The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (72 page)

I had tried to organize a national united front structure with US, RAM, SNCC, RNA, and the Panthers, but Eldridge talked bad about the idea over the phone. More and more the Panthers began to denounce the “pork chop nationalists” — obvious Cleaver terminology — and more and more Karenga's people called the Panthers “kamikaze niggers.” It is proven now from Freedom of Information Act files that the FBI orchestrated much of this discord between the two organizations. But certainly Cleaver's arrogance and shallow bohemian anarchism, which he passed off as Marxism, plus Karenga's Maulana complex, helped speed up the tragic collision that finally saw Bunchy and Huggins dead.

Karenga was frozen by what he had heard on the phone. He was scheduled to speak very shortly and it was obvious he could not. His eyes seemed to dart around in his head, glassy with fear. He said he wouldn't speak, but I began to try to convince him that he must speak, that all the people sitting out front were waiting for him. But he was extremely paranoid, thinking that perhaps the word had already reached East about what had happened. He thought maybe Panther sharpshooters were sitting in the audience. Finally, he did go out to speak, surrounded on all sides by the security, the L.A. brothers, and our own people.

From that point on, the FBI escalated their “intervention” into the conflict. They'd shoot at one organization, knowing that the other would get blamed and that the organization shot at would retaliate in kind. That is just what happened. For months, tales flew back and forth between
Newark and the Coast about new shootouts. One brother we knew barely escaped, going over a fence and catching slugs in his leg and shoulder. Cars were shot up, windows shot out, and homes shot into; a full-fledged war was going on in Los Angeles, between US and the Panthers, courtesy of the FBI; we even got letters from the FBI in Newark. As the conflict broadened and cultural nationalists and Panthers across the country drew their lines and screamed and shouted at each other, we received a letter, ostensibly from the Jersey City Panthers, telling us we were “pork chop nationalists” and threatening to wipe us out. We were supposed to run out and blow them away first. But reading the letter, it was obvious that the writer did not have a firm grasp on the African American dialect. I thought it was just some white racist sending crank mail, so we dropped it into the wastebasket. The FOIA files show that the FBI sent this letter to us, hoping to widen the fratricidal clash that disfigured the Black Liberation movement!

What happened now was that Karenga and the L.A. US organization developed what we called “a foxhole mentality.” Because of the constant shootouts and military encounters with the Panthers and the police, who tried to capitalize on the struggle by busting both sides, US was not able to do much in the way of community organizing. The whole function of the organization now was security and defense, all development was on hold.

At one point Karenga had a machine gun sitting in his living room facing the front door, on a tripod. He even gradually developed a dependence on pills of one kind or another. A kind of “diet pill” that kept him in a perpetual stupor. So that now instead of the swift sparkling intellect, he slurred his words and staggered around the room at times. The advocates were made sometimes to sit in his living room for hours waiting for him while he drowsed and nodded. The old Maulana complex which had shown itself by his gathering advocates around him in his living room to spill out his pearls of master teaching had been stretched out to full caricature — a static cult with a drugged prophet.

While Karenga and US were bogged down in super-security, paranoia, and pills, CFUN still functioned in the day-to-day struggles that concerned black people in Newark. Having had our public baptism in electoral politics, we were fortified for further struggle within that framework. Black Newark spelled a definite motion of Black Power. We would try to apply Karenga's doctrine in practical ways, not just as cultural pundits inveighing from on high. So that from Karenga's Four Aspects of Political Power, which called for community organization, alliances and coalitions, electoral
politics, and disruption, we developed the practical capacity to utilize all or any of the four.

Our day-to-day practical movement pulled us increasingly further and further away from Karenga. One evening I received a call from some of the L.A. advocates, who, alarmed at what was happening inside the L.A. organization, bade me come West to talk to them. I got on a plane and met with about seven or eight of the brothers, most of whom I regarded as strong revolutionaries. They lamented and complained that the organization was slipping down the tubes. Some of them had already been put out; Karenga, they said, was acting weird and arbitrary. They wanted to know what I thought. Those who had been put out could come East if they wanted to, I would try to do what I could. I returned the same evening to the East.

We were getting more deeply involved with the sweep of black Newark politics. We were planning another convention for 1969, but this time we had learned about alliances and coalitions as a means of extending power. We had always been close to the Young Lords. Felipe Luciano, the first national chairman, was an old friend of mine. We had that special connection that cultural workers have. Felipe was a member of the original Last Poets. He and Gylan Kain and David Nelson had extended the form of the ensemble poetry performance that we had worked with in the Spirit House. Despite the fact that the Lords were heavily influenced by the Panthers, Felipe and I remained friends and our ties with the Newark Lords remained strong despite the anticultural nationalist bias that must have informed the national organization. The Newark captain, Ramon Rivera, and I got very tight (we remain so today) and so the planning for the Black and Puerto Rican Convention went forward.

We were extending our black united front that was initiated with CFUN. The Sunday United Brothers meetings got increasingly more animated and serious. The question of mayor was foremost in all of our minds. Who were we going to run? The question ran around and around, with too many people supplying personal self-serving answers. Inside our forum the number got reduced to two persons: Ken Gibson, the City Hall civil engineer, and Harry Wheeler, the politicking schoolteacher. Why we chose Gibson still eludes me. I guess Gibson had run before, he had his name out. We felt maybe Harry was a little too slick for our own good. People kept whispering about a “milk scandal” Harry was implicated in as a public school teacher. At any rate, at the critical moment, our steering
committee hands shot up for Gibson. He would be our candidate at the convention and of course we would make sure he won.

Harry was frustrated. He plain out didn't like it. For one thing, Harry knew he was smarter, more sophisticated, than Gibson. I knew this too. And with the withering intelligence of hindsight, I can say that Harry would probably have made a better mayor than Gibson. Gibson was a civil servant, a grey yellow man from the lower middle class with not the slightest understanding or vision of what the world would be like without the present social and economic system that rules us. Ken's highest dream is that of being a GS-1000 in the great civil service in the sky!

But at that point, Ken Gibson had the weight of our steering committee behind him. He had the commitment, at that point, of the most politicized segment of Newark's black petty bourgeoisie, its left and its center (and even some of its right wing).

The mobilization for the convention was really the mobilization for that campaign. This was late in '69. The Black Power Conference that year had been obstructed by the ineptitude within our own ranks and the American imperialist state. It was held in Bermuda, with a host committee headed by Roosevelt Brown of the Continuations Committee and a member of the Bermuda Parliament. I was convinced that Brown was a thoroughly opportunistic and unserious person, and the Bermuda government kept most of the well-known activists out of Bermuda as personae non gratae, including myself, Sonny Carson, Karenga, and some others. It seemed to be a thoroughly wasted affair.

I had by now gotten onto that Continuations Committee of the Black Power Conference, so that meant I was able to put out some lines on a national basis more easily. I talked about the Black and Puerto Rican Convention and the coming election in Newark as examples of the practical pursuit of Black Power. Newark became a point of some national focus within the national black nationalist community.

We worked now to build a team of candidates who could come out of the convention. The convention was created as a mass vehicle, an instrument of black and Puerto Rican people's power. The point was to limit the wild, unfocused profusion of personally sanctioned candidates and give the people a chance to support a slate which, because it had wide backing, would have a good chance to sweep into power. And this is what we did. Gibson and eventual City Council president Earl Harris were members of our steering committee. Young minister Dennis Westbrook came to our attention as a Central Ward activist, and he was drawn onto the committee.
Ted Pinckney and Donald Tucker met with us regularly and they became candidates. Sharpe James, a physical education instructor, we convinced to run from the South Ward, because in our meetings his name came up as a good solid progressive candidate. Al Oliver, Tucker touted from the East Ward. Ramon Rivera had some doubts about the Puerto Rican candidate, Ramon Aneses. He didn't think he was assertive enough. But Ramon could not come up with another candidate at the time and he did not want to run himself.

The convention was billed as the instrument to choose “the Community's Choice,” and that was the name of the team that came out of it. The convention was widely talked about and extremely popular. Broad masses of black people and the Puerto Rican community could see that what was being constructed was something which could seriously contend with Addonizio and company. And as the convention mobilization moved forward, the younger and more serious black youth joined CFUN. We also sent out word to the various colleges in the area that we would need help, that they should come to Newark and help us build Black Power.

Two mayoral candidates refused to come to the convention, Harry Wheeler and the labor bureaucrats' “progressive,” George Richardson. Together they got fewer than five hundred votes in the election itself. The convention nominated not only Ken Gibson but the whole Community's Choice team of Harris, Tucker, Pinckney, James, Oliver, Westbrook, and Aneses.

(The election campaign is covered in depth in an unpublished book still in the possession of Howard University Press, called
The Creation of the New Ark
. But that book was written from the deep backwardness of cultural nationalism, and when I wanted to revise it in galleys, HUP refused. I told them all I would do is simply to asterisk certain ideas and then argue with myself in the footnotes so that people could see what my nationalist ideas were, how I changed them, and the justification I had for doing so. At this writing HU still refuses on the grounds that they don't have the money.)

In truth, many elements converged at this time that aided us, despite our own relative naivete. Newark was a city on somebody's list, as a result of the '67 rebellion. Obviously some sectors of the ruling class in the U.S. realized that the old, completely segregated, apartheid type of U.S. social structure could no longer hold. The Kerner Commission had spoken of “aggrandizing the ghetto” as one method to bring social peace to the large, increasingly black urban centers. Addonizio and company had been
indirectly denounced, even in that official government report, for the “sense of pervading corruption” which existed in Newark. Every day now there were rumors of Addonizio's indictment. Plus, he was a Democrat and the national power was Republican. Our motion was coming in the midst of all this.

Addonizio and company were not prepared either, as they should have been. Perhaps their Negroes were telling them that all was well, it would all pass. But neither the racists and gangsters that ran the city nor their colored gun bearers realized how isolated they all had become. Nor did they realize how deep the ties we had run into the community had been sunk. There were those among them who realized that I was not an “outside agitator,” but the self-styled prodigal returned. They didn't realize that the self-styling was a mass line, that that very prodigality held interest because I had come back with some information, some national ties, and the brutality of my reception had ignited an unquenchable fury of black patriotism, however warped by cultural nationalism. I was only one part of an entire mass movement for political democracy, Black Power. But I became one focus of Addonizio and company's attacks, because they thought my checkered past and “criminality” — i.e., being arrested in the rebellions — would turn the masses off. It acted exactly the opposite. Every knock was a boost. They were simply letting the people know what I and the rest of us stood for. Addonizio and company and the bourgeois press were our best press agents and advertising aides.

Tying Gibson and the rest of the Community's Choice team to images of my personal militance and rebelliousness helped the campaign immeasurably. It was not just a personal electoral campaign, it was a
movement
, the advanced and the middle forces, the progressive and the average, all mobilized to oppose black people's enemies and their reactionary colored house servants.

CFUN organized the New Ark Fund, which was a fundraising organization, also an excitement-raising mechanism. We brought in the biggest names in the country in support of the campaign. Isaac Hayes with his chains and shades, James Brown, Leontyne Price, Bill Cosby, Dustin Hoffman, Beau Bridges, the Staple Singers, Stevie Wonder came in and rode around on the back of a truck all day, singing and pushing the program. Manhattan borough president, Percy Sutton, walked through the streets passing out leaflets. Even Adam Clayton Powell came in and mesmerized a packed house at Bethany Baptist Church. Chuck Jackson, the Supremes. There was an endless line of speakers, entertainers, performers,
politicians, militants that we brought in. We also did team advertising: posters, leaflets, billboards, and our regular newspaper, all dedicated to the Community's Choice.