Just What We Need, Another Jackleg Preacher

I've had a chance to wade through some of the comments so far.

Maybe it's the time of year? It's hot as hell out these parts...perhaps the heat has addled my partner?

To wit:

They were subversive but what was the aim? The aim was integration, it wasn't to defeat the enemy. The aim was bourgeois brotherhood, not control of the resources of the enemy.

The aim was to defeat white supremacy. Find me a citation, a quote, where someone actually STATES "the aim was brotherhood." The bourgie part is just goofy so I'll let that slide. And in as much as cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, and Atlanta, were resources controlled by the enemy, the aggressive actions of folks like the Black Slate out of Detroit certainly seem to rise to the standard set here.

Let me put it this way, you cannot be militant and also for 'non-violent social change'.

So exactly why was King and his ilk referred to as militants? Why exactly did Hoover spend so much capital surveilling him?

You are taking 21st Century realities and porting them backwards. Damn Coretta was fucked up for not emailing Betty when Malcolm got put down. She should have at LEAST called her on her cell.

Sheesh.

What I'm saying is that the Old School ought to be about rescuing black consciousness and black nationalism from the knuckleheads who have been coddled by the Left. The kind of knuckleheads who would say that people like Assata Shakur are the heirs of the black progressive agenda.

Could you even name a single knucklehead here? Who are you talking about?

What the Old School should be about is preserving the best of our history, and our knowledge. What you're doing here, ain't old school kid. By consistently playing loose with the facts, you're on some new jack shit here.

Wait, wait. See you can't just compare pre- and post-Reconstruction and post-Brown.

Oh. But you CAN put Steve Cokely--a CONTEMPORARY knuckleheaded conspiracy theorist in search of a theory--and the Black Panthers in the same sentence? Even though they lived in two totally differrent time periods?

The crack must've worn off for a second.

When I'm talking black militants there are basically three: The Panthers, MOVE and the Symbionese Liberation Army. If there was a black equivalent of the Weather Underground, and whomever Chesimard thought she was. Maybe you could count the Fruit of Islam, but that's basically it. Break out the FBI's Cointelpro targets and that's the comprehensive list, most of whom were harmless radical loudmouths which everyone admits, now.

When the hell did MOVE start? There are TWO fundamental events in MOVE history. The battle with Rizzo occurs in about 78, and getting bombed out occurs in the nineties. A full generation plus AFTER Watts. Why would you even include them here?

Further, are you saying that the FBI Cointelpro list is the definitive list? You DO remember that FBI agents put Karenga on the same militant list as the Panthers right? That the shootout between US and the Black Panthers was partially spurred by FBI infiltration right? That King was on that list as well.

We all can flunk black militancy and move forward. Beyond the politics of human rights, beyond the politics of civil rights, towards the politics of social power.

No. YOU can flunk black militancy. But as soon as you do, whether it's because you don't think education is as important as capital accumulation, or because of whatever...you place yourself firmly outside of the old school. Albert Murray might flunk and still be down--but even here you won't see him sleeping on jazz and the blues. The rest of us don't get that pass.

What there *is* is a lingering sentiment that black rage can be converted into black militancy and that this is an effective political strategy. That's a myth, and McWhorter just exploded it.

um...right on brother!

i'm not teachin', just preachin.

Just what we need. Another jackleg preacher.

Comments

[Cobb]

I don't see a theme in militancy. And maybe I'm just living in a post 9/11 world where if bombs aren't going off, it just doesn't get my attention. I also don't see why the word has to be rescued, and I'm perfectly willing to say that all militants are knuckleheads, with the exception of Umkhata we Sizwe.

So if I'm going to go anywhere, it's to 'The Fire Next Time' because it's probably only going to be in the literature where I'm going to find some thread of militancy that is consistent enough to survive.

I don't see the separate destiny. I do see black aggregation perhaps in the upper middle and upper classes, but I'm not so sure it really matters. I keep tending to believe that America works. At least that's how it looks from my ninth floor hotel room in downtown Salt Lake City.

No. I don't see education as liberating as capital formation. It's an awfully hard pill to swallow, but I've been chewing on it a long time.

Perhaps when I get back from the Cass Tech reunion, I will have danced some of my aggression away - but I just am not seeing the vision. I don't see the Blues Aethetic seeping in and changing things. I don't see intellectual vanguards with clear visions. I don't..

[Lester Spence]

What you've expressed in your comment is all to the good.

But this is besides the point.

Because we aren't talking about the FUTURE of black militancy. Or even the contemporary role of militancy. We're talking about the PAST.

Why do you confuse the three?

[Cobb]

I'm quite comfortable with saying that the *percieved* militancy of Black Power was instrumental in gaining concessions. Malcolm and Martin had a pincer effect, even if it wasn't an explicit plan. Back in the day you *could* get 10,000 people on the street to protest for 3 clerical jobs. I'm not denying that the threat was credible, but in terms of actually carrying out that militancy, nobody made the leap. We didn't pull off so much as a McVeigh. Nobody even sniped Bull Connor.

I disagreed with and was disappointed in Murray's characterization of Malcolm. But I've had to fess up that Michael Eric Dyson said in truth, that Malcolm never went down South. We can speculate, and people do compare Malcolm with Subhash Bose, but Malcolm's Army never materialized, and my reading of history is that Stokely could muster one. So I'm not convinced that between the credible threat of negroes going buck wild in the streets and the actual possibility of sustaining armed resistance in 1968 that anybody was actually prepared to go the distance. I think the militant *mindset* was there, but not the militant apparatus.

So I immediately jump out to say what is the value of the militant mindset as a standing tactic in the arsenal of black liberation, and the answer in America is close to zero. What I wrote elsewhere and not here brings into the equation of what Blacks were doing all those years when the Red Man was getting annihilated. That's why I separate the periods of history. Putting Cokely, MOVE and SLA in with the Panthers is simply post-black consciousness, because the question was about *black* militancy which I read to be post-Negro struggle for things America had to offer in the post-war period, which is essentially all bourgie - above and beyond what Post-Colonial Africa even hoped for.

[Temple3]

is this mere tomfoolery or is there a greater game afoot to which we are not privy?

honestly, cobb, i can't understand how you've completed ignored the fundamental breadth of this question and the inappropriateness of such a narrow, ahistorical application.

[Temple3]

malcolm didn't do anything elijah muhammad didn't want him to do and the minister did not want malcolm or any noi members agitating in the south in any way, shape or form...and dyson knows that. and so should you, bruh...don't be spreadin' if it ain't butter.

[Cobb]

Where is the pan-generational, international strategy housed? Somewhere in a basement at Morehouse? Clue me in because I didn't get the memo.

[brotherbrown]

Funny thing is, the only way "Black Militancy (Nationalism)" could have evolved into warfare would have been is a manner that today is defined as "terrorism." Individual cells, operating independently on the same objective. But it never made strategic sense to even try it, so brothers focussed on other strategies.

Remember the Republic of New Africa? The idea of acquiring contiguous land, consisting of several of the southern United States, was spectacular, and the irony is that now in the 21st century, blacks are returning to the South.

[Cobb]

ick. Afrocentrics.

[brotherbrown]

Fear of a black {planet|region|state}!

[tootsie]

Interesting Bro Milton Henry and his Bro Richard were part of Black christian Nationalist movement with its lead organization The Shrine of Black Madonna with The Rev Albert Cleage aka Jarmogi as its leader ;the Henry bro broke away in the early 60s and started there on group"the Republic of New Africa."