Production Of New James Brown Film Reveals Structural Persistence of the Cultural Politics of White Supremacy and Capitalist Expropriation In the U.S.

“If I Steal It, Is It Mine?”: Racism, Cultural Expropriation, and the African American Artist in the U.S.
by Kofi Natambu
The Poetry Project Newsletter
New York
December, 1990

appropriation: 3. To take to or for oneself; take possession of. To make one’s own. The act of appropriating.

expropriation: 1. To take (property, ideas etc.) from another, especially without his permission. 2. To deprive (a person, business etc.) of property. To be separated from one’s own.
—The Random House Dictionary of the English Language

A critical analysis of the structural relationship between the African American artist and the political economy of culture in the United States must begin with a theoretical investigation of the social and cultural history of aesthetics and “race” in this country. However, the major problem with the teaching of this history is that the writing of it is monopolized by “white Americans” who don’t know anything about the subject.

For example, it is painfully clear that 98% of all the books written about ‘culture’ in the United States don’t have the slightest idea who the following people are or what they’ve “contributed” to American culture: ‘Native Americans (“Indians”), African Americans (“Negroes”), Asian Americans (“Orientals”), Latino Americans (“Hispanics”). As a result these same writers can’t really talk coherently or accurately about the actual historical experience of the Euro Americans (“white people” of English, Irish, Scottish, Italian, French, German and Eastern European descent). Obviously this creates tremendous confusion when it comes to any clear understanding of the complex meaning of these various histories. This is largely because of a profound ignorance of even the empirical details of what the cross-cultural contacts and conflicts of the many heterogeneous groups that make up the North American continent actually represent. Thus it is not surprising that the ideology of racism (the most powerful instrument of oppression in the world today outside of capitalism itself) dominates contemporary discourse about culture, aesthetics and ‘identity’ in the United States.

THE RELENTLESS HEGEMONY that this ideology wields continues to distort, obscure, and confuse the issue when it comes to a critical assessment of the major role that appropriation plays in cultural theory and praxis today. This is no less true within so-called “avant-garde” circles than it is in the academic/institutional oligopoly known as the “cultural mainstream.” In fact, what both of these aesthetic communities have in common is an equal disdain for, yet voracious exploitation of, other cultural ideas, practices, traditions and values stemming from different social/cultural groups (e.g. African Americans). These reactionary attitudes and philosophical limitations constitute the basis of the historical expropriation of black cultural forms in all the arts (i.e. music, dance, literature, visual arts, ‘performance art’, theater, etc.) by white artists and critics who seek to not only use (or appropriate) the techniques, methods and conceptual ideas of African Americans but to co-opt, absorb and consume them as their property through the systematic ‘legal’ and criminal theft of their cultural productions.

This is carried out by the massive structural domination of the art market by huge corporations owned and administered by predominately upper-class white males who, through bureaucratic managerial control, inherited wealth, and monopolistic manipulation of the vast economic network of marketing, distribution and exchange outlets (the various sites of Capital in the political economy of culture in this country as well as globally), determine what the schools and mass media teach about “who did what, when, where and how” when it comes to American cultural history.

There is nothing necessarily conspiratorial or sinisterly “planned” with respect to this on-going condition. It is simply the way things are when it comes to political, economic and social reality in the United States. The fact that the cultural/artistic communities (‘mainstream’ and ‘avant-garde’) largely support and accept the rather heinous status quo only exposes the vested interests of the “art world” when it comes to their own privileged position within the system. So the point is not merely that individual white artists “stole” their own “personal” aesthetic styles (and much of their content) from blacks but that as a necessarily privileged group of artists (by dint of their “race”, class, and sometimes gender) they were able to do much more than merely “appropriate” information (i.e. creatively use thematic and stylistic material as aesthetic source, cultural reference or energy conduit). The truth is that white artists have always sought to own the economic rights to, and residual benefits of, African American cultural artifacts and conceptions. What made this possible for them is the surplus value of what black artists and cultural workers have produced (in the form of usurious “contracts”, absurdly exploitive royalty arrangements and rigidly segregated markets at the points of both material production and exchange).

THE MOST BLATANT and notorious example of all this is the recording industry whose monumental profiteering off the creative genius of such legendary and seminal musicians, composers and singers as Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Theolonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Louis Jordan, Charles Mingus (and just about every blues artist in history) is scandalous. These are just a very few of the huge number of black artists who have revolutionized music as an art form in the 20th century and who have been mercilessly exploited. Who is the great Jimi Hendrix but a man whose extraordinary talent and vision has been plundered by a whole cottage industry of artistic and financial parasites who continue to bilk millions of dollars from his estate, while doing third-rate imitations of his artistry? In this context, who is Eric Clapton? Who are Mick Jagger & Keith Richard? Who is every ho-hum heavy metal guitarist since 1971? What does the multi-billion dollar music industry represent under these conditions? It’s important to note that this is not simply a matter of “trashing” your favorite white musician/songwriter either. After all, I’m not interested in examining the motives or intent of personalities involved in this process. What’s significant is the political, economic and cultural context that they are a part of, and what they decide to do about these conditions as far as their own cultural work is concerned.

In this light it’s easy to see the implications of the infamous “cover song’ tradition of the 1950s and early 1960s by white artists (a situation in which a popular white artist records the song and/or music of a black artist that often results in black artists not being paid royalties for their work and simultaneously being stymied from getting airplay and openly selling their music to a wider audience). Everyone from Pat Boone to Elvis Presley have cashed in on this little strategy. And while the economics and academic recognition of this situation have improved to a certain degree (more people are aware of what is happening and why) it still remains a major concern within the African American cultural community. Just ask the attorneys representing Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and the estates of Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and yes, James Marshall Hendrix, all of whom are currently involved in massive lawsuits against their respective recording companies. I’m sure there are many more examples.

Another cultural area where this syndrome of white appropriation turns into its ugly linguistic cousin is literature, where three generations of black writers in this century have been ignored, neglected and ripped-off with hardly anyone in academia or the avant-garde batting an eyelash. How else does one explain the colossal ignorance surrounding the important literary contributions of such major ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ writers as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Ann Petry, Melvin B. Tolson, Adrienne Kennedy, John A. Williams, Ishmael Reed, Bob Kaufman, Clarence Major, William Melvin Kelley, Charles Wright, Samuel Delany, Gayl Jones, Jayne Cortez, Calvin Hernton, David Henderson, June Jordan, Al Young and even Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka (whose towering achievements are far too often dismissed as the infantile rantings of a ‘bitter nigger’). There are many other people I could mention but I think you get the point. How many of you reading this essay have heard of/read Sterling A. Brown, W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James or Ida B. Wells? On the other hand how many of you know the work of W.C. Williams, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Ezra Pound, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Jack Kerouac? Many more, I’ll bet.

The fault for all this lies of course with the public educational system whose curriculums and policy decisions throughout the country mirror the already established ideology of the bourgeois class that does indeed “run” the nation. The mere fact that the American literary canon is made up almost exclusively of European and white American males makes this clearly self-evident. The expropriation of the oral tradition in ‘American literature’ begins with the poetic and narrative strategies of Thomas Woolfe and William Faulkner in the 1920s and reaches its apex in the Beat Generation poets of the 1950s (check out Kerouac, Ginsberg and Corso for starters). Again the issue is not the individuals who choose to use/appropriate material from other traditions and folk forms, but the supporting political economy that promotes and markets their cultural productions as “representative” or “central” to a certain aesthetic expression. At the same time the culture industry ignores or renders invisible the work of the seminal forces in the field.

THIS HISTORICAL DYNAMIC continues today with the myriad innovations in popular dance, painting (graffiti, mural art, etc.), ‘performance art,’ multimedia and film by black artists all being mined by white American artists with scarcely any real critical attention being paid to the nature of their technical and expressive achievements. One very significant example of this is the lack of serious critical analysis and commentary surrounding the powerful new hybrid/synthetic form known as RAP. Most white critics and journalists seem more interested in determining whether young black people inventing the form are “underclass criminals” or simply “obscene illiterates.” This is cultural racism of a particularly insidious and manipulative kind, especially in light of the tremendous popularity (as both form and artifact) that RAP enjoys among middle class white suburban youth (records don’t consistently go double platinum without this demographic audience). The corresponding fact that many white and black scholars are beginning to write in literary and cultural journals about the aesthetics and cultural politics of the form also exposes the dangerously reductive and racist attitudes of such middlebrow publications as Newsweek, The New York Times, New Republic, and The New Criterion. Between the “gliberals” (thanks, Ishmael!) and the neoconservatives, African American art is getting slapped around (and expropriated) from all sides.

But this historical assault on the intellectual and spiritual vitality, creative innovation, and liberating vision of African American art in all its forms cannot and will not stop the contemporary black artist any more than the imitators of Armstrong, Hughes, Hurston, Ellington, Parker, Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, Young and Holiday were able to stop their legendary contributions to the 20th century cannon (sic) of world culture. WORD!

HAROLD CRUSE
(1916-2005)

"Racial democracy is, at the same time, cultural democracy and the question of cultural democracy in America is posed in a way never before seen or considered in other societies. This uniqueness results historically from the manner in which American cultural developments have been influenced by the Negro presence. Since a cultural philosophy has been cultivated to deny this truth, it remains for the Negro intellectual to create his own philosophy and to bring the facts of cultural history in focus with the culture practices of the present. In advanced societies it is not the race politicians of the "rights" leaders who create the new ideas and the new images of life and man. That role belongs to the artists and the intellectuals of each generation. Let the race politicians, if they will, create political, economic, or organizational forms of leadership; but it is the artists and creative minds who will, and must, furnish the all important content. And in this role, they must not be subordinated to the whims and desires of politicians, race leaders, and civil rights entrepreneurs whether they come from the Left, the Right, or Center...Which means to say, in advanced societies the cultural front is a special one that requires special techniques not perceived, understood, or appreciated by political philistines. There are those among the latter who give lip service to the idea that Culture and Art belong to the People, but what they actually give to the people (not to speak of what they give to Negroes as people) is not worthy of examination. It is the Negro creative intellectual who must take seriously the idea that culture and art belong to the people--with all the revolutionary implications of that idea. "

--"Cultural Leadership and Cultural Democracy" from The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual by Harold Cruse, 1967

"The peculiarities of the American social structure, and the position of the intellectual class within it, make the functional role of the Negro intellectual a special one. The Negro intellectual must deal intimately with the white power structure and cultural apparatus, and the inner realities of the black world at one and the same time. But in order to function successfully in this role, he has to be acutely aware of the American social dynamic and how it monitors the ingredients of class stratifications ...Therefore the functional role of the Negro intellectual demands that he cannot be absolutely separate from either the black or white world."

-- Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967)

Harold Cruse
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 

Harold Wright Cruse (1916--2005) was an American academic who was an outspoken social critic and teacher of African American studies at the University of Michigan until the mid-1980s. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) is his best-known book.

1.1 Early life
1.2 Theater career
1.3 Academic life
1.4 Death and legacy
2 Works
3 Footnotes
4 Additional reading

Biography

Early life
 

Harold Cruse was born March 8, 1916, in Petersburg, Virginia.[1] His father was a railway porter. After his parents divorced, Cruse moved to New York City, New York. Cruse became interested in the arts as a young man, thanks in large measure to his close relationship with an aunt who often took him to shows on the weekend. During World War II, Cruse joined the U.S. Army and served in Europe and north Africa.[2] Upon returning home, he attended the City College of New York without graduating. In 1947 Cruse joined the Communist Party for several years.

Theater career

In the mid-1960s Cruse, along with LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), founded the Black Arts Theater in Harlem. Cruse viewed the arts scene as a white-dominated misrepresentation of black culture, epitomized by George Gershwin's folk opera Porgy and Bess and Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun.

Many believed Cruse was an opponent of "integration" which he referred to as "assimilation" because its policies were only geared towards integrating blacks into white society and not whites into black; betraying an inherent unacceptability of blackness in mainstream America. But in reality Cruse simply believed in a pluralistic society, any group must amass and control its own political, economic and cultural capital before true integration was possible. Without group self-determination, any group, but particularly American blacks would rely on the benevolence of other groups with political, economic and cultural capital, to voluntarily integrate with blacks which would lead to the dismantlement of black institutions and cultural traditions; rather than facilitate an equal and negotiated sharing throughout society.

While Cruse was very critical of American society, he reserved the bulk of his criticism for black intellectuals and leaders who he believed did not have the academic appetite to master the various disciplines necessary to advocate for real and effective societal change.

Academic life

After publishing The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual in 1967, he was invited to lecture at the University of Michigan (1968) and taught in the African-American Studies program at the Center for Afro-American and African Studies there until the mid-1980s.[3] Cruse was one of the first African-American studies professors, becoming one of the first to earn tenure without holding a college degree.

A theme of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is that intellectuals must play a central role in movements for radical change. This idea re-appeared in his other works including Rebellion or Revolution, a compilation of essays, and Plural But Equal.

Death and legacy

On March 25, 2005, Cruse died from congestive heart failure while living in an assisted-living facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was survived by his wife of 36 years, Mara Julius.

Works
 

Cruse, Harold (2009). Rebellion or revolution?. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9780816668038.
Cruse, Harold (2005). The crisis of the Negro intellectual: A historical analysis of the failure of Black leadership. New York: NYRB Classics.
Cruse, Harold (1987). Plural but equal: a critical study of Blacks and minorities and America's plural society (1 ed.). New York: William Morrow. ISBN 0688044867.
Cruse, Harold (2002). The essential Harold Cruse: a reader. William Jelani Cobb (ed.) (1 ed.). New York: Palgrave. ISBN 9780312293963., with a foreword by Stanley Crouch.
Footnotes[edit]
Jump up ^ Bernstein, Adam (2005-03-29). "Social Critic, Essayist Harold Cruse Dies". The Washington Post (Washington, D.C.). pp. B08. Retrieved 2013-05-21.
Jump up ^ Warikoo, Niraj (2005-03-28). Obituaries. "Harold Cruse: Author, Activist and U-M Professor". Detroit Free Press (Detroit, MI). p. B4. Archived from the original on 30 March 2005. Retrieved 2013-05-21.
Jump up ^ Lehmann-haupt, Christopher (2005-03-30). "Harold Cruse, Social Critic and Fervent Black Nationalist, Dies at 89". The New York Times (New York, NY). ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2013-05-21.
Additional reading[edit]
"An author of "Thought," Harold Cruse". African American Registry.
"The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual by Harold W. Cruse" - New York Review of Books
"Harold Cruse and Afrocentric Theory"
Harold Cruse's The crisis of the Negro intellectual reconsidered. Jerry Gafio Watts (ed.). New York: Routledge. 2004. ISBN 9780415915755.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/movies/james-brown-is-celebrated-in-get-on-up.html

MOVIES

His Own Godfather
James Brown Is Celebrated in ‘Get On Up’
By NELSON GEORGE
JULY 23, 2014
New York Times

Chadwick Boseman as Brown in the new biopic “Get On Up.”  Credit  D. Stevens/Universal Studios

It’s just the kind of movie clip YouTube was made for. In the 1965 Frankie Avalon vehicle, “Ski Party,” James Brown and his backing vocal group, the Famous Flames, enter a ski lodge after rescuing a frozen reveler. Resplendent in a white-and-red sweater, tight black slacks, black pointy-toed shoes and a regal pompadour, Brown performs “I Got You (I Feel Good),” giving the lily-white crowd of clapping skiers a taste of the showmanship that had made him a star on the so-called “chitlin circuit” among blacks. Even in a movie as disposable as “Ski Party,” Brown turned a corny scene into genuine entertainment.

In the biopic “Get On Up,” opening Friday, the filmmakers recreate this moment, trying to see it from Brown’s point of view. While he glides through his steps, we see slow-motion shots of the listeners as if they were creatures from another, whiter planet, one Brown is reluctantly visiting in hopes of reaching a wider audience. In that scene, Brown dances off the set. In the new film, he does a split but doesn’t come up, apparently having ripped his pants.   The new moment is slightly comic but undercuts Brown’s mastery.

Depicting James Brown on screen has always been a seductive proposition. As one of the greatest stage performers of the 20th century, he has inspired documentarians, playwrights, comedians and other artists who see the outlines of his greatness.  But capturing the man inside, and the meaning of his life, is a tricky business.

There was a fluidity to his identity that was reflected in his many stage nicknames: Mr. Dynamite, the hardest working man in show business, Soul Brother No. 1, the Godfather of Soul and the Original Disco Man, as he variously billed himself. All enduring pop stars have the ability to shift with the culture, but Brown’s moves — from staunch integrationist to proto-black nationalist and back, from civil rights role model to wife beater, from disciplined bandleader to drug addict — suggest an inner turmoil that belied his outer confidence. Shortly after his death, I helped edit a collection of articles that spanned Brown’s long career, and in reading the pieces was struck by how many journalists saw the contours of the man but struggled to truly penetrate his psyche. With a feature film about to arrive and a coming documentary, it’s time to take stock of this imposing figure.

Brown, who died on Christmas Day 2006, began his career in the ’50s under the spell of Little Richard and ended it as a major influence on current singer-dancers like Usher and Chris Brown. Michael Jackson and Prince, of course, were acolytes. Reared on gospel, blues and jazz, Brown was a dominant force in the soul ’60s, created funk, inspired disco and laid hip-hop’s foundation with his beats.

As important as Brown was on vinyl, his stage show and personality are legendary: Tilting a mike stand far forward and, before it hit the stage, pulling it back via the cord. Dropping into and rising out of splits. Feigning exhaustion and donning a regal cape before returning to sing again. Executing every new dance from the ’60s to the ’80s with deft steps and body control made Brown a dominant figure during an explosive era for pop music.

Brown was a self-made man who as a child was abandoned by both his parents. So, with success, he constructed his own world in which few could address him by his first name (for employees and interviewers alike it was strictly Mr. Brown), and musicians were fined midshow. An immense ego strove to mask any insecurity. His drive to succeed was as unrelenting as his dancing. During the civil rights movement, he emerged as a leader capable of preventing a riot in Boston after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But he was also an eccentric, who would give up his processed hair for an Afro during the “Black Is Beautiful” era, only to return to the retro style because he loved having straight hair.

“Get On Up,” directed by Tate Taylor from a clever screenplay by the brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, attempts the difficult task of capturing a driven artist whose career spanned six decades and whose public persona overshadowed his inner life. Just as hip-hop would take break beats from the middle or end of Brown’s records to make new sounds, the Butterworths eschew a linear structure, jumping from 1988 to 1968 to 1938 and so on to put you at important turning points in Brown’s life.

The producer Brian Grazer, a Brown fan since his teenage years, first got rights to the star’s story 13 years ago, he said. At one point, Spike Lee was to direct, with Wesley Snipes to star. When Brown died, “it made making the film impossible,” Mr. Grazer added. “All the relationships we’d cultivated dissipated.” Struggles over the estate made Mr. Grazer and company step away.

“Then about a year after his death, Mick Jagger called,” Mr. Grazer said. “He’d cleared all the key rights and read the script. He wanted to partner up.”

Mr. Jagger thought Brown’s “life and times and his struggle against adversity” deserved a film treatment, he said via email. Not only did he push to get “Get On Up” made but he is also producing a coming documentary about Brown directed by the Oscar-winning Alex Gibney.

“James was an early influence on me in many ways,” Mr. Jagger said. “He showed me how to interact with an audience and that you always have to give 100 percent of your energy every show.”

Though not close friends, Brown and Mr. Jagger did interact quite a bit in the ’60s. Both performed in “The T.A.M.I. Show,” a multi-act concert filmed in 1964, a sequence that plays a small part in the biopic.

It’s an interesting cultural phenomenon of the Obama presidency that a surprising number of films focused on black American history have both been financed and successful: “42,” “Django Unchained,” “The Help,” “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” and the 2014 Oscar winner for best picture, “12 Years a Slave.” In addition, two separate films centered on Nelson and Winnie Mandela have been released. A film about Jimi Hendrix is due in September. A biopic of Nina Simone has been filmed; a feature about the 1965 civil rights march that began in Selma just wrapped; one about Miles Davis is shooting now; and projects about the rap group NWA and the rapper Tupac Shakur are in the works.

African-Americans tend to view any Hollywood treatments of their history with at best guarded optimism and often with dread. Decades of omissions, half-truths and outright lies about their role in this nation’s history tend to make black viewers skeptical of the most well-intentioned projects. There is also a sense that black directors and writers are being excluded from telling these stories in Hollywood since, with a few notable exceptions (Mr. Daniels, Steve McQueen of “12 Years a Slave” and Ava DuVernay of “Selma,” among them), these films have been told by white producers, writers and directors. That said, many of these projects have languished, in some cases, for decades until the current epoch. Certainly, they have been a boon to many black performers. Chadwick Boseman, a relatively unknown young actor, has, with Jackie Robinson in “42” and now Brown, played two of the most important cultural figures in American history.

Portraying Brown is complicated by the singer himself, who sometimes seemed to be a caricature of soul music emotion as well as an expression of it. This was particularly true in the last decades of his life, when in the “Blues Brothers” movies and TV appearances he played cartoonlike versions of himself.

Even back at his height as a best-selling recording artist and cultural figure in the ’60s and ’70s, Brown was ridiculed by stand-up comedians for his guttural singing, sweaty histrionics and massive ego. One of Eddie Murphy’s signature “Saturday Night Live” moments was the 1983 skit “James Brown Celebrity Hot Tub Party,” in which he parodied Brown’s vocals and processed hair, and, backed by a funky band, squealed about the virtues of relaxing in bubbling hot water. It was a wickedly funny take on Brown that showcased Mr. Murphy’s genius for mimicry and made it hard to watch Brown again without a knowing smile. Mr. Murphy’s version of Brown was so compelling that even when he played James (Thunder) Early in “Dreamgirls” (2006), a character who looked a lot like the soul singer Wilson Pickett, it was hard not to see it as another version of Brown.

Truthfully, Brown’s legacy is much richer than just passionate singing. With the aid of the arrangers Pee Wee Ellis and Fred Wesley, Brown reworked the bluesy basis of rhythm and blues so that every instrument worked as part of the rhythm section, creating funk music in the process. Though “Get On Up” doesn’t spend much time on Brown’s creative process, there is an effective scene in which Brown browbeats his band, making every musician, from guitarist to trumpeter, testify to the notion that everyone is playing “a drum.”

At the film’s end, a title card explains how widely his beats have been sampled. But there are no scenes showing Brown’s initial irritation with his music being reworked, his struggle to understand sampling or his collaborations with hip-hop figures like Afrika Bambaataa. Hip-hop samples, both of his music and his vocals, have kept Brown relevant to young listeners in a way that have eluded most of his ’60s soul peers. The spit-and-polish Brown trying to relate to saggy-pants M.C.s could have been fun.

Like many musicians, Brown suggested in interviews that you’d learn all you need to know about him by listening to his music, but that actually isn’t true. His ideas about ownership and control of his career were visionary. Before running into tax troubles in the mid-’70s Brown owned a number of radio stations, fast-food restaurants, record labels and a private plane well before it became a rock-star staple.

My favorite sequence in “Get On Up” is not a stage performance or a temper tantrum, but a moment when Brown’s smarts are depicted. His manager and booking agent Ben Bart gives him a Cadillac as a gift, a clichéd way for white authority figures to reward black stars for achievement. Brown is not impressed. Later, he outlines a new system of touring, assuming a central role in booking his shows and thus minimizing promoters’ ability to pocket most of the gate.

Brown would sit in his dressing room after every show going over the box office ledger and greeting local radio D.J.s and record store owners until he’d shaken every hand, all the while getting his hair done. Brown, no doubt, was over the top. But young James Brown was also a forward thinker who would thrive in the current music environment, in which artists are self-contained enterprises who rely not on record company largess but on their own talent, innovations and moxie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_George

Nelson George
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

NELSON GEORGE

Born     September 1, 1957 (age 56)
Brooklyn, New York, USA
Education    St. John's University
Occupation    journalist
author
columnist
music & culture critic
filmmaker
Years active    1979–present

Nelson George (born September 1, 1957) is an African-American author,[1] columnist, music and culture critic, journalist, and filmmaker. He has been nominated twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Contents 
1 Biography
2 Literary work
3 Film and television work
4 References
 

Biography

George attended St. John's University, after which he served as a music editor for Billboard magazine from 1982 to 1989. While there, George published two books; Where Did Our Love Go: The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound in 1986, and The Death of Rhythm & Blues in 1988. He also wrote a column, entitled "Native Son," for the Village Voice from 1988 to 1992. He first got involved in film when, in 1986, he helped to finance director Spike Lee's debut feature She's Gotta Have It.

A lifelong resident of Brooklyn, New York, George currently lives in Fort Greene.

Literary work

George has authored fifteen non-fiction books, including the bestseller The Michael Jackson Story in 1984, Blackface: Reflections on African-Americans and the Movies in 1994, Elevating the Game: Black Men and basketball in 1992 and Hip Hop America in 1998. With Alan Leeds he co-authored The James Brown Reader, a collection of articles about the Godfather of Soul in 2008. in 1991 he co-wrote the Halle Berry vehicle Strictly Business and in 1993 Nelson was co-creator of the movie CB4 starring comedian Chris Rock.

Nelson George's The Death of Rhythm and Blues chronicles and critiques the path that R&B has taken. Nelson takes a close look at the genre's fall to the hands of the mainstream and even mentions that some popular artists sold out.

Film and television work
 

In 2004, George made a short film called To Be a Black Man, starring Samuel L. Jackson, and a documentary called A Great Day in Hip-Hop. Both titles appeared in festivals in New York, London, and Amsterdam. He executive-produced the HBO film Everyday People which also debuted in 2004 at the Sundance Film Festival.

Currently he is serving as co-executive producer of VH1's Hip Hop Honors television show and executive producer of Black Entertainment Television's American Gangster series, which was the highest rated series in the history of BET in 2006. His directorial debut, Life Support, starring Queen Latifah, aired on HBO on March 10, 2007. Latifah won several awards for her performance as Ana Wallace, including a Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild award, and the NAACP Image Award. Life Support was also named best TV film of the year by the NAACP. He also currently hosts the VH-1 series "Soul Cities", which examines the music and culture of six prominent cities in the U.S.

A resident of Fort Greene, Brooklyn for over 25 years, George wrote, narrated, and co-directed with Diane Paragas the 2012 feature documentary, Brooklyn Boheme, portraying the uniquely vibrant and diverse African American artistic community of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill during the 1980s and '90′s that included Spike Lee, Chris Rock, Branford Marsalis, Rosie Perez, Saul Williams, Lorna Simpson, Toshi Reagon, writer Touré, writer Adario Strange, Guru of Gang Starr, Erykah Badu, and Talib Kweli, among many others. Unlike the legendary Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, which was largely a literary scene, the artists collected in these neighborhoods were as involved with newer means of expression (film, rock music, hip hop, avante garde theater, stand up comedy, photography) as with traditional African-American artistic pursuits (poetry, jazz.) The film premiered on Showtime Networks in February 2012 for Black History Month.

References
Jump up ^ "BROWNSVILLE BRED Announces Series Of Post-show Talk Backs". Broadway World. July 6, 2011. Retrieved 8 July 2011.

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/29/mick-jagger-get-on-up_n_5625588.html?utm_hp_ref=entertainment&ir=Entertainment

Why Did Mick Jagger Produce The James Brown Movie, 'Get On Up'? Let Him Tell You
by Christopher Rosen
July 29, 2014
Huffington Post

MICK JAGGER

Mick Jagger has been a James Brown fan for actual decades. The Rolling Stones lead singer, who turned 71 on Sunday, has admitted he copied many of Brown's dance moves on stage. As the men rose to prominence as two of the biggest singers of the 1960s, they even became acquaintances. It was a relationship that lasted until Brown's death in 2006.

"I saw him at a show in Cleveland. I can't remember when, but we were both there together," Jagger told HuffPost Entertainment when asked about the last time he saw Brown alive. "I went to see his show, and he came to see me. We had a good time."

For Jagger, his connection to Brown has only increased in the eight years since the pioneering singer died. Peter Afterman, Brown's estate manager and Jagger's long-time friend, asked the Rolling Stones frontman if he wanted to make a documentary on Brown's life after securing music rights to Brown's catalog of hit songs. Jagger thought to take it one step further: a feature film about Brown that could work in concert with documentary. It was then that he connected with producer Brian Grazer, who had been working on a Brown movie himself for a decade with little triumph. Using a script written by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, Jagger and Grazer put together "Get On Up," an unconventional biography about Brown that jumps through the singer's life, from his troubled upbringing in Georgia to his incredible career as a performer to his numerous issues with the law. (Brown was arrested multiple times on domestic violence charges and also spent time in prison for other offenses, including a three-year stint after leading police on a high-speed chase in 1988.)

Starring Chadwick Boseman as Brown and directed by Tate Taylor, "Get On Up" hopes to capitalize on audiences who helped make "Lee Daniels' The Butler" and Taylor's previous film, Best Picture-nominee "The Help," surprise box office hits in the month of August. For his part, Jagger has everything in his power to make the film a success: In addition to being a hands-on producer for "Get On Up" during production, Jagger has promoted the film on the "Today" show and in interviews with TIME magazine, Billboard, USA Today and The Huffington Post. We spoke to Jagger about his involvement in "Get On Up" at the world famous Apollo Theater in New York on a hazy, hot and humid Saturday afternoon in July. An edited transcript of our conversation is below.

You were producing the Alex Gibney documentary, "Mr. Dynamite: James Brown and the Power of Soul," and, as the story goes in the press notes, woke up one day and thought a feature on Brown would be great too. Why?

It's just a different animal, isn't it? Obviously I thought of "Ray." I thought "Ray" was a great movie. I loved that movie and people loved that movie. But I thought, in a way, that James Brown's life story and his onstage persona was more interesting. The onstage performances are more vivid and alive than in Ray's story. As much as we love Ray Charles, and he's one of my favorite singers, but I mean, when I thought about it, I thought, "Wow, if you could make a movie like that [with Ray Charles], we can certainly do a movie about someone like James Brown." But without copying "Ray" in any way, so why not make a feature of it too? And we can do the documentary, too. They can both be fantastic.

You've discussed how James Brown influenced you. Watching the movie, I couldn't help but think of how we can see parts of James Brown in singers like David Lee Roth and Axl Rose and also modern hip-hop artists like Kanye West and Jay Z. Do you think people even realize how influential Brown was across all genres of music?

Well, probably not. Why would they? But he was definitely a role model on many levels. He's a role model as a guy who comes out on stage and really works his butt off. He always gave his best. He came out and did it. I never thought, "I want to be like that!" But obviously that rubs off on you. The other person I toured with was Little Richard. Every night he went out there -- didn't matter who the audience was, whether they were good, bad or indifferent -- and he just worked it. That rubs off on you. These are guys who were just always working it. So that's the way you want to be. On the other level, James Brown wanted to be in control of his own destiny. This movie is about someone who wants to be in control of their career and their life, especially when they came from a place where they weren't in control or they had very little to start with.

The movie depicts the infamous T.A.M.I. concert, and shows a screen version of The Rolling Stones watching Brown perform. How familiar were you with Brown before that show?

Very familiar. I had everything. I had all his music. I had seen his music here at the Apollo. I talked to him. I hung out with him.

How much influence did you have on who was cast as a Mick Jagger for that scene?

Not much, in the end. I was somewhere far away. I don't want to talk about it really. How can I talk about it without sounding ... there was a little bit of poetic license in that scene. In the end the scene works. It's a fun scene. It wasn't really what happened, but it works well.

As a producer was there one moment that you really fought to keep in the finished film?

I can't really remember. My thing was, I wanted you, the audience, to be pulling for James. Sometimes when I read the script, I felt there was some feeling that you ... I was really saying, "I'm not pulling for this guy enough." It was quite simple really: It was just a question of juxtaposition of a few scenes. It wasn't really taking things out, it was where things were in the story. It's just where you put the accentuation. It doesn't matter how bad he is or how good he is, you want to see both sides of a character. But nevertheless, you do want to be pulling for him.

You obviously don't need to be a producer. Why do you do it?
I quite enjoy doing it. It's a different discipline, but it has a lot of things that are the same [as leading the Rolling Stones]: managing large groups of people, making sure they get on with a common goal. But you've also got a lot of competing parties and you have problems to solve and so on. I also like the literary part of it, which I don't really get to do that much. I like the scripts. I like solving the puzzles. I kind of enjoy the dealmaking. I mean, as long as it doesn't go on forever. It's a lot of moving parts! As long as it doesn't take all my time, because I like to do creative things in other ways, it's a great thing. It's still a creative thing, it's not a business only thing. So it depends which route you take. Being a producer can mean many things. For this particular movie, it was quite interesting because it did have a good literary beginning. Other movies you're presented with a script and there is very little you can say. It's done. It could even be cast. You still get the same credit. With this, it was a much longer process.

You weren't just a rubber stamp of approval.

I'm not really interested in doing that. I don't mind doing that, you know, if it's a project you really love.

With this film and the documentary, you've become the de facto caretaker of James Brown's legacy for a generation of young viewers. Do you think about who will do that for you and the Rolling Stones?

Not really. I don't think about that much [laughs]. I always get asked about it!

With that in mind, did you feel any pressure to make sure James Brown's legacy was shown in a way that was true to him?

Yeah, I want it to be true to him. I think he's a wonderful artist and I didn't want it to be over-glamorized or too de-glamorized and sleazy. In making the documentary, it was the same thing. By shading and nuancing, you can destroy someone's reputation. In the documentary, for instance, it would be very easy to accentuate the negative side -- which everyone has in their life -- and that would be a mean thing to do. What I tried to do in both these films is to show not only the creative and other side, but to show him as a complete person as much as possible. But still really leave people with an uplifting feeling, which I think is a correct thing to do for an artist of his status.

How did you decide on Tate Taylor as director?

Brian and I, once we decided to partner up but before we had a deal, we decided to look for directors. We looked at lots of directors, and Tate was on the top of our list of people. We thought that even though Tate was relatively inexperienced, he did have experience with doing "The Help," which we liked. It was a bit of a leap of faith with Tate because he hadn't done a lot. But he convinced us that he could do this and he had boundless enthusiasm and energy and vitality to push the project through, especially for the limited amount of money that we had to make it. We decided that Tate could do it. I think we were vindicated at the end.

When did you realize it was the right decision?

When you start seeing the first assembly cut, after the first couple of weeks. You know, "Okay, I think it's working. We're going to keep going!"

Tate's going to be forever connected with James Brown, and I wanted to ask you about your connection with Martin Scorsese. Do you have a favorite scene from his movies set to your music?

I can't remember. He's used "Gimme Shelter" a lot. I'm doing this HBO series with Marty now. I think we're talking about using Stones music in that. Some of it. But, yeah he has a really great flare for using music. He was one of the first who used loud rock music, like, in your face. Before, it was sort of in the background, and he lets the music sometimes take over the scene in a really great way.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/brian-grazer-reveals-why-spike-lee-was-replace-by-tate-taylor-to-direct-james-brown-biopic

 
https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366

Brian Grazer Reveals Why Spike Lee Was Replaced By Tate Taylor To Direct James Brown Biopic
BY TAMBAY A. OBENSON
JANUARY 16, 2013
Shadow And Act
On Cinema of the African Diaspora

James Brown in Alex Gibney's "Mr. Dynamite."

Recapping what we've known until today...

First Spike Lee spent years trying to get his Jackie Robinson project financed and produced (unsuccessfully), only to eventually watch Legendary Pictures and Brian Helgeland launch their own Jackie Robinson picture, with Chadwick Boseman starring (scheduled to be released in 2013).

And then it was announced in October that Spike would have to, once again, sit back and watch (this time) Tate Taylor (director of The Help) helm a James Brown biopic, with super producer Brian Grazer producing, and Mick Jagger joining Grazer as producer.

You'll recall that a film based on the life of the singer has long been in the works, with Spike Lee directing, and Brian Grazer overseeing the production. Obviously, something happened, since Spike is no longer attached to direct, but Brian Grazer is still on to produce.

In the October post announcing the director change, we all wondered what could've happened that inspired the director change; now, 3 months later, we have our answer.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, posted on their website this morning, producer Brian Grazer was asked that question specifically. Here's the section of the interview where it's all addressed:

RS: What happened with Spike Lee, who was said to be directing the original movie project before Brown's death?

BG: He was the choice when I had the rights. I had just produced Inside Man with him. When the rights left me, I didn't have any control, and I couldn't make director choices. So when it came later with new people and new rights holders, we weren't doing it with Spike Lee anymore. The world was different then. Now you have to make movies for less money.

RS: When it was announced that Lee was no longer involved and that a white director, Tate Taylor, was on board, the blogosphere went nuts. How do you respond to those comments?

BG: What would I say? I view that a bunch of different ways. Mick and I don't see the world that way. I started my career making Boomerang and CB4. I've made so many movies where I've supported black artists. Tate made The Help, and that had almost an entirely black population. I just want to try to make the best movie.

RS: Were you surprised by those reactions?

BG: Well, I didn't read them! I can't make movies like that, where I'm going to look at some blog and change the course of the whole movie. I also think Mick is so amazing. For him to decide he's going to participate and split half the money – he's a man of integrity, and I feel pretty good about that.

Well, after reading all that, what I gather from his response is that the choice for who to direct was out of his control, after James Brown died, and the rights issues became more complicated as they now fell under a different set of rights holders, who, we can assume, didn't want Spike Lee to direct.

Is that what you read in all this as well?

He adds that the world was different then, and now movies have to be made cheaper. Does that mean we can also infer that Spike's asking fee was higher than Tate Taylor's? Or the budget for Spike's version of the film was more than what financiers were willing to spend on a Spike Lee-directed film about James Brown?

So, while we get answers we didn't have before, the answers themselves raise even more questions, which means, even more speculation.

In the interview, Grazer reveals how much of a James Brown fan he is, and how long he's been trying to get the project off the ground (12 years since he bought the rights), as well as how much of his own money he's invested in it thus far ($2 million). He also shares that, at one point, Al Sharpton was a consultant on the movie.

And as for whether James Brown (whom Grazer said he met several times while he was alive, and even discussed the project) was at all concerned about a warts and all telling of his life story on film, Grazer said he seemed OK with that.

And finally, with regards to casting, Grazer says they haven't decided yet, but are about to begin the process of testing/auditioning actors, and believes they'll likely be looking at a lot of actors before they find the right one.

You might recall that, at one point, Wesley Snipes was Spike's man for the starring job, but my guess is that Wesley's tax problems meant a change in plans.

In fact, as recently as 2009, it seemed like the project was as close to a sure-thing as any can get, with Spike saying in an interview with MTV News, "We're doing it together – it's going to happen... He’s my man."

He was referring to Wesley Snipes in that quote back in January 2009 (S&A hadn't been born yet).

Spike added that he intended to use James Brown's "authentic voice" during for any musical sequences in the film; essentially, Wesley would lip-synch.

Years later since that interview, little seemed to have further developed on the project, and it looked like it was dead.

In a 2011 interview, James Brown's daughter, Dr. Yamma Brown, said that the family was considering Eddie Murphy, Chris Brown & Usher to star in the Godfather of Soul’s biopic - an announcement which, as I recall, took a lot of you by surprise.

Whether or not any of the above gentlemen are still being considered, or if there are others, we'll find out eventually; although, I doubt it.

As I've said before, go with an unknown - definitely not a star.

The screenplay has been penned by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth (they wrote the script for Fair Game, the Naomi Watts and Sean Penn film).

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366
 

RE: The previous four (4) posts on the new James Brown film, 'Get On Up,' and its broader political, aesthetic, economic, ideological, and historical implications for African Americans within the structural and institutional contexts of the fundamental political economy and culture governing the United States.

Thus a recapitulation (now updated in italics and boldface text) of the initial quote from the critical essay "Cultural Leadership and Cultural Democracy" by Harold Cruse from his classic text 'The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual' (William Morrow, 1967) is in order: 

"Racial democracy is, at the same time, cultural democracy and the question of cultural democracy in America is posed in a way never before seen or considered in other societies. This uniqueness results historically from the manner in which American cultural developments have been influenced by the Negro presence. Since a cultural philosophy has been cultivated to deny this truth, it remains for the Negro intellectual to create his own philosophy and to bring the facts of cultural history in focus with the culture practices of the present. In advanced societies it is not the race politicians or the "rights" leaders who create the new ideas and the new images of life and man. That role belongs to the artists and the intellectuals of each generation. Let the race politicians, if they will, create political, economic, or organizational forms of leadership; but it is the artists and creative minds who will, and must, furnish the all important content. And in this role, they must not be subordinated to the whims and desires of politicians, race leaders, and civil rights entrepreneurs whether they come from the Left, the Right, or Center...Which means to say, in advanced societies the cultural front is a special one that requires special techniques not perceived, understood, or appreciated by political philistines. There are those among the latter who give lip service to the idea that Culture and Art belong to the People, but what they actually give to the people (not to speak of what they give to Negroes as people) is not worthy of examination. It is the Negro creative intellectual who must take seriously the idea that culture and art belong to the people--with all the revolutionary implications of that idea. "

--"Cultural leadership and Cultural Democracy" from The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual by Harold Cruse, 1967

Chokwe Lumumba (1947-2014) and Cleo Silvers On the the Pivotal Roles of Race, Class And Gender In The Struggle For A Revolutionary Society And Culture in the United States

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/free-the-land/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366

Free the Land:  An Interview with Chokwe Lumumba
Issue 14: A World to Win
Strategy
by Bhaskar Sunkara
JACOBIN

CHOKWE LUMUMBA  1947-2014
(PHOTO BY Trip Burns / Jackson Free Press)

In his last interview, Chokwe Lumumba discusses popular power and the past and future of revolutionary struggle in the American South.

Chokwe Lumumba’s dilemma was simple: how to be a revolutionary in a Mississippi the popular imagination would paint as anything but.

It was a mission that seemed bound to alienate and polarize long before he became mayor of Jackson, home to a State Capitol building that flies a defiant Confederate battle flag and a City Hall built by slave labor.

But when I went to Jackson to profile the newly elected Lumumba last year and in my conversations with Mississippians throughout this year, I was shocked at how hard it was to find someone who didn’t like him. Mainstream politicians like Rickey Cole, chairman of the state Democratic Party, and his staff were keen to show solidarity with Jackson’s new administration. They talked about Lumumba’s honor and integrity, whatever their political differences. After the mayor’s death in February at the age of sixty-six, Cole called him “a man by the people, of the people, and for the people.”

Even city business leaders like Ben Allen, president of Downtown Jackson Partners, expressed surprise during Lumumba’s administration about how clear, open, and efficient his first few months in office had been. Hampered by a lack of city revenue and hostility at the state level, Lumumba had just passed a one-cent local sales tax to fund Jackson’s infrastructure. The taps ran brown and many roads were in disrepair when I visited the city, and the Environmental Protection Agency had threatened action if waste systems weren’t upgraded. There was nothing especially radical about the tax, except for the fact that Lumumba took his case to the people, explaining the situation and winning consent for the measure in a referendum.

It gave a new resonance to the “sewer socialist” tradition that administered public office for generations in Milwaukee and elsewhere in the twentieth century. But there were signs that if the mayor and his Malcolm X Grassroots Movement stayed in power, the deepening of their revolution would attract something of a counterrevolution in response.

Lumumba was born in Detroit as Edwin Finley Taliaferro. He saw racism growing up, from all-white restaurants in Dearborn that wouldn’t serve his family to housing and job discrimination in the inner city. It instilled a level of social consciousness in the young man, consciousness that would only grow as he absorbed the era’s images: Emmett Till’s battered teenaged corpse, street battles and sit-ins, and, most formatively, the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Like so many other black youth, he was radicalized. Adopting his “free name” from a Central African ethnic group and slain Congolese revolutionary Patrice Lumumba, Chokwe put ambitions of becoming a lawyer on hold to join the fight. He was attracted to the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) movement, which had roots in Detroit but relocated to Jackson. They wanted a new nation in the African-American majority counties of the Southeast.

In 1971, Lumumba joined them in Jackson — where, as in other cities in Mississippi, blacks had little political representation and nostalgia for Jim Crow was still strong. In August of that same year, local police and FBI agents raided the RNA compound. In the ensuing gun battle, during which Lumumba was not present, a police officer was killed and another, along with a federal agent, was wounded. Eleven New Afrika members were arrested. In the aftermath, Lumumba moved back to Detroit, finishing law school at Wayne State University in 1975 before finding his way back to Jackson a decade later.

But Lumumba’s was not the tale of a radical coming to terms with society as it exists, like so many from the New Left. His legal career was radical and often controversial. He took on a host of high-profile cases, including those of Fulani Sunni Ali, rapper Tupac Shakur, and former Black Panther Party members Geronimo Pratt and Assata Shakur.

He never renounced the goal of black self-determination or apologized for his activism during his Republic of New Afrika years. Lumumba told me in the interview below that only his tactics had changed in light of the new political avenues now open to black militants in the South.

“At that time, in the seventies, we were locked out of government completely,” he said. “We were actually victims of government violence, so we protected ourselves against that repression.”

Today, the situation is different. From Tunica, in northwest Mississippi, to Wilkerson County, in the southwest, there are eighteen predominantly black counties in the state that have in the last few decades finally been able break the domination of white officeholders. Lumumba saw this as only the start of the deep transformation that the region needed.

“One of the routes to that self-determination,” he told me, “is to use the governmental slots in order to accumulate the political power that we can, and then to demand more, and to build more.” But he was quick to portray his movement as an inclusive socialist one. “This is not a ‘hate whitey’ movement. This is not some kind of a reactionary nationalist movement.”

Lumumba and the activists who rallied around his campaigns hoped to establish two planks of political power: one based on people’s assemblies and another on a solidarity economy, built on a network of worker-owned cooperatives. The assemblies were, for the moment, purely advisory. They started in Ward 2, while he was a councilman, but spread after his election as mayor.

Mississippi has had truly universal suffrage for only a little more than a generation. Yet Lumumba wanted to foster a democratic culture that was not just representative, but participatory. Inviting people to voice their grievances in town halls and have a say in the distribution of public resources was part of that commitment. But he had loftier ambitions: over time, he wanted the new organs of people’s power, absolute and direct democracy, to replace existing structures.

He didn’t even think that his government could be equated with “people’s power.” “That’s still a struggle to be achieved; that’s a goal to be reached. That’s not where we are now,” Lumumba cautioned.

The solidarity economy schemes were just as ambitious. While keenly aware of and open about the limits of political and economic experimentation on the local level — and seeing his new administration’s efforts as transitional — Lumumba wanted to use city contracts and economic leverage to foster worker ownership. Invoking the Ujamaa concept of former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, he hoped to transform a full 10 percent of Jackson’s economy into cooperatives by the end of his first term alone. The administration had been planning for months to debate and explore their options with activists and outside experts at a “Jackson Rising: New Economies Conference” in May.

It was less about spearheading a revolution from above than creating a climate of radical thought and experimentation that could take on dynamics of its own. In the meantime, even Jackson’s moderates were won over by clean and efficient government and Lumumba’s easy charm and humor.

That support would have been needed. Activists within the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement worried that if they went too far too fast, the state legislature could limit self-governance in Jackson, maybe even place the city under trusteeship. What’s more, both sides knew that the honeymoon period with downtown developers couldn’t last either. Real economic and political transformation requires taking power away from those not keen on relinquishing it.

This interview was conducted with Lumumba in February 2014, several days before he died from heart failure. For the Left, a few lessons in particular should be drawn from it. Lumumba governed to inspire movements from below, not to administer austerity. There need not be a contradiction between holding office, even executive office, and building a radical opposition.

Lumumba navigated these waters successfully despite the fact that he ran as a Democrat. Utilizing open primaries — a peculiarity of the American system — may not be the best route for socialists in northern cities where liberal machines still dominate and neutralize insurgencies from within, but it can make tactical sense elsewhere.

Nowhere is that truer than in states such as Mississippi. One of the most progressive voting blocs in the country is in the so-called Black Belt: the African-American majority counties that stretch across the Southeast. Without sufficient progressive numbers statewide to swing states in the electoral college or to elect anyone but local officials, these constituencies are ignored by presidential-cycle-minded national liberals. They shouldn’t be by socialists and all those committed to building militant currents among the most oppressed.

Success doesn’t come easy. But Lumumba and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement showed how years of disciplined work “serving the people,” including politicized relief work after Hurricane Katrina, could pay off in the electoral arena and how those victories could expand rather than restrict popular power.

We’ll need many more efforts like it in the years to come to end class and racial exploitation. And that’s the only way fit to commemorate a comrade as astounding as Chokwe Lumumba.

Sunkara: You came to Jackson in the early 1970s — what was the political climate in the city like at the time?

Lumumba: When I came to Jackson in March 1971, it was just about six to eight months after two Jackson State University students — James Earl Green and Phillip Lafayette Gibbs — had been killed on the campus.

The Civil Rights Movement rocked the foundation of the white-supremacist government and culture in the South. And across Mississippi, a lot of good work was spearheaded by Fannie Lou Hamer, Vernon Dahmer, Medgar Evers and others. In 1964, they helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. That party, in the early seventies, had a profound effect on the state Democratic Party. It was forced, for instance, to mandate that half of its delegates would have to be black and half be women.

So the Civil Rights Movement had significant gains, but repression was still extreme. Discrimination on jobs was commonplace. Even though the Civil Rights Movement had pretty much nationally won acceptance of the idea that Mississippi apartheid, or Jim Crow, as it was called, had to go, in the state there was still resistance to it. It was clear that even where access had come to universities and to restaurants, that was not associated with access to power — economic or political — for blacks.

There were very few blacks that were political officials — none in Mississippi’s major cities, and only some in small towns. Economically, it was still pretty much a white supremacist system. Rich whites owned production and blacks and others were relegated to the fringes.

At the same time, we still faced intimidation from right-wing forces. Klansmen populated police departments, and so on.

Around the country, a lot of black people’s movements had moved from the phase of just merely turning the other cheek in the face of attacks and egregious repression to actually declaring the right to self-defense, under the inspiration of Malcolm X. And that certainly was the position that we took, which inevitably led to clashes between those who were used to preying on blacks — and particularly movement blacks, like civil rights organizers — without any kind of response, and our determination to say that we weren’t going to be victimized.

We came in peace, but we came prepared.

Given this context, during the 1970s, you were a supporter of the Republic of New Afrika movement. How do you reflect on this period in your activism? Have your political views shifted at all in regards to black self-determination and the methods in which it can be achieved?

My view on self-determination is the same. First of all, it’s a fundamental right for all people — not just black people. I’d say that what has changed are the tactics, and somewhat the strategy, for reaching that goal.

In the seventies, we were locked out of government completely. We were actually victims of government violence, so we protected ourselves against that repression. But since that time, particularly in Jackson, where I am now the mayor, the population changed. The city is now 85 percent black. Many of those people have worked together with us as we fought for rights for our youth, political prisoners, the victims of racism, the prosecution of the murder of Medgar Evers, and so on.

We’ve been able to politicize the growing black population in Jackson, and in the state. We now have not just an 85 percent black population, but a black population prepared to elect progressive leadership.

The tactical change here is that we now can elect black people into government, particularly into local governments and county-wide governments. And we have a whole region called the Kush region, as we’ve named it, on the western part of Mississippi — everywhere from Tunica, which is the northwest, all the way down to Wilkinson County, which is southwest, and everywhere in between those two points. A contiguous land mass of 18 different counties; 17 of them are predominantly black. Only one of them, Warren County, is about 47 percent black.

In those areas, the population has been now for some time electing black sheriffs, black mayors, black city council people, et cetera. So what we have determined is that one of the routes to that self-determination is to use the governmental slots in order to accumulate the political power that we can, and then to demand more, and to build more, and even to build more statewide as the leverage for our position so we can launch an effort for more statewide control and participation by the black population.

I think it is important to say here, because I know some people will mischaracterize this, that this is not a “hate whitey” movement; this is not some kind of a reactionary nationalist movement. This is a movement that is geared toward winning the right of self-determination. It is our view that where you have a majority-black population, they have the right to have the majority of political power, to exercise the majority of the economic power and social power, to build that kind of influence. And at the same time they have a responsibility to make sure that the resources of society are equally available to all residents, whether they be white, Hispanic, Indian, and so on and so forth — particularly Indian, I would say. But all folks.

Last year, in an interview with the Jackson Free Press, Jackson’s police chief, Lindsey Horton, inadvertently laid out a pretty vulgar Marxist view of policing. He said that policing goes back to the biblical days — you can’t have a civilized society with haves and have-nots without the have-nots trying to take from the haves. Policing defends property.

How does administering these repressive parts of the state in Jackson clash with the movement’s values? What, if anything, can be done to change the nature of policing in Jackson, considering we’ll probably be living in a class society for a little while longer?

There have been a lot of contradictions in our struggle, and this is just another one. There are many stages of struggle that have contradictions in them. As a lawyer, people used to call me the “revolutionary lawyer” because I served political prisoners, took on causes for resistance and helped the movement move forward in many different ways. But nothing could be more of an oxymoron than a “revolutionary lawyer,” because the law itself is a reactionary thing in the United States, which has been set up, in many instances, by the people who keep us oppressed. There’s no question about that.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t be a lawyer, and it doesn’t mean that you can’t serve the people as a lawyer, and that you can’t fight for people’s rights as a lawyer, and that you can’t do all you can in order to change the situation. It’s the same thing in this position as mayor. And in fact, we think I can do more in this position than I could as a lawyer.

We’ve made sure that Lindsey Horton is in line with our vision that we are working to change the situation between haves and have-nots in order to bring up people who are have-nots and put them in a position where they will be equally respected in this society, where the social forces in this society will respect their equality and that, therefore, would reduce crime. Jobs and other programs reduce the need for crime. I don’t think that Mr. Horton is where I am on the issue, and he doesn’t have the background that I have, but I do believe that’s one of the obligations I have, to try to teach those who are in my administration the points that are important to the transition of society.

So, yes, we still run into some behavior which is problematic in terms of our march forward to create a revolutionary culture down here, to create a culture that challenges all repression and all types of exploitation — and the struggle against that manifests itself in many different ways — but I think so far, we’ve been pleasantly surprised at the response that we’ve gotten from people.

However, just because the people were ready to step forward and say, “Oh, I want to make that change,” does not mean that all the people who voted have a thorough understanding of what that change is, or how we’ve got to go about that change. And the same is true for all the people who work for the government.

You just alluded to your work as a cofounder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the movement’s role in your election. How do you see the relationship between the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and your position now as mayor of Jackson? Have there been measures to maintain the independence of the movement? Is it hard to govern without demobilizing the activists and the energy that actually got you in office? Or do you not see a contradiction between having a grassroots movement and also holding executive power?

Here again, you’re good at asking questions that present contradictions, but you certainly identified one there. It was a contradiction that was raised in Detroit when they elected their first black mayor, Coleman Young, who had some history of fighting for the labor movement and for the rights of our people. It raised itself in Chicago when Harold Washington was elected, and it’s true for some cities. And it may be nowhere more manifested than right here in the city of Jackson. There is a tendency — this is what creates the contradiction — for movement groups and protest groups and other activists who are trying to get revolutionary change to put their movement on hold and to rely exclusively on the mayor and the mayor’s staff to get things done for the people.

That’s a mistake. Our administration has very little more control over the economic realities of our society than we did before we got in these positions. We have some technical control over those things — or technical influence, let’s put it that way. But not real control — and especially in a city setting, as opposed to being in charge of the whole state. The contradictions exist. So what you have to do is, you have to tell the folks they have to be steadfast. You have to teach them that it’s important to have someone in office who’s trying to fight for the right things.

That’s necessary, but not sufficient. It’s not sufficient to win our struggle. We need to encourage the whole population to become involved in the movement for change.

To foster that kind of involvement, you’ve encouraged the creation of people’s assemblies. Do you envision direct democracy of this type just augmenting traditional representative offices, or one day replacing them?

The people’s assembly is a body where the people challenge government, ask government questions, get informed by government, and protest government when necessary. And that’s a movement that we support, and we to continue to support, to tell people that government is totally in their hands — and that’s on all levels: federal, state, and local.

The assembly should represent all things that don’t currently represent the people’s authority. And in many instances, that will be some of the elected government. And some of the bureaucratic structures. So I think the people should become more and more involved in reforming and changing the structures that surround them and the people that surround them — determining who handles structures, and how they should be elected, and who should be elected — until the people’s power becomes the same as, becomes simultaneous with, the development of government.

Now what does that mean? Does that mean that you have to have something different in terms of the name of the government, something different in structures? It’s probably going to mean that. That’s going to be for the people to decide. But right now, I don’t think it would be truthful to say, even though we are building a people’s government, that our government at this time is simultaneous with, and the exact same as, people’s power.

That’s still a struggle to be achieved; that’s a goal to be reached. That’s not where we are now.

You described the type of economy you’d like to build in Jackson as a “solidarity economy.” You’ve mentioned worker-owned co-ops and banks, community land trusts, and participatory budgeting. How is this progressing considering the fact that you are, as you mentioned, running a city where you can’t deficit-finance like we could at the national level?

Yes, there are limitations to what we can accomplish. We know that the problem is that too few people control too many of the resources that people live on, and that’s why you have your big gap between haves and have-nots.

What can we do in order to change that situation? Well, from the mayor’s position, a number of these companies want to get local contracts from us. We can create rules, and that’s what we’ve done. Jackson’s open for business, but if you’re going to do business in Jackson, then we say, “Look, you’re going to have to employ the people of Jackson.” And we say that over 50 percent of your subcontracting has to go out to what they call minorities — I don’t really agree with that term, but we’ll use it for the time being. It could mean Native American contractors; it could mean various other people like that. So that’s something to help begin some change.

However, that’s not comprehensive enough, because it leaves out a lot of the private sector who do not come through government in order to get their contracts, and the people employed by these businesses. We are a city, and I don’t want you to mistake us, yet, for a revolutionary state or some other place. We can’t seize corporations and turn them over to the people. We can’t do that. So that’s one of the limitations.

And secondly, we can have influence on trying to stop these corporations from discriminating on various different levels, because we can it make it uncomfortable for them. But we don’t have the ability to police that completely, because we’re just a city.

What did the movement look like before you were elected, either during the campaign or before it, in terms of community work building some sort of presence in the city?

That’s a good question. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement was created here in Jackson in 1990, and it was predated by some other work you have already referred to — the Republic of New Afrika — that started here back in 1971. So over the years, a lot of work has been done. But more importantly, since 1990, we have been engaged in a lot of youth programs. We have literally been involved in helping hundreds of youths go to college who would not have gone to college, and probably would not have finished high school, had it not been for us. We have run programs where they’ve learned about their cultural heritage, where they’ve gotten aid and assistance in the academic world, where they’ve had a chance to learn drama, and so many other things — and where they really became stand-up figures in their community.

We’ve also defended a lot of people who were the victims of racial abuse. We’ve done that all over the state. And that helped our situation. We helped thousands of Hurricane Katrina survivors. We literally sent tons of material aid to Gulf Coast survivors of Katrina, and we created political programs, political projects, and political organizations in order to fight the abuses that the Katrina residents were suffering.

As you know, Katrina happened in 2005. My first election to anything was in 2009, when we ran for City Council. We were also engaged in a lot of work to straighten out specific communities — building a garden, for instance, to help food flow for some people, and really for the idea of bringing people in the community together.

And we aligned ourselves with a lot of the civil rights organizations here who are working on many projects. A lot of them had to do with the so-called criminal justice system. So many people going to prison — not only those who are being wrongly convicted, but those who became sensitive to the problem that America wasn’t really providing, and that Mississippi’s system wasn’t providing, the opportunity for a number of young people to grow up in a healthy social environment.

We united with a very progressive ACLU movement in Mississippi at the time, with the NAACP, who worked on many of these projects, and with a number of other people and organizations that were dealing with the prison situation. Fifty prisoners had been killed in jail over a five-year period in the state. So we got involved in that project and exposed that in several instances they were not all victims of suicide as had been claimed. There was some skullduggery going on.

Those are some of the things, off the top of my head, that I can tell you about that we were working on at the time of our election. And of course we were building the people’s assembly before I got elected mayor.

Do you see your success in Jackson as being indicative of a model that could work nationally? I know the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement organizes across the state, and elsewhere in the South, but have you sought national alliances with other left groups?

The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement definitely seeks alliances with other groups, and the idea of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement is to build a movement of what we call a new Afrikan people. And a new Afrikan people is the same thing as black people, or so-called “African-American people.” But it’s also to build a movement of people, period. In other words, to create a positive, progressive movement across the borders of the United States and internationally.

We fully understand that there’s no freedom for us unless there’s freedom for everybody. Martin Luther King said that at one point, and I think it’s very true. So we seek different kinds of relationships, and we want to spread the things that we are doing, which we think are useful and can help people in other places. Of course, people are going to have to organize and plan based on the conditions in their own areas.

But the people’s assembly is something we recommend, and actually, the people’s assembly is something we borrowed from elsewhere. Our use of the assembly really comes from Katrina, with the destruction of New Orleans. There was a survivors’ assembly created in order to try to help folks in the New Orleans area and in the Gulf Coast area to reclaim their land and their jobs and their educational status. We facilitated that from Jackson, which is about two and a half hours away from the Gulf Coast. But we later decided that we would create an assembly for ourselves in order to advance our political objectives, so we wouldn’t wind up in a situation like the folks did down in New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast.

But yes, we certainly think that’s a model that can be exported and work for others across the country.

What has the response been from the Right in Jackson and Mississippi as a whole? Obviously, you’re contending with a hostile and very conservative state legislature.

The New Afrikan Independence Movement — which the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement is a part of, and is preceded by the Republic of Afrika and others — has been hated by the Right. We may be the most hated group by the Right, historically. And that was reflected in the way we got elected. During the election process, those communities that are more identified with the right wing voted almost unanimously for the other candidate.

I didn’t get many of those votes at all. In fact, there was one precinct where I got three votes. But fortunately, we got overwhelming support from the majority of the city, from people who benefited from our long struggle against repression, as opposed to people who felt threatened by that long struggle. However, I would like to suggest something: since I’ve been elected, even though those forces still exist which would oppose us, we have been getting overwhelming support, initially, from all sectors of the community.

I’m sure we’re not getting it from the Tea Party, or the extreme right — don’t get me wrong. But I’m saying that clearly there are white people in the city who were persuaded by Tea Party right-wingers and others that we were the devil, who are now realizing that is not true. And they see the logic in what we’re talking about, and we seem to be getting their support.

Now, there’s a lot to that, and some other time we can both talk about it and dissect it, and I’m sure there are going to be some strains in that relationship from time to time as people have difficulty understanding the sacrifices that they have to make in order to get a really revolutionary, changed society, and the other things that are involved in our transition. But as of right now, we’re actually in a period where we’re getting overwhelming support from across the city.

As an example, we just put a referendum on the ballot and got 91 percent support. That means that we got support from every segment of the community, and the referendum had to do with work that we need to do to repair the infrastructure of our city. That’s good for us, because we’re going to march on ideas which ultimately do help everybody, not just the black population. So I think we’re on a little bit of a honeymoon still, and I’m sure there will be a lot of political struggle in the future.

But as long as we can stay on the right side of it, keep the good ideas, and not get politically reactionary, then I think that ultimately — I’m sure that ultimately — we will win.

Portions of the introductory notes were first published in the Nation.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/07/when-the-unions-the-enemy/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366

When the Union’s the Enemy: An Interview with Cleo Silvers
7.22.14
by Andrew Elrod
JACOBIN

Cleo Silvers, a former organizer with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, discusses racism in the labor movement.
In 1973, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health issued a report on the auto industry estimating that workplace diseases alone were responsible for about sixty-five deaths a workday — more than 16,000 a year.

The numbers were shocking, but they gave some explanation for the dramatic upsurge in wildcat actions over the preceding half-decade — what historian Jeremy Brecher calls the “labor dimension of the Vietnam War era revolt.” The report also substantiated a claim made thereafter by labor activists: the number of autoworkers killed and injured surpassed the number of American soldiers killed and maimed in any year in the Vietnam War.

In the five years after 1968, workplace grievances inundated the union bureaucracy as newfound expectations of decency and dignity invigorated a generation of American industrial workers. The New York Times reported that the young workers entering the labor force were “better educated and want treatment as equals from the bosses” were opposed to “work they think hurts their health or safety, even though old-timers have done the same work for years,” and “want fast changes and sometimes bypass their own union leaders and start wildcat strikes.”

In the auto plants of Detroit, where an all-white management and union leadership confronted a darkening workforce, these grievances often assumed a racial edge. Of all the rank-and-file caucuses that formed in this tumultuous period, perhaps none was more militant than the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

Founded in 1969 to unify several black caucuses that sprouted up amid a strike wave, the League worked to organize independent black power within the labor movement for the explicit purpose of socialist revolution. A far-fetched goal to twenty-first century American ears, in that raucous denouement of the New Left, the League — and its short-lived national equivalent, the Black Workers Congress — advanced its cause in the political space opened by the UAW’s shortcomings on working conditions and racial inequality.

For black autoworkers, upward mobility in the plant was a rarity; as Nelson Lichtenstein writes in his biography of Walter Reuther, “Black workers called the skilled trades ‘the Deep South’ of the UAW.” And though most auto work was dangerous, it was black workers who bore the brunt of the industry’s hazardous tasks. In his 1976 book Auto Work and Its Discontents, labor activist B.J. Widick quotes one company official as saying, “[S]ome jobs white folks will not do; so they have to take niggers in… It shortens their lives, it cuts them down but they’re just niggers.”

Despite its work funding the Freedom Riders and the March on Washington, the UAW was guilty of its own institutional racism. By 1962, it had failed to elect a single black member to its twenty-two-person executive board, despite the fact that African-Americans by then composed a quarter of the Detroit membership. By 1968, there were still just two. Locked out of union leadership, their workplace grievances ignored, many activists turned to organizing wildcat actions.

This was the context in which the League of Revolutionary Black Workers was born. Though it would quickly collapse amid competing visions of black power, the League’s emergence underscored both the institutional limits of the post-war labor movement, especially in regards to race, and the consequence of that failure: a generation of activists alienated from their union. As Lichtenstein notes, “whatever their politics, DRUM’s [a League precursor] founding cohort constituted the same species of ideologically motivated cadre who had animated the UAW in its heroic youth.” Rather than incorporate this cohort, the UAW rejected their racial grievances and condoned managerial repression of shop-floor agitation.

One of these cadre was Cleo Silvers, a former social worker with VISTA in Harlem who had organized with the Black Panthers and Young Lords before turning to independent rank-and-file organizing. I recently spoke with Cleo about her time with the Revolutionary Union Movements in both New York and Detroit during the early 1970s.

You came to New York City as a social worker with VISTA, after which you began working at Lincoln Hospital. How did you end up in Detroit organizing autoworkers?

I met Jim [Forman] and several other friends in the process of the work that I was doing with HRUM, the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement, which was about organizing independent organizations of workers in the health care industry. That came from the struggles initiated at Gouverneur Hospital, at Lincoln Hospital, and several other hospitals in New York City.

The major struggle for hospital workers was around the issues of increasing education needs of the workers, bettering working conditions, and, not only that, the workers in the hospital industry also fought around patient issues.

HRUM actually began as a result of the Think Lincoln Committee, which was a coalition of community people, members of the Young Lords and the Black Panther Party concerned with hospital conditions. At the time I was a community mental health worker at Lincoln Hospital, which was so bad that people would be left in the emergency room for 72 hours and not be seen.

If you didn’t speak English it was almost impossible for you — they didn’t have translators — it was almost impossible for you to speak to your doctor. A woman who came to the hospital for a saline abortion was killed on the surgery table. There were people who went in for surgery and had the wrong kidney extracted. The people felt in the community that they were being used as guinea pigs.

We set up a patient complaint table in the emergency room. This is how we really got to understand what the conditions were inside the hospital. Patients would come to us with their complaints, and we would document them and compile them until we had a stack of complaints that you would not believe. And it didn’t take us a long time to acquire that many coming from the people in the community. It was really a horrible set of conditions inside that hospital for the patient.

Were you a union member at this time?

I was a member of 1199, but 1199 saw us as a bunch of troublemakers inside the union. We were young. We were arrogant. We knew that we were right. We knew that what we were fighting for was something that was going to be positive for the community. It was going to be positive for our class, for the young people coming up behind us, because we were fighting for better conditions.

We were fighting for a more equal distribution of the resources in society in general. We were fighting for an end to police brutality. We were fighting for the basics — for the right to be treated as a human being, the franchise, the equal ability to have access to all the things the society has to offer. We were kind of tough guys, in the sense that we demanded that they hear us. We wouldn’t go into a union meeting and not be heard. If they refused to call on us we would just take over the microphone and make our case to the rank-and-file that was in attendance at the meeting.

In the process of building our organization, we had learned about DRUM and the League. We began doing political education, and we were beginning to recognize that the working class had a role in society that was greater than most people understood. I was the co-chair of HRUM, and during one of our meetings with Jim Forman and several of the League workers — at that time I believe they had developed into the Black Workers Congress — there was a vote that I should take my organizing skills that I developed here in New York City, with HRUM and with several of the other organizations, and go to Detroit and organize in the auto plants.

When I got to Detroit I got set up in the home of Mike Hamlin, who was the chairman of the League. I met and studied with the Central Committee, which included General Baker, John Watson, Ken Cockrel.

What sort of work was the League doing in Detroit?

One thing was the book clubs. The reason those book clubs were necessary was that there were lots and lots of white people who were activists who were interested in supporting the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Black Workers Congress, but of course if you weren’t black or a person of color you could not be in the organization.

The League got me a job. The companies would have these cattle calls for workers to come into different plants, based on what they needed. There happened to be, when I came into the city, a call for workers at Dodge Truck. I was taken over, and I got hired on at the Dodge Truck plant in Warren, Michigan, which is right outside Detroit.

The racial composition in the plant at that time was about 70 percent African-American. There were Arabs. A very strong Arab community in the Detroit metropolitan area. There were Latinos, but that was a very small group. So the struggle inside the plant took all kinds of turns.

There was one struggle that was very interesting between the Arabs and the African-Americans. The African-Americans used to call the Arabs “camel jockeys.” The activists, the Marxists, came together and began to encourage the black workers to recognize that if they don’t want to be called a nigger, then you don’t want to call those Arab workers, who are your comrades that are on this line working with us, camel jockeys. Slowly, we began to build very strong relationships, and when it came time to take a plant-wide action, all of the workers who we built relationships with were involved and supportive, and took action along with us.

What sorts of issues did people organize around?

There was the paint shop, where workers had very little to support their breathing. They didn’t have masks that were very good, and the masks were overused, and the workers were breathing in paint and of course dying as a result of breathing in this paint. Speedup was the other important thing.

I worked in two areas. It was a filthy job, where you put the frames onto the line, and then you have several bolts and nuts that you had to attach to the frame. My second job was installing brake fluid cups. Brake fluid is a corrosive, and it would corrode my hands and feet. They gave you one pair of vinyl gloves per week and one apron per week and one pair of boots, because the brake fluid was running onto the ground, and it would eat through that stuff.

And I had been harassed by foremen. You know, foremen’s thing with women, that’s another issue. There weren’t a lot of women in the plant, and those that were there were always being harassed, whether you were black or white or whatever. It was not unexpected for a foreman to come up to you and say, if you sleep with me I’ll give you a better job.

Were there any deaths at the plant?

Absolutely, yes. There were several. One worker was crushed by a huge motor. The motors are very, very big, and they are extremely heavy. The really big guys were responsible for moving the motor around and dropping it into the shell of the truck, and one guy got crushed by a motor. There were people that lost hands and other limbs on the line because management would never stop the line when they were asked. Sometimes you could get stuck, and the thing is to stop the line. But managers would not stop the line. And you would be fired immediately if you were a worker on the line and you stopped the line.

What was the union’s role at the plant?

The UAW actually had a low profile at Dodge Truck. They had their votes, they had their meetings. We attended a few meetings. But the work that we were doing, with so many workers, you start to build relationships with so many workers. We didn’t really have time to fool with the UAW. Some of them were like, “yeah the UAW, they’re not shit, they ain’t doin’ this or that.”

But the point was that the UAW only fought for you if you were in the plant and your hand got cut off, then they would come and stop the line, you know, negotiate with management, that kind of thing. Or the workers in the paint shop decided, this is too much today. We’re breathing in too much of the fumes from the paint, we’re not going to do this anymore. Then the union would come down and try to negotiate with the workers to go back to work.

Did you witness a lot of shop floor activism disciplined by the union?

Absolutely, yes.

How did that go?

They would be like, you know, “you guys are fuckin’ up!” And really that’s what they’d tell you. And we’d say, “you’re fucking up by not demanding quality conditions, decent conditions, for us, for the workers. So don’t come over here tellin’ us we’re fuckin’ up. That’s not us, that’s you.” So there was back and forth all the time between us.

Were you aware of the work the union had done to support the Civil Rights Movement?

That’s before the period in which the League of Revolutionary Black Workers took place. So yes they did progressive things, but that was way back in the Civil Rights Movement. You see, the development of the League came on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, as a result of workers not wanting to be nonviolent, and recognizing that it was important to organize on a class basis. The Civil Rights Movement was done on a racial basis. The struggle for equality and justice inside a town like Detroit was fully based on working class awareness.

What sorts of actions did the workers take against poor conditions?

There were heat walkouts, several every year. In the summer inside the plant it would get up to 120 degrees, and our position was that once the temperature was over 120 degrees that is not a place for human beings to be working in.

Management would not shut the plant down. They would expect us to continue to work. But even workers who didn’t agree with us did not want to be working in [a] 120 degree auto plant. It wasn’t that difficult. We would go all around the plant and say, “It’s very hot today, once it hits 120 degrees we’re all leaving.” Everybody would leave. Who wants to be there? It was led by us, the young members of the League, the young black workers, and supported very heavily by the Arab workers, and some of the white workers too.

That’s the other thing that was going on. When you are working in a place like an auto plant, it is very difficult to maintain prejudice, because we’re all in the same boat, we’re all doing the same thing, and you get to discuss. “Here I’m standing next to you on the line.” “Well I don’t like you!” “Why you don’t like me? We have to care about each other!” And you have to watch each other’s back.

So that’s one of the most important things. You want to see prejudice and racism obliterate itself? Give a group of people a job to do where they have to share the responsibility and the labor. I think that’s one of the great things I learned inside the auto plant.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/about/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366

Raison d’être

Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches over 6,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of 300,000 a month.

EDITOR & PUBLISHER
Bhaskar Sunkara
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Remeike Forbes
EDITORS
Seth Ackerman
Max Ajl
Nicole Aschoff
Alyssa Battistoni
Mike Beggs
Megan Erickson
Peter Frase
Connor Kilpatrick
ART EDITOR
Erin Schell
BOOK EDITOR
Scott McLemee
MULTIMEDIA EDITOR
Rebecca Rojer
ONLINE EDITOR
Micah Uetricht
DESIGN ASSISTANT
Nicha Ratana-Apiromyakij
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Liza Featherstone
Belén Fernández
Benjamin Kunkel
Chris Maisano
Gavin Mueller
Karen Narefsky
Kate Redburn
Corey Robin
ASSISTANT EDITORS
Shawn Gude
Cyrus Lewis
Jennifer Pan
WEB DEVELOPMENT
Daniel Patterson
CIRCULATION
Max Thorn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine)

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366

Publisher
Bhaskar Sunkara
Categories
Politics, Culture
Frequency
Quarterly
Circulation
7,500
First issue
Winter 2011
Country
United States
Based in
New York
Language
English
Website
jacobinmag.com
Jacobin (magazine)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Publisher Bhaskar Sunkara

Categories Politics, Culture
Frequency Quarterly
Circulation 7,500
First issue Winter 2011
Country United States
Based in New York
Language English
Website jacobinmag.com

Jacobin is a quarterly "magazine of culture and polemic"[1] based in New York. Its self-styled raison d’être is as a "leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture". The publication began as an online magazine released in September 2010,[2] but expanded into a print journal later that year.[3] Jacobin has been described by its publisher as a radical publication, "largely the product of a younger generation not quite as tied to the Cold War paradigms that sustained the old leftist intellectual milieus like Dissent or New Politics."[4]

The New York Times ran a profile of Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor and publisher of Jacobin in January 2013, commenting on the publication's unexpected success and engagement with mainstream liberalism.[5] In a 2013 article for Tablet Magazine, Michelle Goldberg discussed Jacobin as part of a revival of interest in Marxism among young intellectuals.[6]

Earlier in 2013, "Jacobin Books" was announced, a partnership with Verso Books and Random House.[7] A collection of essays by Jacobin contributors is also slated to be published by Henry Holt and Company in 2014. "Class Action: An Activist Teacher’s Handbook," produced in conjunction with the Chicago Teachers Union's CORE Caucus and Jacobin was distributed to trade union activists in the sixteen cities in the United States and Canada.[8]

Prominent Jacobin contributors include Bob Herbert, Yanis Varoufakis, and Hilary Wainwright.

References[edit]
Jump up ^ "About". Jacobin. Retrieved 2014-06-19.
Jump up ^ "Bookforum". Bookforum. Retrieved 4/1/2011.
Jump up ^ "Boston Review".
Jump up ^ "No Short-Cuts: Interview with the Jacobin". Idiom magazine.
Jump up ^ "A Young Publisher Takes Marx Into the Mainstream". New York Times.
Jump up ^ Michelle Goldberg. "A Generation of Intellectuals Shaped by 2008 Crash Rescues Marx From History’s Dustbin". Tablet.
Jump up ^ Verso. "Jacobin Books series".
Jump up ^ Jacobin. "Class Action: An Activist Teacher’s Handbook".
External links[edit]
Official website
"A Young Publisher Takes Marx Into the Mainstream", Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times, 20 January 2013
Boston Review on Jacobin
"New York literary magazines – start spreading the news", Hermione Hoby, The Observer, 5 January 2013