The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (65 page)

Another issue that began to surface that year was the proposed building of a medical school in Newark's Central Ward. The authorities proposed that the medical school be built on 155 acres of land in the central city! This was supposed to mean that 23,000 black people would have to be moved out of the Central Ward. As this situation gradually surfaced, it
became clearer and clearer that what was happening was an attempt by the white power structure to undermine completely any motion by the black majority population toward democracy and political power. It also came out that there was no medical school on the planet that took up 155 acres of land. One of the most prestigious medical schools in the United States, Johns Hopkins, took up only an acre and one half of land. This kind of information was distributed in the black community on a mass basis. As the hearings for the school began, at first the administration wanted to keep them closed — they didn't even want to have them. But the black community pushed, black agitators appeared, even those middle-classed blacks who simply wanted to run for office but who dug that without a constituency, running was futile. Hearings were called for. They were resisted, then they began to be held. And with each resistance, all that happened was a further building of momentum. Whitewash crews were put into the streets now to try to white out the Black Power signs we'd made ubiquitous. Different black groups began to emerge, as well as some white groups, like the visiting SDS spinoffs that people like Tom Hayden were associated with. The question of Black Power had set things in motion. The civil rights movement of the late '50s and early '60s was in the act of being transformed. A few years earlier, questions like whether to fight back, whether to turn the other cheek, how to resist, how much to struggle, had been dominant in the movement, put forward by the middle-classed black ideologues associated with people like Dr. King and the SCLC. But the civil rights movement was giving way to a Black Liberation movement. Jacksonville, Harlem, Watts had announced this. Hough had confirmed it.

One early evening, a short, stocky, bald man dressed in a green olive-drab dashiki, accompanied by two brothers dressed very similarly, came up to the top floor of the Spirit House to see me. The short, stocky man introduced himself as Ron Karenga, from Los Angeles. I didn't know the name. The two brothers with him also had African, Swahili, names. Both of them were also bald and wore the same kind of wooden pieces of African sculpture around their necks — talisimus.

We talked generally about the movement. But Karenga began by telling me he knew my work. He said he liked
Blues People
, but that he thought the blues were reactionary. That blues were talking about slavery and submission. I blinked and politely disagreed. But Karenga is nothing if not aggressive. He went on, elaborating his theories on culture and nationalism, talking at high speed nonstop, laughing at his own witticisms and
having two members of a chorus, yea-saying, calling, “Teach!” when Karenga made some point he considered salient.

Surveying this dynamic fat little man, who spoke his mind with such authority, I could see things from the point of view of my highly styled conscious aesthetic that I questioned. The little cheap nondescript shoes, highly polished. The bargain basement overcoat and sale socks. But what that meant, I told myself later, was that I was some kind of elitist; trained that way by my long-term residence in and worship of the white elitist culture and aesthetic. This brother was more likely to be rooted with the people. (Now if you can dig the real elitism of that supposedly anti-elitist construct, then we in business. You mean they with the people cause they corny?! Gad!)

At any rate, I was obviously impressed by this visit. Karenga was in town, he told me, helping to plan the Second Black Power Conference. Adam Powell had called for the First, which was held in Washington, D.C, in 1966, with his declaration that black people must seek “audacious power.”

Strangely, in a couple of months Sylvia and I were in San Francisco. Not to stay, but I had gone as a visiting professor at San Francisco State College, invited by its Black Student Union. The president of the BSU, Jimmy Garrett, had come to Newark, visited me, and asked me to come out to San Francisco to organize some cultural presence among the students. By now, Sylvia was pregnant and it was just beginning to show. We went West as “Mr. and Mrs. LeRoi Jones,” and this rankled her in a way I didn't appreciate until later when she came out with it.

Garrett had impressed me as a deeply serious and willingly militant young man. Though I guess I also thought he was a trifle arrogant from the way he told me that “we [young people] don't say Negro anymore,” when I had used “Negro” in some context. But it was good to see this kind of spirit.

The BSU at the time was pretty tightly organized with a strong sense of centralized leadership (Garrett's). They had an office on campus that I was to work out of. Later I got my own, still not far from the BSU's. I wanted to put together a “Communications Project,” really a means of bringing black consciousness to the students and the community. I wanted to organize a company of students and community people to put together a repertory of plays and travel throughout the area and all this, the preparations, the plays, community response, travel, would also be filmed. This was my proposal. Garrett liked it, and we also got good support from artists
in the area, principally Ed Bullins and Marvin X Jackmon. There were also people like Duncan Barber, Hilary Broadous, Carl Boissiere, who helped form the core of that company, even though they were not students. Plus, the students themselves participated, both as actors and as technical staff and publicists in a very enthusiastic, positive way. Emory Douglas, who became the Black Panther Party's “Revolutionary Artist,” was my set designer and graphics specialist. George Murray, who became the BPP's Minister of Education, was the star of Ben Caldwell's
First Militant Minister
, which I directed for our tour.

San Francisco is a very special and lovely town, shrouded, it seems to me, in a kind of provincial charm, very colorful and exciting and even a trifle mysterious. It has a kind of bohemian character to it, not just from the herds of real and legendary bohemians who do animate the Fillmores and Haight-Ashburys and North Beaches; the landscape itself, those sharp rolling hills that the city is built upon, seems out of the ordinary — as if the landscape itself was some kind of bohemian. The weather, as well, is romantic, raincoats everyday, without a sharp winter or summer, just raincoats and then the bay and those two magnificent bridges, one going to Oakland and Berkeley, the other to hip Sausalito, where once I lived for a minute or so on a houseboat owned by Godfrey Cambridge, Shammy and I organizing tours of young black women to go back East.

Bullins and Marvin X were extremely supportive. They had put together Black Arts West, along with Duncan, Hilary, and Carl, down on Fillmore Street. Marvin X and the rest were into Islam (though I think only Duncan actually joined a mosque, in New York, and remained with the Nation fourteen years). Bullins was, in some senses, closer to my own type. He had been hooked up more directly with white bohemia and had stepped past it.

Working together, with us pushing the program from one direction and the students pushing from the other, we got a whole lot done and created a dynamic movement and program that reflected the tide of the times. Duncan, Hilary, and Carl were actors. Bullins and Marvin X were not only writers, they would help direct and connect the program with different aspects of the black community.

The repertory we put together to tour with ended up as Ed Bullins's
How Do You
Do, directed by Duncan and Ed, with Carl and Hilary in leads.
Taking Care of Business
by Marvin X.
We Own the Night
(with the title taken from a poem of mine) by Jimmy Garrett, which I directed. I also directed Ben Caldwell's
Militant Preacher
and my own
Mad Heart
.

In the programs we would also include poetry readings by Marvin X and myself as well as Sonia Sanchez, who had come out to live in San Francisco. There was a brother named Willie X, who wrote a song, which he sang much like Joe Lee Wilson, called “Babylon.” These programs were heavily political and black-nationalist-oriented, with a strong overlay of Islam and other cultural nationalist tendencies. We traveled to schools all over the Bay Area as well as local halls in San Francisco. We even went down to Los Angeles and did the CORE convention, which is when I got a chance to see Karenga again.

The Communications Project had a great attraction for the young, politically turned-on blacks of the Bay Area. Here too, there were bubbles that suggested deep turbulence. It was early '67 and Watts was not even two years in the past. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense had just formed, based across the bridge in Oakland. The audiences at Merritt College and Laney College, which were two heavy Panther enclaves, were some of our best. We also did performances outside in an Oakland park, Marvin X lighting people up with his poem “Burn, Baby, Burn!” which immortalized the mass cry that had come out of Watts as the bourgeoisie's property went up in smoke.

The Panther message was also being pushed afternoons out at San Francisco State, with literature and speakers. We began to do regular programs of poetry and music out there and so it all intensified. Our base in the community was at the Black House, which actually closely resembled the Black Arts in many ways. We rehearsed there and did regular programs of poetry and song. The Panthers pulled security for those programs, with armed brothers flanking the stage in a symbolic gesture showing the links between black revolutionary art and political struggle.

The day Bobby Seale and the Panthers went up to Sacramento with their guns, the state campus sparkled with anticipation. The word spread like only good news can. Black students were beaming from one end of the campus to the other. The real shit was not too far away, was what was in some of our minds. The real revolution is just around the corner, we felt. The photos of Bobby and Bobby Hutton on the front page with their heat strapped on or in hand did something wonderful to us. It pumped us up bigger than life. Black men demanding democracy and justice and ready to fight about it! Those were heady times.

On the campus, as we built our program and put the parts together, we began to get some opposition. A reactionary group of white students who had control over the student activities monies resisted giving the black
students the funds necessary for our program. In the true spirit of whiteracist-controlled anti-poverty programs, they wanted to give up mainly the monies to bring me out there and a little chump change for the actual program. They didn't want to give up any money for the film at all. And we had already got most of the program in motion, now we were being stopped.

But to show just how much of the spirit of those times animated different sectors of the black community, a meeting was called with the white student body that controlled the funds. This was to be a showdown. We had already talked back and forth in memos and letters, over the phone and in small conferences. But now this was to be the push. The people at Black Arts West and the Black House got the black community elements interested in this struggle, the most politically tuned-in elements, to come out to the mass meeting. The BSU mobilized the main body of black students.

When we got to the meeting place we were greeted not just by the white student government body which was refusing to give up the money, but these jokers had gone out and rounded up a group of white S.F. State athletes to be their security! White football players and wrestlers stood around the perimeter of the room, seeking to surround the group of us when we sat in the seats in the middle of the room. And it got even funnier. The speeches back and forth naturally got hotter and hotter. The place was bulging with people. I made a speech near the end characterizing the white students as student racists trying to get degrees in white supremacy so they could carry on the traditional U.S. program of black national oppression, but that we were going to stop their shit before it even got going good.

Finally, people were talked out. We had shown that, according to the percentage of blacks on campus and the amount they paid in student fees that were supposedly designed to create programs such as ours, the black students were not getting “too much money” but were being robbed, as usual. Now there were calls back and forth and that rising turbulence in a crowd that means very soon the shit will be on. One blood said, “We oughta just kick your ass,” to the white students and their security and their white faculty advisers. There were some brothers and sisters from Fillmore, a mainly black community, and from Oakland, and they thought the only alternative was to “knock these motherfuckers out,” as several put it very directly.

Hearing this, one of the white wrestlers stood up, big and burly, and shouted, “You wanna fight? You wanna fight? Hell, we'll fight you, if you fight fair.”

At this point a short little black dude who obviously was not a student stood up and, almost like he was telling everybody the time of day, called, looking directly at the wrestler, “Fair? Shit, I'll break my motherfucking knife off in yo' head!” The meeting, for all intents and purposes, was over. We got the money.

Nathan Hare was also at San Francisco State during that period and he and Jimmy Garrett helped put together the first Black Studies program in the country. Humanitarian California? No, some niggers with guns had just walked into the California legislature. It was during this same period that black people got their first U.S. senator since Reconstruction (Edward Brooke of Massachusetts). For the same reasons. It ain't everybody that can go one hundred years between senators, not and be some thirty million folk!

I saw Eldridge Cleaver one afternoon at State. He had just got back from Alabama, where he'd interviewed Stokely Carmichael for
Ramparts
magazine. There were many tales about Cleaver at the Black House. He was going with a young sister, who was pregnant at the time, who rehearsed with us at the House. One sister, who was going with Marvin X at the time, told Sylvia that Cleaver was tipping around still seeing his lawyer and old love, Beverly Axelrod, who was white. The sisters around the Black House were highly critical of him for this. Plus, this same sister took Sylvia upstairs to peep in Eldridge's room. It was different from the rest of the house, which tended toward a minimalist militance as far as its furnishings went. Cleaver's digs were somebody's idea of plush, with wall-to-wall carpet and color television.