie with much of the nobility receiving feudal exemptions. But the king even managed to alienate much of the nobility.
Famously, when Louis XVI tried in 1789 to shut down the Estates-General, the parliament he had called to impose taxes, the bourgeois delegates called together a constituent assembly to agitate for reform of the monarchy and its feudal restrictions. After the king attempted to disperse this assembly, the sans culottes—the artisan masses of Paris who were enraged by the increasing cost of food—stormed the Bastille and commenced the great French Revolution.
Riding a mass movement, the assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man announcing that all men are free and equal.Within the assembly the Amis Noirs, the Friends of the Blacks, demanded equal rights for the free men of colour and gradual abolition of slavery itself.But the merchants and planters who had their representatives within the assembly attempted to silence even this mild demand for reform.
At the heart of France’s bourgeois revolution for liberty, equality and fraternity lay a giant contradiction: racism and slavery. This contradiction between the proclaimed ideals of the revolution and the reality of bigotry and bondage would spark the slave revolution in San Domingue.
The free men of colour strike first The French Revolution ignited all the conflicts in France’s precious colony. The big whites, small whites, and the free men of colour split into hostile camps. The planters were nobles who after flirting with the idea of fighting for independence quickly became royalists. They obviously opposed the Rights of Man and defended feudalism.
The merchants quaked in fear that their colonial slave economy was in jeopardy from the revolution that they themselves had started. Rights are noble and morally virtuous, but for the good bourgeois, profits trump principle on every question. Nevertheless they opposed the planters’ royalism. They needed the connection to the French state and so wanted a limited revolution that kept slavery and the colonial order intact.
The small whites immediately aligned themselves with the revolution as an opportunity to strike out against the big whites. But they were far from the radicalism of the Parisian masses; they were adamantly opposed to rights for free men of color and the abolition of slavery. The various white forces battled out their conflicting ideas in the colonial assembly set up in the wake of the revolution.
In these crosscurrents among the whites, the free men of colour took up the standard of the revolution as an opportunity to win their rights as citizens. Of course, as colonial property owners, they too did not demand abolition of slavery. They sent a delegation to agitate for their inclusion in the Rights of Man at the assembly in Paris. The Friends of the Blacks and free men of colour spoke to the assembly, sending a ripple of consternation through the merchants and planters who maneuvered to suppress the question.
In the end, the assembly voted for a resolution that said nothing specific about rights for the free men of color. After a furious debate, they passed a resolution that all persons over the age of twenty-five and with property qualifications would be granted the right to vote. Instead of solving the question, this vague compromise triggered a three-cornered fight between white and free colored rulers and the small whites, many of whom would be denied the vote under the new law due to their lack of property.
Enraged by the assembly’s failure to address their rights, one of the free men of color in the delegation, Vincent Oge, left France for England to meet British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. Oge convinced him to supply money for an armed insurrection of the free men of color for their rights. Oge returned to San Domingue to lead a rebellion of a few hundred free men of colour in Cap Français onOctober 21, 1790.
Oge appealed not to the slaves, but to the big whites, hoping to convince them with arms that they held common interests as plantation owners. The big whites would have none of it. They responded with the utmost savagery, suppressing the rising, torturing Oge and the other leaders, and finally killing them. But the spark of rebellion had been lit, and the fire of revolution would travel back and forth between the France and the colony for the next decade. The fate of the two revolutions was tied together in a complex knot.
France becomes a republic Faced with revolution in France and chaotic conflict in the colonies, the king attempted to organize a counterrevolution with international backing to reimpose the old order. The King fled Paris and was seized by the masses in Varennes. The Parisian masses had heard of Oge’s murder and began to see their common cause with not only the free men of colour but with the slaves. They now demanded liberty and equality not only at home but also abroad.
Under pressure from the radicalized masses, the assembly again debated the question of rights for free men of colour. Julien Raimond, himself a free man of colour, argued for rights for his group but also defended slavery before the assembly. In the end, they reached another rotten compromise that only served to further inflame the colonial revolt. They granted rights to free men of colour who had been born of free parents. They thus enfranchised only about 400 out of the 30,000 free men of colour.
On top of that, they defended slavery. One delegate, Barnave, summed up the attitude of the French bourgeoisie, stating that slavery “is absurd, but it is established and one cannot handle it roughly without unloosing the greatest disorder. This regime is oppressive, but it gives livelihood to several million Frenchmen. This regime is barbarous but a still greater barbarism will be the result if you interfere with it without the necessary knowledge”.
The capitulation to profit over principle demoralized the assembly, especially the Jacobins, the left wing of the revolution, and their supporters among the Parisian masses. The capitulation also gave the green light to reaction. Royalist forces won the day, repressed the masses, and scattered the Jacobin radicals who fled or went into hiding.
But as James argues, “phases of revolution are not decided in parliaments, they are only registered there”. Amid the tide of reaction, the Jacobins sharpened their ideas and cultivated their leadership of the French artisans and peasants. In San Domingue, James writes, the Black slaves “had heard of the revolution and had construed it in their own image: the white slaves in France had risen, and killed their masters, and were now enjoying the fruits of the earth. It was gravely inaccurate in fact, but they had caught the spirit of thing. Liberty. Equality. Fraternity”.
The slave revolt Vesuvius was about to erupt. The crisis of the revolution and splits among the colony’s rulers opened space for the slave revolution. Throughout France’s Caribbean colonies, slaves revolted. Without this mass insurrection, there is no doubt that France would never have abolished slavery. James writes, “Neglected and ignored by politicians of every brand and persuasion, they had organized on their own and struck for freedom at last” . In San Domingue, the commanders—the better-educated slave overseers—provided the organization and leadership through secret meetings, which were often Vodou ceremonies.
The slave commander Boukman led a meeting at Bois Caiman that organized and launched the insurrection at the end of July 1791. He and his followers built a vast conspiracy across dozens of plantations in the Northern Plain. No one informed the planters and merchants of the coming insurrection; they were completely caught by surprise—a testament to the overwhelming solidarity among the slaves. The slaves rose up in the tens of thousands, slaughtered their masters, burned the plantations, and terrorized the surviving white population, taking revenge on their torturers.
The slave masters of yesteryear and today, along with their liberal handmaidens, have always condemned the Black laborers for their violent insurrection. James refutes this slander arguing that the slaves were
surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them. They did not maintain this vengeful spirit for long. The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased…. Compared with what their masters had done to them in cold blood, what they did was negligible.
Toussaint L’Ouverture Toussaint Breda, then using a last name borrowed from the plantation on which he laboured, watched the rising from a distance, protecting the plantation and its mistress from harm. He was not a slave; he had been freed for quite some time. He was educated, literate, and had acquired at least one plantation and slaves of his own. He had achieved as much as any free Black man could in San Domingue. He certainly had more to lose than his chains.
Toussaint watched the course of the struggle for a month, pondering Abbe Raynal’s famous passage and weighing his options. Finally he decided to join the ever-expanding slave army in the mountains of the north commanded by Jean Francois and Biassou. He was appointed as a doctor in the army and after demonstrating political and military skills was promoted to Biassou’s assistant. By then they collectively commanded an army of self-emancipated slaves that had grown to 100,000, dwarfing all other military forces on the island.
In the colony’s less developed south and west, the free men of colour rose up and demanded equality but not the abolition of slavery. This schism between the north and the south would plague the revolutionaries, opening breaches to imperialist schemes and invasions. In the north, the Black generals also did not demand abolition, but instead reform of slavery. Biassou, Jean Francois, and even Toussaint attempted to strike a deal with the French that would only emancipate a handful in return for peace. But the utterly reactionary planters and merchants refused. James writes, “only then did Toussaint come to an unalterable decision from which he never wavered and for which he died. Complete liberty for all, to be attained and held by their own strength”.
To prepare for revolutionary war, Toussaint separated himself from the other Black generals and trained a professional army of his own, utterly loyal to him and fired by their commitment to liberation. Meanwhile in France, moderate revolutionaries, like the Girond in Brissot, who was also a member of the Friends of the Blacks, were in power. But however much they supported rights for the free men of colour, they said nothing about emancipation. Profits for the bourgeoisie mattered more than even their own doctrines.As James argues, Toussaint’s troops and “not the perorations in the Legislative would be decisive in the struggle for freedom”.
The Masses’ “frenzy for liberty” The French peasants and artisans, the mass base of the French Revolution, faced the same quandary as the Black slaves. The bourgeoisie had already attempted to rein in the radicalization. It was the masses and their Jacobin leadership that would bring the revolution to its grandest heights, finally eradicating the monarchy and abolishing slavery.
The assembly had sent a new commission to San Domingue to secure peace between the big whites and free men of colour, stabilize the colony under a new anti-racist compact in the ruling class, and repress the slave insurrection. Twomoderate Jacobins,Sonthanax and Polverel, led the commission and oversaw General Leveaux and 6,000 new French troops. Upon arrival, however, their mission fell to pieces as the troops split into opposed camps of royalists and revolutionaries.
The Paris masses decisively shifted the revolutionary tide in both France and San Domingue. They rose up to demand price controls on bread and other essentials, final abolition of all feudal strictures, and the end of the monarchy. They voted in Jacobins to the assembly. James describes their radical aims:
They were striking at royalty, tyranny, reaction and oppression of all types, and with these they included slavery. The prejudice of race is superficially the most irrational of all prejudices, and by a perfectly comprehensible reaction the Paris workers, from indifference in 1789, had come by this time to detest no section of the aristocracy so much as those whom they called “the aristocrats of the skin.” On August 11, the day after the Tuileries fell, Page, a notorious agent of the colonists in France, wrote home almost in despair. “One spirit alone reigns here, it is horror of slavery and enthusiasm for liberty. It is a frenzy which wins all heads and grows every day.” Henceforth the Paris masses were for abolition, and their Black brothers in San Domingo, for the first time, had passionate allies in France.
With the Jacobins in firm command and backed by the French masses, they soon executed Louis XVI. Now France had become the centre of world revolution and a threat to all the other European empires. Spain and England declared war on France, leading all the rest of Europe in a counterrevolutionary war for the destruction of Republican France. At the very same time, they invaded San Domingue to seize the colony, reimpose slavery, and reap the profits they had long coveted.
Sonthanax and the French leaders in San Domingue thus faced two imperial invasions and counterrevolution from royalist planters. Galbaud, a planter and the new governor of the colony appointed by the assembly, became the vehicle for counterrevolution. He and his planter allies attempted to overthrow Sonthanax. With no military forces to speak of, Sonthanax had no choice but to appeal to the slaves for military support. He promised emancipation for any slave who joined in the defense of his commission. Thousands of slaves rallied to his call and Sonthanax defeated Galbaud and chased 10,000 big whites from the island. Flush with victory, Sonthanaxdeclared on August 29, 1793, the abolition of slavery in San Domingue.
The Black Jacobins Yet Toussaint, Jean Francois, and Biassou did not rally to Sonthanax and the French Republic. Instead they allied themselves with monarchist and pro-slavery Spain, which hoped to use them as proxies bought with promises of individual liberty to conquer the colony. Toussaint was not fooled by the Spanish, and his decision was certainly not the result of some African allegiance to kingship. It was a rational calculation. He knew that Sonthanax had no power to abolish slavery; that lay in the hands of the assembly, which had yet to prove itself an ally of the slaves.
Toussaint bided his time and built his own army. He took advantage of Spanish support to acquire training and guns, and waited for the French National Assembly to decide where it stood on slavery. As a counter to Sonthanax, Toussaint issued his own decree on August 29. He discarded his old slave last name, Breda, and announced his new one, L’Ouverture—meaning the opening to liberty. He declared,“Brothers and friends. I am Toussaint L’Ouverture, my name is perhaps known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in San Domingo. I work to bring them into existence. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause”.
Meanwhile in the south and west, the ruling free men of colour allied themselves with the invading British Army that had landed from Jamaica. Hemmed in by counter-revolution, the future of revolutionary France and the future of the slave rebellion in San Domingue hung in the balance. The Paris masses would decide the fate of both. They demanded that the Jacobins wash away every remaining vestige of feudalism, every limitation on liberty, including slavery. James writes:
It was not Paris alone but all revolutionary France. Servants, peasants, workers, the labourers by the day in the fields all over France were filled with a virulent hatred against the “aristocracy of the skin.” The many so moved by the sufferings of the slaves that they had long ceased to drink coffee, thinking of it as drenched with the blood and sweat of men turned into brutes. Noble and generous working people of France… are the people whom the sons of Africa and the lovers of humanity will remember with gratitude and affection, not the perorating Liberals in France nor the… hypocrites in the British Houses of Parliament.”
Into this feverish climate of revolution that swept France in 1794, Sonthanax sent a multiracial delegation from San Domingue to appeal for emancipation. One white, one free man of colour, and one former slave arrived to a rapturous reception in the National Convention. Minister Lacroix proposed a resolution that read, “The National Convention declares slavery abolished in all the colonies. In consequence it declares that all men, without distinction of colour, domiciled in the colonies, are French Citizens, and enjoy all the rights under the Constitution”. The convention passed it with overwhelming numbers.
In San Domingue, Toussaint soon heard of the decree and abandoned Spain as well as the other Black generals who remained Spanish pawns. He led his professional army of 4,000 emancipated slaves to join Sonthanax, Polverel, and Laveaux in a revolutionary war for the expulsion of the British and Spanish invaders and for complete liberation of all the island’s slaves. Toussaint had become a Black Jacobin, committed to the French Revolution and the abolition of slavery—at this point, two intertwined allegiances.
Toussaint and the revolutionary Black army At the moment of victory, Sonthanax and Polverel were recalled to France to face charges brought by disgruntled planters, leaving General Laveaux in charge of Toussaint, now a French general, and his army. Together they led the fight against the English and Spanish occupations.
Toussaint gathered around himself the ex-slave generals who would decide the future of San Domingue—Dessalines, Christophe, Moise, and his own brother, Paul L’Ouverture. Toussaint’s army grew to immense size, its ranks drawn from emancipated slaves and maroon bands that rallied to the French after the decree of emancipation. Laveaux, Toussaint, and the Black generals controlled the north and west. In the south, Andre Rigaud, a free man of colour, mounted a revolutionary campaign against the British and their collaborators among the free men of colour. He consolidated much of the area under his own regime, separate from Toussaint and the French who dominated the north.
The revolutionary forces were unstoppable in their assault on the British and Spanish. James captures the revolutionary spirit that animated their campaign: “All the French Blacks, from the labourers at Port-de-Paix demanding equality to the officers in the army were filled with immense pride at being citizens of the French Republic ‘one and indivisible’ which had brought liberty and equality to the world”. Their determination and allegiance was so firm that, James declares, “The British and Spaniards could not defeat it. All they could offer was money, and there are periods in human history when money is not enough”.
They quickly defeated Spain, which granted its half of the island to France. All but a few British redoubts remained in the north and south. By 1795 Laveaux and Toussaint were in control of San Domingue, facing the challenge of rebuilding the society ravaged by four years of warfare. Touissaint attempted to maintain the plantation system worked not by slave labor but by using the former slaves as wage laborers paid in money and a percentage of produce. He appointed whites to government posts and even allowed big whites to retain ownership of their great estates, and he tried to prevent the freed slaves from breaking up the plantations. This attempt to organize an agricultural proletariat on capitalist plantations would become a source of friction between Toussaint and the emancipated Black slaves, who wanted to farm their own small plots.
But no old order dies without a fight. Toussaint would face counterrevolution again and again for the next nine years both at home and abroad. Laveaux and Toussaint had to repress the free men of colour, who saw rulership as their right, as well as big whites who sought the re-imposition of slavery. Some of these counterrevolutionaries kidnapped Laveaux at one point. James writes that after being liberated by Toussaint, Laveaux, “to the astonishment of all and the unbounded joy of the Blacks … proclaimed Toussaint Assistant to the Governor and swore that he would never do anything without consulting him. He called him the saviour of constituted authority, the Black Spartacus, the Negro predicted by Raynal who would avenge the outrages done to his race”.
France soon confirmed Toussaint’s appointment and entrusted his army with the defense of the new order while France’s own revolutionary army fought against the counterrevolutionary invasion from the rest of Europe.
Victory and reaction in France France’s army soon defeated its foes. Now secure, the bourgeoisie began to rein in what it saw as the excesses of the revolution and consolidate their hold on the country. They repressed the Parisian masses, brought down the Jacobins, executed Robespierre, and ended the Terror the Jacobins had used to defend the revolution against internal foes.
With the rollback of the revolution, the merchants and planters in Paris began to agitate for the return of slavery. In 1795 these and other conservative forces passed a new constitution and elected a new centralized leadership, the Directory. In the new parliamentary bodies, recently elected slaveholders raged against the loss of their property, the slaves, in San Domingue. Reaction was gaining strength in France but did not yet have the power and will to carry through counterrevolution in the colonies.
Sonthanax, exonerated and back in San Domingue, noted the tide of reaction and worked to consolidate his regime’s control of the entire colony. He distributed 20,000 guns amongst the freed slaves, declaring, “here is the liberty which Sonthanax gives you; whoever would take this gun from you means to make you a slave again.” Against the wishes of Toussaint, Sonthanax then marched against Rigaud in the south. Up until then Toussaint and Rigaud had been collaborating despite differences, and both had abolished slavery in their territories. Rigaud quickly defeated Sonthanax’s forces. The conflict opened up two tragic fissures in the colony—one between Toussaint and Sonthanax and another between Toussaint and Rigaud.
From this point on, Toussaint aimed to gain control of the whole island to preserve liberty under Black leadership. Both Laveaux and Sonthanax were elected to represent San Domingue in France. Laveaux soon left and Toussaint quickly moved to compel Sonthanax to leave as well. Toussaint’s motives were not simply power, as some cynics claim, but the need to unite the entire island under his leadership, and to prevent the Directory from restoring slavery.
Toussaint issued a letter to the Directory declaring his allegiance to France but also his willingness to defend the new order in the colony. He hoped “France will not revoke her principles…. But if, to re-establish slavery in San Domingue, this was done, then I declare to you it would be to attempt the impossible: we have known how to face dangers to obtain our liberty, we shall know how to brave death to maintain it”.
The Directory plots against Toussaint A split between France and Toussaint’s San Domingue was inevitable at this point. The Directory sent a new emissary, Gabriel Hedouville, to stir up division, win over Rigaud, and bring down Toussaint. While the Directory plotted his demise, Toussaint dutifully carried on his campaign against the British.
As the British forces collapsed, General Maitland attempted to lure Toussaint away from France. But the Black Jacobin would have none of it; he remained loyal to the French Revolution to his death. He instead destroyed the British forces, which lost over 80,000 men to battle and disease; it was one of the biggest single defeats in Britain’s colonial history.
Hedouville schemed against Toussaint, despite the Black general’s loyal service to France. Hedouville attacked him for allowing royalist big whites to retain their plantations. Frustrated with Hedouville’s constant interference, Toussaint resigned his post, returned to his plantation, and let Hedouville rule the colony on his own. Bereft of the Black general’s support, Hedouville proceeded to offend Black leaders and laborers. After he dismissed the Black general Moise, Toussaint overthrew Hedouville and drove him back to France.
Toussaint had crossed the Rubicon. He aimed to consolidate his hold on the island and prepare for its defense against what he feared to be an inevitable French invasion. He invaded the south to bring down Rigaud, whom Hedouville had stirred into opposition to Toussaint. Dessalines commanded the troops and quickly brought down the free men of colour, as Rigaud too escaped to France. After suppressing various rebellions, Toussaint commanded the entire colony.
In France, Napoleon had just seized control of the French state to prevent a royalist coup. In doing so he consolidated the bourgeois revolution. Busy with his own revolutionary campaign that overthrew several feudal states in Europe, he delayed any confrontation with Toussaint. Napoleon instead confirmed Toussaint as governor and commander-in-chief of San Domingue. Napoleon’s redesign of the French state, however, confirmed Toussaint’s worst fears. Napoleon terminated political representation from the colonies and ruled that they would be governed by, in an ominous phrase, “special laws.”
Convinced that Napoleon aimed to restore slavery, Toussaint prepared the island for military defense and launched an enormous reconstruction plan to prove that it could be just as productive a colony under a free labour regime as it had been under slavery. He seized control of the Spanish section of the island to prevent it being used as a staging ground for a French invasion. He also freed slaves on the Spanish side of the island.
However, James argues, Toussaint made a great mistake. He never explained to either his army or the Black masses that he was preparing a fight for independence to preserve liberty. In contrast, Dessalines told his followers, “The war you have won is a little war, but you have two more, bigger ones. One is against the Spaniards, who do not want to give up their land and who have insulted your brave Commander-in-Chief: the other is against France, who will try to make you slaves again as soon as she is finished with her enemies. We’ll win those wars”.
James argues “that was and still is the way to speak to the masses, and it is no accident that Dessalines and not Toussaint finally led the island to independence. Toussaint, shut up within himself, immersed in diplomacy, went his tortuous way, overconfident that he had only to speak and the masses would follow”.
Black rule and colonial reconstruction Nevertheless, Toussaint was in complete command of the island. He ruled for a brief period before the final war for independence. The island’s plantations were in ruins, much of the old ruling class had fled, and over a third of the ex-slaves had perished in the wars. Toussaint and his fellow generals represented a new Black ruling class that seized control of abandoned plantations, attempted to work out an antiracist compact with the remaining big whites, employing free Black laborers on the old plantations.
They implemented Toussaint’s double aim of reconstruction and preparation for self-defense. They buttressed the army with tens of thousands of guns purchased from the United States and other powers. They imposed draconian labor regulations that prevented the Black workers from leaving plantations or buying up property for subsistence farming. Toussaint even legalized the slave trade to overcome the labour shortage. Of course he freed the slaves upon arrival on the island and he even entertained the idea of a revolutionary war for ending the African slave trade and emancipating the subject areas of Africa from European domination. The new Black rulers rebuilt the great towns of the colony, Le Cap and Port-au-Prince. In these towns, they built a new education system to train a new layer of Black rulers.
Toussaint wrote a new constitution for the colony not as an independent state, but as a colony with dominion status within the French empire. It abolished slavery, guaranteed civil rights for all, protected the right to private property, and declared Toussaint ruler for life with the right to name his successor. Even within these dictatorial and extreme measures—no worse than Napoleon’s consolidation of the French Revolution under his own dictatorship—San Domingue was still a beacon of liberty in a New World of slave states and colonies.
Napoleon’s aim: Colonial counterrevolution Napoleon and the French bourgeoisie had by now thoroughly abandoned the revolutionary egalitarianism of 1794. Hungering for the boundless profits of their slave colonies, they began to devise plans to invade and reimpose slavery in San Domingue and elsewhere. Napoleon represented bourgeois reaction in France, but his wars in Europe were progressive. By contrast, his planned invasion of San Domingue was counter revolutionary.
Napoleon was a racist. He denounced the Black generals as “gilded Africans” and declared that “he would not leave an epaulette on the shoulders of a single nigger in the colony”. He dismissed Toussaint in particular as a “revolted slave” and raved that he would reduce them all to “nothingness”. He appointed his brother-in-law General Leclerc, a vile racist in his own right, to command sixty-seven ships transporting 20,000 troops—the largest marine force in French history at the time. French invading forces would eventually peak at 60,000. Britain and the United States aided the French invasion. Leclerc boasted in classic imperial fashion, “All the niggers, when they see an army, will lay down their arms. They will be only too happy that we pardon them”.
While the vast fleet crossed the ocean, Toussaint tightened his grip on the island. He repressed the Black workers who rose up against his stern regime of plantation labor. When they revolted in the north, the workers chanted support for Toussaint’s nephew, Moise, who had relaxed restrictions on the plantations and allowed them to buy and farm small plots of land of their own. They supported him as a political rival to Toussaint’s rule. Faced with revolt on the eve of the invasion, Toussaint crushed the rebellion, further undermining his base of support among the Black workers, and executed Moise. By turning against Moise and the workers, he isolated himself and weakened his ability to arouse his base against the French forces.
On top of that, although he understood the threat from Napoleon, Toussaint again hesitated to openly declare resistance to France. James argues, “Toussaint could not believe that the French ruling class would be so depraved, so lost to all sense of decency, as to try to restore slavery. His grasp of politics led him to make all preparations, but he could not admit to himself and to his people that it was easier to find decency, gratitude, justice, and humanity in a cage of starving tigers than in the councils of imperialism”.
Toussaint was caught between his commitment to the French Revolution and his commitment to liberty, a double commitment that had been united in 1794 but was now broken in contradiction. He could not come to grips with this reality and hesitated to fight for independence. Consequently he could not lay out to the laboring masses the nature of the struggle that lay ahead. Toussaint foundered on a contradiction he could not resolve.
When the French landed in the old Spanish side of the island, Toussaint could not raise the masses and instead had to rely solely on his military forces. Nevertheless, Toussaint laid out a plan for the resistance. He wrote to Dessalines:
Do not forget, while waiting for the rainy season which will rid us of our foes, that we have no other resource than destruction and fire. Bear in mind that the soil bathed with our sweat must not furnish our enemies with the smallest sustenance. Tear up the road with shot; throw corpses and horses into all the fountains, burn everything and annihilate everything in order that those who come to reduce us to slavery may before their eyes see the image of that hell which they deserve.
Even with a military plan of total war, he would not announce any goal of independence. The Black generals led a furious guerrilla war against the French troops, outsmarting them, wiping out thousands, and proving Leclerc wrong beyond his most traumatic nightmares. Toussaint, however, disoriented his generals by opening negotiations for some kind of settlement with France that would maintain the Black generals in their offices. This mixture of total war and negotiation demoralized his generals who one after the other capitulated to Leclerc, beginning with Christophe. Finally Toussaint and last of all Dessalines surrendered.
Leclerc accepted Toussaint’s terms, maintaining the generals in their posts, but using them to repress the Black laborers who began to resist the French occupation. Leclerc used them yet distrusted them at the very same time; he always intended to get rid of them and replace them with white officers, and reimpose slavery. Leclerc began with Toussaint. He lured him into a meeting–which Toussaint could not refuse as an officer–captured him and his entire family, placed them in chains, and sent them aboard a ship for imprisonment in France.
Toussaint, outraged, declared when boarding the ship, “In overthrowing me, you have cut down in San Domingo only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep”(334). Napoleon jailed Toussaint high up in the cold French mountains. He died alone on April 7, 1803, killed by “ill-treatment, cold, and starvation” abandoned by France—the country to which he had remained loyal, upholding its standard of liberty and equality even when its rulers had abandoned it. As the greatest Black Jacobin he had defeated two slave empires—Britain and Spain—but France, his treasured empire of liberty had betrayed him. The fight for independence to preserve liberty fell to his acolytes, the generals he had trained.
The fight for independence Liberty hung by a thread. The struggle for its preservation was begun not by the generals, but by the Black laborers. They rose up when they heard rumours of Napoleon’s restoration of slavery in Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1802. The old vultures, the big whites who had fled San Domingue, began to return in the hopes of reclaiming their old plantations with re-enslaved laborers.
The Black generals vacillated between France and the rising by the laborers in defense of emancipation. They too were subject to the illusions that had doomed Toussaint. For a period they even followed Leclerc’s orders to repress the workers’ rebellion. Finally, Dessalines and other Black generals joined the rebellion, breaking forever with France, and gave the Black masses disciplined military leadership. The final fight for independence and liberty now commenced. Dessalines displayed what James calls a “one-sided genius,” far more crude than Toussaint yet essential for emancipation.
But the French imposed the rules of the final conflict. Leclerc waged a war of extermination, a genocidal war that aimed to kill off the existing workers who resisted and replace them with docile new slaves. General Rochambeau was particularly sadistic. Writes James, “Rochambeau drowned so many people in the Bay of Le Cap that for many a long day the people of the district would not eat fish. Following the example of the Spaniards in Cuba and the English in Jamaica, he brought 1,500 dogs to hunt down the Blacks”. He held a special “fete” in Le Cap in which a cheering audience of gaily-dressed white women watched dogs rip apart a Black man tied to a stake. He also invited a group of free women of colour to a party at which he informed them that they had inadvertently participated in a funeral ceremony for their husbands whom Rochambeau had recently murdered. The French “burned alive, hanged, drowned, tortured and started their old habit of burying Blacks up to their neck near nests of insects. It was not only hatred and fear, but policy”.
Leclerc’s plan was a fantasy of arrogance and ignorance. He was confronting not just a military resistance, but in fact an island-wide rebellion of the Black masses, who fought ferociously for liberty or death. “Far from being intimidated,” writes James, “the civil population met the terror with such courage and firmness as frightened the terrorists” . A French observer, Lemonnier-Delafosse, described how he witnessed a captured nineteen-year-old Black youth, who had seen two Blacks burned alive before him, shout, “You do not know how to die,” and proceed, in front of a crowd of whites, to free himself and put his own feet into the fire. Another captured woman refused to be hung by others, grabbed the rope and hung herself, remarking how sweet it is to die for liberty. “These were the men we had to fight against,” remarked Delafosse .
This was a “people’s war,” in which “they played the most audacious tricks on the French” . One French army was held down all night in anticipation of a major assault, only to find that they had been fooled by the shouts and movements of one hundred laborers pretending to be an army. Groups of armed Blacks and free men of colour made lightning raids using small boats, landing quietly, killing and carrying off prisoners and plunder, and then moving on. Leclerc’s forces soon succumbed to disease, demoralization, exhaustion, and death on the battlefield. His army crumbled and he himself soon died of disease.
Dessalines declared the goal of the insurrection to be independence. Famously, he gathered his officers and soldiers together, took out the French tri colour flag, and tore out the white band, leaving the flag—blue and red—as a symbol of the Black nation’s resistance to white imperial rule and slavery. Fired with their new goal of independence to preserve liberty, the Black army and laborers decimated the French, who lost nearly all of their 60,000 troops.
In the final assault by the Black armies on Le Cap, the French faced wave after wave of attacks on their heavily entrenched positions. “The French, who had fought on so many fields,” writes James, “had never seen fighting like this”. French soldiers began shouting “Bravo!”, and Rochambeau sent a message to the other side commending the heroism of Clairveaux, the officer leading the assault.
Delafosse later wrote in his memoirs:
But what men these Blacks are! How they fight and how they die! One has to make war against them to know their reckless courage in braving danger when they can no longer have recourse to strategem. I have seen a solid column, torn by grape-shot from four pieces of cannon, advance without making a retrograde step. The more they fell, the greater seemed to be the courage of the rest. They advance singing, for the Negro sings everywhere, makes songs on everything. Their song was a song of brave men…
Dessalines, however, did not successfully take control of the Spanish section of the island that would eventually become the Dominican Republic, a division that would haunt the politics of both nations.
Victorious against the French army, Dessalines declared independence in 1804. He named the new Black nation, “Haiti”—the name given the island by the indigenous population, the Tainos. It was a symbolic break with European and French slave masters’ conquest of the New World. He declared himself emperor for life. Then in 1805 faced with more counterrevolution from the big whites, he launched a massacre of the remaining white population. Importantly he did not kill all the whites, sparing Polish soldiers who had abandoned the French to fight on the side of the liberation struggle as well as white experts he thought necessary for the new nation. He declared that henceforth all citizens, regardless of their skin color, were Black.
“The massacre of the whites was a tragedy,” writes James,
not for the whites. For these old slave-owners… there is no need to waste one tear or one drop of ink. The tragedy was for the Blacks and the Mulattoes. It was a policy of revenge, and revenge has no place in politics…. As it was, Haiti suffered terribly from the resulting isolation. Whites were banished from Haiti for generations, and the unfortunate country, ruined economically, its population lacking in social culture, had its inevitable difficulties doubled by this massacre. That the new nation survived at all is forever to its credit for if the Haitians thought that imperialism was finished with them, they were mistaken.
Isolated and starved of capital, the Black and free men of colour were unable to develop a vibrant capitalist economy, but slipped back into subsistence farming and the consequent underdevelopment that has plagued Haiti ever since.
Haiti: Beacon of liberation It would be wrong, however, to see the final war for independence as a tragedy. The United States, France, and Britain strangled Haiti in the nineteenth century precisely because it was a threat to their slave economies, a threat that should be defended and celebrated. It had abolished slavery, won independence, and set an example that would inspire slave rebellion throughout the New World.
As the great Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared, “We should not forget that the freedom you and I enjoy today; that the freedom that eight hundred thousand coloured people enjoy in the British West Indies; the freedom that has come to coloured race the world over, is largely due to the brave stand taken by the Black sons of Haiti…. When they struck for freedom… they struck for the freedom of every Black man in the world.”7
The Haitian Revolution transformed the Old and New Worlds. In Europe, Napoleon’s diversion of forces to re-enslave San Domingue led directly to his defeats at sea and on the continent. In the New World, the revolution terrified the slave masters throughout the region. In the wake of the slaves’ victory, the British opted to abolish the slave trade for fear of importing restive African labour to their colonies. The French abandoned their pretension to empire when they sold off their possessions in America with the Louisiana Purchase. Haiti itself became a redoubt of anti-colonial revolution; on the condition that he would free the continent’s slaves, Haiti gave support to Simón Bolívar and his struggle for Latin American emancipation. In the modern imperialist era, Toussaint and the Black slaves’ revolution continued to inspire struggles for national liberation.
C. L. R. James’s brilliant book recovers this revolutionary history to aid our struggles today. With imperialist occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Haiti, we have much to learn from the intertwined struggle of Toussaint, the Black masses, and the Paris masses of the French Revolution. The Haitian Revolution’s searing lesson is that class struggle, the defense of the right of nations to self-determination, and international working-class solidarity for social revolution are the only solution to world imperialism.
2) THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLKS by W.E.B Dubois
This seminal work of literature written by the trailblazing Sociologist, Civil right activist and Pan-Africanist, set the foundation for many works on the race, class and society which followed This Souls Of Black Folks is largely heralded as the cornerstone of black literature introducing radical concepts such as double consciousness, the color line and the veil.
The book contains several essays on race, some of which had been published earlier in The Atlantic Monthly. To develop this work, Du Bois drew from his own experiences as an African Americanin American society. Outside of its notable relevance in African-American history,The Souls of Black Folk also holds an important place in social science as one of the early works in the field of sociology.
In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois used the term “double consciousness“, perhaps taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson(“The Transcendentalist” and “Fate”), applying it to the idea that black people must have two fields of vision at all times. They must be conscious of how they view themselves, as well as being conscious of how the world views them.
Chapters
Each chapter in The Souls of Black Folk begins with a pair of epigraphs: text from a poem, usually by a European poet, and the musical score of a spiritual, which Du Bois describes in his foreword (“The Forethought”) as “some echo of haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past”. Columbia University English and comparative literature professor Brent Hayes Edwards writes:
It is crucial to recognize that Du Bois chooses not to include the lyrics to the spirituals, which often serve to underline the arguments of the chapters: Booker T. Washington‘s idealism is echoed in the otherworldly salvation hoped for in “A Great Camp-Meeting in the Promised Land”, for example; likewise the determined call for education in “Of the Training of Black Men” is matched by the strident words of “March On”.
Edwards adds that Du Bois may have withheld the lyrics to mark a barrier for the reader, to suggest that black culture—life “within the veil”—remains inaccessible to white people.
In “The Forethought”, Du Bois states: “Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.” He concludes with the words: “…need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil?”
“Of Our Spiritual Strivings”
Chapter I,“Of Our Spiritual Strivings”,lays out an overview of Du Bois’s thesis. He says that the blacks of the South need the right to vote, the right to a good education, and to be treated with equality and justice. Here, he also coined “double-consciousness“, defined as a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The History of the American Negro is the history of this strive-this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
The first chapter also introduces Du Bois’s famous metaphor of the veil. According to Du Bois, this veil is worn by all African-Americans because their view of the world and its potential economic, political, and social opportunities is so vastly different from those of white people. The veil is a visual manifestation of the colour line, a problem Du Bois worked his whole life to remedy. Du Bois sublimates the function of the veil when he refers to it as a gift of second sight for African Americans, thus simultaneously characterizing the veil as both a blessing and a curse.
In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,-darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission.
“Of the Dawn of Freedom”
The second chapter, “Of the Dawn of Freedom”, covers the period of history from 1861 to 1872 and the Freedmen’s Bureau.Du Bois also introduces the problem of the colour-line: “The Problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.
Du Bois describes the Freedmen’s Bureau as “one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition.” He says that the bureau was “one of the great landmarks of political and social progress.” After a year’s work, Du Bois states that “it relieved a vast amount of physical suffering; it transported seven thousand fugitives from congested centres back to the farm; and, best of all, it inaugurated the crusade of the New England school-ma’am.”
The greatest success of the Freedmen’s Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among Negroes, and the idea of free elementary education among all classes in the South.
Finally, he argues that “if we cannot peacefully reconstruct the South with white votes, we certainly can with black votes.”
the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud.
“Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others”
Chapters III and VI deal with education and progress. Here Du Bois argues against Booker T. Washington‘s idea of focusing solely on industrial education for black men. He advocates the addition of a classical education to establish leaders and educators in the black community.
Du Bois refers to the Atlanta Compromise as the “most notable of Mr. Washington’s career,” and “the old attitude of adjustment and submission.” Du Bois claims that Washington wants black people to give up three things: political power, insistence on civil rights, and higher education. He fears that, if black people “concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South,” this will lead to 1) The disenfranchisement of the Negro, 2) The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro, and 3) The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.” By Washington focusing on “common-school and industrial training,” he “depreciates institutions of higher learning,” where “teachers, professional men, and leaders” are trained.
But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds,—so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this,—we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.
Note: By the time Du Bois published his book, most of the former Confederate states had completed disenfranchisement of blacks, led by Mississippi in 1890, by constitutional amendments and other laws raising barriers to voter registration, primarily through poll taxes, residency and recordkeeping requirements, subjective literacy tests and other devices. Virginia passed similar laws in 1908. By excluding blacks from political life, southern legislatures were able to pass Jim Crow laws and other discriminatory methods.
“Of the Meaning of Progress”
In the fourth chapter, “Of the Meaning of Progress”, Du Bois explores his experiences first, when he was teaching in Tennessee. Secondly he returned after 10 years and found the town where he had worked had suffered many unpleasant changes. He says: “My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.”
I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men thought that Tennessee-beyond the Veil- was theirs alone, and in vacation time they sallied forth in lusty bands to meet the county school-commissioners.
Yet, he states, after meeting with the commissioner, “but even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate first, then I-alone.”
I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it; and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity.
“Of the Wings of Atalanta”
The fifth chapter is a meditation on the necessity of widespread higher education in the South.
Du Bois compares Atlanta, the City of a Hundred Hills, to Atalanta, and warns against the “greed of gold,” or “interpreting the world in dollars.” The “Black World beyond the Veil”, should not succumb “Truth, Beauty, and Goodness,” to the ideal of wealth attainment in public schools.
beyond the Veil are smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders and the led, of serfdom, of poverty, of order and subordination, and, through all, the Veil of Race.
He admonishes readers to “Teach workers to work, and Teach thinkers to think.” “The need of the South is knowledge and culture,” he says: “And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living,—not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold.”
“Of the Training of Black Men”
Du Bois discusses how “to solve the problem of training men for life,” especially as it relates to the Negro, who “hang between them and a light a veil so thick, that they shall not even think of breaking through.” Du Bois cites the progress of Southern education, consisting of army schools, mission schools, and schools of the Freedman’s Bureau, from the end of the Civil War until 1876. Then complete school systems were established including Normal schools and colleges, followed by the industrial revolution in the South from 1885 to 1895, and its industrial schools. Yet, he asks, “Is not life more than meat, and the body more than raiment?”
Du Bois asserts: “…education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than bread-winning,” is the right of the black as well as the white. He goes on to state, “If the Negro was to learn, he must teach himself,” and cites the 30,000 black teachers created in one generation who “wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the land, and they made Tuskegeepossible.”
Additionally, 2500 Negroes had received a bachelor’s degree, of whom 53% became teachers or leaders of educational systems, 17% became clergymen, 17% mainly physicians, 6% merchants, farmers and artisans; and 4% in government service. From 1875 to 1880, there were 22 Negro graduates from Northern colleges and 143 from Southern Negro colleges. From1895 to 1900, Northern colleges graduated 100 Negros and over 500 graduated from Southern Negro colleges. Du Bois concludes by stating that the “…inevitable problems of civilization the Negro must meet and solve largely for himself.”
The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and co-operation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men.
“Of the Black Belt”
Du Bois calls Albany, Georgia, in Dougherty County, the “heart of the Black Belt.” He says: “Here are the remnants of the vast plantations.”
How curious a land is this,- how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise!
Yet, he notes, it is not far from “where Sam Hose was crucified” [in a lynching], “to-day the centre of the Negro problem,-the centre of those nine million men who are America’s dark heritage from slavery and the slave-trade.” He continues: “Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce hate and vindictiveness there,—these are the extremes of the Negro problem which we met that day, and we scarce knew which we preferred.”
“Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece”
Speaking of the cotton fields from “Carolina to Texas”, Du Bois claims an analogy between the “ancient and modern “Quest of the Golden Fleece in the Black Sea.” Continuing his discussion of Dougherty County, he explains that of the 1500 Negro families around Albany in 1898, many families have 8–10 individuals in one- or two-room homes. These families are plagued with “easy marriage and easy separation,” a vestige of slavery, which the Negro church has done much to prevent “a broken household.” He claims that most of the black population is “poor and ignorant,” more than 80 percent, though “fairly honest and well meaning.” “Two-thirds of them cannot read or write,” and 80 percent of the men, women and children are farmers.
Economically, the Negro has become a slave of debt, says Du Bois. He describes the economic classes: the “submerged tenth” of croppers, 40 percent are metayersor “tenant on shares” with a chattel mortgage, 39 percent are semi-metayers and wage-laborers, while 5 percent are money-renters, and 6 percent freeholders. Finally, du Bois states that only 6 percent “have succeeded in emerging into peasant proprietorship”, leading to a “migration to town”, the “buying of small homesteads near town”.
“Of the Sons of Master and Man”
This chapter discusses “race-contact”, specifically as it relates to physical proximity, economic and political relations, intellectual contact, social contact, and religious enterprise. As for physical proximity, Du Bois states there is an obvious “physical colour-line” in Southern communities separating whites from Negroes, and a Black Belt in larger areas of the country. He says that here is a need for “Negro leaders of character and intelligence” to help guide Negro communities along the path out of the current economic situation. The power of the ballot is necessary, he asserts, as “in every state the best arbiters of their own welfare are the persons directly affected.” He says that “the police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves,” and Negroes viewed its “courts as a means of re enslaving the blacks.” Regarding social contact, Du Bois states “there is almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with thoughts and feelings of the other.” He concludes that “the future of the South depends on the ability of the representatives of these opposing views to see and appreciate and sympathize with each other’s position.”
“Of the Faith of the Fathers”
In Chapter X, Du Bois describes the rise of theblack church and examines the history and contemporary state of religion and spiritualism among African Americans.
After recounting his first exposure to the Southern Negro revival, Du Bois notes three things that characterize this religion: the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy—the Frenzy or Shouting being “when the Spirit of the Lord passed by, and, seizing the devotee, made him mad with supernatural joy.” Du Bois says that the Negro church is the social center of Negro life. Predominately Methodists or Baptists after Emancipation, when Emancipation finally came Du Bois states, it seemed to the freedman a literal “Coming of the Lord”.
“Of the Passing of the First-Born”
The final chapters of the book are devoted to narratives of individuals. In Chapter XI, “Of the Passing of the First-Born”, Du Bois recounts the birth of his first child, a son, and his untimely death as an infant. His son, Burghardt, contracted diphtheria and white doctors in Atlanta refused to treat black patients.
Du Bois comments, “Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in my life.” He says, “I saw his breath beat quicker and quicker, pause, and then his little soul leapt like a star that travels in the night and left a world of darkness in its train.”
Du Bois ends with, “Sleep, then, child,—sleep till I sleep and waken to a baby voice and the ceaseless patter of little feet-above the Veil.”
“Of Alexander Crummell”
In this chapter, Du Bois recounts a short biography of Alexander Crummell, an early black priest in the Episcopal Church.
Du Bois starts with, “This is the history of a human heart.” He notes that Crummell faced three temptations: those of Hate, Despair, and Doubt,” while crossing two vales, the Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of Death.”
Du Bois ends with, “And now that he is gone, I sweep the Veil away and cry, Lo! the soul to whose dear memory I bring this little tribute.”
“Of the Coming of John”
The penultimate chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Coming of John”, “reads like a short story, [but] Du Bois clearly considered it an essay.” The essay/story describes two young men, both named John, one Black (John Jones) and the other white (John Henderson, the son of the wealthy and powerful Judge Henderson). Both Johns grow up in Altamaha, Georgia, where they were playmates in their youth. Both leave to go off to college, and both the white and Black communities in Altamaha anticipate their returns, saying: “When John comes.” When John Jones returns to his hometown, transformed by his time away, now a serious man with a deep understanding of the world, including the injustice of racism and of Jim Crow, he finds himself at odds with both Black and white. He speaks at his church, but what he says falls flat: “little had they understood of what he said, for he spoke an unknown tongue” Du Bois. He convinces Judge Henderson to let him become a teacher at the Black school, and is warned to keep his place and to not stir up trouble. The Judge makes his opinions clear: “in this country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can never expect to be the equal of white men….But when they want to reverse nature, and rule white men, and marry white women, and sit in my parlor, then, by God! we’ll hold them under if we have to lynch every N– in the land.” John Jones says he accepts the situation and is allowed to teach. It’s hard work, but he makes some headway. Some time passes. One day, word gets back to the Judge that John Jones is “liven in’ things up at the darky school.” While Judge Henderson storms off to shut down the school, his son, John Henderson, grows bored and leaves his home and finds John Jones’s sister. She is young and beautiful, and John Henderson is bored. He demands a kiss; she runs. He pursues her. John Jones, walking home from the school, which Judge Henderson has just closed, comes upon John Henderson accosting his sister. John Jones picks up a branch and defends his sister, killing John Henderson. In the final paragraphs, a lynch mob on horseback approaches with the Judge in front, for whom John Jones is filled with pity. Knowing what is ahead, John Jones “softly hum[s] the ‘Song of the Bride'” in German. Du Bois.
“The Sorrow Songs”
Chapter XIV, “The Sorrow songs“, is about Negro music. He refers to the short musical passages at the beginning of each of the other chapters. Du Bois mentions that the music was so powerful and meaningful that, regardless of the people’s appearance and teaching, “their hearts were human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power.” Du Bois concludes the chapter by bringing up inequality, race and discrimination. He says, “Your country? How came it yours?..we were here”.
Du Bois heralds the “melody of the slave songs,” or the Negro spirituals, as the “articulate message of the slave to the world.” They are the music, he contends, not of the joyous black slave, as a good many whites had misread them, but “of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.” For Du Bois, the sorrow songs represented a black folk culture—with its origins in slavery—unadulterated by the civilizing impulses of a northern black church, increasingly obsessed with respectability and with Western aesthetic criteria.Rather than vestiges of a backward time that should be purged from black repertoires and isolated from what Alain Locke called the “modernization of the negro” (coincident, for Locke, with urbanization), negro spirituals are—for Du Bois—where the souls of black folk past and present are found.
Du Bois passionately advocated for the preservation of the spiritual, along with Antonín Dvořák and contemporary black aestheticians, including Harry Burleigh, Robert Nathaniel Dett, Alain Lockeand Zora Neale Hurston. It is in the retrieval of black cultural folkways—particularly “The Sorrow Songs”—that one of the major complications of Du Bois’s project and, later, the Harlem Renaissance (where Hurston and Locke debut their own retrievals) surfaces. For Du Bois’s contention that the sorrow songs contain a notative excess, and untranscribable element Yolanda Pierce identifies as the “soul” of the sorrow songs. The mappings of sound and signs that make up the languages of white Western culture would prove insufficient to many black literary critics of the 1920s and beyond, and the debates over the abilities to retrieve and preserve black folkways find their roots in Du Bois’s treatment of the sorrow songs and in his call for their rescue.
Critical reception
In Living Black History, Du Bois’s biographer Manning Marable observes:
Few books make history and fewer still become foundational texts for the movements and struggles of an entire people. The Souls of Black Folk occupies this rare position. It helped to create the intellectual argument for the black freedom struggle in the twentieth century. “Souls” justified the pursuit of higher education for Negroes and thus contributed to the rise of the black middle class. By describing a global color-line, Du Bois anticipated Pan-Africanism and colonial revolutions in the Third World. Moreover, this stunning critique of how ‘race’ is lived through the normal aspects of daily life is central to what would become known as ‘whiteness studies‘ a century later.
At the time of its publication, the Nashville Banner warned of The Souls of Black Folk, “This book is dangerous for the Negro to read, for it will only incite discontent and fill his imagination with things that do not exist, or things that should not bear upon his mind.” The New York Times said, “A review of [the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau] from the negro point of view, even the Northern negro’s point of view, must have its value to any unprejudiced student—still more, perhaps, for the prejudiced who is yet willing to be a student.”
In his introduction to the 1961 edition, writer Saunders Redding observed: “The boycott of the buses in Montgomery had many roots . . . but none more important than this little book of essays published more than half a century ago.”
Literary Reception
As Yale professor Hazel Carby points out, for black writers before the abolition of slavery in 1865, it was impossible “even to imagine the option of returning to the South once black humanity and freedom had been gained in the North”, and it was rarely found in later literature as well. While the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet AnnJacobs move towards the North and freedom, Du Bois reverses “the direction of the archetypal journey of these original narratives” and focuses on the Black Belt of the South. Although the text “consistently shifts between a predominantly white and a predominantly black world”, in line with Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, “its overall narrative impulse gradually moves the focus from a white terrain to an autonomous black one.”
Carby traces the ways in which Du Bois gendered his narrative of black folk, but also how Du Bois’s conceptual framework is gendered as well. According to Carby, it seems that Du Bois in this book is most concerned with how race and nation intersect, and how such an intersection is based on particular masculine notions of progress. According to Carby, Du Bois “exposes and exploits the tension that exists between the internal egalitarianism of the nation and the relations of domination and subordination embodied in a racially encoded social hierarchy.” So Du Bois makes a conceptual argument that racialization is actually compatible with the nation in so far as it creates unified races. However, this unified race is only possible through the gendered narrative that he constructs throughout Souls, which renders black male intellectuals (himself) as the (only possible) leader(s) of the unified race. Carby explains that “in order to retain his credentials for leadership, Du Bois had to situate himself as both an exceptional and a representative individual…. The terms and conditions of his exceptionalism, Du Bois argues, have their source in his formation as a gendered intellectual.” According to Carby, Du Bois was concerned with “the reproduction of Race Men”. In other words, “the figure of the intellectual and race leader is born of and engendered by other males.”
Such a reading of Du Bois calls attention to “queer meanings” that, according to Charles Nero, are inherent in Souls. Nero, who uses Anne Herrmann’s definition of queer, conceptualizes queerness as the “recognition on the part of others that one is not like others, a subject out of order, not in sequence, not working.” Foundational to Nero’s argument is the understanding that men have the authority to exchange women among one another in order to form a “homosocial contract”. Nero analyzes Du Bois’s discussion on the Teutonic and Submissive Man to conclude that such a contract would lead to a “round and full development” to produce a “great civilization”. However, Nero is concerned with violence and the “rigid policing of sexual identity categories at the turn of the century”, which ultimately made such a homosocial, biracial contract impossible.
In Charles I. Nero’s “Queering the Souls of Black Folk”, Nero marks “Of the Coming of John” as a central chapter that demonstrates his queer reading of Souls. Nero argues that John Jones’s absence of masculinity is a sign of his queerness and that the killing of his “double” represents Du Bois’s disillusionment with the idea that a biracial and homosocial society can exist. Nero contends that Du Bois’s illustration of the gulf between the two Johns is complicated by the impossibility of biracial male union, which suggests that John’s acculturation in the metropole (Johnstown in Du Bois’s narrative)—alongside lessons in Victorian comportment and a “queer” intellectualism—is also an ideological induction into male sexual panic, or the hegemony of a racializing gender order at the turn of the twentieth century. Nero’s interpretation of Jennie’s assault (and her subsequent disappearance from the text) chafes against earlier interpretations that allege John Jones’s murder of John Henderson as indebted to a tradition of white southern chivalry. Instead, Nero marshals Signithia Fordham’s terminology of “gender integrity” to delimit how the murder of John Henderson resolves the challenge to John Jones’s masculinity, going on to point out that “Du Bois [is] writing about race… [and] against a culture that turns him queer by excluding him from public heterosexuality” .
Cultural and religious criticism
Du Bois had transdisciplinary training and he provided a historical context for black religion and culture. His concept of “double-consciousness” and other concepts from Souls have been highly influential on other scholars in their interpretations of black culture and religion. Cheryl Sanders, a professor of Christian ethics at Howard University School of Divinity, lists a “who’s who” of Du Bois progeny in her scholarly work, including Paul Gilroy, C. Eric Lincoln, Lawrence Mamiya, Peter Paris, Emilie Townes, and Cornel West. These are some of the scholars who take up themes or concepts found in Souls for their own work in religious and theological studies or cultural criticism. Additionally, Victor Anderson, a philosophical theologian and cultural critic at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and the author of Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism, links concepts from Souls to much of the work in black religious studies.
In Beyond Ontological Blackness, Victor Anderson seeks to critique a trope of “black heroic genius” articulated within the logics of ontological blackness as a philosophy of racial consciousness. At the center of this conception is Du Bois.
Anderson says,
W. E. B. Du Bois’s double-consciousness depiction of black existence has come to epitomize the existential determinants of black self-consciousness. These alienated forms of black consciousness have been categorically defined in African-American cultural studies as: The Negro Problem, The Colour Line, Black Experience, Black Power, The Veil of Blackness, Black Radicalism, and most recently, The Black Sacred Cosmos.
Anderson’s critique of black heroic genius and a move towards black cultural fulfillment is an attempt to move beyond the categories deployed by Du Bois in Souls.
Similarly, Sanders critiques Du Bois’s concept of double-consciousness, especially in terms of interpreting black holiness-Pentecostalism. In Sanders’s work, Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture, Sanders deploys a dialectical understanding of exile, which she characterizes in black holiness-Pentecostal terms as “Being in the world, but not of it.” At the same time, Sanders wishes to contrast this to the double-consciousness dialect of Du Bois, at least as she understands it. For Sanders, “exilic dialectics” is “hoped to represent a progressive step beyond the ‘double-consciousness’ described by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903, which persists as the dominant paradigm in African American religious and cultural thought.”
Describing exilic consciousness as between “both-and”, and double-consciousness as “either-or”, Sanders says that those who live in exile “can find equilibrium and fulfillment between extremes, whereas adherents to the latter either demand resolution or suffer greatly in the tension, as is the case with Du Bois’s description of the agony of ‘double-consciousness,’ as ‘two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.'”
International reception
The Souls of Black Folk had significant influence in China. The Chinese translation was based on the 1953 Blue Heron edition, which had removed arguably anti-Semitic references from the original text. People’s Daily praised the book extensively, although it also had some mild criticism, and recommended that Chinese read it to understand how racial discrimination has oppressed Black Americans.
Du Bois’ account of the loss of his son was particularly well-regarded in China and was published as a separate pamphlet by Commercial Press the year after the book as a whole was published in Chinese.
In 1953,The Souls of Black Folk was published in a special “Fiftieth Anniversary Jubilee Edition”. In his introduction, Du Bois wrote that in the 50 years since its publication, he occasionally had the inclination to revise the book but ultimately decided to leave it as it was, “as a monument to what I thought and felt in 1903“. While he stuck by his decision, he wrote that in the new edition he had made “less than a half-dozen alterations in word or phrase and then not to change my thoughts as previously set down but to avoid any possible misunderstanding today of what I meant to say yesterday.”
In 1973, historian Herbert Aptheker identified seven changes between the editions. Historian and literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a team of readers performed a line-by-line comparison of the two editions during the 1980s and identified two more changes. All the changes are minor; the longest was to change “nephews and poor whites and the Jews” to “poor relations and foreign immigrants”. In six of the nine changes, Du Bois changed references to Jews to refer to immigrants or foreigners. Two of the other changes also involved references to Jews.
Du Bois wrote to Aptheker in February 1953 about concerns he had with his references to Jews in the book:
I have had a chance to read [The Souls of Black Folk] in part for the first time in years. I find in chapters VII, VIII and IX, five incidental references to Jews. I recall that years ago, Jacob Schiff wrote me criticising these references and that I denied any thought of race or religious prejudice and promised to go over the passages in future editions. These editions succeeded each other without any consultation with me, and evidently the matter slipped out of my mind. As I re-read these words today, I see that harm might come if they were allowed to stand as they are. First of all, I am not at all sure that the foreign exploiters to whom I referred … were in fact Jews…. But even if they were, what I was condemning was the exploitation and not the race nor religion. And I did not, when writing, realize that by stressing the name of the group instead of what some members of the [group] may have done, I was unjustly maligning a people in exactly the same way my folk were then and are now falsely accused. In view of this and because of the even greater danger of injustice now than then, I want in the event of re-publication [to] change those passages.
In a March 1953 letter to Blue Heron Press, Du Bois asked that the following paragraph be added to the end of “Of the Black Belt”:
In the foregoing chapter, “Jews” have been mentioned five times, and the late Jacob Schiff once complained that this gave an impression of anti-Semitism. This at the time I stoutly denied; but as I read the passages again in the light of subsequent history, I see how I laid myself open to this possible misapprehension. What, of course, I meant to condemn was the exploitation of black labour and that it was in this country and at that time in part a matter of immigrant Jews, was incidental and not essential. My inner sympathy with the Jewish people was expressed better in the last paragraph of page 152. But this illustrates how easily one slips into unconscious condemnation of a whole group.
3) A LONG WALK TO FREEDOM by NELSON MANDELA
This autobiographical work profiles the South-African Leader’s childhood, activism, and 27 years in prison. The book is an examination of the roots of apartheid told from the perspective of a global icon. It’s an inspirational story to say the least, which offers a realistic but yet largely optimistic outlook.
Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the centre of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. The foster son of a Thembu chief, Mandela was raised in the traditional, tribal culture of his ancestors, but at an early age learned the modern, inescapable reality of what came to be called apartheid, one of the most powerful and effective systems of oppression ever conceived. In classically elegant and engrossing prose, he tells of his early years as an impoverished student and law clerk in Johannesburg, of his slow political awakening, and of his pivotal role in the rebirth of a stagnant ANC and the formation of its Youth League in the 1950s. He describes the struggle to reconcile his political activity with his devotion to his family, the anguished breakup of his first marriage, and the painful separations from his children. He brings vividly to life the escalating political warfare in the fifties between the ANC and the government, culminating in his dramatic escapades as an underground leader and the notorious Rivonia Trial of 1964, at which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Here counts the surprisingly eventful twenty-seven years in prison and the complex, delicate negotiations that led both to his freedom and to the beginning of the end of apartheid. Finally he provides the ultimate inside account of the unforgettable events since his release that produced at last a free, multiracial democracy in South Africa. To millions of people around the world, Nelson Mandela stands, as no other living figure does, for the triumph of dignity and hope over despair and hatred, of self-discipline and love over persecution and evil.
Long Walk to Freedom is an autobiography by South Africa‘s first democratically elected PresidentNelson Mandela, and it was first published in 1994 by Little Brown & Co.The book profiles his early life, coming of age, education and 27 years spent in prison. Under the apartheid government, Mandela was regarded as a terrorist and jailed on Robben Island for his role as a leader of the then-outlawed African National Congress (ANC) and its armed wing the Umkhonto We Sizwe. He later achieved international recognition for his leadership as president in rebuilding the country’s once segregationist society. The last chapters of the book describe his political ascension and his belief that the struggle still continued against apartheid in South Africa.
In the first part of the autobiography, Mandela describes his upbringing as a child and adolescent in South Africa and being connected to the royal Thembu dynasty. His Xhosa birth name wasRolihlahla, which is loosely translated as “pulling the branch of a tree”, or a euphemism for “troublemaker”.
Mandela describes his education at a Thembu college called Clarkebury, and later at the strict Healdtown school. He mentions his education at the University of Fort Hare, and his practice of law later on. He also writes; “Democracy meant all men to be heard, and the decision was taken together as a people. Majority rulewas a foreign notion. A minority was not to be clashed by a majority.”
In the second part of the book, Mandela introduces political and social aspects of apartheid in South Africa, and the influences of politicians such as Daniel François Malanwho implemented the nadir of African freedoms, as he officially commenced the apartheid policies. Mandela joined the African National Congress in 1950 and describes his organisation of guerrilla tactics and underground organisations to battle against apartheid.
In 1961, Mandela was convicted for inciting people to strike and leaving the country without a passport and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. However, Mandela was shortly thereafter sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage in what was known as the “Rivonia Trial“, by Justice Dr Quartus de Wet,instead of a possible death sentence.
Mandela describes prison time on Robben Island and Pollsmoor Prison. His 28-year tenure in prison was marked by the cruelty of Afrikaner guards, backbreaking labour, and sleeping in minuscule cells which were nearly uninhabitable. Unlike his biographer Anthony Sampson, Mandela does not accuse the warder James Gregory of fabricating a friendship with his prisoner. Gregory’s book Goodbye Bafana discussed Mandela’s family life and described Gregory as a close personal friend of Mandela. According to Mandela: The Authorised Biography, Gregory’s position was to censor the letters delivered to the future president, and he thereby discovered the details of Mandela’s personal life, which he then made money from by means of his book Goodbye Bafana.Mandela considered suing Gregory for this breach of trust. In Long Walk to Freedom Mandela remarks of Gregory only that ‘I had not known him terribly well, but he knew us, because he had been responsible for reviewing our incoming and outgoing mail.’
Later on in his sentence, Mandela met South African president,Frederik Willem de Klerk, and was released from prison in 1990. Unlike his friend Anthony Sampson’s account, Mandela’s book does not discuss the alleged complicity of de Klerk in the violence of the eighties and nineties, or the role of his ex-wife Winnie Mandelain that bloodshed. Mandela became the President of South Africa in 1994.
The film held its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on 7 September 2013. It was released on 28 November 2013 in South Africa and on 3 January 2014 in the United Kingdom, a week before and a month after Mandela died, respectively.
Long Walk to Freedom premiered in London on 5 December 2013 as a Royal Film Performance, an event held in aid of the Film & TV Charity, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were in attendance, along with Mandela’s daughters Zindzi and Zenani. The announcement of the death of Nelson Mandela occurred while the film was being screened; the Duke and Duchess were immediately informed of Mandela’s death, while producer Anant Singh (alongside Idris Elba) took the stage during the closing credits to inform patrons of his death, and held a moment of silence. Prince William made brief comments to the press while exiting the theatre, stating that “I just wanted to say it’s extremely sad and tragic news. We were just reminded what an extraordinary and inspiring man Nelson Mandela was. My thoughts and prayers are with him and his family right now.” The film was temporarily pulled from theatres in South Africa the next day out of respect, but returned on 7 December 2013.On 8 December to mark the launch of the film a Gala dinner, private screening and charity auction in aid of the children’s charity One to one childrens fund. Sir TrevorMcDonald was Master of Ceremonies for the evening, introducing the auction where one of a limited edition of six portrait heads of Nelson Mandela, sculpted from life by David Cregeen. The head was donated by the sculptor and sold in aid of the charity’s work in South Africa.
4) RE-CREATING OURSELVES by MOLARA OGUNDIPE-LESLIE
This 1994 book by Nigerian poet, feminist and activist and literary critic MolaraOgundipe-Leslie is a classic feminist work by one of it’s foremost African authorities. In Re-creating ourselves, Ogundipe-Leslie, discusses colonialism, sexist traditions and articulates the plight of Black and African women. She has written many significant works on feminism from an African perspective, such as the acclaimed essay “NotspinningontheAxisOfMaleness”, published in the book Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology. Her work is an example of the importance of black women creating and owning their narratives.
Reports of Africa’s demise, according to Molara Ogundipe-Leslie in Re-Creating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations, are at once grave and greatly exaggerated. The author’s healthy skepticism is rooted equally in an intimate and even understanding of the problems and possibilities of contemporary African life and the refusal to make short shrift of the latter even in the face of universal fixation on the former. As this collection of essays illustrates, Ogundipe-Leslie is positioned well to make a distinguished contribution to African cultural commentary. While she recently joined the rapidly growing postcolonial class of “nomadic professor[s] as migrant laborer[s]” (253) in North America, she has long labored in the conflict-ridden fields of African feminism and politics, trying to nurture the tenuous but important relationship between women and Africa’s nation-states. The result, collected in this book, is a fruitful analysis, a “harvest,” to use her word, of the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual resources of African women that constitute significant cultural capital for the revitalization of African societies. The text’s big premise is thus obliquely stated: Africa’s problem-plagued terrain can be rehabilitated and women are integral to the recovery process.
Confronting the fundamental questions concerning Africa’s devaluation in the global economy of ideas, Ogundipe-Leslie, like Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe, longtime observers of the contemporary African scene, is bedeviled by a familiar array of frustrations, ranging from colonial perfidy to the rising specter of repressive militias. However, to the conventional list of colonial and class considerations that the topic generally inspires Ogundipe-Leslie has added the neglected category of gender, confident in the belief that the rise of women in Africa will raise the continent from its current state of dejection and despair to new heights of resourcefulness and creativity. That gender matters as much as culture, race, and class in the restoration of Africa is the fresh and crucial detail Ogundipe-Leslie brings to the discourse of African transformation. Re-creating Ourselves is therefore a hybrid text, addressing simultaneously the need for African women to break the…
5) STOKELY SPEAKS: FROM BLACK POWER TO PAN-AFRICANISM by STOKLEY CARMICHAEL
This collection of essays, speeches and articles tracks the evolution of consciousness of the Revolutionary Civil rights hero and the collective conscious of the black community as a whole through three key movements: Civil Rights, Black Power and Pan-Africanism. It’s a lesson in the many political efforts that has shaped black history in the United States, and a reminder to never stop growing in knowledge and perspective.
Stokely Carmichael
(1941 – 1998)
“From Black Power to Pan-Africanism”
Stokely Carmichael
Stokely Carmichael was the controversial and charismatic young civil rights leader who, in 1966, popularized the phrase “black power.” Carmichael was a leading force in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), working in the Deep South to organize African American voters. In the process he was beaten by white racists and frequently jailed. In time, Carmichael grew disillusioned about the prospects for social change through nonviolent protest, interracial alliances and civil rights legislation. He wasn’t the first civil rights figure to proclaim the need for black power, but Carmichael became one of the most prominent exponents of the term.
Carmichael was born in Trinidad in 1941. His family moved to New York when he was a boy, settling in a relatively prosperous section of the Bronx. Carmichael was a bright student, attending a selective public high school. He attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and got involved in civil rights activities his freshman year. Carmichael signed on to the Freedom Rides, where black and white activists travelled together on bus trips through the South to challenge segregated public transportation. Carmichael was repeatedly arrested in the Freedom Rides. He marked his 20th birthday in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Penitentiary.
After graduating from Howard in 1964, Carmichael became a full-time organizer for SNCC in Mississippi. Historian Clayborne Carson says Carmichael quickly demonstrated his skill as a civil rights organizer, combining “an astute political awareness with an ability to communicate with less-educated people on their own terms. Carmichael was named chairman of SNCC in 1966.
Over time, Carmichael became impatient with the willingness of older civil rights leaders to compromise with President Lyndon Johnson and other white authorities. Following his arrest during a protest march in Mississippi, Carmichael angrily demanded a change in the rhetoric and strategy of the civil rights movement. “This is the twenty-seventh time I’ve been arrested,” Carmichael told a crowd of marchers in Greenwood, Mississippi. “I ain’t going to jail no more. The only way we gonna stop them white men from whipping us is to take over. We’ve been saying ‘Freedom’ for six years and we ain’t got nothing’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power.”
Carmichael was speaking about more than the white oppression in the Mississippi Delta. Black discontent was growing in urban neighbourhoods in the North, where poverty and discrimination were also commonplace. Black power “seemed perfectly attuned to the mood of the ghettos,” writes historian Adam Fairclough, where “a cult of the gun” injected a sense of impending black-on-white violence. Carmichael’s stance on the use of violence was at once provocative and complicated. Parting ways with SNCC, he proclaimed the need and the right for African Americans to take up arms for self-defense.He denied that his speeches were anti-white or encouraged anti-white violence. Yet Clayborne Carson says such implications were “an unmistakable part of the appeal of the black power rhetoric for many discontented blacks.” By 1967, Carmichael endorsed revolutionary violence as a righteous tool for the world’s oppressed peoples.
Most whites condemned black power as a motto for a new form of racism, or as a call for outright race warfare. Mainstream civil rights leaders also rejected the phrase. NAACP leader Roy Wilkins denounced the slogan as “the father of hate and the mother of violence,” predicting that black power would mean“black death.” Martin Luther King Jr. said the term was “unfortunate” and urged Carmichael to drop the phrase. Carmichael refused.
In 1966 and 1967, Carmichael toured college campuses giving increasingly belligerent speeches. He co authored a radical manifesto, Black Power, in which he argued that civil rights groups had lost their appeal among more militant young blacks. The movement’s voice, he wrote, had been hopelessly softened for “an audience of middle class whites.”
After leaving SNCC in 1967, Carmichael became honorary prime minister of the militant Black Panthers in California but soon left that group over disagreements on seeking support from whites. Although Carmichael had once worked with whites in the civil rights movement, he now urged black power activists to work on their own, arguing that whites no longer had a role to play in the struggle for black freedom. In 1969, Carmichael moved to the West African nation of Guinea, where he became affiliated with the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, a socialist Pan-African group founded by Ghanaian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah.
Carmichael gave this speech at Whittier College as part of a speaking tour of American college campuses in 1971. On the tour, Carmichael frequently appeared in a white African shirt and slacks with embroidered detailing at the collar and cuffs. He warned his audiences that those who came to hear him shout slogans like, “Off the pigs and kill the honkies,” would be disappointed. Instead, he had a Pan-African revolutionary philosophy to impart.
Carmichael argued that the discrimination endured by African Americans was simply one manifestation of the global misery caused by European colonization. His speech described black power as part of a world-wide revolutionary freedom movement, with Africa’s tradition of communalistic societies as the model for liberation in a post-capitalist future.
In his autobiography, Carmichael explained that the way he talked to audiences owed much to the “stepladder speakers” of 1950s Harlem, black orators who stood on ladders to hold forth on the history and the oppression of African Americans. “Important elements of my adult speaking style — the techniques of public speaking in the dramatic African tradition of the spoken word, can be traced to these street corner orators of Harlem. To them and the Baptist preachers of the rural South,” Carmichael wrote.
Carmichael lived in Guinea-Conakry for three decades, returning to the United States regularly to appeal for Pan-African unity. He changed his name to Kwame Toure in recognition of his two primary political mentors, exiled Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah and Guinean president Ahmed Sékou Touré. In 1998, Carmichael lost a battle with cancer, dying at his home in Africa.
In reviewing Carmichael’s autobiography, Ready for the Revolution (published posthumously in 2003), author and journalist Norman Kelley says that the young SNCC activist’s “brilliant” political organizing work in the Deep South “laid the foundation for developing an independent black political base.” Carmichael, he wrote, tossed aside the gains he had made “for the rhetoric of revolution.”
Historian Peniel Joseph argues that Carmichael’s legacy is more significant than is generally recognized in the literature on the civil rights movement. Joseph says the story of Carmichael’s agitation for black power overshadows his accomplishments as a SNCC organizer. Joseph writes that Carmichael played a “pivotal role” in challenging and transforming America’s democratic traditions, and understood — better than many others in the movement — that black sharecroppers in the South “held the power to alter the course of American history through an individual act of self-determination — the vote.”
Good evening. I’ve been invited to speak at the Black Culture Week. I have prepared a speech dealing with the black world and I’m not going to change that speech.
I’ve been in California before. I used to come to California several times. My last visit to California was 1968. This is 1971. If I were to say the same things in 1971 that I said in 1968, it would present the fact that I’ve not been growing. If I use the same attitude in 1966 that I use in 1971, it would reflect the fact that the political movement of black people has not been growing.
Thus, not only must our attitude change but what we say must change because our movement must continue to progress. It must go forward. To repeat the same things over and over again is to show stagnancy. We cannot be stagnant because our movement is a liberation movement. We seek to liberate the Africans all over the world.
Thus, if you came tonight to hear a speech — a ra ra ri — how black and beautiful we are, which we are, black and proud we are, which we are, and how we should [xx] and all of that, you’ve wasted your time. You’ve wasted your time.
Simply because we must deal today with hard concepts. We must analyze our situation and we must pose correct solutions within a scientific framework. Within a scientific framework.
Thus, tonight, we will be dealing with concepts… I’m sorry, does anyone have a “Malcolm X Speaks” with them? “Malcolm X Speaks”? Nobody? None of the students in the Black Culture Week, you don’t have a “Malcolm X Speaks”?
“Malcolm X Speaks” book? No-one has it? I’m sorry.
The black world–from Nova Scotia to South Africa–finds itself in political chaos. We find ourselves in political chaos purely because we do not have a clear ideology which represents the common interests of Africans all over the world.
Now, black people in America are Africans, that’s all we are. We may not want to admit that we’re Africans but we cannot deny that we came from Africa. And, if you’re ashamed of your home, you have problems. If you’re ashamed of your background, you have problems. We are Africans. And we will discuss that more later.
Inside our community — the African communities of the world — and when I speak of black people, I speak of Africans because the black man is the African and the African is the black man, thus they are one and the same. The black communities of this world, which stretch from South Africa to Nova Scotia, finds itself in a great deal of problems because we haven’t analyzed our situation.
I’m sorry I don’t have the book “Malcolm X Speaks” with me because I would have been able to use some direct quotes from brother Malcolm’s book showing that we who have an ideology today use Malcolm X as our framework. Our basic framework. Our point of reference. Unfortunately, I don’t have the book with me. [xx] I need that. OK, we’ll just continue. You take my word for the quotes I give you from brother Malcolm and you’ll read them yourself later.
We need an ideology. An ideology that represents our communal interest. We need an ideology. In order for an ideology to be valid it must be, number one, scientific, number two, be consistent, number three, it must be based on the correct interpretation of history and, number four, if it is to be a revolutionary ideology, it must be based on the philosophy of dialectics. The philosophy of dialectics.
That’s four points the idea of ideology must be able to apply itself to. It must be scientific, it must be consistent. If the ideology isn’t consistent, it’s invalid. It must be based on thorough and complete analysis of history, interpretation of history. And it must be based–if it’s revolutionary–on the philosophy of dialectics. The philosophy of dialectics is very important. Philosophy of dialectics is really the philosophy of opposites. Opposites.
Brother Malcolm X in his message to the grass roots says to us that there can be no compromise in revolution. Revolution knows no compromise. He’s correct. Brother Malcolm can say this because he recognizes that our revolutionary ideologies must be based on the philosophy of dialectics. Philosophy of opposites. And they follow a very scientific practical law which simply says that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.
That, since you have a philosophy of opposites, you will have two philosophies vying for the same space at the same time. And this philosophy, since they’re based on the philosophy of dialectics, are diametrically opposed. They are diametrically opposed. Thus, they must clash. They must clash violently. And only one will win. Only one will win. The other must be crushed.
The Vietnamese are revolutionary. That’s why they say, “either we will win or we will die.” Because they’re fighting for a system which is diametrically opposed to the system that they now find themselves under and their philosophy must win. The same is also true for all Africans all over the world. We must find a system [ah, thank you]… We must find a system… I feel comfortable now.
[laughter]
I feel very comfortable now.
We must find a system which is diametrically opposed to the system under which we live. We have to do that. We must find that system because the major preoccupation of a revolutionary–you must understand–is building and creating. The major preoccupation of a revolutionary is building and creating. He must destroy in order to build and create because the system that the revolutionary opposes must be diametrically opposed–diametrically opposed–to the system that the masses of people are living under. But his major preoccupation is with building and creating. Building and creating that new system. Not destruction. Destruction is an inevitable consequence of his building. Destruction is an inevitable consequence of his building. It is not the other way round. The building and creating is not an inevitable consequence of his destroying.
We live in a capitalist society. The capitalist society must be destroyed if we are to oppose a system that is diametrically opposed to capitalism. But our major preoccupation is not destroying capitalism. Our major preoccupation is with creating the type of system that will be diametrically opposed to capitalism. In order to do that we must destroy capitalism.
When you see people call themselves revolutionary always talking about destroying, destroying, destroying, but never talking about building or creating, they’re not revolutionary. They do not understand the first thing about revolution. It’s creating.
A revolutionary must present a viable alternative to the masses. He must do that. And he must explain his concepts and explain his system to the masses. Explain and educate them why he thinks it is viable and why it can succeed and why they must be not only willing to die but be willing to kill to bring about the system that the revolutionary is advocating.
I am an Nkrumist. I am an Nkrumist. That is my political ideology. We cannot talk about Nkrumism because, unfortunately, many people have not spent time reading the ideas of Dr Nkrumah. But the basis of my ideology starts in Pan-Africanism. Starts in Pan-Africanism. Thus, we can talk about Pan-Africanism. I feel we can talk about Pan-Africanism because across this country–black student unions, African-American societies, student associations, etc–have been talking about Malcolm X. Everyone talks about him. They wear his sweatshirts, they quote him. Unfortunately, very few people read him. And less study him. Very few read him and less study him. But they quote him. They [xx], “yeah,man, brother Malcolm said blah, blah, blah, blah.” Unfortunately, they don’t study him. You can’t wrap your way through television through revolution, you can wrap your way through television but you can’t wrap your way through revolution. You have to study. So, thus, it’s incumbent upon us to study. We must study.
I’m looking… I’m sorry I didn’t get the quotes… I’m not prepared on Malcolm X, I’ll just have to continue…
Brother Malcolm recognized that we were all one people. In the book, he says that if you do not know what is happening in Mississippi, you cannot know what is happening in the Congo. And if you’re not interested in what is happening in Mississippi, you cannot be interested in what is happening in the Congo. The same states, the same interests, they’re all the same. The same schemes. The same man who’s trying to stop us from living in Mississippi is the same man who’s trying to stop us from living in the Congo. Brother Malcolm X, brother Malcolm X. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to find the quote.
My ideology is Pan-Africanism. My ideology is Pan-Africanism. In order for me to pose a correct ideology, the ideology must study the problems, the problems of the African. After studying the problems of the African, I must pose correct solutions to those problems. Black people all over the world face three major problems. Africans all over the world face three major problems.
We are landless. That means we are people who have no land. We do not own any land. We do not control any land. Individually, we may have land. We may be house owners, home owners. We may even have little stores. In the south, we may even have some farms. But collectively as a people we are landless. We own no land. And that’s not only Africans in America. It is Africans in South America, Africans in the Caribbean, even our brothers and sisters on our mother continent. We are landless.
On the question of land, white man divided the African into two groups. One group he took from the land. That’s us. Slavery. The second group he took the land from them. That’s our brothers and sisters on the continent. Colonialism. Colonialism. That’s why any African today, he is a landless man.
Even on our own continent the resources of our continent are built for the benefit of Europeans, not for the benefit of Africans. Landless, victims of capitalism, the victims of racism.
Any ideology, any ideology which seeks to speak to the needs of the black man must cover the needs of these three areas: land, race and class. It must be covered. If they’re not covered, the ideology has not analyzed correctly the problems of Africans in the world today. We must get some land. We must get some land because revolution is about land. That’s what revolution is. Revolution is getting land. Brother Malcolm X.
The Chinese revolution. They wanted land. The Algerians were revolutionists. They wanted land. France offered to let them be integrated into France. They told France, “to hell with France!” They wanted some land. Land is the basis of revolution. Land, said Malcolm X, is the basis of all independence. Land is what revolution is about. Seizing, taking and controlling land.
Thus, if black students are talking about revolution today, they must be crystal clear in their minds that they’re talking about taking some land. L-A-N-D. Land.
We have to take land because it’s from the land that we get everything. The clothes that we wear comes from the land in the form of cotton. What we eat comes from the land in the form of agricultural food stuff.
All of the elements and materials necessary to build this building, and to build big machinery in an industrialized society, comes from the land in the form of raw resources: peroxide, copper, zinc, etc, etc.
Thus, it is he who controls the land that will control the people who live on the land. And because we do not control any land, we are dependent upon the white man who controls the land. Land, then, is what we’re talking about. So if we’re talking about revolution, we’re talking about taking some land because that’s the only way you’re going to get it. You got to take it. Or nobody give up some for nothing. You got to take it. Land. Land.
[applause] Land. Land.
Land is what we’ve got to get. Now, the African, you see, was scattered all over the western hemisphere and this scattering was as a result of European imperialism. We were scattered all over the western hemisphere.
We must ask ourselves, “where must we get this land or at least if not where must we get this land?” “What will be our priority geographically in seizing this land?” That’s the question we must ask ourselves.
But before we go into that, we must discuss a political development in the question of land. A political state that has come to be. It’s usually referred to as a settler colony. More particularly it would be known as a European settler colony. We must discuss European settler colony because it will be of great interest and great importance to our particular ideology on the question of where is the African going to get some land? Where is the African going to get some land?
A European settler colony is a land base where the European leaves Europe, goes to the land, takes over the land and subjugates the original owners of the land to the type of system the European imposes upon the original owners of the land. The Europeans do this by sheer barbaric force. Sheer barbaric force.
A European colony. A white boy leaves Europe, goes to somebody’s land, takes it over, subjugates the people to his way of life: politically, economically, socially, culturally. That’s a settler colony.
My wife is from South Africa. South Africa is a settler colony. Europeans leave Europe, come to Africa, our continent and rip off the most wealthy part of the continent and take it. And subjugate our brothers and sisters to a vicious way of life.
Mozambique is a settler colony. Angola is a European settler colony. Rhodesia. Rhodesia is a European settler colony. But we can use Rhodesia to understand one of the major characteristics of a European settler colony. The real name of Rhodesia is Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is the real name.
One of the characteristics of the European settler colony is that, when the European arrives, they change the name. They change the name. They change the name for two purposes. They want to obliviate the history of the past, number one, and, number two, they want to legitimize their existence as the true owners of the land. That’s very important. Very, very important.
And we must be very careful. We cannot allow them to do that to us because our ideology must be based on a correct interpretation of history. And if we must understand that we cannot allow the Europeans to define when we begin to study an area according to their definition, we will only begin to study areas when they arrive. Before they arrived nothing happened.
Zimbabwe is the real name of Rhodesia. If you understood history, and you were studying history, you would see that we would study Zimbabwe. From the growth way back when our ancestors began to build a civilization. And we would understand Rhodesia as a barbaric interference to our way of life.
Thus, when we study Zimbabwe, we would study Zimbabwe seeing it as a straight line and understanding that Europeans imposed themselves by force upon our civilization. But if we talk about Rhodesia, we start with Rhodesia. We start with some stupid man by the name of Cecil Rhodes who was a murderer and a thief. And that’s where our history begins. Which is absolutely absurd.
Australia is a European settler colony. Israel is a European settler colony.
[applause] Israel is a European settler colony.
Some people have been studying.
Israel is a European settler colony because European Jews leave Europe, go to Palestine, take over the country, change the name to Israel, impose their culture, impose their political system, their economic system, their language, by sheer barbaric force, and oppress the original owners of the land. The Palestinian arabs. Israel is a European settler colony.
You must understand that. Because if you understand that, then you understand where we have to go. America and Canada are European settler colonies. America and Canada are European settler colonies. America and Canada are European settler colonies but they are harder to distinguish than the others. They’re harder to distinguish simply because America and Canada come closest to being successful settler colonies. They come closest to being successful settler colonies.
In order to be a successful settler colony, one must commit genocide against the original owners of the land. America did this. America did this. In order to be a successful settler colony, one must commit genocide against the original owners of the land. They did this and then they changed the name, and it sounds as if they belong here.
They wiped out an entire nation to take the land. Changed the name and call themselves Americans. When you call them an American, you obliviate the correct history. They are not Americans. They are European settlers, that’s all that they are. If they’re not European settlers, they’re certainly the sons and daughters of European settlers. They’re not Americans. You should not call them Americans. To do that, you misrepresent the red man who owns this land. They are Europeans. They are Europeans.
[applause]
Thus, if they are Europeans, we are Africans. Yes.
[applause]
There cannot be a black American. A black American is someone who participated and derised the profit from the genocide of the red man. You had nothing to do with that. You were brought here as a slave. I know that.
We’re Africans. We’re all the same people. There is no difference between us. I was born in Trinidad in the Caribbean. There is no difference between me and you. The only difference is when the slave ship got to Trinidad, they kicked me off Trinidad and brought you here. That’s the only difference, we are the same people.
[applause]
Thus, if you understand that we are the same people, you will understand that we have brothers and sisters in the Caribbean, brothers and sisters on the whole north eastern coast of South America where they had slavery. Brothers and sisters here. And millions and millions and millions of our brothers and sisters in Africa. In order for us to understand where we’re going, we must become part of the worldwide African nation. Where our nation is stretched from Africa to Nova Scotia. We’re Africans.
Many people when they try to analyze the problems of the African in America calls it a problem peculiar to America. They take the history back to the Africans when they came to America. That’s absurd. The problem didn’t start in America. The problem started in Africa when the first white man came to rape us of our continent and of our people. That’s where the problem started. That’s the roots of the problem. The first white boy that came there and tried to get us had to fight. That’s where the problem started. America is only an extension of the war. A tangent, if you will. But the problem didn’t start in America. It started in Africa. We fought in Africa, we fought in the slave ships, we fought in America, we fought during slavery, we fought after slavery, we’ve been fighting, we continue to fight because it’s only an extended war. That is all. We are fighting today.
Wherever our people are, we’re fighting. We’re fighting against a worldwide vicious system that hooks us in. We must break this system.
[applause] We must break this system.
The land belongs to the red man. You must know something about revolution. You must understand revolution very carefully. It may sound romantic but it’s very true. Revolution is based on Truth, with a capital ‘T’. And it’s based on Justice, with a capital ‘J’. Thus, if you talk about advocating a revolutionary theory, your revolutionary theory must be just and truthful.
The Vietnamese say all the time, “we will win our struggle because ours is a just struggle.” And they’re correct. They will win because theirs is a just struggle.
The Palestinian arabs say all the time, “we will win because ours is a just struggle.” And they are right. They will win because theirs is a just struggle.
And we, the Africans, we are bound to win because our struggle is the most just. But it must be… it must be [xx]cated on just theories. This land belongs to the red man. Where must be the base for the African? The only land base for the African, the only land base for the African must be his base. Africa. Africa, my brothers and sisters, is the richest continent in the world. Can you dig that? Africa, is the richest continent in the world. You got gold, diamonds, zinc, copper, aluminum, oxide, everything, copper, you got everything. And plus it’s beautiful. Africa is the richest continent in the world. You can fit America 16 times into Africa. 16 times. America is chump change compared to Africa.
[applause and cheering]
Africa is ours. It belongs to us. Mother Africa produced us. Africa is the richest continent in the world. If Africa were properly organized, she would be the most powerful continent in the world. Can you dig that? And if Africa were the most powerful continent in the world, whether we lived in South Africa, whether we lived in Egypt, whether we lived in Guinea, whether we lived in Barbados, whether we lived in Jamaica, whether we lived in Antigua, whether we lived in Trinidad, whether we lived in Brazil, whether we lived in Santa Domingo, whether we lived in Haiti, whether we lived in Cuba, whether we lived in Venezuela, whether we lived in Ghana, wherever we live, be it in Harlem or in California, we would be the most powerful people on the face of this earth.
[applause and cheering]
And if we were the most powerful people, would nobody mess with one [xx] grain of hair on our [xx].
[applause and laughter]
It is power. It is power, that’s what it’s all about. Power. Power. P-O-W-E-R. Power.
When you see a white boy, you are not afraid of that white boy individually. You are afraid of the power that that white boy represents. That’s what you’re afraid of. And the power may start from the local police, go all the way to the state militia, run through the army and the navy, and reach NATO, The North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Because that’s white power incorporated. That’s all it is.
[laughter]
When you see an African, there is no power behind him. When you see a black man, there is no power behind him. Thus, there’s no reason to respect him. We need a power behind us. We need a power that will speak and protect us. We must develop mother Africa. We must make mother Africa our major and our primary objective, because as mother Africa becomes strong, we will become strong. We will become strong and as we become strong we will lessen the gap between the powerful and the powerless.
Thus, our primary objective must be mother Africa. Many people say we should fight to take the land in America. If you’re fighting to take the land, you have to take it. You have to take it. Because he killed for it. If I kill for something and you came and asked me for it, I shoot you for being so stupid as to ask.
[laughter]
The European killed for this land. He killed a whole nation. And if you think that after killing a while nation he’s going to give you this land, you’re making a mistake. Once you kill for something, you’ve got to keep on killing to keep it. Do you understand that? Because if we’re talking about taking this land, we must be prepared to kill for the land. We have to kill for land. We have to kill for land because our evolution is based on diametrically opposed philosophies. And the philosophy that now controls Africa must be diametrically opposed to the one we have to fight for. Thus, we have to fight.
Since we have to fight for land, it makes sense to fight for the richest land, which you’ll be able to develop much quicker, thus, build your strength much faster.
In order to take land, you must follow a revolutionary formula. You must seize the land, hold the land, develop the land and then expand. You have to seize, hold, develop, and expand. You seize, you hold it, you develop, and you expand. I don’t think we could seize much land in America but, even if we could, I know we couldn’t hold it. And even if we could hold it, it’s certainly true that we could not develop land in America as rapidly as we could in Africa, which is the richest continent in the world.
Thus, the Pan-Africanist says that the land base for the African revolution must be Africa. Must be Africa. That’s the land base. It is our land. It belongs to us. We must fight, develop it, and make it what it has to be. The most powerful continent on the face of this earth. Africa must be the land base.
We must deal with the question of capitalism. But before we deal with it, it’s necessary to do some defining. Simply because there are too many people using too many terms confusing the minds of our people. I see people all the time. “We’re going to kill all the black capitalists.” “Nixon’s inventing black capitalism.” They don’t understand what they’re talking about. They really don’t.
We say that the African is the victim of capitalism. In order to do that, we must explain how we are the victims of capitalism and we must explain what is capitalism. What are capitalists? Because we hear the word thrown around so many times. But I now, as black students, you have been following the various ideologies within the black community. You know there are black Marxist-Leninist groups. You know there are some Pan-Africanist groups. And I know that as black students, you study these, because that’s what you’re here for, to study. And that you wouldn’t be hearing words used about you that you wouldn’t take time out to study. I know that.
So I know that you understand Marxism-Leninism. I know you understand capitalism. I know you understand capitalist. So we’re just going to review very quickly some of the things that I know that you’ve been studying.
[pause]
I know you wouldn’t be wasting your time jiving and rapping your way through revolution. I know you’re studying.
A capitalist, according to Marx, is someone who owns and controls the means of production. A capitalist, according to Karl Marx, is someone who owns and controls the means of production. If you understand this definition, which is the correct definition of a capitalist, then you would know there are no black capitalists in America. You would know that because there’s no black man who owns and controls the means of anything. So that when people talk about black capitalists, you would know that they don’t know what they are talking about. No, there’s no black capitalist.
Below the capitalist comes a class called the bourgeoisie. They serve the interests of the capitalists. They serve the interests of the capitalists. They do the capitalist’s work for him. They are what Mr Lenin calls, “the lackeys of capitalism.” They’re what Mao Tse-tung calls, “the running dog lackeys of capitalism.” And that’s what they are.
There are some members who happen to be black inside that class. The bourgeoisie are aspiring capitalists. They want to be capitalists but they will never be capitalists because the class of the capitalist never expands. Never. Because the primary motivating reason for capitalist is private profits. Private profits. Make more. Make more. Thus, if that’s his primary motivating force, he cannot expand and include more people because his profits will be cut down. He cannot do that. Thus, when you hear them talking about, “we will establish black capitalism,” they’re talking nonsense. Because inside the capitalist class there are always contradictions. Each one trying to eliminate the other to make more profits.
Thus, you cannot develop black capitalism. Nonsense. You must understand these things because they deal with our people. They are the problems that we face. Below the bourgeoisie, you have the petty bourgeoisie and then below that you have the masses: the workers, the peasants, the proletariat. These are the masses that will fight. They will fight against the capitalists. The capitalists there’s no hope for. The bourgeoisie, there may be hope for them on an individual basis. Not as a class. Not as a class. On an individual basis. I know you know these things but, if you don’t, you should have. You should be because they’ve been mentioned.
The Black Panther party talks about capitalism and Marxism-Leninism all the time. I know you’ve been reading or listening to the party. But since you’ve been doing that, I know you’ve been studying the terms. You wouldn’t just let the party say something about you and you not know what they’re talking about. So I know you’ve been studying. If you have not, then you’ve made a mistake as black students. You’ve made a grave mistake because you should be keeping up with the struggle of your people. You’ve made a grave mistake.
Confucius says, “if you make a mistake, and you see it’s a mistake, and you don’t correct your mistake, you’ve made your second mistake.”
[laughter]
I hope you will not make a second mistake. Your people’s lives may depend upon it. And thus your own lives.
We say we’re the victims of capitalism. We are the victims of capitalism because we are forced to sell our labor to the capitalist. We are forced to sell our labor to the capitalist. Thus, we are wage earners. We are wage earners. As we sell our work, the capitalists pay us a wage. A daily wage. A weekly wage. A monthly wage. But the wage is never enough for us to accumulate wealth. Off of our profits–that is our labor–our labor, the capitalists [cuts off]
There’s a white capitalist, who owns and controls the means of production in order to produce the match. He owns and controls it. He does no work. He never steps into a ring. He never trains. No labor. Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, they are the labor.
Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier get $800,000. The white capitalists get $30 million. That’s capitalism. That’s capitalism.
[applause]
Off of the labor of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, this white boy makes $30 million. They make $800,000. Not enough money to do any development with. Next year, they will be back on the streets trying to fight again. Trying to sell their labor to the capitalists. That’s why capitalism is vicious. That’s why we must destroy it. That’s why we must smash it into nothing-ness. All of us.
[applause]
All of us are the victims of capitalism. Even if you own two cars and a house and a television, you are constantly working, working, working. Paying insurance bills, paying that bill, paying that bill, your wife is working with you, everybody is working, working, working. Selling your labor and someone reaps the profit of your labor. That’s why we’ve got to destroy capitalism. That’s why we must destroy it. We are the victims of capitalism.
We must pose a system which is diametrically opposed to capitalism. It must be so diametrically opposed that none of the characteristics of a decadent capitalist system will be found in our system. They must be diametrically opposed and they must be fighting to occupy the same space at the same time. Thus, one will win, one will die.
We must deal with Marxism-Leninism. We must deal with Marxism-Leninism simply because it’s been cropping up in the community and many people who have been using the terms and the phrases really don’t know what they’re talking about. They confuse Marx and Lenin. They think that Marx and Lenin invented, they really do… They think that Marx and Lenin invented the science known as Marxism-Leninism. Marx and Lenin did not invent. They merely observed and recorded. That’s all they did. They’re no different to Newton. We call the laws of gravity Newton’s Laws. But Newton did not invent the laws of gravity. He merely observed and recorded.
For example, Newton says that an object at rest stands to stay at rest unless pushed by an outside force. Newton didn’t invent that. He just observed it and wrote it down. And since he was literate, he put his name next to it. That’s all he did.
Newton did not invent that when a body drops it drops at a rate of 32 feet per second squared. He observed it and recorded it. And put his name to it. We call it Newton’s Laws but he didn’t invent them.
Any astute student of practical science can recognize that an object will fall at a rate of 32 feet per second squared. Without prior knowledge of Newton. We thank Newton for classifying knowledge, thus making our research easier. Yes, we must thank him for that.
The same is true of Monsieurs Marx and Lenin. They did not invent the science known as Marxism and Leninism. They observed certain phenomena in the economic arena in relationship to capital and labor. And having observed certain observations, they recorded. Any astute student of political science, which I am, can come to the same conclusions without prior knowledge of Mr Marx and Mr Lenin.
We thank these two western philosophers for classifying knowledge, thus making our research easier. But they didn’t invent. They did not invent. They only recorded.
And if one really understands the science of Marxism and Leninism, one would know that the roots of Marxism and Leninism are to be found in the communalistic society of the traditional African society. That’s where the roots are. The roots of Marxism and Leninism are to be found–must be found–in a communalistic society, which is the traditional society of the Africans.
Thus, if you are an African, it makes little sense for you to stop at Marxism and Leninism. You should come home to the roots. You must come to Africa. Marxism and Leninism is a science. It is an instrument, a tool, a weapon, for dissecting one’s history, that’s all it is.
If one takes Marxism and Leninism and doesn’t have a knowledge of one’s history, one is dogmatic. You’re slashing everywhere. You’re like a quack who’s picked up some instruments and calls himself a doctor. Without knowledge of medicine he just cuts his patient. And when he misses, he becomes more dogmatic. And the more he can’t find a cure, the more vicious he becomes. The more vicious he becomes.
Thus, any black man who says he’s a Marxist-Leninist must come to Pan-Africanism. Must come to Pan-Africanism. We must analyze our traditional society. It was a communalistic society. It was a communalistic society. Our ancestors were very intelligent. The capitalist society is not an intelligent society. It’s a stupid society. The cornerstone of capitalism is private property. Private property. Private property is the cornerstone of capitalism. You’ve got to get hold of some land in order to control it. That’s the cornerstone of the capitalist society.
Our ancestors, being very intelligent people, knew that there could never be such a thing as private property. Nobody came with land, nobody was going to take any when they left, so how could they own the land. It was there for everybody. Thus, the land belonged to the community. The land belonged to the community. The community worked the land and the profits from the land was divided equally amongst the community. A communalistic society.
Today, we must take the guidelines of communalistic society and bring them up to our modern day society. We must take the guidelines of communalistic society and bring them up to our modern day society. Our communalistic society was an agricultural society. Today, we have industrialization. Thus, we must bring forth all of these guidelines and introduce industrialization into our community.
That would be known as scientific socialism. Because the basic guidelines of the communalistic society is in fact what is referred to as scientific socialism. Scientific socialism is diametrically opposed to capitalism. Diametrically opposed. Simply because in a capitalist society a few people own and control the means of production and use the profit for their own selves. In a socialist society, the means of production is owned and controlled by the masses of people and the profits are divided equally among the masses.
Thus, our system must be a system based on our communalistic past brought up to our modern history with industrialization. Scientific socialism. That’s the ideology of Pan-Africanism. Deals with the problem of capitalism. Deals with the problem of land.
The problem of race is now left. Pan-Africanism is what we’re talking about. Pan means “all”. Pan-Africanism means “all Africans.” Thus, when you talk about all Africans, there’s no problem of race when you talk about all Africans. There’s no racism amongst us. Racism only comes when we have contact or relation with people who are racist. We are not racist. The African is not racist. The African is not racist because the African has never propagated a theory of pure race. The theory of pure race has always been propagated by the European, not the African. Examples of that are very clear. If an African and a European have a child, the offspring is considered a molatu [sp].
The white race never accepts the offspring because the white race has a pure theory. The African always accepts the child. There is never a question. In our race, we have all mixtures. They are all Africans. We’re not concerned, we’re not bothered. Perhaps it’s because we’re strong and we know it will all come back home sooner or later. Thus, the African is not racist. He accepts anyone. It is the white man. He has a pure race theory. If you are not pure white, you’re not white.
You must understand this because they try to make it look as though we are racist. But we must always scientifically analyze and understand and use clear examples to point out our case.
Thus, then the Pan-Africanist’s ideology is clearly the problems of land, race and class. Land, race and class. Of course, you probably ask, “what does that mean? Does that mean we all have to go back to Africa?” People who ask this question really love America because they don’t want to leave America. That’s why that ask, “do we have to go back to Africa?” Because if you knew where your home was, you’d try your best to get back there.
[applause]
They love America, they love America very much. America’s going to die and they will die with America. America’s going to die.
[applause]
America is going to die you know. She’s rushing to her death. You see her in Vietnam. They’re whooping her. They’re putting a hurting on her and [xx] and Cambodia, they’re beating her to death. And look she’s not satisfied. She’s running right into China and Mao Tse-tung is just tapping his foot waiting for her.
America must be destroyed. The systems that are being posed in the world today are systems which are diametrically opposed to imperialism. We Africans in America must not die with America.
Brother Malcolm X give you the answer. I know you quote him. I know you read him. Thus, when I read the paragraph here, you will know it. And you will say, yes, that’s what brother Malcolm has always been saying.
“Just as the American Jew is in harmony (politically, economically and culturally) with world Jewry, it is time,it is time, it is time (he was saying that a long tine ago), it is time for all African-Americans to become an integral part of the world’s Pan-Africanists, and even though we might remain in America physically while fighting for the benefits the Constitution guarantees us, we must ‘return’, we must return, to Africa philosophically and culturally and develop a working unity in the framework of Pan-Africanism.”
Malcolm X. Don’t let people interpret him for you. He was speaking for you, to you, and about you. Read him. Study him. And interpret him yourself. He was saying Pan-Africanism. He said it’s time.
We must return to Africa, psychologically, even if we remain in America. Even if we remain in America. What our primary objective must be the development of mother Africa because it is our only salvation. If we stay here in America we would never be able to amass the strength necessary to defeat America. We could not. We wouldn’t have the resources or the time. We’d be so busy fighting, we would never have the time to develop. But in Africa, we could develop.
Guinea, which is a very small country has one third of the world’s [xx]. We can develop every type of aeroplane we need and just keep on developing. We don’t have to let anybody else have any because it belongs to us.
Africa is rich. Africa is rich. Of all the rape that has been committed against our mother, not even one hundredth of her natural resources has been tapped. Africa is rich. We can develop Africa quick, fast, in a hurry. If the Chinese did it in 20, we can do it in 10.
[applause] We can do it in 10.
But in order to do that we must have one mind. We must see ourselves as one people working for the same objectives, working for the same system, willing to kill. Willing to kill. To bring about our system. We must understand the necessity to kill. We must understand the necessity to kill. And the only thing that can give you the necessity to kill is a clear, political ideology. A clear, political ideology.
[applause][xx]
Sorry if I avoid you but you just can’t rap and we can’t ride off on our way through revolution. Ride on, brother, ride on! Scientific. It must be scientific.
There’s emotion, there must be emotion. We are emotionally committed to Mother Africa. It’s ours. But it must be scientific. It must be scientific and it must be geared that once the wheels are put in motion, nothing can turn it back. Revolution, says brother Malcolm, overturns and destroys everything that gets in its path. It must be scientific.
If you accept Black Power, you must accept Pan-Africanism because it is the logical and consistent development. The highest political expression of Black Power is Pan-Africanism. It is the logical and consistent development. We said Black Power. Black Power meant power to black people. Black Power did not mean power to the people. The people have power. Black people don’t have power. You have to give power to the powerless in order to balance power. You don’t give power to other people because the relationship will remain the same. You have to give power to the powerless. Black Power is for black people. Power to black people. They have no power. And in order to balance out the injustices they must have power. Black Power simply means that black people should get together and organize a base. By any means necessary, begin to move to get some power.
Unfortunately, my brothers and sisters here in the States though that they were the only black people in the world. Or at least they thought Black Power was just for them. My brothers and sisters, there are black people are the entire north-eastern coast of South America.
My mother was born in Panama. My grandfather was taken from the West Indies to build the Panama Canal. He died there. Many of our people died there. We have a long history. We have a long debt to pay. There are many black people in the West Indies. Many black people in the West Indies. All over the West Indies, there are black people. And there are millions and millions and millions and millions of black people in Africa. Black Power means all of these people wherever they are organizing themselves. That’s real Black Power on an international basis. Black Power means all of these people. All of us coming together.
[applause] All of us coming together.
Land is power. Power is land. Land is power. Power is land. Black Power is the black man in control of black land. Black Power is the black man in control of black land. The black man in control of black land is Pan-Africanism. Is Pan-Africanism. Because the logical and consistent development of Black Power leads only to Pan-Africanism. There is no other way to go. There is no other out.
If you accept the ideology, you may say, “well, now, what does that mean? I have to go back to Africa? How is that supposed to work?” [?]
The precedent has been set. The precedent has been set. It has been set by Jews. Jews, whether they live in Miami, California, Chicago, London, Brussels, France, Italy, their major preoccupation is building a strong Israel. That’s all they talk about. Israel. Israel. Israel. They’re Jewish settlers in this country. Every time they get up, they talk about Israel, Israel, Israel. Israel was created in 1948. I am older than Israel. I am older than the state of Israel. Yet, in 1967, when Israel committed a war of aggression against Egypt, millions of dollars all over this world flowed to Israel to help protect Israel. Jewish boys and Jewish girls aged 17 and 18 left America going to fight for Israel. Israel was fighting against Egypt. Egypt is thousands and thousands and thousands of years old. Egypt is an Africa. Africa is ours. We never did a thing. As a matter of fact, some of us sided with the Jews.
Lack of scientific analysis, lack of history, lack of everything, complete confusion. We are being brainwashed by television. You watch it too much. You watch it too much.
[laughter and applause]
You do not recognize how the mass media works its propaganda against our movement. Why they talk so much about revolution on television. They try to project so much revolution that we actually have people in our community who are trying to dress like the revolutionary. [laughter] Can you dig that?
[applause]
There are people who actually try to dress like the revolutionary. I don’t know what a revolutionary looks like… [laughter] …but they try to dress like one.
[laughter]
They don’t work like one, they don’t think like one, they don’t study like one, but they try to dress and rap like one.
[laughter and applause]
What’s television doing to you? You’re not even recognizing it. The way to put a people to sleep is not let them know what’s being done. A revolutionary is not by the way he’s dressed and he’s not dirty. Why is it that all these revolutionaries in the black community must be dirty? From whence does it come?
Poverty does not equal dirt. All of us who grew up poor grew up clean. Our mothers would iron our pants every day even if it shine [?]. [xx] poor and dirt does not equal the same.
I have met many revolutionaries the world over and none of them have been dirty.
[laughter]
I have met real, live revolutionaries and none of them have been dirty; they have all been clean. I don’t know where this idea comes from; I can only assume it comes from association with the white left who suffers from proletariat chauvinism.
[laughter, cheering and applause]
Trying to look revolutionary.
Now, before I sit down, I just want to spend a few minutes on guerilla warfare. Mmm. Now, I’ll tell you something. There are all sorts of laws here about advocating guerilla warfare. I’m not advocating guerilla warfare.
[laughter and undefinable heckle from the audience]
You ought to have some proof when you open your mouth.
[noise from audience–possibly same heckler]
I’m not advocating guerilla warfare. But what I’m telling you is that I am a political activist. I’m a student of politics. I’m a student of politics. I studied political philosophy at Harvard University and I was an Honors’ student. I have to some degree–maybe not as much as some revolutionaries–worked in black political struggles, not only here in America, not only in South America, not only in the West Indies, but also in Africa. Thus I’m a little bit… at least I have credentials that could be acceptable. So I’m not advocating guerilla warfare but I’d like to discuss it academically. And I’d like to say to you that I’m not advocating it but if America continues the way she continues, which she will, there’s going to be a guerilla warfare in America.
Thus, I’m just making a political hypothesis. And since I think there’s going to be guerilla warfare in America, it behooves us it seems to me to discuss it again on an academic level.
Now, don’t go tomorrow and say to the man, Carmichael’s advocating guerilla warfare. Say, Carmichael said that if the country continues the way it is there’s going to be guerilla warfare. Yes.
[laughter]
Now one thing you must learn about guerilla warfare which some of us so-called revolutionaries did not learn, although in a revolution the political and military leadership are combined in one, the political dominants the military. The political ideology guides the use of the gun. It is not the gun that dominants the political ideology. So in other words, you don’t give somebody a gun who doesn’t have a political ideology.
[applause] Never do that.
If you give somebody a gun who doesn’t have a political ideology they end up shooting themselves and if not shooting you, that’s because of their sheer stupidity. It’s a political ideology that dominants the use of gun. Mao Tse-tung says that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun and it does. But there’s a man who controls that gun. And the man controlling the gun must have a political ideology. He must have it. Must have it. Must have it. So you just don’t give a gun to some stupid young child without a political ideology. Because then the gun becomes his political ideology. “I’m bad, I gotta a gun, I’m going off to cop!” Boom boom boom! And the cop is often him. Where’s his political ideology? He doesn’t know when to use the gun. He doesn’t know who is enemy is. You never give the gun to someone unless you give them a clear political ideology.
In guerilla warfare, now see some people, because of television, they misunderstood guerilla warfare with gorilla warfare.
[laughter and clapping]
Yeah, they made a mistake. They didn’t hear the word correctly. The man said ‘guerilla’; they said ‘gorilla’.
[laughter]
They didn’t hear the word correctly.
In guerilla warfare, first of all, you work in small groups. You never work in large groups. And the basis is always test of time. Any time somebody wants to join, you test them over a period of time. Like if somebody comes in and rap bad [?], “Yeah, we ought to go blow up some pigs, brother!” Yeah, you’re a revolutionary. Boom! Conspiracy. Time. Tested.
A guerilla never hides all of his guns in an office so that when the pig kicks down the door he gets the guns and the guerilla cries foul. That’s nonsense.
[laughter] Nonsense.
Weapons are vital to the guerilla, thus, the guerilla separates into little stashes his weapons, hiding them in different places, so at least if the conventional force finds, he only finds a little bit, not all of it.
The guerilla studies. The guerilla studies. The guerilla studies. The guerilla analyzes. The guerilla doesn’t run his mouth saying, “I’m a guerilla”, he is the fish in the sea. How can he be conspicuous? The guerilla is inside the masses. If the masses are in church, the guerilla is in church. If the masses are in the bars, the guerilla is in the bars.
The guerillas we have today wear buttons all over their shirts saying, “I’m a guerilla.” That’s a guerilla, not a gorilla.
[laughter and applause] Guerilla, not a gorilla.
The guerilla should not be detected by the policeman. Those people in our community today who are trying to look revolutionary are only giving themselves away. Look like the people. Look like the people. The job of the guerilla is to organize the masses. His strength comes from the masses. His strength comes from the masses. The guerilla is humble. He doesn’t try to Bogart his way every where he goes. He’s humble. The guerilla is supposed to be the servant of his people. Nobody asked him to be the vanguard. He calls himself the vanguard, thus, he has to be humble and accept what the black community gives him. If he doesn’t like it, let him jump out and get himself another job. Thus the guerilla is humble. Very humble. Because he is serving his people.
And he’s serving his people because he has an undying love. For his people. Not for America, for his people. The guerilla cannot have an undying love for America. If he has an undying love for his people, he must hate America for what America has done and continues to do to his people.
[applause]
The guerilla studies. The guerilla studies. The guerilla studies. My brothers and sisters, before I sit down, I beg you, I plead with you, I have sent… I have thrown out some concepts. You may not have to accept them but I only ask one thing. I beg you to study. I beg you to analyze the problems of our people. You are students. In any revolutionary movement, students played the role of the revolutionary intelligentsia. Your job is to analyze the problems that face our people, criticize the proposed solutions, argue and debate and discuss them, and then give them back to the masses. That is your job.
You cannot do that if you’re not reading. You cannot do that if you’re rapping. And you cannot do that if you’re listening and being directed by misguided people who do not even understand the words they use. But you are students. You are here in school to study. Thus, while you are studying, if someone is using a word that they don’t know, you should be able to tell them. There are no such thing as black capitalists. You should be able to tell them when you curse out the black bourgeoisie and you make an alliance with the white bourgeoisie you are racist. You should tell them that. You should tell them that if they call themselves Marxist-Leninist and they make alliances with the white bourgeoisie they are unorthodox. They are unholy alliances because the masses and the [xx] proletariat can never make an alliance with the bourgeoisie to destroy the system.
The bourgeoisie will fight to uphold the system. His interests are at stake. The interests of the bourgeoisie are diametrically opposed to the interests of the [xx] proletariat. Diametrically opposed. Thus it’s impossible for them to make an alliance.
You are students, you must know these things. You are students, you must be studying these things. Your people need you. Your people need you. They need your analytical mind. I beg you, I plead with you, please, for your people, study and work for us.
Thank you.
[applause]
6) NEO-COLONIALISM: THE LAST STAGE OF IMPERIALISM by KWAME NKRUMAH
Upon it’s release in 1965, this book was so controversial that the US department of State blocked $25 Million in foreign aid to Ghana. In the book, Nkrumah unabashedly lambasted Western governments-particularly the United States-calling out the exploitative nature of their economic presence in Africa, even after several African nations gained their independence. It remains one of the most thorough critiques on the subjects of Neo-Colonialism.
Kwame Nkrumah Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism 1965
THE neo-colonialism of today represents imperialism in its final and perhaps its most dangerous stage. In the past it was possible to convert a country upon which a neo-colonial regime had been imposed — Egypt in the nineteenth century is an example — into a colonial territory. Today this process is no longer feasible. Old-fashioned colonialism is by no means entirely abolished. It still constitutes an African problem, but it is everywhere on the retreat. Once a territory has become nominally independent it is no longer possible, as it was in the last century, to reverse the process. Existing colonies may linger on, but no new colonies will be created. In place of colonialism as the main instrument of imperialism we have today neo-colonialism.
The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.
The methods and form of this direction can take various shapes. For example, in an extreme case the troops of the imperial power may garrison the territory of the neo-colonial State and control the government of it. More often, however, neo-colonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means. The neo-colonial State may be obliged to take the manufactured products of the imperialist power to the exclusion of competing products from elsewhere. Control over government policy in the neo-colonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over foreign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power.
Where neo-colonialism exists the power exercising control is often the State which formerly ruled the territory in question, but this is not necessarily so. For example, in the case of South Vietnam the former imperial power was France, but neo-colonial control of the State has now gone to the United States. It is possible that neo-colonial control may be exercised by a consortium of financial interests which are not specifically identifiable with any particular State. The control of the Congo by great international financial concerns is a case in point.
The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.
The struggle against neo-colonialism is not aimed at excluding the capital of the developed world from operating in less developed countries. It is aimed at preventing the financial power of the developed countries being used in such a way as to impoverish the less developed.
Non-alignment, as practised by Ghana and many other countries, is based on co-operation with all States whether they be capitalist, socialist or have a mixed economy. Such a policy, therefore, involves foreign investment from capitalist countries, but it must be invested in accordance with a national plan drawn up by the government of the non-aligned State with its own interests in mind. The issue is not what return the foreign investor receives on his investments. He may, in fact, do better for himself if he invests in a non-aligned country than if he invests in a neo-colonial one. The question is one of power. A State in the grip of neo-colonialism is not master of its own destiny. It is this factor which makes neo-colonialism such a serious threat to world peace. The growth of nuclear weapons has made out of date the old-fashioned balance of power which rested upon the ultimate sanction of a major war. Certainty of mutual mass destruction effectively prevents either of the great power blocs from threatening the other with the possibility of a world-wide war, and military conflict has thus become confined to ‘limited wars’. For these neo-colonialism is the breeding ground.
Such wars can, of course, take place in countries which are not neo-colonialist controlled. Indeed their object may be to establish in a small but independent country a neo-colonialist regime. The evil of neo-colonialism is that it prevents the formation of those large units which would make impossible ‘limited war’. To give one example: if Africa was united, no major power bloc would attempt to subdue it by limited war because from the very nature of limited war, what can be achieved by it is itself limited. It is, only where small States exist that it is possible, by landing a few thousand marines or by financing a mercenary force, to secure a decisive result.
The restriction of military action of ‘limited wars’ is, however, no guarantee of world peace and is likely to be the factor which will ultimately involve the great power blocs in a world war, however much both are determined to avoid it.
Limited war, once embarked upon, achieves a momentum of its own. Of this, the war in South Vietnam is only one example. It escalates despite the desire of the great power blocs to keep it limited. While this particular war may be prevented from leading to a world conflict, the multiplication of similar limited wars can only have one end-world war and the terrible consequences of nuclear conflict.
Neo-colonialism is also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress. In the days of old-fashioned colonialism, the imperial power had at least to explain and justify at home the actions it was taking abroad. In the colony those who served the ruling imperial power could at least look to its protection against any violent move by their opponents. With neo-colonialism neither is the case.
Above all, neo-colonialism, like colonialism before it, postpones the facing of the social issues which will have to be faced by the fully developed sector of the world before the danger of world war can be eliminated or the problem of world poverty resolved.
Neo-colonialism, like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. The temporary success of this policy can be seen in the ever widening gap between the richer and the poorer nations of the world. But the internal contradictions and conflicts of neo-colonialism make it certain that it cannot endure as a permanent world policy. How it should be brought to an end is a problem that should be studied, above all, by the developed nations of the world, because it is they who will feel the full impact of the ultimate failure. The longer it continues the more certain it is that its inevitable collapse will destroy the social system of which they have made it a foundation.
The reason for its development in the post-war period can be briefly summarised. The problem which faced the wealthy nations of the world at the end of the second world war was the impossibility of returning to the pre-war situation in which there was a great gulf between the few rich and the many poor. Irrespective of what particular political party was in power, the internal pressures in the rich countries of the world were such that no post-war capitalist country could survive unless it became a ‘Welfare State’. There might be differences in degree in the extent of the social benefits given to the industrial and agricultural workers, but what was everywhere impossible was a return to the mass unemployment and to the low level of living of the pre-war years.
From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, colonies had been regarded as a source of wealth which could be used to mitigate the class conflicts in the capitalist States and, as will be explained later, this policy had some success. But it failed in ‘its ultimate object because the pre-war capitalist States were so organised internally that the bulk of the profit made from colonial possessions found its way into the pockets of the capitalist class and not into those of the workers. Far from achieving the object intended, the working-class parties at times tended to identify their interests with those of the colonial peoples and the imperialist powers found themselves engaged upon a conflict on two fronts, at home with their own workers and abroad against the growing forces of colonial liberation.
The post-war period inaugurated a very different colonial policy. A deliberate attempt was made to divert colonial earnings from the wealthy class and use them instead generally to finance the ‘Welfare State’. As will be seen from the examples given later, this was the method consciously adopted even by those working-class leaders who had before the war regarded the colonial peoples as their natural allies against their capitalist enemies at home.
At first it was presumed that this object could be achieved by maintaining the pre-war colonial system. Experience soon proved that attempts to do so would be disastrous and would only provoke colonial wars, thus dissipating the anticipated gains from the continuance of the colonial regime. Britain, in particular, realised this at an early stage and the correctness of the British judgement at the time has subsequently been demonstrated by the defeat of French colonialism in the Far East and Algeria and the failure of the Dutch to retain any of their former colonial empire.
The system of neo-colonialism was therefore instituted and in the short run it has served the developed powers admirably. It is in the long run that its consequences are likely to be catastrophic for them.
Neo-colonialism is based upon the principle of breaking up former large united colonial territories into a number of small non-viable States which are incapable of independent development and must rely upon the former imperial power for defence and even internal security. Their economic and financial systems are linked, as in colonial days, with those of the former colonial ruler.
At first sight the scheme would appear to have many advantages for the developed countries of the world. All the profits of neo-colonialism can be secured if, in any given area, a reasonable proportion of the States have a neo-colonialist system. It is not necessary that they all should have one. Unless small States can combine they must be compelled to sell their primary products at prices dictated by the developed nations and buy their manufactured goods at the prices fixed by them. So long as neo-colonialism can prevent political and economic conditions for optimum development, the developing countries, whether they are under neo-colonialist control or not, will be unable to create a large enough market to support industrialisation. In the same way they will lack the financial strength to force the developed countries to accept their primary products at a fair price.
In the neo-colonialist territories, since the former colonial power has in theory relinquished political control, if the social conditions occasioned by neo-colonialism cause a revolt the local neo-colonialist government can be sacrificed and another equally subservient one substituted in its place. On the other hand, in any continent where neo-colonialism exists on a wide scale the same social pressures which can produce revolts in neo-colonial territories will also affect those States which have refused to accept the system and therefore neo-colonialist nations have a ready-made weapon with which they can threaten their opponents if they appear successfully to be challenging the system.
These advantages, which seem at first sight so obvious, are, however, on examination, illusory because they fail to take into consideration the facts of the world today.
The introduction of neo-colonialism increases the rivalry between the great powers which was provoked by the old-style colonialism. However little real power the government of a neo-colonialist State may possess, it must have, from the very fact of its nominal independence, a certain area of manoeuvre. It may not be able to exist without a neo-colonialist master but it may still have the ability to change masters.
The ideal neo-colonialist State would be one which was wholly subservient to neo-colonialist interests but the existence of the socialist nations makes it impossible to enforce the full rigour of the neo-colonialist system. The existence of an alternative system is itself a challenge to the neo-colonialist regime. Warnings about ‘the dangers of Communist subversion are likely to be two-edged since they bring to the notice of those living under a neo-colonialist system the possibility of a change of regime. In fact neo-colonialism is the victim of its own contradictions. In order to make it attractive to those upon whom it is practised it must be shown as capable of raising their living standards, but the economic object of neo-colonialism is to keep those standards depressed in the interest of the developed countries. It is only when this contradiction is understood that the failure of innumerable ‘aid’ programmes, many of them well intentioned, can be explained.
In the first place, the rulers of neo-colonial States derive their authority to govern, not from the will of the people, but from the support which they obtain from their neo-colonialist masters. They have therefore little interest in developing education, strengthening the bargaining power of their workers employed by expatriate firms, or indeed of taking any step which would challenge the colonial pattern of commerce and industry, which it is the object of neo-colonialism to preserve. ‘Aid’, therefore, to a neo-colonial State is merely a revolving credit, paid by the neo-colonial master, passing through the neo-colonial State and returning to the neo-colonial master in the form of increased profits.
Secondly, it is in the field of ‘aid’ that the rivalry of individual developed States first manifests itself. So long as neo-colonialism persists so long will spheres of interest persist, and this makes multilateral aid — which is in fact the only effective form of aid — impossible.
Once multilateral aid begins the neo-colonialist masters are f aced by the hostility of the vested interests in their own country. Their manufacturers naturally object to any attempt to raise the price of the raw materials which they obtain from the neo-colonialist territory in question, or to the establishment there of manufacturing industries which might compete directly or indirectly with their own exports to the territory. Even education is suspect as likely to produce a student movement and it is, of course, true that in many less developed countries the students have been in the vanguard of the fight against neo-colonialism.
In the end the situation arises that the only type of aid which the neo-colonialist masters consider as safe is ‘military aid’.
Once a neo-colonialist territory is brought to such a state of economic chaos and misery that revolt actually breaks out then, and only then, is there no limit to the generosity of the neo-colonial overlord, provided, of course, that the funds supplied are utilised exclusively for military purposes.
Military aid in fact marks the last stage of neo-colonialism and its effect is self-destructive. Sooner or later the weapons supplied pass into the hands of the opponents of the neo-colonialist regime and the war itself increases the social misery which originally provoked it.
Neo-colonialism is a mill-stone around the necks of the developed countries which practise it. Unless they can rid themselves of it, it will drown them. Previously the developed powers could escape from the contradictions of neo-colonialism by substituting for it direct colonialism. Such a solution is no longer possible and the reasons for it have been well explained by Mr Owen Lattimore, the United States Far Eastern expert and adviser to Chiang Kai-shek in the immediate post-war period. He wrote:
‘Asia, which was so easily and swiftly subjugated by conquerors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, displayed an amazing ability stubbornly to resist modern armies equipped with aeroplanes, tanks, motor vehicles and mobile artillery.
‘Formerly big territories were conquered in Asia with small forces. Income, first of all from plunder, then from direct taxes and lastly from trade, capital investments and long-term exploitation, covered with incredible speed the expenditure for military operations. This arithmetic represented a great temptation to strong countries. Now they have run up against another arithmetic, and it discourages them.’
The same arithmetic is likely to apply throughout the less developed world.
This book is therefore an attempt to examine neo-colonialism not only in its African context and its relation to African unity, but in world perspective. Neo-colonialism is by no means exclusively an African question. Long before it was practised on any large scale in Africa it was an established system in other parts of the world. Nowhere has it proved successful, either in raising living standards or in ultimately benefiting countries which have indulged in it.
Marx predicted that the growing gap between the wealth of the possessing classes and the workers it employs would ultimately produce a conflict fatal to capitalism in each individual capitalist State.
This conflict between the rich and the poor has now been transferred on to the international scene, but for proof of what is acknowledged to be happening it is no longer necessary to consult the classical Marxist writers. The situation is set out with the utmost clarity in the leading organs of capitalist opinion. Take for example the following extracts from The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper which perhaps best reflects United States capitalist thinking.
In its issue of 12 May 1965, under the headline of ‘Poor Nations’ Plight’, the paper first analyses ‘which countries are considered industrial and which backward’. There is, it explains, ‘no rigid method of classification’. Nevertheless, it points out:
‘A generally used breakdown, however, has recently been maintained by the International Monetary Fund because, in the words of an IMF official, “the economic demarcation in the world is getting increasingly apparent.”’ The break-down, the official says, “is based on simple common sense.”’
In the IMF’s view, the industrial countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, most West European nations, Canada and Japan. A special category called “other developed areas” includes such other European lands as Finland, Greece and Ireland, plus Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. The IMF’s “less developed” category embraces all of Latin America and nearly all of the Middle East, non-Communist Asia and Africa.’
In other words the ‘backward’ countries are those situated in the neo-colonial areas.
After quoting figures to support its argument, The Wall Street Journal comments on this situation:
‘The industrial nations have added nearly $2 billion to their reserves, which now approximate $52 billion. At the same time, the reserves of the less-developed group not only have stopped rising, but have declined some $200 million. To analysts such as Britain’s Miss Ward, the significance of such statistics is clear: the economic gap is rapidly widening “between a white, complacent, highly bourgeois, very wealthy, very small North Atlantic elite and everybody else, and this is not a very comfortable heritage to leave to one’s children.”
“Everybody else” includes approximately two-thirds of the population of the earth, spread through about 100 nations.’
This is no new problem. In the opening paragraph of his book, The War on World Poverty, written in 1953, the present British Labour leader, Mr Harold Wilson, summarised the major problem of the world as he then saw it:
‘For the vast majority of mankind the most urgent problem is not war, or Communism, or the cost of living, or taxation. It is hunger. Over 1,500,000,000 people, some-thing like two-thirds of the world’s population, are living in conditions of acute hunger, defined in terms of identifiable nutritional disease. This hunger is at the same time the effect and the cause of the poverty, squalor and misery in which they live.’
Its consequences are likewise understood. The correspondent of The Wall Street Journal previously quoted, underlines them:
‘… many diplomats and economists view the implications as overwhelmingly — and dangerously — political. Unless the present decline can be reversed, these analysts fear, the United States and other wealthy industrial powers of the West face the distinct possibility, in the words of British economist Barbara Ward, “of a sort of international class war”.’
What is lacking are any positive proposals for dealing with the situation. All that The Wall Street Journal’s correspondent can do is to point out that the traditional methods recommended for curing the evils are only likely to make the situation worse.
It has been argued that the developed nations should effectively assist the poorer parts of the world, and that the whole world should be turned into a Welfare State. However, there seems little prospect that anything of this sort could be achieved. The so-called ‘aid’ programmes to help backward economies represent, according to a rough U.N. estimate, only one half of one per cent of the total income of industrial countries. But when it comes to the prospect of increasing such aid the mood is one of pessimism:
‘A large school of thought holds that expanded share-the-wealth schemes are idealistic and impractical. This school contends climate, undeveloped human skills, lack of natural resources and other factors — not just lack of money — retard economic progress in many of these lands, and that the countries lack personnel with the training or will to use vastly expanded aid effectively. Share-the-wealth schemes, according to this view, would be like pouring money down a bottomless well, weakening the donor nations without effectively curing the ills of the recipients.’
The absurdity of this argument is demonstrated by the fact that every one of the reasons quoted to prove why the less developed parts of the world cannot be developed applied equally strongly to the present developed countries in the period prior to their development. The argument is only true in this sense. The less developed world will not become developed through the goodwill or generosity of the developed powers. It can only become developed through a struggle against the external forces which have a vested interest in keeping it undeveloped.
Of these forces, neo-colonialism is, at this stage of history, the principal.
I propose to analyse neo-colonialism, first, by examining the state of the African continent and showing how neo-colonialism at the moment keeps it artificially poor. Next, I propose to show how in practice African Unity, which in itself can only be established by the defeat of neo-colonialism, could immensely raise African living standards. From this beginning, I propose to examine neo-colonialism generally, first historically and then by a consideration of the great international monopolies whose continued stranglehold on the neo-colonial sectors of the world ensures the continuation of the system.
7)WOMEN, RACE AND CLASS by ANGELA DAVIS
This book by one of the feminist movement’s most celebrated thought leaders, is a dissection of an array of societal issues that plagued America including race, class and gender inequality. It’s a systemic analysis that breakdowns systemic oppression in a digestible way from one of the Legendary scholar and Former Black Panther Leader.
Angela Davis was born in Alabama, United States, in 1944 as the oldest of four children in a black middle-class family. She was an activist from an early age, inspired by female parental figures who opposed the Jim Crow laws, and became involved with socialist groups and Marxism–Leninism. She attended Brandeis University, majoring in French. She later studied under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse and joined the Black Panther Party and Communist Party USA in the late 1960s. After completing a master’s degree, she began teaching philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was repeatedly fired over her political beliefs and jailed for two years for purchasing guns later used by revolutionary Jonathan P. Jackson, being released in 1972 and later acquitted.
The 1981 work Women, Race and Class was Davis’ third book. It followedIf They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971), a collection of writings edited by Davis, including contributions in which she discusses her experiences in prison, and Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), which was about the civil rights movement and its impact on her ideology.
Synopsis
Women, Race and Class is a collection of 13 essays about the American women’s liberation movement from the 1960s up to the point at which the book was published, and also about slavery in the United States. She applies Marxist analysis to the relation of class and race to capitalism in America. Davis criticizes that the women’s liberation movement has been run by and for white middle-class women, to the exclusion of black women, other women of colour and other social classes. She makes similar comments about women’s suffrage. Davis comments on the participation of white women in the abolitionism movement. The book also describes the woman’s club movement.
Davis explores the economic role of black women slaves. She writes that black women under slavery had similar struggles to black men, both groups sharing the task of manual labour and participating in abolitionist activism. However, women were also expected to perform the household labour, similar to women of other races. Engaging in Marxist analysis, Davis argues that women’s liberation should consist of women participating in wage labour and domestic labour becoming socialized. She believes that rape is a crime of power, giving the example of white men raping their black slaves Davis describes the role of race in rape and the archetype of the black male rapist. She also comments on race and birth control, linking abortion-rights movements to the Eugenics Society and commenting on the sterilization of black and Puerto Rican women.
Analysis
Bernice McNair Barnett of the journal Race, Gender & Class wrote that, in Women, Race and Class, Davis was one of the first scholars to make an intersectional analysis of race, gender and class. She and other women of colour writers around the same period led to the development of such analyses and research in academia. The field is sometimes known as “integrative race, gender, and class studies”. Reviewers for Race & Class compared the book to Ain’t I a Woman? (1981) by bell hooks, as both begin with comparisons between white and black women in the abolitionism and suffrage movements of the U.S.
Valerie A. Batts of the journal Women & Therapypraised the book as an “extremely well documented account” of women’s movements in the U.S. She praised Davis’ writing as “clear and highly readable”. Anne Laurent of the Washington Postagreed that the book was “well-documented” in terms of early history, but criticized it for offering “little new information” and for being “curiously dated” on contemporary history. She praised the book’s “factual abundance” but reviewed that it was “a gathering of disparate essays”. Race & Class reviewers critiqued that some questions are “left unanswered”, particularly in regard to the Marxist analysis omitting discussion of women’s relations touse valueandexchange valuein a capitalist economy, and not accounting for the fact that women’s “subordination to” wage labour would be undesirable.
8) MALCOM X AS TOLD TO ALEX HALEY
This book is often credited with enlightening in many a black college student by providing an explosive introduction to black consciousness. It’s the most detailed accounts of how the icon, born MalcolmLittle, went on to become the fierciest icon of Civil Rights Movement, and a leader whose name is virtually synonymous with black resistance.
he Autobiography of Malcolm X is an autobiography written by American minister Malcolm X in collaboration with American journalist Alex Haley. It was released posthumously on October 29, 1965, nine months after his assassination. Haley coauthored the autobiography based on a series of in-depth interviews he conducted between 1963 and 1965. The Autobiography is a spiritual conversion narrative that outlines Malcolm X’s philosophy of black pride, black nationalism, and pan-Africanism. After the leader was killed, Haley wrote the book’s epilogue.[a] He described their collaborative process and the events at the end of Malcolm X’s life.
While Malcolm X and scholars contemporary to the book’s publication regarded Haley as the book’s ghostwriter, modern scholars tend to regard him as an essential collaborator who intentionally muted his authorial voice to create the effect of Malcolm X speaking directly to readers. Haley influenced some of Malcolm X’s literary choices. For example, Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam during the period when he was working on the book with Haley. Rather than rewriting earlier chapters as a polemic against the Nation which Malcolm X had rejected, Haley persuaded him to favor a style of “suspense and drama”. According to Manning Marable, “Haley was particularly worried about what he viewed as Malcolm X’s anti-Semitism” and he rewrote material to eliminate it.
When the Autobiography was published, The New York Times reviewer Eliot Fremont-Smith described it as a “brilliant, painful, important book”. In 1967, historian John William Ward wrote that it would become a classic American autobiography. In 1998, Time named The Autobiography of Malcolm X as one of ten “required reading” nonfiction books. James Baldwin and Arnold Perl adapted the book as a screenplay, which later provided the source material for Spike Lee‘s 1992 film Malcolm X.
Summary
Published posthumously, The Autobiography of Malcolm X is an account of the life of Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little (1925–1965), who became a human rights activist. Beginning with his mother’s pregnancy, the book describes Malcolm’s childhood first in Omaha, Nebraska and then in the area around Lansing and Mason, Michigan, the death of his father under questionable circumstances, and his mother’s deteriorating mental health that resulted in her commitment to a psychiatric hospital. Little’s young adulthood in Boston and New York City is covered, as well as his involvement in organized crime. This led to his arrest and subsequent eight- to ten-year prison sentence, of which he served six-and-a-half years (1946–1952). The book addresses his ministry with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (1952–1963) and his emergence as the organization’s national spokesman. It documents his disillusionment with and departure from the Nation of Islam in March 1964, his pilgrimage to Mecca, which catalyzed his conversion to orthodox Sunni Islam, and his travels in Africa. Malcolm X was assassinated in New York’s Audubon Ballroom in February 1965, before the book was finished. His co-author, the journalist Alex Haley, summarizes the last days of Malcolm X’s life, and describes in detail their working agreement, including Haley’s personal views on his subject, in the Autobiography’s epilogue.
Genre
The Autobiography is a spiritual conversion narrative that outlines Malcolm X’s philosophy of black pride, black nationalism, and pan-Africanism. Literary critic Arnold Rampersad and Malcolm X biographer Michael Eric Dyson agree that the narrative of the Autobiography resembles the Augustinian approach to confessional narrative. Augustine’s Confessions and The Autobiography of Malcolm X both relate the early hedonistic lives of their subjects, document deep philosophical change for spiritual reasons, and describe later disillusionment with religious groups their subjects had once revered. Haley and autobiographical scholar Albert E. Stone compare the narrative to the Icarus myth. Author Paul John Eakin and writer Alex Gillespie suggest that part of the Autobiography’s rhetorical power comes from “the vision of a man whose swiftly unfolding career had outstripped the possibilities of the traditional autobiography he had meant to write”, thus destroying “the illusion of the finished and unified personality”.
In addition to functioning as a spiritual conversion narrative, The Autobiography of Malcolm X also reflects generic elements from other distinctly American literary forms, from the Puritan conversion narrative of Jonathan Edwards and the secular self-analyses of Benjamin Franklin, to the African American slave narratives. This aesthetic decision on the part of Malcolm X and Haley also has profound implications for the thematic content of the work, as the progressive movement between forms that is evidenced in the text reflects the personal progression of its subject. Considering this, the editors of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature assert that, “Malcolm’s Autobiography takes pains to interrogate the very models through which his persona achieves gradual self-understanding…his story’s inner logic defines his life as a quest for an authentic mode of being, a quest that demands a constant openness to new ideas requiring fresh kinds of expression.”
Construction
Haley coauthored The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and also performed the basic functions of a ghostwriter and biographical amanuensis, writing, compiling, and editing the Autobiography based on more than 50 in-depth interviews he conducted with Malcolm X between 1963 and his subject’s 1965 assassination. The two first met in 1959, when Haley wrote an article about the Nation of Islam for Reader’s Digest, and again when Haley interviewed Malcolm X for Playboy in 1962.
In 1963 the Doubleday publishing company asked Haley to write a book about the life of Malcolm X. American writer and literary critic Harold Bloom writes, “When Haley approached Malcolm with the idea, Malcolm gave him a startled look …” Haley recalls, “It was one of the few times I have ever seen him uncertain.” After Malcolm X was granted permission from Elijah Muhammad, he and Haley commenced work on the Autobiography, a process which began as two-and three-hour interview sessions at Haley’s studio in Greenwich Village. Bloom writes, “Malcolm was critical of Haley’s middle-class status, as well as his Christian beliefs and twenty years of service in the U.S. Military
When work on the Autobiography began in early 1963, Haley grew frustrated with Malcolm X’s tendency to speak only about Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Haley reminded him that the book was supposed to be about Malcolm X, not Muhammad or the Nation of Islam, a comment which angered Malcolm X. Haley eventually shifted the focus of the interviews toward the life of his subject when he asked Malcolm X about his mother:
I said, “Mr. Malcolm, could you tell me something about your mother?” And I will never, ever forget how he stopped almost as if he was suspended like a marionette. And he said, “I remember the kind of dresses she used to wear. They were old and faded and gray.” And then he walked some more. And he said, “I remember how she was always bent over the stove, trying to stretch what little we had.” And that was the beginning, that night, of his walk. And he walked that floor until just about daybreak.
Though Haley is ostensibly a ghostwriter on the Autobiography, modern scholars tend to treat him as an essential and core collaborator who acted as an invisible figure in the composition of the work. He minimized his own voice, and signed a contract to limit his authorial discretion in favour of producing what looked like verbatim copy. Manning Marable considers the view of Haley as simply a ghost writer as a deliberate narrative construction of black scholars of the day who wanted to see the book as a singular creation of a dynamic leader and martyr. Marable argues that a critical analysis of the Autobiography, or the full relationship between Malcolm X and Haley, does not support this view; he describes it instead as a collaboration.
Haley’s contribution to the work is notable, and several scholars discuss how it should be characterized. In a view shared by Eakin, Stone and Dyson, psychobiographicalwriter Eugene Victor Wolfensteinwrites that Haley performed the duties of a quasi-psychoanalyticFreudian psychiatrist and spiritual confessor. Gillespie suggests, and Wolfenstein agrees, that the act of self-narration was itself a transformative process that spurred significant introspection and personal change in the life of its subject.
Haley exercised discretion over content, guided Malcolm X in critical stylistic and rhetorical choices, and compiled the work. In the epilogue to the Autobiography, Haley describes an agreement he made with Malcolm X, who demanded that: “Nothing can be in this book’s manuscript that I didn’t say and nothing can be left out that I want in it.” As such, Haley wrote an addendum to the contract specifically referring to the book as an “as told to” account. In the agreement, Haley gained an “important concession”: “I asked for—and he gave—his permission that at the end of the book I could write comments of my own about him which would not be subject to his review.” These comments became the epilogue to the Autobiography, which Haley wrote after the death of his subject.
Narrative presentation
In “Malcolm X: The Art of Autobiography”, writer and professor John Edgar Wideman examines in detail the narrative landscapes found in biography. Wideman suggests that as a writer, Haley was attempting to satisfy “multiple allegiances”: to his subject, to his publisher, to his “editor’s agenda”, and to himself. Haley was an important contributor to the Autobiography‘s popular appeal, writes Wideman. Wideman expounds upon the “inevitable compromise” of biographers, and argues that in order to allow readers to insert themselves into the broader socio-psychological narrative, neither coauthor’s voice is as strong as it could have been. Wideman details some of the specific pitfalls Haley encountered while coauthoring the Autobiography:
You are serving many masters, and inevitably you are compromised. The man speaks and you listen but you do not take notes, the first compromise and perhaps betrayal. You may attempt through various stylistic conventions and devices to reconstitute for the reader your experience of hearing face to face the man’s words. The sound of the man’s narration may be represented by vocabulary, syntax, imagery, graphic devices of various sorts—quotation marks, punctuation, line breaks, visual patterning of white space and black space, markers that encode print analogs to speech—vernacular interjections, parentheses, ellipses, asterisks, footnotes, italics, dashes ….
In the body of the Autobiography, Wideman writes, Haley’s authorial agency is seemingly absent: “Haley does so much with so little fuss … an approach that appears so rudimentary in fact conceals sophisticated choices, quiet mastery of a medium] Wideman argues that Haley wrote the body of the Autobiography in a manner of Malcolm X’s choosing and the epilogue as an extension of the biography itself, his subject having given him carte blanche for the chapter. Haley’s voice in the body of the book is a tactic, Wideman writes, producing a text nominally written by Malcolm X but seemingly written by no author. The subsumption of Haley’s own voice in the narrative allows the reader to feel as though the voice of Malcolm X is speaking directly and continuously, a stylistic tactic that, in Wideman’s view, was a matter of Haley’s authorial choice: “Haley grants Malcolm the tyrannical authority of an author, a disembodied speaker whose implied presence blends into the reader’s imagining of the tale being told.”
In “Two Create One: The Act of Collaboration in Recent Black Autobiography: Ossie Guffy, Nate Shaw, and Malcolm X”, Stone argues that Haley played an “essential role” in “recovering the historical identity” of Malcolm X. Stone also reminds the reader that collaboration is a cooperative endeavor, requiring more than Haley’s prose alone can provide, “convincing and coherent” as it may be:
Though a writer’s skill and imagination have combined words and voice into a more or less convincing and coherent narrative, the actual writer [Haley] has no large fund of memories to draw upon: the subject’s [Malcolm X] memory and imagination are the original sources of the arranged story and have also come into play critically as the text takes final shape. Thus where material comes from, and what has been done to it are separable and of equal significance in collaborations.
In Stone’s estimation, supported by Wideman, the source of autobiographical material and the efforts made to shape them into a workable narrative are distinct, and of equal value in a critical assessment of the collaboration that produced the Autobiography. While Haley’s skills as writer have significant influence on the narrative’s shape, Stone writes, they require a “subject possessed of a powerful memory and imagination” to produce a workable narrative.[40]
Collaboration between Malcolm X and Haley
The collaboration between Malcolm X and Haley took on many dimensions; editing, revising and composing the Autobiography was a power struggle between two men with sometimes competing ideas of the final shape for the book. Haley “took pains to show how Malcolm dominated their relationship and tried to control the composition of the book”, writes Rampersad. Rampersad also writes that Haley was aware that memory is selective and that autobiographies are “almost by definition projects in fiction”, and that it was his responsibility as biographer to select material based on his authorial discretion. The narrative shape crafted by Haley and Malcolm X is the result of a life account “distorted and diminished” by the “process of selection”, Rampersad suggests, yet the narrative’s shape may in actuality be more revealing than the narrative itself. In the epilogue Haley describes the process used to edit the manuscript, giving specific examples of how Malcolm X controlled the language.
‘You can’t bless Allah!’ he exclaimed, changing ‘bless’ to ‘praise.’ … He scratched red through ‘we kids.’ ‘Kids are goats!’ he exclaimed sharply.
Haley, describing work on the manuscript, quoting Malcolm X
While Haley ultimately deferred to Malcolm X’s specific choice of words when composing the manuscript, Wideman writes, “the nature of writing biography or autobiography … means that Haley’s promise to Malcolm, his intent to be a ‘dispassionate chronicler’, is a matter of disguising, not removing, his authorial presence.” Haley played an important role in persuading Malcolm X not to re-edit the book as a polemic against Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam at a time when Haley already had most of the material needed to complete the book, and asserted his authorial agency when the Autobiography‘s “fractured construction”, caused by Malcolm X’s rift with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, “overturned the design” of the manuscript and created a narrative crisis. In the Autobiography‘s epilogue, Haley describes the incident:
I sent Malcolm X some rough chapters to read. I was appalled when they were soon returned, red-inked in many places where he had told of his almost father-and-son relationship with Elijah Muhammad. Telephoning Malcolm X, I reminded him of his previous decisions, and I stressed that if those chapters contained such telegraphing to readers of what was to lie ahead, then the book would automatically be robbed of some of its building suspense and drama. Malcolm X said, gruffly, ‘Whose book is this?’ I told him ‘yours, of course,’ and that I only made the objection in my position as a writer. But late that night Malcolm X telephoned. ‘I’m sorry. You’re right. I was upset about something. Forget what I wanted changed, let what you already had stand.’ I never again gave him chapters to review unless I was with him. Several times I would covertly watch him frown and wince as he read, but he never again asked for any change in what he had originally said.
Haley’s warning to avoid “telegraphing to readers” and his advice about “building suspense and drama” demonstrate his efforts to influence the narrative’s content and assert his authorial agency while ultimately deferring final discretion to Malcolm X. In the above passage Haley asserts his authorial presence, reminding his subject that as a writer he has concerns about narrative direction and focus, but presenting himself in such a way as to give no doubt that he deferred final approval to his subject. In the words of Eakin, “Because this complex vision of his existence is clearly not that of the early sections of the Autobiography, Alex Haley and Malcolm X were forced to confront the consequences of this discontinuity in perspective for the narrative, already a year old.” Malcolm X, after giving the matter some thought, later accepted Haley’s suggestion.
While Marable argues that Malcolm X was his own best revisionist, he also points out that Haley’s collaborative role in shaping the Autobiography was notable. Haley influenced the narrative’s direction and tone while remaining faithful to his subject’s syntax and diction. Marable writes that Haley worked “hundreds of sentences into paragraphs”, and organized them into “subject areas”. Author William L. Andrews writes:
[T]he narrative evolved out of Haley’s interviews with Malcolm, but Malcolm had read Haley’s typescript, and had made interlineated notes and often stipulated substantive changes, at least in the earlier parts of the text. As the work progressed, however, according to Haley, Malcolm yielded more and more to the authority of his ghostwriter, partly because Haley never let Malcolm read the manuscript unless he was present to defend it, partly because in his last months Malcolm had less and less opportunity to reflect on the text of his life because he was so busy living it, and partly because Malcolm had eventually resigned himself to letting Haley’s ideas about effective storytelling take precedence over his own desire to denounce straightaway those whom he had once revered.
Andrews suggests that Haley’s role expanded because the book’s subject became less available to micro-manage the manuscript, and “Malcolm had eventually resigned himself” to allowing “Haley’s ideas about effective storytelling” to shape the narrative.
Marable studied the Autobiography manuscript “raw materials” archived by Haley’s biographer, Anne Romaine, and described a critical element of the collaboration, Haley’s writing tactic to capture the voice of his subject accurately, a disjoint system of data mining that included notes on scrap paper, in-depth interviews, and long “free style” discussions. Marable writes, “Malcolm also had a habit of scribbling notes to himself as he spoke.” Haley would secretly “pocket these sketchy notes” and reassemble them in a sub rosa attempt to integrate Malcolm X’s “subconscious reflections” into the “workable narrative”. This is an example of Haley asserting authorial agency during the writing of the Autobiography, indicating that their relationship was fraught with minor power struggles. Wideman and Rampersad agree with Marable’s description of Haley’s book-writing process.
The timing of the collaboration meant that Haley occupied an advantageous position to document the multiple conversion experiences of Malcolm X and his challenge was to form them, however incongruent, into a cohesive workable narrative. Dyson suggests that “profound personal, intellectual, and ideological changes … led him to order events of his life to support a mythology of metamorphosis and transformation”. Marable addresses the confounding factors of the publisher and Haley’s authorial influence, passages that support the argument that while Malcolm X may have considered Haley a ghostwriter, he acted in actuality as a co author, at times without Malcolm X’s direct knowledge or expressed consent:
Although Malcolm X retained final approval of their hybrid text, he was not privy to the actual editorial processes superimposed from Haley’s side. The Library of Congress held the answers. This collection includes the papers of Doubleday’s then-executive editor, Kenneth McCormick, who had worked closely with Haley for several years as the Autobiography had been constructed. As in the Romaine papers, I found more evidence of Haley’s sometimes-weekly private commentary with McCormick about the laborious process of composing the book. They also revealed how several attorneys retained by Doubleday closely monitored and vetted entire sections of the controversial text in 1964, demanding numerous name changes, the reworking and deletion of blocks of paragraphs, and so forth. In late 1963, Haley was particularly worried about what he viewed as Malcolm X’s anti-Semitism. He therefore rewrote material to eliminate a number of negative statements about Jews in the book manuscript, with the explicit covert goal of ‘getting them past Malcolm X,’ without his coauthor’s knowledge or consent. Thus, the censorship of Malcolm X had begun well prior to his assassination.
Marable says the resulting text was stylistically and ideologically distinct from what Marable believes Malcolm X would have written without Haley’s influence, and it also differs from what may have actually been said in the interviews between Haley and Malcolm X
In Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X, Dyson criticizes historians and biographers of the time for re-purposing the Autobiography as a transcendent narrative by a “mythological” Malcolm X without being critical enough of the underlying ideas. Further, because much of the available biographical studies of Malcolm X have been written by white authors, Dyson suggests their ability to “interpret black experience” is suspect. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Dyson says, reflects both Malcolm X’s goal of narrating his life story for public consumption and Haley’s political ideologies. Dyson writes, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X … has been criticized for avoiding or distorting certain facts. Indeed, the autobiography is as much a testament to Haley’s ingenuity in shaping the manuscript as it is a record of Malcolm’s attempt to tell his story.”
Rampersad suggests that Haley understood autobiographies as “almost fiction”. In “The Color of His Eyes: Bruce Perry’s Malcolm and Malcolm’s Malcolm”, Rampersad criticizes Perry’s biography, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America, and makes the general point that the writing of the Autobiography is part of the narrative of blackness in the 20th century and consequently should “not be held utterly beyond inquiry”.To Rampersad, the Autobiography is about psychology, ideology, a conversion narrative, and the myth-making process. “Malcolm inscribed in it the terms of his understanding of the form even as the unstable, even treacherous form concealed and distorted particular aspects of his quest. But there is no Malcolm untouched by doubt or fiction. Malcolm’s Malcolm is in itself a fabrication; the ‘truth’ about him is impossible to know.” Rampersad suggests that since his 1965 assassination, Malcolm X has “become the desires of his admirers, who have reshaped memory, historical record and the autobiography according to their wishes, which is to say, according to their needs as they perceive them.”Further, Rampersad says, many admirers of Malcolm X perceive “accomplished and admirable” figures like Martin Luther King Jr., and W. E. B. Du Bois inadequate to fully express black humanity as it struggles with oppression, “while Malcolm is seen as the apotheosis of black individual greatness … he is a perfect hero—his wisdom is surpassing, his courage definitive, his sacrifice messianic”. Rampersad suggests that devotees have helped shape the myth of Malcolm X.
Author Joe Wood writes:
[T]he autobiography iconizes Malcolm twice, not once. Its second Malcolm—the El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz finale—is a mask with no distinct ideology, it is not particularly Islamic, not particularly nationalist, not particularly humanist. Like any well crafted icon or story, the mask is evidence of its subject’s humanity, of Malcolm’s strong human spirit. But both masks hide as much character as they show. The first mask served a nationalism Malcolm had rejected before the book was finished; the second is mostly empty and available.
To Eakin, a significant portion of the Autobiography involves Haley and Malcolm X shaping the fiction of the completed self. Stone writes that Haley’s description of the Autobiography‘s composition makes clear that this fiction is “especially misleading in the case of Malcolm X”; both Haley and the Autobiography itself are “out of phase” with its subject’s “life and identity”. Dyson writes, “[Louis] Lomax says that Malcolm became a ‘lukewarm integrationist‘. [Peter] Goldman suggests that Malcolm was ‘improvising’, that he embraced and discarded ideological options as he went along. [Albert] Cleage and [Oba] T’Shaka hold that he remained a revolutionary black nationalist. And [James Hal] Cone asserts that he became an internationalist with a humanist bent.” Marable writes that Malcolm X was a “committed internationalist” and “black nationalist” at the end of his life, not an “integrationist”, noting, “what I find in my own research is greater continuity than discontinuity”.
Marable, in “Rediscovering Malcolm’s Life: A Historian’s Adventures in Living History”, critically analyzes the collaboration that produced the Autobiography. Marable argues autobiographical “memoirs” are “inherently biased”, representing the subject as he would appear with certain facts privileged, others deliberately omitted. Autobiographical narratives self-censor, reorder event chronology, and alter names. According to Marable, “nearly everyone writing about Malcolm X” has failed to critically and objectively analyze and research the subject properly.Marable suggests that most historians have assumed that the Autobiography is veritable truth, devoid of any ideological influence or stylistic embellishment by Malcolm X or Haley. Further, Marable believes the “most talented revisionist of Malcolm X, was Malcolm X”, who actively fashioned and reinvented his public image and verbiage so as to increase favour with diverse groups of people in various situations.
My life in particular never has stayed fixed in one position for very long. You have seen how throughout my life, I have often known unexpected drastic changes.
Malcolm X, from The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Haley writes that during the last months of Malcolm X’s life “uncertainty and confusion” about his views were widespread in Harlem, his base of operations. In an interview four days before his death Malcolm X said, “I’m man enough to tell you that I can’t put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is now, but I’m flexible.” Malcolm X had not yet formulated a cohesive Black ideology at the time of his assassination and, Dyson writes, was “experiencing a radical shift” in his core “personal and political understandings”.
Legacy and influence
Eliot Fremont-Smith, reviewing The Autobiography of Malcolm X for The New York Times in 1965, described it as “extraordinary” and said it is a “brilliant, painful, important book”. Two years later, historian John William Ward wrote that the book “will surely become one of the classics in American autobiography”. Bayard Rustin argued the book suffered from a lack of critical analysis, which he attributed to Malcolm X’s expectation that Haley be a “chronicler, not an interpreter.” Newsweek also highlighted the limited insight and criticism in The Autobiography but praised it for power and poignance. However, Truman Nelson in The Nation lauded the epilogue as revelatory and described Haley as a “skillful amanuensis”. Variety called it a “mesmerizing page-turner” in 1992, and in 1998, Time named The Autobiography of Malcolm X one of ten “required reading” nonfiction books.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X has influenced generations of readers, In 1990, Charles Solomon writes in the Los Angeles Times, “Unlike many ’60s icons, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with its double message of anger and love, remains an inspiring document.”Cultural historian Howard Bruce Franklin describes it as “one of the most influential books in late-twentieth-century American culture”, and the Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature credits Haley with shaping “what has undoubtedly become the most influential twentieth-century African American autobiography”.
Considering the literary impact of Malcolm X’s Autobiography, we may note the tremendous influence of the book, as well as its subject generally, on the development of the Black Arts Movement. Indeed, it was the day after Malcolm’s assassination that the poet and playwright, Amiri Baraka, established the Black Arts Repertory Theater, which would serve to catalyze the aesthetic progression of the movement. Writers and thinkers associated with the Black Arts movement found in the Autobiography an aesthetic embodiment of his profoundly influential qualities, namely, “the vibrancy of his public voice, the clarity of his analyses of oppression’s hidden history and inner logic, the fearlessness of his opposition to white supremacy, and the unconstrained ardor of his advocacy for revolution ‘by any means necessary.'”
bell hooks writes “When I was a young college student in the early seventies, the book I read which revolutionized my thinking about race and politics was The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” David Bradley adds:
She [hooks] is not alone. Ask any middle-aged socially conscious intellectual to list the books that influenced his or her youthful thinking, and he or she will most likely mention The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Some will do more than mention it. Some will say that … they picked it up—by accident, or maybe by assignment, or because a friend pressed it on them—and that they approached the reading of it without great expectations, but somehow that book … took hold of them. Got inside them. Altered their vision, their outlook, their insight. Changed their lives.
Max Elbaum concurs, writing that “The Autobiography of Malcolm X was without question the single most widely read and influential book among young people of all racial backgrounds who went to their first demonstration sometime between 1965 and 1968.”
At the end of his tenure as the first African-American U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder selected The Autobiography of Malcolm X when asked what book he would recommend to a young person coming to Washington, D.C.
Doubleday had contracted to publish The Autobiography of Malcolm X and paid a $30,000 advance to Malcolm X and Haley in 1963. In March 1965, three weeks after Malcolm X’s assassination, Nelson Doubleday Jr., canceled its contract out of fear for the safety of his employees. Grove Press then published the book later that year. Since The Autobiography of Malcolm X has sold millions of copies, Marable described Doubleday’s choice as the “most disastrous decision in corporate publishing history”.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X has sold well since its 1965 publication. According to The New York Times, the paperback edition sold 400,000 copies in 1967 and 800,000 copies the following year. The Autobiography entered its 18th printing by 1970. The New York Times reported that six million copies of the book had been sold by 1977. The book experienced increased readership and returned to the best-seller list in the 1990s, helped in part by the publicity surrounding Spike Lee‘s 1992 film Malcolm X. Between 1989 and 1992, sales of the book increased by 300%.
In 1968 film producer Marvin Worth hired novelist James Baldwin to write a screenplay based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Baldwin was joined by screenwriter Arnold Perl, who died in 1971 before the screenplay could be finished. Baldwin developed his work on the screenplay into the book One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, published in 1972. Other authors who attempted to draft screenplays include playwright David Mamet, novelist David Bradley, author Charles Fuller, and screenwriter Calder Willingham. Director Spike Lee revised the Baldwin-Perl script for his 1992 film Malcolm X.
Missing chapters
In 1992, attorney Gregory Reed bought the original manuscripts of The Autobiography of Malcolm X for $100,000 at the sale of the Haley Estate. The manuscripts included three “missing chapters”, titled “The Negro”, “The End of Christianity”, and “Twenty Million Black Muslims”, that were omitted from the original text. In a 1964 letter to his publisher, Haley had described these chapters as, “the most impact [sic] material of the book, some of it rather lava-like”. Marable writes that the missing chapters were “dictated and written” during Malcolm X’s final months in the Nation of Islam. In them, Marable says, Malcolm X proposed the establishment of a union of African American civic and political organizations. Marable wonders whether this project might have led some within the Nation of Islam and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to try to silence Malcolm X.
The book has been published in more than 45 editions and in many languages, including Arabic, German, French, Indonesian. Important editions include:
9) I WRITE WHAT I LIKE by STEVE BIKO
This compilation of writing form the South African revolutionary, illustrate why he was one of the Anti-apartheid movement’s most celebrated figures. The book is the fierce leader’s retrospective call-to-action, that encourages readers to reframe their State Of Mind. I Write What I Like, gifted us this famous gem: “The greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”
I Write What I Like (full name I Write What I Like: Selected Writings by Steve Biko) is a compilation of writings from anti-apartheidactivistSteve Biko.
I Write What I Like contains a selection of Biko’s writings from 1969, when he became the president of the South African Student Organisation, to 1972, when he was prohibited from publishing. Originally published in 1978, the book was republished in 1987 and April 2002. The book’s title was taken from the title under which he had published his writings in the SASO newsletter under the pseudonym Frank Talk.
I Write What I Like reflects Biko’s conviction that black people in South Africa could not be liberated until they united to break their chains of servitude, a key tenet of the Black Consciousness Movement that he helped found.
10) WOMEN’S LIBERATION AND THE AFRICAN FREEDOM STRUGGLE by THOMAS SANKARA
This transcript of a speech that the late first president of Burkina Faso’s 1987 speech at a women’s rally, illustrates why he is, even till this day, considered African’s most progressive leader. In the forward-thinking speech, Sankara authoritatively sends a message of uncompromising gender equality. It’s is in this speech that he delivered one of his most unforgettable quotes: “there is no true social revolution without the Liberation of women”, Thirty years later and his words still rings true.
It is true that both the woman and the male worker are condemned to silence by their exploitation. But under the current system, the worker’s wife is also condemned to silence by her worker-husband. In other words, in addition to the class exploitation common to both of them, women must confront a particular set of relations that exist between them and men, relations of conflict and violence that use physical differences as their pretext.”
― Thomas Sankara, Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle
Thomas Sankara was a revolutionary leader and became the prime minister of Burkina Faso (formerly the Republic of Upper Volta) after a people’s uprising toppled the previous government. This book contains a speech Sankara gave on International Woman’s Day to praise the contribution of women to the revolutionary effort, as well as a profile on Thomas Sankara himself which is a great summary of his ideas and actions! Unlike many world leaders, Sankara understood the importance of women’s emancipation for the nation to thrive. Revolutionary struggle requires courage, determination and constant involvement of all the people to succeed. The way society is set up excludes women from the fruits of their labour, as part of a broader hierarchy that divides us as people rather than working towards a common goal. I love a man who speaks the truth in the face of opposition in the form of other men’s misguided contempt towards women, without this courage from a leader society can never develop healthier attitudes that foster compassion over competition.
Sankara’s speech rings as true now sat here in the UK as it did when it was spoken in 1987 in Burkina Faso. We need one another and the complex nature of the way the world works needs to be challenged robustly. If men are to realise their aspirations, they need to focus on fighting the system causing their anguish rather than mistreating women. This baseless attempt to restore their own dignity will continue to fail the individual as well as wider society. No matter how oppressed man is, there is often a woman he feels he can oppress in some capacity and sadly society still has a place for this exploitation. Disagreeing with oppression is one thing, but Sankara stood up and faced the men who would be most affronted by the idea of women’s liberation, the bravery to do this is what we all need to embody to make the world a better place. The lack of character found in an oppressor is criticised in the speech and attributed to “pitiful and insignificant” men. Being compassionate something we all need to work on and Sankara had a nuanced understanding of the individual behaviours coming from an oppressive ideology in the form of imperialist capitalism, which needs to be challenged for meaningful change to occur. What I particularly like about this book is that it shows great disdain for the way the world operates and there is an immense passion felt in the words, willing the change to occur through encouraging unity and responsibility.
I recently re-read Women, Race and Class and it was fascinating to see how Angela Davis’ rigorous historic analysis matches up with what Sankara attempted to put into practice. They both determined that the future depends on women reaching the freedoms men already have, and then going beyond for the good of everyone! If he hadn’t been killed a few months later I’m sure a lot more dreams would have been realised. Thankfully his words and actions have inspired many others. Thomas Sankara himself said “You cannot kill ideas” and the fact that I’m reading a speech from 1987 suggests this to be the case!
Here’s a low resolution, but high quality documentary about this great man!!
11) THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK: WRITINGS BY RADICAL WOMEN OF COLOR EDITED BY CHERRIE MORAGA AND GLORIA ANZALDÜA
This collection of writings from a diverse group of woman scholars, offers critical, essays, analyses and prose that reflects on feminism, race and identity and a range of experiences which impact women of colour. It is one of the earliest works to criticize white feminism. Each entry enlightens with personal accounts, and unique perspectives that stimulates and resonate with readers
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color is a feministanthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa first published in 1981 by Persephone Press. The book centers on the experiences of women of color and emphasizes the points of what is now called intersectionality within their multiple identities, challenging white feminists who made claims to solidarity based on sisterhood Writings in the anthology, along with works by other prominent feminists of color, call for a greater prominence within feminism for race-related subjectivities, and ultimately laid the foundation for third wave feminism. It is among the most cited books in feminist theory.
The second edition was published in 1983 by Kitchen Table: Women of Colour Press. The book’s third edition was published by Third Woman Press until 2008, when it went out of print. In 2015, the fourth edition was published by State University of New York Press, Albany. In 2021, the fourtieth anniversary edition was also published by State University of New York Press. Each edition has a new foreword that connects world events that transpired in between the release of the last edition and the most recent edition to the book and its themes. Each edition also has the forewords of the previous editions.
Anzaldúa began writing This Bridge after she experienced discrimination and exclusion at a feminist retreat that she had been invited to by author Merlin Stone. Moraga and Anzaldúa began compiling works for the anthology in 1979. The two Chicanas initially meant for the book to be a response to white feminists’ racism, but it ended up being a reflection of the conversations women of colour were having at the time regarding feminism. While looking for media about women of colour’s experiences in the US, they received a large amount of scholarly articles by women of colour who were looking to get published. Ultimately, the co-editors turned down these works because they hoped to create a non-academic anthology that encapsulated Third World feminismin the US through spiritual, artistic, and theoretical means. Moraga was in charge of the thematic organization of the book. Both Anzaldúa and Moraga wrote introductions for different sections of the book and both of them contributed to the revision, marketing, and publication of the anthology. In the introduction of the original version of This Bridge, the co-editors state that this book was the sole focus of their time and money for the two years that it took them to publish it.
While pursuing her masters at the University of Texas, Anzaldúa wrote an essay titled “Growing Up Chicana.” Anzaldúa used ideas from this essay to write “La Prieta” which is included in This Bridge. “La Prieta” is an “autohistoria” (autobiography) that highlights how her beliefs and experiences transcend boundaries. Moraga explains that the time she spent in San Francisco in the 70s with Anzaldúa helped shape her writing and her vision for This Bridge. The authors of this anthology came from a variety of cultural, economic, and racial backgrounds, and their works span different genres, writing styles, and topics. All of the essays in this book are written in the first person. In between those essays, there are poems, journal entries, interviews, photos, and more.
Racism
This Bridge Called My Back by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa is a feminist piece that describes two polarizing views based on skin colour, the perspectives of light and dark skin Latin American women. In addition to being a feminist piece of literature, this book by Moraga and Anzaldúa touches upon racist remarks for people of Latin American descent. The use of the term güera, both title of a chapter along with the nickname given to Moraga for her light skin tone, heavily resembles the racial remarks within the book. Additionally, prieta is a term used to describe Anzaldúa. While prieta and güera are two opposing skin tones, This Bridge Called My Back connects them with the feeling of oppression that the two women feel.
While güera is a term used within Mexico, gringo is a term widely used in all of Latin America. Güera implies a pale-skinned latino while gringo is a term used to refer to a European or white American. The choice to use güera instead of gringa shows that, while Moraga has light skin, they still see her as a member of the latino community. Moraga, due to her skin colour, is in a peculiar position. While she is part of the latino community and seemingly is recognized to be hispanic, she remains an outlier solely because of her skin colour. Moraga, due to her skin colour, is in a peculiar position. While she is part of the latino community and seemingly is recognized to be hispanic, she remains an outlier solely because of her skin colour, which creates a bridge contrasting her from her own identity.
In contrast, the term prieta is used widely within Spanish-speaking cultures as an indicator of dark skin. Anzaldúa, a dark skinned hispanic, endured different racial stereotypes due to her skin colour. She is characterized with stereotypical, immigrant traits for having a darker skin tone along with racially motivated negative indigenous stereotypes. These comments and attitudes can even come from her own mother. While Anzaldúa primarily highlights her sexual orientation as a disturbance in her relationship with her mother, racial oppression and her mother’s attempt to shield her daughter from them result in further disturbance within the two.
This racial contrast creates a lost sense of personal identity and a challenging fit in a community. While both Moraga and Anzaldúa experience seemingly opposing stereotypes, they face the same challenges together: being judged for simply being born with a skin colour. What is most interesting is that these stereotypes come from people who are the exact same. Moraga mentions her mother and being opposed to her because of her skin colour. Throughout the book, the differences between her mother, an immigrant, straight, and traditional woman, along with Moraga, a homosexual, white-coloured feminist, become smaller and smaller. Eventually, Moraga finds that she relates to her mother. Her and her mother are not that different after all.
Apart from being a book about feminism and homosexuality, this book has strong racial content that emphasizes personal identity within traditional hispanic households. While uncommonly heard of, hispanic groups experience heavy oppression from within themselves due to skin coloration. This book highlights racism in the latino community behind the initial topics mentioned. When combined, these topics all highlight the importance of personal identity, the challenges that stem from understanding oneself and her own identity.
Moraga and Anzaldúa originally published the book with Persephone Press because it was a well-known feminist publisher and they had already published one of Moraga’s essays. A press release for the book from 1981 says, “the classic consciousness-raising/organizing tool for both women of color and non-colored women committed to eradicating racism within the feminist movement and society in general.” Across the different editions of the anthology, Moraga and publishers have had discussions over whether or not to use the term “women of colour”. This is because there is no set definition for this term and its meaning depends on the reader and their context. At the time of the original publication, Moraga and Anzaldúa considered using the term “third-world women”. They opted for “women of color” because they felt it was “most progressive” and it included women of colour who were living in “first-world” countries like the US.
Though other published writings by women of colour existed at the time of This Bridge’s printing, many scholars and contributors to This Bridge agree that the bringing together of writing by women of colour from diverse backgrounds in one anthology made This Bridge unique and influential. Barbara Smith, a contributor, wrote that Black, Native American, Asian American, and Latina women “were involved in autonomous organization at the same time that we [were] beginning to find each other. Certainly This Bridge Called My Back […] has been a document of and a catalyst for these coalitions.”
In addition to providing the framework for new activist-based coalitions, This Bridge has had a considerable impact upon the world of academia for its linking of feminism, race, class, and sexuality. It also brought “an intellectual framework” of identities based on race and ethnicity to lesbian and gay studies. In this bridge we call home, the anthology published in 2002 to examine the impacts of This Bridge twenty years later, Australian anthropologist Helen Johnson details This Bridge’s effects on institutional teaching environments. She describes how the anthology “has allowed her to offer global perspectives on issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and power against the now antiquated white feminists’ utopian ideal of universal sisterhood.” This Bridge has been hailed for providing an “easily accessible discourse, plain speaking, a return to Third World storytelling, voicing a difference in the flesh, not a disembodied subjectivity but a subject location, a political and personal positioning.”
Though This Bridge is referenced in many essays and books regarding the development of Third World feminism, one of the most widely recognized explorations isNorma Alarcón‘s essay entitled “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism.” In her essay, Alarcón discusses the importance of looking at relationships not just between gender groups but within gender groups, as highlighted in This Bridge. Through questioning the existence of objective “truth” as separate from human construction, and through an analysis of language that acknowledges deep contextual and historical meanings, she highlights the intentions of This Bridge to challenge the forces that put all feminists into one category, as well as the oppositional thinking that makes differences hierarchical instead of inter-related and interdependent. Barbara Smith believed that these messages are made clear within the pages of This Bridge, asserting that “more than any other single work, This Bridge has made the vision of Third World feminism real.”
However, even with these aforementioned impacts, many individuals contend that women of colour feminisms still remain marginal within women’s studies in the United States. Chela Sandoval, in her essay on third-world feminism, writes: “This Bridge Called My Back made the presence of U.S. third world feminism impossible to ignore on the same terms as it had been throughout the 1970s. But soon the writings and theoretical challenges of U.S. third world feminists were marginalized into mere ‘description.'”
This Bridge “offered a rich and diverse account of the experience and analyses of women of colour; with its collective ethos, its politics of rage and regeneration, and its mix of poetry, critique, fiction and testimony, it challenged the boundaries of feminist and academic discourse.”
Anthologists Moraga and Anzaldúa stated in the preface that they expected the book to act as a catalyst, “not as a definitive statement on Third World Feminism” in the United States. They also expressed a desire to “express to all women, especially white, middle class women, the experiences which divide us as feminists …we want to create a definition that expands what ‘feminist’ means.”
Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, and Norma Alarcón adapted this anthology into the Spanish-language Este puente, mi espalda: Voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos. Moraga and Castillo served as editors, and Castillo and Alarcón translated the text. In 2002, AnaLouise Keating and Gloria Anzaldúa edited an anthology (this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation) that examined the impact of This Bridge twenty years later while trying to continue the discussion started by Anzaldúa and Moraga in 1981.
12) ASSATA SHAKUR: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
This affecting page-turner, reveals the cutting racial dynamics and corrupt criminal justice system that landed the now exiled Black Liberation Army member in prison for life. We follow her journey from her contested murder conviction to her escape from to Cuba. Her Story highlights the Often downplayed role of Black Women in the fight towards racial equality in the United States.
On May 2, 1973,Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder.
Assata: An Autobiography is a 1988 autobiographical book by Assata Shakur.[1] The book was written in Cuba where Shakur currently has political asylum.[2]
The autobiography[3] begins on May 2, 1973. Shakur recounts what happened after a shooting on the New Jersey State Turnpike. The shooting left Zayd Shakur and New Jersey State Trooper Werner Forrester killed, Assata Shakur wounded, and Sundiata Acoli on the run.[4] The book continues with Shakur describing her early childhood growing up in Queens, New York, with her mother, and spending her summers in Wilmington, North Carolina, with her grandparents. Shakur tells her story by going back and forth between the “present” with Shakur’s hospitalization, incarceration, pregnancy and trial following the events on the New Jersey State Turnpike; and the “past” with her early childhood schooling, the beginning of her radicalization, and her time as a prominent Black Power and human rights revolutionary.
“To My People” was a recorded statement released by Assata Shakur while in jail in Middlesex County, New Jersey. The tape was recorded on Independence Day, 1973, and was broadcast on numerous radio stations.[5] Shakur includes the transcript of the recording in Chapter 3 of the autobiography.[3] The recording was released in response to the media coverage about Shakur after the New Jersey Turnpike Shooting. In the recording, Shakur publicly described herself as a black revolutionary, her participation in the Black Liberation Army and her participation in the incident. In the message, Shakur describes the corruption of police, structural inequality between blacks and whites, and the American support of brutal wars and regimes in Cambodia, Vietnam, and South Africa.
In her foreword,[3]Angela Davis discusses her involvement in the benefit at Rutgers University for campaigning to free political prisoners such as Shakur. While the event did not lead to Shakur’s freedom, it was an impressive step in the right direction. Additionally, Davis explains Shakur’s initial run-in with the state troopers on a New Jersey turnpike in 1973 with acquaintances Zayd Shakur and Sundiata Acoli, then shares a similar experience. After the benefit at Rutgers University, Davis notes that she, too, was signalled to stop by a cop car even though no violations occurred. Hinds was following close behind, and when he went to approach the police car, stating he was their lawyer, one of the officers pulled a gun on him. In this instant, Davis and Hinds were afraid to make any move, fearing that it would be misconstrued, just like what happened with Shakur, which left her with a murder charge and plenty more injustices during imprisonment. Lastly, Davis emphasizes the misinterpretations of Shakur and the effects of these various misrepresentations of her.
Lennox Hinds represented Shakur in a lawsuit against the New Jersey prison for the less-than-ideal conditions she endured throughout her time. In his foreword to this autobiography, Hinds notes that the first time they met was when she was in the hospital, handcuffed to her bed. He goes on to write about some contributing factors and prior engagements leading up to Shakur’s fearful image before her encounter on the New Jersey turnpike, most predominantly, her involvement with the Black Panther Party. Shakur was an outspoken Black woman who worked hard to fight for her brothers and sisters of the world, and throughout her autobiography, it is clear this is a personal piece; however, it is also a highly political text. Hinds categorizes Shakur alongside Martin Luther King Jr. because her presence and advocacy threatened the administration just like King Jr did. Lastly, Hinds makes it a point to emphasize the concerning and distorted experiences Shakur endured throughout her imprisonment for a wrongfully convicted crime because of her race.
These forewords by Davis and Hinds bring awareness to Black people’s existence in society and the non-existent threat the police force imposed upon them during this period. Additionally, they highlight the lived experiences of Black individuals and emphasize that Shakur’s story is not a one-off or a unique experience; these instances occur again and again, but there is no change in authority, and these racial injustices continue.
Chapters 1-4
Shakur introduces herself as a Black revolutionary, describing herself as a Third World woman living in a First World country. She recounts the harrowing experience of being shot and the police killing her companion, Zayd, on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. Shakur regards her mistreatment at the hands of law enforcement as an instance of racism and prejudice, as she sees herself as being targeted simply for being Black. She recounts overhearing the police contemplate killing her, too. The ambulance arrives and she is dragged across the pavement into it. Once at the hospital, she recounts her feelings of it being inconsequential whether she lives or dies, as she is harassed by doctors and police. She feels fear as she finds herself in a hospital surrounded by white people. Despite her significant injuries, she is belittled and mocked for them and for her race by police and doctors. She is examined and fingerprinted, and they repeatedly ask her why she shot the trooper, but she does not respond as she mentally resolves to withstand their brutal treatment. Later in the chapter, she narrates the oppressive environment in which detectives continue to harass her for information; she ultimately remains resolute in her silence. The chapter closes with her trial and she faces a judge who reads to her the multiples charges against her.
Chapter 2
Shakur discusses her childhood, looking back on her family and past experiences. Born JoAnne Deborah Byron in Jamaica, New York, to a divorced mother, she describes herself as a bright child. She reflects on her childhood by emphasizing how her grandparents instilled dignity and self-respect into her as core principles. Overall, Shakur highlights the racism of growing up as a Black girl in America and she emphasizes how her family’s teachings related to the societal expectations of her.
Chapter 3
In this chapter, Assata describes her transportation from Hospital to Jail. She describes her cell and furnishings and environment within her cell. On her first day, she is subject to the routine of prison as well as other prisoners and their habits. Later, Assata speaks with the Warden, who refers to Assata as Joanne, to discourage her from wanting to leave her cell, citing threats on her life. During her internment, Evelyn contacts multiple officials in law enforcement to petition on Assata’s behalf. Assata highlights that Nixon and other government officials should be criminally acknowledged, citing news and television painting the Black Liberation Army as a criminal organization. Assata goes on to describe her time in prison, including violence, issues with prison doctors, and other inmates. During the jury selection process, an issue arises with a juror providing a biased opinion on the case, causing issues within the court and resulting in a postponement.
Chapter 4
Assata reflects on her life in middle school, focusing on courses and boys. In this she divulges her previous worries of how others perceived her. Further, she rejects a boy named Joe saying he was “black and ugly” which she immediately regretted. Assata then recounts her experiences exploring the world and discovery, to the dismay of her parents. She also explains how she went to Evelyn’s house when she first ran away. Later, she describes a robbery of a jewellery store she committed with Tina and Tina’s mother. After this, they celebrate at a bar and end up in a gang meeting, where the gang discussed an issue with a rival gang named “The Bishops”. She goes one to describe her confusion of Tyrone’s constant desire to fight, which leads her to reject an idea of being with him and taking his name.
Chapters 5-8
This chapter involves Shakur’s transfer from Middlesex County Jail to Rikers Island and the horrid treatment she receives from the staff, while at the same time undergoing a legal battle regarding her alleged bank robbery case. It outlines the injustices of the judicial system, showcasing the judge’s inherent biases when dealing with Assata and Kamau’s case. Shakur meets a supportive group of women while imprisoned, and they are surprised to see that she is not “bigger, blacker, and uglier” like the media has portrayed her. This chapter also deals with the problem of incarceration and motherhood, as Assata and Kamau grow increasingly intimate in their solidarity, and when the two get kicked out of the courtroom they are assigned to a room by themselves where Shakur’s child is consummated.
Chapter 6
Shakur discusses a period in her late adolescence when she ran away from her mother’s house at age 13 to find work in Greenwich Village, encountering the harsh realities of living on the street. She finds work hustling men and working as a barmaid, quickly getting an up-close experience with racism and sexism in society. After working for and getting fired by (in the same day) a cafeteria owner who sexually harasses her, Shakur uses her day’s pay to get a hotel room and subsequently meets Miss Shirley, a trans woman who befriends her. Shirley acts as Shakur’s mentor for the remainder of her stay in Greenwich Village, showing her how to survive in the hostile streets. At the end of the chapter one of her aunt’s friends sees her in the street and brings her back home, ending her stint of independence.
Chapter 7
Shakur, after being acquitted in the bank robbery trial in the Southern District of New York, is sent back to New Jersey. In Morristown jail, she recalls friendly dealings with her friends, and continued harassment and racism from the prison guards. She recalls the fraudulent jury selection process, in which no Black people were selected. As the trial proceeds, she becomes increasingly worn out to the point of illness, and contemplates her deteriorating mental health. She eventually realizes that she is pregnant. At first no one believes her. The various doctors she speaks to tell her that she is suffering from an intestinal disease. She spends her days alone in her jail cell contrasting the misery and ugliness of the world, with the beautiful, exciting anticipation of having a baby, of being a mother. To conclude the chapter, she meets her new doctor, a man whom she feels reassured by. His name is Ernest Wyman Garret. Shakur’s condition worsens, though, and Dr. Garrett realizes that she is in danger of miscarrying. A ruling is announced that she will be temporarily removed from the trial during her pregnancy, and Sundiata will be tried alone in the meantime.
Chapter 8
This chapter follows Shakur living in Manhattan with her aunt, Evelyn, on 80th Street. She delights in the new neighbourhood, the people, the many stores, the sights, the museums, and her growing interest in art–despite her contempt for the snobs who treat her poorly at the galleries. She contemplates her contempt for the rich, and her naive feelings of money as a solution to problems. While living on 80th Street, she spends most her time on the stoop viewing the various happenings, the coming and going of people, the fights, the arguments. She tries to understand her feelings of excitement towards the “misery” and “malice” of this street. She describes the growing resentment she felt for one of her school teachers who discriminated against her for her music taste. She goes to an NAACP meeting in which she is unable to answer, to the organizers’ satisfaction, a question about how to react if someone spits in her face while she is participating in a boycott. She branches off of her recollection of her time with Evelyn, and begins to write about how she has grown to understand the world, and how she has come to understand that injustice and racism are at the heart of America.
Chapters 9-12
Chapter 9 describes Shakur’s pregnancy and the ways in which she is mistreated by prison and hospital staff during the birth, and while navigating the various medical complications she experiences throughout. After being determined pregnant at Roosevelt Hospital, she is returned to Rikers Island prison to suffer with minimal medical attention and little to no food that suits her new dietary needs. Her lawyers attempt to file for medical maltreatment but are thwarted by the malicious US judicial system which is determined to keep Shakur in inhumane conditions. When she goes into labour in September 1974, she is taken to Elmhurst Hospital where she is prohibited from receiving treatment from her chosen doctor. A demonstration is held outside while her doctor and lawyer fight for her right to choose who delivers her baby. In the meantime, Shakur declares she will deliver the baby herself, highlighting her strength in resisting oppression. Once the hospital eventually concedes to her demands, the baby is delivered with no complications but kept separated from Shakur for most of her hospital stay. Upon returning to the prison after a short recovery period, she is brutalized by a group of guards and unjustly thrown into the Punitive Segregation Area. The chapter concludes with the poem “Leftovers–What Is Left”, which draws attention to the struggle of perpetuating hope in a society that is built to destroy it. In this chapter, Shakur uses the depiction of the hardships she endures during her pregnancy to show how difficult it can be to maintain hope, but that it is always worth it when you are protecting the future for new life.
Chapter 10
Chapter 10 shows the evolution of Shakur’s awareness of global issues and how this impacts her perception of her everyday life. When she is 17, Shakur quits school, moves out of her mother’s house, and gets a boring desk job. At first, she expresses excitement at being a part of a community and working for a great company, until she realizes how little the company cares for her as an individual. This marks one of the first moments in which she acknowledges society’s perception of her as nothing more than an instrument of capitalism. Shakur discusses a time in which one of her white colleagues brings up the riots of the 1960s and asks for her opinion after going on about how Black people were burning down their own neighbourhoods for nothing, to which Shakur helplessly agrees. The next time the topic comes up at work, she decides to express her true opinion, eventually resulting in her being fired. At this point, she begins to become more passionate about local and global issues, specifically when it comes to arguing with those who disagree. It is not until she makes friends with a few African men and embarrasses herself with her lack of knowledge surrounding the war with Vietnam, that she realizes she has never doubted the word of the United States government. This prompts her to begin doing her own research as well as cements her distrust in the government. As her perception evolves, she expresses feeling as if she does not fit in any one group, leading to her seeking opportunities to become more involved in her community. She gets a job at an employment agency and helps put together a conference to provide young Black college students with interviews for big corporations. Shakur is then saddened to realize that a great many students paid hundreds of dollars to be at this conference only for a select few to secure interviews. The chapter ends with the poem “Culture” which highlights Shakur’s distaste for the perpetuation of European culture as a result of colonialism. In this chapter, Shakur shows how her perception and interpretation of global events and issues has changed as she expands her knowledge base and begins conversing with others like her.
Chapter 11
This chapter focuses on the accusation and unjust arrest of Assata Shakur. This chapter illustrates the quick escalation between her and the law. Assata becomes a victim of police brutality and an unfair judicial system in which she is ultimately accused of a Queen’s bank robbery. Although she pleads not guilty and is returned to the workhouse, in a turn of events she, is then forced to wear the same clothes as the robber in the robbery she is accused of, and her photograph is superimposed over the original photo of the thief to convince the jury in her trial that she is guilty. However, before the first trial for the supposed bank robbery, she must undergo a trial for being accused of kidnapping of a known drug dealer for ransom, along with two others, in which the case is acquitted.
Chapter 12
Here we see a new form of Assata who is evolving while attending a community college in Manhattan. As she is attending college she encounters many individuals whose ideals align with her political viewpoints. During her time at college, she takes a closer look at the history of oppression. Through her research, she finds that the institutions that are tasked with educating the general population have fallen short on educating the general public on the history of oppression. While engaging in research she learns of the prosecution of people of colour which fuels her desire to contribute to social change.
Chapter 13-16
This chapter begins with Assata talking about the Murder of Martin Luther King. Throughout her autobiography she talks about prosecuting the individuals who are creating systematic injustice and bodily harm towards African Americans and a form of rebellion to ensue. She changes colleges and experiences more radicalization towards social change and the revolution for equality. She states that for things to change in this revolution white radicals, hippies, individuals of Mexican descent, African Americans, and individuals of Asian descent would have to join for real social change to be made. While working as an assistant to a doctor in Alcatraz she witnesses Indigenous people protesting. She comes to the realization that true history will never be taught or learned as the education system only remembers one type of history. She later seeks the Black Panther Party who she greatly admires.
Chapter 14
Following her acquittal regarding the previous kidnapping charge, Assata is moved to the Manhattan Correctional Center, where she still experiences persecution but also reunites with former cellmates and experiences more freedom in the general population as opposed to being in isolation. She faces another trial regarding the case of her bank robbery and is worried about being convicted, but the case is surprisingly overturned and she is acquitted. However, right after this case she is sent back to Rikers Island and placed in solitary confinement once more.
Chapter 15
Chapter 15 focuses on Shakur’s journey as a member of the Black Panther Party (BPP). As she first walks down the streets of Harlem on her first day as a member, she is bright and electric, full of energy. It does not take her long, however, to understand that even within organizations that are focused on liberating and supporting Black communities, power is quick to inflate egos. Her work helping others, especially children, is fulfilling to her. It is in her moments of community work that Shakur finds the purpose and passion she longed for when she originally joined the party. She has goals to continue growing programs like this, however, political differences within the party quickly arise. As complications within and outside of the party becomes more apparent, Shakur understands that the best option for her is to leave the party that she once admired so deeply. Once she leaves, Shakur notices the increasing surveillance that authorities have implemented on her everyday life. An energy has shifted, and she can feel that something is happening that she cannot see. The chapter ends with Shakur being informed that the police are at her apartment, and she is warned not to go home.
Chapter 16
After getting a warning that the Feds have been keeping close tabs on her movement and correspondences, Shakur decides to “go underground,” which she also describes as living a clandestine existence. At first, this experience did not require her to upheave her entire life, as all she needed to do was keep her interactions low and not draw attention to herself. While she lays low, she is informed by a friend that her image is plastered all over the news, with the media linking her to the death of a cop. Shakur understands that the police’s claim to only want her for questioning is most likely untrue. In order to avoid being detained, she goes deeper into hiding, cutting close ties to those that can be easily traced back to her. She later finds refuge with a friend with whom she doesn’t have any external links to. At the end of the chapter, Shakur dons a wig and a maid’s outfit as a disguise to board the train in the early morning. During her time on the train, she realizes that all around her are Black women heading somewhere, most likely to their jobs. Each and everyone one of them covers their natural hair with a wig, and Shakur discerns that surviving in America as a Black person means having to disguise and hide yourself. She hopes that this reality does not remain, and dreams of a free future for all who have to minimize themselves to fit a white standard.
Chapter 17-20
Chapter 17 depicts Shakur’s perception of the Black Liberation Army, including her own ideas for how the organization can become more effective as a revolutionary asset. She describes the Black Liberation Army as an organization without a single leader or chain of command. Rather, it is made up of various groups working towards a common goal. She discusses the idea of armed struggle and how it drives people to join movements. When reflecting on this, she emphasizes more scientific modes of action, meaning less action inspired by emotion alone and more attention on working toward common goals effectively. The groups must work strategically rather than through brute force or direct physical action. This is difficult and a common issue amongst the community as they are the ones often victimized by brutality and violence. She focuses on how the goals have changed to mobilizing Black masses.
Chapter 18
After her acquittal in the Queens robbery case, Shakur is brought to Middlesex County Jail for men. While she spends a little over a year in solitary confinement during the Jersey trial, the National Conference of Black Lawyers and various members of the defense team file a civil suit against the state for the inhumane conditions of her solitary confinement. Although the conditions are ruled to be cruel, the state bypasses these claims to keep Shakur locked up. Following these events, Shakur’s defense team struggles to find fitting lawyers and experts to help with the Jersey case; however, various student supporters volunteer to help. After the death of Stanley Cohen, Shakur’s defense attorney, a large number of legal documents related to her case went missing. Evelyn discovers that these documents mysteriously ended up in the New York City Police Department but the majority was still not found. Shakur feels exhausted by the case, the biased jury, and the racist judge. Looking back at the trial, she claims it was incorrect and unprincipled to participate. She says that participating in the trial was partaking in her own oppression – the only way to free yourself is to not depend on others.
Chapter 19
Shakur is transferred to a Maximum Security Prison in Alderson, West Virginia – a prison for the most dangerous women in the country. Isolated from the rest of the world, she calls this prison the most brutal concentration camp in the country. Although Shakur does not get along with other prisoners, she meets Lolita Lebrón, one of the most respected political prisoners in the world. Although Shakur is a big supporter of Lolita’s views, they have minor disagreements over religion and politics. Shakur befriends a Catholic nun, Mary Alice, and learns about liberation theology in order to have intellectual conversations with Lolita. However, Shakur does not get the chance to follow through with this plan as the prison closes down and she is brought back to New Jersey again.
Chapter 20
Within this chapter, Shakur’s experience shows her grappling with navigating motherhood while incarcerated. She struggles on multiple fronts while being separated from her young daughter, Kakuya, and with her daughter viewing her as a stranger more than a parent. Further, Shakur accounts the difficulty of her daughter coming to terms with her absence, illustrating a multitude of complicated emotions when Kakuya believes Shakur can easily leave prison to be with her but simply chooses not to. This brief chapter contains broad insight into the pain that is inflicted on families through the prison industrial complex, as the separation of parents from their children hinders the growth and well-being of all parties involved. After this visit, Shakur vows to leave prison. The chapter ends with a poem dedicated to Kakuya. It describes Shakur’s wish to be in her life, to see her joy and happiness, to have her go beyond all her expectations, and to inherit a world bigger than what she herself was afforded.
Chapter 21 and Postscript
Shakur is visited by her grandmother, during which she discloses a vivid dream she had about Shakur. Shakur describes how her grandmother is well-known for her prophetic dreams—dreams which manifest in the real world. However, these dreams do not merely manifest spontaneously, but must be worked for. They operate simply as a guiding knowledge that leads one to partake in the experiences they are meant to encounter. Her grandmother explains that the content of her dream showed Shakur returning home, and after her return she bathes and dresses her. At first Shakur assumes she is a child in the dream, but upon finding that she is a grown adult she panics, thinking the dream’s prophecy is her death. Her grandmother assures her that she is alive and well, but is unable to elaborate on the complexities of the dream’s meaning. For Shakur, returning home means escaping state capture. She knows this reality cannot come to fruition with her waiting idly, and while she feels fear creeping in, she makes up her mind to leave. She scales her mental hurdles by chanting her belief in herself. The chants reinforce her confidence and allow her to remain steadfast in her mission to not forget the feeling of freedom. The chapter ends with Shakur speaking outside of prison, but the details regarding her escape are intentionally omitted.
Postscript summary
The postscript begins with Shakur reflecting on her freedom. She goes through a series of emotions beginning with elation and disbelief of how far she had come. These joyful feelings are then followed by somber ones as she reflects on the horrors that preceded her freedom from prison. She describes herself as overcome by emotions, ones she had spent so much time and effort suppressing while incarcerated. The chapter continues with Shakur reflecting on how far she has come in her ideals and opinions on revolution and her place within it. She then shifts the focus to her new life in Cuba. She compares her new life to her old one, and is left shocked by the lack of racism she experiences in Cuba, even going as far as saying that racism is a foreign concept to the locals. Shakur considers the anti-racist policies put in place by the Cuban government and reflects on the differences between those and the ways in which the United States attempts to combat racism. She compares how racism in America shapes the everyday lives of its citizens and how Cuba, lacking the same type of racism, is comparably much happier. The section concludes with Shakur calling home to her aunt. Her aunt is cold at first as she does not believe it is her, based on the many fake letters she’s received from the police pretending to be Shakur. Once her aunt realizes it is truly her, she gets into contact with Shakur’s mother and daughter and the four of them finally reconnect in Cuba. The book ends with Shakur, her mother, her aunt, and her daughter sharing stories and past experiences together in Cuba.
Oppression and resistance
Shakur describes the oppression she faced and witnessed throughout her life. The book begins with the physical abuse she received from New Jersey police officers in the hospital after the shooting on the Turnpike. She discusses the trials against her and describes them as completely fabricated. Along with the oppression from the state, she recounts the racism she, and her family experienced in North Carolina as well as watching the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) train people for peaceful protests and sit-ins. Shakur describes resistance methods taken by the NAACP, including the peaceful, non-violence ideology. Though she does not adopt this, she respects it. Shakur chooses to take on roles with the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army as forms of resistance to social oppression.
Revolution
Throughout the book Shakur describes her personal desire to be a revolutionary, and the social revolution she believes is necessary for African Americans and other minorities. She discusses this revolution many times, including in the “To My People” recording. The idea of revolution is also mentioned when she makes the opening statement[8] at the New York State Supreme Court County of Kings during the trial against her, where she was accused of the kidnap of a drug dealer, for which she was acquitted.
Black Panther Party
In Chapter 13, Shakur describes her introduction into the Black Panther Party while visiting the Bay Area. She discusses her reservations about joining the party with the members which included their lack of politeness and respect for the people they talked to. Shakur eventually joins while living in New York. It is when she joins the party, she witnesses and experiences the Federal Bureau of Investigation infiltration of political organizations now known a COINTELPRO.It is this surveillance that leads her to choose to go “underground” and eventually leave the party.
Critical reception
The New York Times‘ review stated: “The book’s abrupt shifts in time can annoy after a while, as can the liberties she takes with spelling – court, America and Rockefeller, for example, become kourt, amerika and Rockafella. But, all in all, the author provides a spellbinding tale that evokes mixed feelings in the way the autobiographies of Malcolm X, Sonny Carson and Claude Brown did in years past.”
Legacy and influence
The book was first published in the United Kingdom by Zed Books in 1987. In 1999, an American edition was released by Lawrence Hill Books of Brooklyn, New York.
Rapper Common released “A Song for Assata” in 2000 after visiting Shakur in Cuba. The song details some of the events in the book.
The 2014 edition of the book features forewords by activist Angela Davis and criminal justice scholar Lennox S. Hinds.
The book was adapted as an audio dramatization by BBC Radio 4 in July 2017.
This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and White revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials. The result is a signal contribution to the literature about growing up Black in America that has already taken its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou.
Two years after her conviction, Assata Shakur escaped from prison. She was given political asylum by Cuba, where she now resides.
13) THE FIRE NEXT TIME by JAMES BALDWIN
The prolific writer’s 1963 book, contains two thought provoking essays; My Dungeon Shook-Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary Of Emancipation, a gut-wrenching address to his young nephew about the perils of back identity in America and a meditation on intergenerational trauma, change and legacy, and Down At The Cross – Letter from a Region Of My Mind is an equally poignant piece that Chronicles his childhood experiences in Harlem. The essay offers a provocative stance on racial dynamics in America.
The Fire Next Time is a 1963 non-fiction book by James Baldwin, containing two essays: “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” and “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind”.
The book’s title comes from a couplet in some versions of “Mary Don’t You Weep“, an African-American spiritual.The same lyric has been used in another spiritual entitled “God Gave Noah the Rainbow Sign”:
God gave Noah the rainbow sign No more water, the fire next time
The first essay, written in the form of a letter to Baldwin’s 14-year-old nephew, discusses the central role of race in American history. The second essay, which takes up the majority of the book, deals with the relations between race and religion, focusing in particular on Baldwin’s experiences with the Christian church as a youth, as well as the Nation of Islam‘s ideals and influence in Harlem.
The two essays were first published separately in American magazines in late 1962: “Letter from a Region in My Mind” in The New Yorker, and “My Dungeon Shook” in The Progressive.They were then combined and published in book form in 1963 by The Dial Press, and in 1964 in Britain by Penguin Books. The book was enthusiastically received by critics, and it is now widely considered to be one of the most influential books about race relations in the 1960s. It was released in an audiobook format in 2008, narrated by Jesse L. Martin.
Content
The book includes two essays that were written in the 1960s during a time of segregation between White and Black Americans. In his essays, Baldwin’s purpose was to reach a mass white audience and help them to better understand Black Americans’ struggle for equal rights.Looking at the time period in which Baldwin’s essays were published shows how purposefully each essay was constructed. At the time, the Civil Rights Movement was beginning to recognize the need for publicity, in particular “story-telling that would generate public support for the movement’s people and goals”. This was the context in which Baldwin’s essays were first published.
What made Baldwin’s essays effective is that they were testimonial. Giving testimonial evidence about how racism in America has operated in real people’s lives is an effective strategy for connecting with an audience that is otherwise unaware. The book met both the need of the Civil Rights Movement for publicity and an unspoken need of white audiences who did not understand the movement or the lives of the people involved. Although many of the ideas that Baldwin writes about in his essays were not novel to black intellectualism, the way in which they were presented to their audience was. Baldwin’s writings profoundly “provoked and challenged the dominant white American frame for understanding race relations” during the time that they were first published.
“My Dungeon Shook”
The first essay, originally appearing in The Progressive magazine in 1962 and titled “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation“, is a letter to Baldwin’s nephew in which he compares his nephew to the men in their family including Baldwin’s brother and father. He tells his nephew about America’s ability to destroy Black men and challenges his nephew to convert his anger due to mistreatment as a Black man into having a passionate and broad outlook on the African-American experience.
“Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in my Mind”
The second essay originally appeared in The New Yorker (1962) under the title “Letter from a Region in My Mind”.[12]
Titled in the book as “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in my Mind“, the essay addresses the detriment of Christianity on the Black community and Baldwin’s journey from being a teen pastor to completely pulling away from the church because it felt like a repression of his full experience of humanity. He then recounts his dinner with Elijah Muhammad where Muhammad educated Baldwin on the Nation of Islam in the hope of getting him to join the movement. In this section Baldwin describes how Black Muslims have made a “black god” to avoid the oppression of a “white god” that Christianity has established within the Black community.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall wrote an article that focused on the civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr., building on Baldwin’s work. Baldwin’s piece examined the issue of racism mainly in his area of Harlem, New York, and Hall emphasized that the racial issue they confronted in America was not a sectional but a national problem.
Another article that expands on Baldwin’s new religious view was written by Jon Nilson, a theology professor. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin focused on how Christianity was corrupted. Observing that Baldwin challenged the Catholic Church, Nilson said that the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. had almost seemed like The Fire Next Time had come true.
In July 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an article in The Atlantic as a modernized version of Baldwin’s letter to his nephew called “Letter to My Son”, and later published an entire book called Between the World and Me that talks about the current state of the Black experience in America.
The title was alluded to in Max Hastings‘ book America, 1968: The Fire This Time.
