In Conversation with History: Speaking Back to Trayvon

In Conversation with History: Speaking Back to Trayvon

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

In wake of the murder of Trayvon Martin, in the face of anger, sadness, frustration, outrage, sadness, and more anger, I found myself returning to several quotes that reflect on racism, violence, injustice, and resistance.  I found myself wanting to dialogue with these thinkers, these organic intellectuals, and those who continue to promote “freedom dreams.”  This is my conversation within an experimental dialogue that emphasizes the continuity of violence and resistance throughout our history.

Sojourner Truth: “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman?”  

DJL: Why does this continue to be so true for women, for people of color, for the poor?  The parent over there sends their child out to play, without a worry; the child over can go to the park, walk to school, or go to the store, without any fears. Innocence is protected.  Nobody can say that for Trayvon Martin; ain't he a person; ain’t a child? 

Frederick Douglas: “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them.”   

DJL: Mr. Douglas, your words remain true today.  Where Trayvon’s was deprived of his humanity, where his rights were ignored, where his future was denied “neither persons nor property will be safe.”  

Kahil Gibran: “Learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, I am ungrateful to these teachers.”

DJL: Yes, in just three weeks, we have seen injustice from those responsible for justice, terror from those who claim to protect, and erasure from those responsible for education and informing the collective.  We have once again seen the stains and violence of American racism.  Yet, we have seen the apathy and ignorance concerning these painful realities.

Shirley Chisholm: “Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live. Until a problem reaches their doorsteps, they're not going to understand. . . Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.” 

DJL: Ms. Chisholm, we are still seeing this today.  When black and suspicious becomes normalized, racism is invisible; when the murder of black youth is not breaking news “it invisible because it is so normal.” When black death goes unnoticed it has become normal and acceptable.  Only when fathers and mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers, brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters begin to contemplate “what if,” what if my family or friends couldn’t go to the store without fear, without threat, without potential death will we see change. 

Albert Camus: “In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.” 

DJL: Why do people continue to side with the executioners? But not in every case?  It must stop.  In a world where black youth can't walk to the store to buy skittles and something to drink, where black youth are deemed suspicious for walking while black, in “a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.” It is the job of thinking people not to silence the critics, the fighters of freedom.

Paul Robeson: “The answer to injustice is not to silence the critic but to end the injustice.” 

DJL: Indeed, because in a world with Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Aiyana Jones, Robbie Tolan and so many more, “the answer to injustice is not to silence the critic,” to denounce those who bring up race, who are angry, who are outraged by the consequences of American racism and white privilege, “but to end the injustice.” 

Paulo Freire: “Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”

DJL: In a world of injustice, where all violence, where all pain, where all suffering, and where all injustice is not treated equal, ignore, denying, and minimizing will not bring about justice.  Too many people are “washing their hands.”  They might as well keep it real and own the fact that “to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”

Haile Selassie: “Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.” 

DJL: Don’t we know this? In the weeks since Trayvon was murdered, the silence from the “justice” system, the silence from “our leaders,” the silence from the media, and from our collective inaction “has made it possible for evil to triumph.”  

Grace Lee Boggs: “Each of us needs to be awakened to a personal and compassionate recognition of the inseparable interconnection between our minds, hearts, and bodies, between our physical and psychical well-being, and between our selves and all the other selves in our country and in the world.” 

DJL: I am tired of the silence, lethargy and apathy. I am sick of how we sleep through the pain of some.  In a world where young black boys, and young Latino girls are unable to walk freely, I hope everyone from every community will wake up to the pain and suffering, wake up to view every life equally.  Our collective sleepiness is killing people and destroying families.   

Aimé Césaire: “When I turn on my radio, when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to…; when I turn on my radio, when I hear that Jews have been insulted, mistreated, persecuted, I say that we have been lied to…; when, finally, I turn on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been inaugurated and legalized, I say that we have certainly been lied to.”

DJL: I know; when I open my books to learn about contemporary slavery, I think we have been lied to, racism is not dead; when I turn on my radio and hear about another case of police brutality, I think we have been bamboozled, racism is not dead; when I go on social media and see another slur, another dehumanizing image, and “another joke,” I know we have been led astray, racism is not dead.  And when I hear about Trayvon Martin, a boy walking while black, I know that racism is alive and well and that only when we rise up and demand change, we will the lying end.  

Jacques Derrida: “We must do and think the impossible.  If only the possible happened, nothing more would happen.  If I only did what I can do, I wouldn’t do anything.”  If we don’t demand and imagine a new reality, we aren’t do anything.  

DJL: Amen! We must do and think the impossible; we must think justice for Trayvon and demand a world free of degradation, dehumanization, and fear.  

Fred Hampton: “Let me just say: Peace to you, if you're willing to fight for it.”  

DJL: Peace and justice for Trayvon, peace and justice for the Martin family, and peace and justice so there are no more Trayvons, that is if we are “willing to fight for it”

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis.  Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness will be published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.

“I Am…”: Troy Davis, Fred Hampton and the Black Freedom Movement

“I Am…”: Troy Davis, Fred Hampton and the Black Freedom Movement

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

The State has acted in the case of Troy Anthony Davis and in many ways that was never in doubt; it acted as it has always acted.  What was never really clear, is whether we all had the resolve to respond.  The more than half-million signatures that were generated on behalf of Davis (largely via social media), the re-engagement of the NAACP under the leadership of Ben Jealous, and the stellar on-the-ground coverage of the State murder of Davis by Amy Goodman and Democracy Now are just a few examples that we still do have the capacity to build, organize and resist.  That we need to sustain these efforts on behalf of social justice goes without saying.

I was most struck though, by the many images of signs, tee-shirts and Facebook pages that declared “I Am Troy Davis”—images that circulated within logics particular to this moment of social media and the market forces that frame so much of our visual culture and our political activities.  Anybody could imagine themselves as a political progressive if they simply wore a t-shirt.   Yet, instead the invocation of “I Am Troy Davis” took me back to another historical era of mass political resistance.

Black Panther member Fred Hampton was murdered by the State, at roughly the same age as Troy Davis, when the latter was initially arrested for the murder of  police officer Mark MacPhail.  Unlike Davis, who was arguably tried in front of a jury of his peers, Hampton was gunned down by the Chicago Police Department in concert with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover) in the early morning hours in what poet and publisher Haki Madhubuti has called a “one-sided shootout.”  Hampton’s crime was, ultimately, being one of the youngest and most effective organizers within the Black Freedom Movement of the late 1960s. 

The attack on Hampton, which included the use of a Black FBI informant, was intended to highlight the so-called violent nature of the Black Panther Party and was firmly in line with the FBI’s preference to remove effective local leadership, before they ascended to the national stage.  The plan backfired when the house that Hampton and comrade Mark Clark were murdered in was left open for public viewing, allowing for independent forensic experts to discover that  the vast majority of the gunfire came from the police officers; the party members in the house fired one bullet in self defense.

Though Hampton’s story was long known among Chicago residents and veterans of the Black Freedom Movement, a new generation became aware with the broadcast of the ground-breaking documentary series Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement 1954-1985.  The episode “A Nation of Law, 1968-1971” specifically examines the acts of repression visited upon the Black Freedom Movement by the State, including the murder of Hampton and the put down of the Attica prison revolt. 

One of the episode’s respondents, Father George Clements, had been named the first Black priest at Chicago’s Holy Angels Catholic Church in Chicago in June of 1969, six months before Hampton’s murder.  In the episode Clements recalls a mass he held in response to Hampton’s killing:

“in the midst of this mass, I was trying to explain to our children, we had all the school children there, all 1,300, and I was trying to explain to them the importance of Fred. And I wasn't getting through, at least I felt like I wasn't getting through. And in the midst of my explanation, I just burst into tears. And the next thing I knew was here was one of our 8th grade boys. He jumped up and he said, "I am Fred Hampton." And then a girl in the 6th grade, she jumps up and says, "I am Fred Hampton." Another kid in first grade, "I'm Fred Hampton." And before you knew it, the whole church, kids were all shouting, "I am Fred Hampton."

Father Clements’ recollection speaks to the power of the very idea of a Fred Hampton, as the late political leader was very much a prototype for the next generation of Black political leadership in the 1970s and the very reason he had to be destroyed.  By the time Hampton’s story is told via Eyes on the Prize, the Black Freedom Movement as it existed at the end of Hampton’s life had been largely—and effectively—neutralized by the very State forces responsible for his death, more formally known as the FBI’s covert counter intelligence program or COINTELPRO.

The value of consciousness raising by hip-hop artists in the 1980s, notably Black Power child, Chuck D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour), was that the very practices of sampling that allowed hip-hop to mine the sonic history of American music was also used to piece together a history of Black radicalism and resistance; a generation of American youth were introduced to figures like Joanne Chesimard—Assata Shakur—and Malcolm X. 

It was this element of hip-hop that filmmaker Spike Lee increasingly made use of in his own films, and as such, Lee drew reference to Clements’ story about Fred Hampton in the closing montage of his film Malcolm X.   In scenes shot in South Africa and Harlem, NY, Lee captured young students, encouraged by the actress Mary Alice and a just released Nelson Mandela, standing from their seats shouting “I Am Malcolm X.”  It was a brilliant piece of cinematic layering that allowed for a recognition of a broader reality of Black loss and trauma.

Unfortunately in the hands of Madison Avenue advertisers, Lee’s spark of creativity was little more than a gimmick, that they later deployed in the name of a “Cablinasian” professional golfer, who had no more interest in the history of Black radicalism than he did embracing the post-racial project, even as he become the defining symbol (before our current President) for that project within a neo-liberal meritocracy.   The subsequent “I am Tiger Woods” campaign which Nike ran in the aftermath of Woods’ historic win at the Master’s Tournament in 1997, effectively silenced the voices of those girls  and boys who stood up in Holy Angels Catholic Church chanting Fred Hampton’s name, and the legacy of the movement that their voices embodied.

And yet in September of 2011, Fred Hampton is again recalled, this time in another symbol of the State’s will towards violence.  Most heartening were images of Davis’ nephew De’Jaun Correia, a reminder that the State murder of Troy Davis can serve as his generation’s River Jordan, a possibility that was also reflected in the photoof Howard University students, mouths taped in silent protest, effectively mocking the first Black President for his own silence on the matter of Troy Davis.  May a generation be renewed in the aftermath of Davis’ death.

“I Arrived the Day Fred Hampton Died”: If Jay Z Met Fred Hampton

“I Arrived the Day Fred Hampton Died”: If Jay Z Met Fred Hampton

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

In the early morning of  December 4, 1969, before dawn, the Chicago Police Department in conjunction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation—The FBI—riddled the residence of Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, killing them both.  Hampton, who was sleeping in the back of the house with his pregnant girlfriend was unable to defend himself (he had been drugged by an informant), leading poet and Third World Press founder Haki Madhubuti (then Don L. Lee) to describe the incident as a “One Sided Shootout.”  On that same day, Shawn Corey Carter—the maverick hip-hop mogul and artist—was born in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, NY.   I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if these two—icons for two distinct generation of Black youth—might have ever had the chance to meet.

For those familiar with the legacy of Fred Hampton, simply known as Chairman Fred for many, Jay Z might seem the very antithesis of what Hampton represented.  At the time of his assassination, Hampton was being prepared for national leadership within The Black Panther Party, which was decimated by incarceration (Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale) and exile (Eldridge Cleaver).  Hampton was 21-years-old, five years younger than Martin Luther King, Jr. was when he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the same age of Malcolm Little when he was when he began the prison sentence that transformed him into Malcolm X. Hampton was no ordinary young Black man.

Specifically the Black Panther Party was targeted by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s counter-intelligence program, known by the acronym COINTELPRO.  The year before Hampton’s death, Hoover publically announced that the Black Panther Party was the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Part of the FBI’s strategy was to kill off the local leadership of the Black Panther Party, before it could ascend to national leadership. In that vein Hoover targeted the Black Panther Party’s breakfast program, because it was one of the most tangible ways the organization impacted their communities.

According to historian Craig Ciccione, author of the forthcoming  If I Die Before I Wake: The Assassination of Fred Hampton,  “The threat was on the local level because on the local level the organizing was most effective.”  Ciccone suggests that killing off local leadership could be achieved on a much quieter level—he notes that virtually none of the Panthers killed in the late 1960s were part of the national leadership.

Of those local leaders, Fred Hampton was perhaps the most significant—The FBI created a file on Hampton when he was just an 18-year-old high school student, who would shortly become leader of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party.  Fred Hampton was a compelling figure because of his skills as an organizer—he was instrumental in the creation of the Rainbow Coalition (a term later appropriated by Jesse Jackson) which included the Black Panther Party,  young White activist known as The Young Patriots and The Young Lords, a national organization of Puerto Rican activists co-founded by Felipe Luciano, who was also a member of the original Last Poets.

Combined with his accomplished skills as an orator and his willingness to organize beyond the Black community, Hampton was the prototype for the next generation of Black activist, a possibility that was literally killed in the early hours of December 4^, 1969.

One of the tragedies of Fred Hampton’s death is that his presence would not be felt in the Marcy Houses that Jay Z came of age in, or in any of the like communities across this country were young Black Americans lacked examples of political agency and activism that were in sync with their lives at the dawn of 1980s.  The period, best known as the Reagan era, was marked by the child murders in Atlanta, the explosion of crack cocaine in Black communities, the emergence of AIDS and the collapse of the kinds of social and cultural infrastructures that helped Black Americans survive segregation and racial violence throughout the 20^th Century.

Hip-Hop initially filled that void and though early hip-hop was little more than the “party and bullshit” that seems so normative today, it ability to allow young Black Americans a voice and alternative ways to view the world may have been it most potent political achievement. For example, Chuck D would have been Chuck D regardless of Hip-Hop, but how many young Blacks became politically engaged because Chuck D had Hip-Hop.  Indeed as Jay Z details throughout his memoir Decoded (written with Dream Hampton), the possibilities that Hip-hop offered were compelling enough to take him from the street life.

The easy part of this story is to suggest that Jay Z, as emblematic of a Black generational ethos, has squandered Hip-Hop’s political potential on the spoils of crass materialism, middle-management wealth and a politics of pragmatism (as embodied by his man Obama).   The feel good move is to imagine a 61-year-old Hampton and a 41-year-old Carter sitting down in conversation with Sonia Sanchez to discuss the legacy of the Black Panther Party on Hip-Hop and Carter’s funding of the Fred Hampton and Shirley Chisholm Institute for Black Leadership Development (which by the way Mr. Carter, need not be a dream). Unfortunately the history of Black political engagement is not as simple as one of those Staples “easy” buttons.

What happened on that morning on December 4, 1969 in many ways is not even about the man Fred Hampton.  Who knows what Hampton’s political trajectory might have been—COINTELPRO guaranteed a mixed legacy for so many of that generation of Black radicals whether they became the seasoned and spirited intellectuals that Kathleen Cleaver and Elaine Brown have become or a cracked-out Huey P Newton, Ph.D.  who was shot to death by a drug dealer in 1989 or the card-carrying conservative Republican that the late Eldridge Cleaver became in the 1980s.

What was murdered in the early morning of December 4, 1969 was the idea of Fred Hampton—an idea that some hip-hop artists, notably Dead Prez have tried valiantly to resuscitate.  Had Hampton been allowed to more fully mature as a leader, thinker and human, he would reproduced others who found value in his political passions and his singular skills. 

Had the idea of Fred Hampton been allowed to survive and flourish, perhaps a 16-year-old Shawn Carter wouldn’t have needed Hip-hop or the street game and would have lived in a world where his brilliance could have been amply displayed and reproduced long before Decoded became a New York Times Bestseller.

The Murder of Fred Hampton