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Abstract
In this two-part interview with Columbia University doctoral candidate Megan French, Baraka reflects on his political and cultural activities during turbulent times. He explains his shifting perspectives on major events and gives some indication of the great ideological change he would undergo in the mid-1970s. It was through the class and racial struggles of Newark and the intense fights to create racial justice in that city that ultimately led Baraka toward a more radical political analysis embracing broader class struggles.
Notes
Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000), xv.
The 1972 Gary Convention's Statement of Purpose was decidedly international reflecting the turn of radical activists towards Third World Liberation movements. Stating that “the twin foundations of white racism and white capitalism” have been the foundations of global domination, the language of liberation was the framework for understanding the purpose of both the convention and its subsequent actions.
Baraka visited Cuba in 1960 shortly after the Revolution. His seminal essay “Cuba Libre” defiantly supported Fidel Castro's regime and provided links between Cuba and the struggles of Black American activists.
The rhetoric of internal colonization used by black activists to describe the situation of black urban spaces, expanded to describe a globalized crisis as militant anti-colonialist movements erupted throughout the African continent. By the mid 1970s, successful armed struggles had liberated Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Zimbabwe. Emerging from these movements was a call for the united struggle of oppressed people of color against racism and capitalism. While not all movements were socialist in nature, the language of self-determination and anti-imperialism informed Baraka's political rhetoric and focus, which had already sought to include the critiques of Lenin, Marx, and Mao.
Baraka's split with US followed the 1969 UCLA shoot-out between the Black Panthers and members of US in which two Panthers were killed. The shoot-out was the culmination of a long-standing tension between the two community organizations, as the Panthers moved towards purporting a class-based struggle as opposed to a culturally based one. This conflict, dire on its own, had been exploited and heightened through COINTELPRO intervention. Like so many organization feuds and ruptures, the FBI was directly involved in making sure that broad based coalitions of radical militant organizations could not form or function.
These were further attempts by the FBI's COINTELPRO to create in-fighting between radical organizations. Initiated in 1967, COINTELPRO was charged with preventing a coalition of “militant black nationalist groups” from forming and prevent groups from gaining a following within the black community. Using infiltration, wire-tapping, scare tactics, assassinations, and other divisive efforts, the FBI wages a full out war on black radicals.
In his most radical effort, Mayor Gibson supported building CFUN-backed Kawaida Towers, a low-income high rise to be situated in the wealthier North Ward of Newark, yet found that his executive power would yield few results for the community. After a powerful North Ward businessman with political ambitions raised concerns about how it would affect the Italian American community, the all white city council led the campaign to destroy the development plan. In an egregious slight of the mayor's authority, the white police commissioner resigned rather than enforce order at the building site where white protestors were throwing rocks and screaming racial epithets at members of CFUN. The buildings were never built.
See C.L.R. James’ Eulogy of Walter Rodney, “Walter Rodney and the Question of Power.” Talk given January 30, 1981. In the piece, James raises questions about how leaders engage their communities when having read Mao, Lenin, and Castro, the issues of the community are not at a place to embrace a socialist revolutionary agenda. He says, “A revolution is made with arms, but a revolution is made by the revolutionary spirit of the great mass of the population. And you have to wait for that.” Importantly, Baraka critiques his own move towards socialism for not engaging the grassroots base of his movement within his struggle.
Baraka's shift to Marxist-Leninism alienated not just more conservative elected officials, but also many Black Nationalists. In an attempt to reconcile the middle ground, the Assembly voted to oust Baraka from the organization in 1975.
Refers to Jesse Jackson's unsuccessful 1988 bid for President.
Refers to Sharpe's federal fraud trial for rigging the sale of empty city lots to his girlfriend, who in turn sold them for hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit. In 2008, Sharpe was convicted and sentenced to 2 years in a federal prison.
Refers to Haki Madhubuti, a Black Arts Movement poet and founder of Third World Press. He was on the executive council of the Congress of Afrikan Peoples.
A 2006 comment made by Hugo Chavez to the UN General Assembly about George Bush's address made the day before.