The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (74 page)

Prudential Insurance at first had opposed us, of course. They had put up the fire chief, Caulfield, as opposition. They had first gone with a refined Italian senator, as well, hedging their bets. But the senator struck out quickly. After the runoff, they had a change of mind. Even before this, they had given up some money for voter registration. We had got Howard Samuels, the rich Jewish New York gubernatorial candidate, to come over and support voter registration and used his image to get close enough to Pru for some voter registration moneys and even some money for the convention. Hey, wasn't that the Spirit of Good America, voter registration and public participation in the electoral process? They gave us no chance. But Baba said he had heard that they began rubbing up against Gibson after the first election, giving him a little taste. Now, after the wipe-out, they had crept even closer and Gibson was easing away from us. But I hoped not.

Actually, this would have been the time to take Gibson for a long ride and threaten to blow his head off if he pulled any funny Negro shit. But we didn't, and I have to take the weight for this. Certainly I was counseled to do this by my elders, who really knew how the shit worked.

Still, for the time being, everything was on an upbeat. We were getting ready to run the city. A black-run city—what we had said, what we had thought was the practical approach to Black Power. We had done it; now the heavy work had begun.

My view was that Newark should be a model for the country, for the black movement, of how to gain practical Black Power. In the Continuations Committee meetings of the Black Power Conference, I had advanced this. I wrote a paper called “The Beginnings of National Movement” and another called “The Strategy and Tactics of a Pan-African Nationalist Party,” in which these ideas were advanced.

It was also my idea and some other people's that the Black Power Conference, with its informal structure, had to give way to an organization, a national, even Pan-African organization, whose function would be to struggle for Black Power wherever black people were in the world. This was finally accepted in the BPC Continuations meetings. The 1970 Black Power Conference would be held in Atlanta, on the campus of Atlanta University, and its main focus would be the formation of the Congress of Afrikan Peoples. CAP was conceived as a party as well as a united front, which reflected the fuzziness of some of our thinking, although the essence of what we came up with was sound. The African American Nation still needs a national black united front, a liberation front, like the struggling nations and peoples of the Third World have raised to fight colonialism and imperialism in general.

The meeting was in September, Labor Day. That same weekend, the Black Panther Party held its Constitutional Convention in Washington, D.C. The Panthers drew about 10,000 people, we drew about 4,000, so that there were maybe 14,000 people meeting that weekend trying to transform an oppressive U.S. society.

But now we ran into open conflict with Karenga. Because of the siege situation in L.A., Karenga made none of the Continuations Committee meetings leading up to the CAP conference in Atlanta. I had sent him information, and occasionally he would send a rep, but as things got worse in L.A., he could not even send anyone. Actually we were supposed to be his representatives.

However, since Karenga had not been at the meetings and had not been able to impose his personal stamp on what had developed, he now suddenly opposed having the conference. First he had someone call me and tell me this, that all those plans for having a conference in Atlanta had to be scrapped. I couldn't or didn't want to understand this. I told his caller that I needed some clarification. What did this mean? Couldn't I talk to Maulana myself? A few days later one of the advocates called me from L.A. and then someone got on the phone. He sounded drowsy, as if he were drifting through deep space and conversation was a tremendous effort he could not consistently sustain. “Baaaaa-raaaaa-kaaaaa” — his saying of my name took seconds. He began trying to tell me something about “not disobeying him.” He seemed to be repeating this over and over again, from somewhere high up over the rainbow. It was Karenga. He sounded drunk or high. It was astonishing.

I kept saying that the 1970 meeting was very important. That we had already mobilized people. People were ready all over the country. I didn't see how we could just drop the idea. Why? What was the reason? What he was saying seemed arbitrary and certainly disjointed. There was no sense to it. He was saying something about how we didn't need to hold the conference. He mentioned the Panthers. But we were pulling out the whole spectrum of the black community, from one ocean to the other. We were pulling together a true united-front meeting. The Panthers couldn't stop us. They were having their own meeting anyway, there was no reason for them to hassle us, nor we to hassle them.

What I didn't count on was the extent of Karenga's bizarrerie. He had mumbled in a later conversation that he was going to “send some people” to the conference. After the first conversation, I had felt totally disconnected from him. Now I knew that was real, we had no more connection of any positive nature. He was threatening us. If we went on with the CAP conference he would send people to disrupt it.

As the time for the conference got closer, I called our people together and announced that the alliance between CFUN and US was no longer. Ex-advocates from L.A. had been coming back East for a while now with various horror stories about the organization's degeneration. So the straight-out directive that we were no longer allies was not as shocking as it would have been a year or so before.

I had met with Balozi and Mfundishi to discuss the Atlanta conference, since CAP was going to be a national front, with entire organizations as members on one level. Even though we couldn't be in the same organization,
certainly we could be in the same united front. We contacted various organizations across the country, mobilizing people for the conference. We had been developing closer ties with organizations with a similar Pan-African nationalist ideology. There were some folks in the Bronx who had a community organization that Shorty had joined; also, Les Campbell, later Jitu Weusi, a friend of Sonny Carson's, had organized a cultural center in Brooklyn called The East. We had begun to communicate on a limited basis, particularly through Carson in the Continuations Committee meetings.

The security for the Atlanta meeting would be the CFUN Simba and Saidi, the BCD brothers who had gone off with Balozi and Mfundishi, and some of the ex-US advocates who'd split from L.A. and come out to the East Coast. Balozi and Mfundishi perhaps had never forgiven Maulana for taking sides with me. Balozi had come to some of the Continuations Committee meetings as well, so he felt the Atlanta conference should go on too.

The conference itself was a historic meeting very much like the conventions held during the early part of the 19th century, the black convention movement, which provided a lot of the fuel for the abolitionist movement, black and white. All of the Black Power Conferences must be compared to those early-19th-century conventions. They had the same objective: Black Liberation!

Ken Gibson, Jesse Jackson, Roy Innis of CORE, Richard Hatcher (himself newly elected as mayor of Gary, Indiana), Whitney Young of the Urban League, Minister Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, Julian Bond (head of the Atlanta host committee), the ambassadors from Guinea and Tanzania, representatives from many of the African liberation movements, Imari Obadele from the Republic of New Africa, Howard Fuller (later Owusu Sadaukai) of Malcolm X University in Greensboro (who read a message from Stokely Carmichael), Max Stanford (now Muhammad Ahmed) of RAM, an NAACP national officer all appeared, made major speeches, and participated in the conference. But almost from the outset, Karenga's people did appear. There were six or seven of them, all dressed identically, all carrying the characteristic attaché cases in which we used to carry our heat around before the airlines put up the metal detectors. When we saw them we knew what those cases meant. Word was got to me immediately about the six, mostly new, people who had appeared and who were now marching ominously around the campus which was the conference site trying silently to intimidate people.

Their leader had asked to see me and some of the brothers didn't want to allow it. But it seemed to me that the best thing to do was to take them all the way out, as far as they wanted to go, peaceably, and to make plans for dealing with them in other ways if they wanted to take it there. The US brother told me that Maulana wanted to speak to me. He would call and then I could speak to him. All right, call him.

Karenga got on the phone and said some of the same things. They really seemed out now, because the conference was going on. There was no turning back. Karenga's shrill little voice raced up and down in his wearying attempt to make what he was saying sound rational. After we talked, the tactical leader stood looking at me. I said, “OK, we've talked. Is there anything else?” He turned and went out.

The security heads came together to discuss this problem. What were these Karenga dudes really going to do? Threats aside, what would they really attempt? George Armstrong, who had once been head of Karenga's security forces, as Weusi, said he thought we should take the attache cases away from the L.A. brothers. Mfundishi seemed to be going along with this, but I squashed this as hard as I could. Trying to take those cases away from them would mean instant confrontation, possibly shooting, maybe an end to the conference in wild chaos. Wasn't that what Karenga wanted? No, we would cool it. We would tail them, but let them go anywhere they wanted to go in the conference the public was. They could participate like anybody else. Let 'em in any of the workshops they wanted to go in. They were our guests. They were emissaries from Maulana Karenga, certainly they were welcome. But we would tail them.

A couple more times the brother who seemed to be in charge of the “killer squad” said Maulana had requested that I talk to him on the phone. We talked again, but the third time I was unavailable. Karenga was just saving face over the phone now. There were no incidents except one young brother roused the troops in the middle of the night by shooting himself in the foot while on security. This was the joke of the conference and lightened the mood as our combined units of Simba and Saidi, their blood tingling because of the possibility of confrontation, marched back and forth to their posts or drilled so that all could see we had a strong and disciplined security force. I had learned that from Karenga—a show of force often precludes having to use it. Karenga had learned it from Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military master.

I was directing the Political Action Workshop of the conference, and the most important thing to come out of that workshop was the call for a Liberation
Front of black people that should include even the Panthers and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, two left organizations that the nationalists usually would not work with. We were also supposed to go on organizing a “cadre organization” of Pan-African nationalists to continue to build the united front structure formalized in this meeting.

One of the most important points to come out of this workshop was that we should call, by 1972, a National Black Political Convention, not only to flesh out the united front structure but also to choose candidates to run in the major elections and to give black people a unified voice in dealing with the presidential election.

There was one famous photo in
Jet
of the conference in which Hayward Henry, who was elected chairman of CAP, is shown holding up Minister Farrakhan's hand along with Whitney Young's hand to symbolize the unity found at the conference. Farrakhan had delivered a crowd-pleasing address, in a style that made some people think perhaps he should pay royalties to Malcolm's family. As it was, Betty Shabazz, who also spoke at the conference, left in stony silence when Farrakhan and his party appeared. Many people were surprised that Whitney Young (called “Whitey” Young by many of the nationalists) even showed, especially since there were a couple people on the program who had been locked up just a few years before, having been framed by the FBI for planning to assassinate Young. Roy Wilkins, who was also one of the targets for this bullshit FBI assassination plot, did not show.

Hayward Henry was a young Unitarian minister who headed up the Black Affairs Council of the Unitarian Church. The white churches had begun to set up such groups in their midst as blacks in white churches demanded that these churches share some of their vast resources with the black community. Henry, along with Richard Traylor and Law Gothard, had come in with some money to help with voter registration in Newark, and we had gotten rather close. Later Henry set up a chapter of CAP in Boston and Traylor set one up in Philadelphia.

Not only was the conference a success, but what had happened also was the meeting and identification of kindred forces in the Black Liberation movement. We had brought hundreds of black organizations together and some who seriously thought along the same lines that we did. We were trying to evolve an ideology that could deal with black nationalism as well as African liberation. It was Pan-Afrikan Nationalism. (A “k” in “Afrika” because one of our theorists, Brother Ruwa Chiri, who belonged to an organization called UFOMI—United Africans for One Motherland
Indivisible—put out a newsletter explaining that “c” did not exist in African languages.) But we were also heavily indebted to Karenga's Kawaida, which remained an underlying structure we related to. We could not work with him, but we were still committed to Kawaida and its multiple lists and the Nguzo Saba and Kwanzaa.

Back in Newark, our thrust now was toward the creation of a national organization. We were CFUN, one chapter of the Congress of Afrikan Peoples. We had also met brothers and sisters who had organizations in Pittsburgh, Gary, South Bend, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Detroit, Camden, and Cleveland who wanted to hook up with the cadre structure of CAP.