The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (76 page)
There was much infighting and confrontations between different groups. Just like in the Congress of the U.S. In truth, that was our model for the National Black Political Assembly, the mechanism we created to elect delegates to the convention. We wanted to create a focused national group dealing with black concerns, the members of which would be elected every two years. We wanted a Congress for the black nation to act on our concerns as if we were a nation with political power.
Owusu Sadaukai stopped me in the hallway and said he had been told that CAP was going to attack him if he or his people did not vote as we
wanted. This was science fiction, I told him, but I wondered who would put that out. Probably, again, Hoover's Heathens. If anything, we wanted to get closer to Sadaukai and the Malcolm X Liberation University he headed because we respected what they were doing, despite our differences of interpretation about Pan-Africanism.
Roy Innis and his CORE people provided the most tension and nutty confrontations. Innis thought what he had to do was come out to the convention and straight-out “bogart” everybody with some big fat gun-toting gorillas. But as bad as he must've thought he was, I wasn't too worried because we had people with the same equipment, more of it and better training.
Innis wanted to push an “antibusing” plank through the convention, but finally there was a compromise of language on the resolution that actually passed. Most of the black masses are not interested in busing, they want to know why they can't get quality education right in their neighborhoods.
That busing resolution and the last one that hit the floor the final night of the convention, which called for “the dismantling of the state of Israel,” caused the most controversy. The last resolution was widely blamed on me by the press, but in truth I had known nothing at all about it or its origins. It had come from Reverend Douglas of the Black United Front of D.C.
The shock waves caused by the Black Convention swept all across the country. We had raised up another level, we were not just militant, we were organizing. At the end of the convention, Mayor Hatcher was elected chairman of the National Black Political Assembly, which became a forum for continuing the work of the convention, and Congressman Diggs, president of the national convention itself. I was named secretary-general. The task with the most work but, at the same time, the job that would give us the most hand in organizing the Assembly and bringing in new forces. We wanted to make sure that the Assembly went on and reached out even further.
During this same period another very important formation in the Black Liberation movement was organized. Owusu Sadaukai had gone to Mozambique and had talked with many of the liberation fighters. They had told him that the best thing African Americans could do to help their struggle would be to send dollar and materiel support but, most important, to wage struggle over here in the U.S. against the U.S. imperialist superpower.
When Owusu returned he began to contact people about forming an organization in the U.S. which would focus on supporting the African liberation movements and mobilizing people to struggle over here. And so work began on organizing what was known first as the African Liberation Day Support Committee, later as the African Liberation Support Committee.
From the beginning CAP was in the forefront of efforts to build the ALSC. The first focus was to mobilize people to march in D.C. in May 1972 on what had been designated African Liberation Day by the Organization of African Unity. There was some negativity between the organizers of ALSC and people in Guyana and even Stokely Carmichael because some people had a very partisan understanding of struggle and thought that if such and such wasn't being organized under their direction and according to the ideological designs of their group then it shouldn't be supported. But we went past that. CAP sent a person down to D.C. to help with the organizing and national mobilization. Just as we had done with the Black Convention, bringing together a broad united front.
That first ALSC demo saw more than fifty thousand people march in D.C. and another ten thousand march in San Francisco. Black nationalists and Pan-Africanists, workers, students, elected officials, all participated in the mobilization and program. We marched and also stopped in front of the Portuguese, Rhodesian, and South African embassies to denounce them. We grouped at the foot of the Washington Monument, with miles and miles of black folks stretched out in all directions away from the monument. The Panthers' Elaine Brown spoke, surrounded by a crew of bighatted security brothers. Congressman Diggs, dressed in a dashiki, denounced South Africa (and it was probably as a result of these appearances by Diggs that the racists in Congress and the FBI decided that he must be busted so that his seniority and chairmanship of the Africa committee would not stall their defense of white colonialism and racism in Africa). Haki Madhubuti read, a group sang, a preacher prayed. I spoke too. But Owusu raised everybody up as he ended with the final address to the audience, quoting Frederick Douglass.
Both the National Black Assembly and the ALSC formed in 1972, perhaps a high point of black organization at the time. But by 1975, both organizations had peaked as the result of too many internal contradictions and errors and the interference of the state. CAP also had its high point of organization and influence in '72. That fall, at our CAP convention held in San Diego, I was elected national chairman, replacing Hayward Henry.
This meant that the Kawaida influence in CAP had consolidated at the highest level, but there were also intense and still developing contradictions.
For one thing Karenga sent a few carloads of intimidators down from L.A. to pull the same shit at the CAP conference as he had pulled in Atlanta two years before. Perhaps he was still smarting from the effrontery we had had to go ahead with a project of such magnitude without his being in the driver's seat. But he had not been in any condition to drive anything. A short time later, his whole playhouse came tumbling down when he got arrested and jailed for “torturing” two female members of the organization. This and his wife testified against him as well as George Armstrong-Weusi. He was incarcerated in St. Louis Obipso in California.
In the '72 confrontation, two groups of armed brothers, dressed in dashikis, some old comrades, stood facing each other, ready to fight. For what? Some vague egotistical king-of-the-hill bullshit. But the conference went on. Owusu spoke and C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian writer. Unfortunately, for all of C.L.R.'s great work, he is still very much influenced by his Trotskyist youth and often counsels people incorrectly, telling them that spontaneous organization by the masses is a substitute for the Leninist vanguard party. It was just such counsel that delayed the Grenadian revolution when the revolutionaries tried to overthrow Eric Gairy without a revolutionary vanguard, heavily influenced by C.L.R.'s antiparty line. But he is still a great historical writer and his books of Marxist and cultural historical theory and his book on Haiti,
Black Jacobins
, are landmark works.
If my election as chairman of CAP meant a consolidation of the Kawaida tendencies, it also meant that CAP would be moving even more sharply to the left. Our contact with Owusu Sadaukai and the Malcolm X Liberation University had made us place more emphasis on Pan-Africanism, though we never believed as Stokely and Owusu did that our only struggle was in Africa. When Owusu ceased to believe this, he and Stokely split up.
In the CAP newspaper, we now pushed nationalism-Pan Afrikanism-Ujamaa. Our reasoning was that we had to fight the black liberation struggle here in the U.S., support the liberation of Africa, and at the same time push cooperative economics (as Ujamaa was defined in the Nguzo Saba). We didn't know it clearly at the time, but there were Communists inside the ALSC, black Communists. We had only very little to do with them consciously, but obviously we were being influenced. The Black Workers Congress, the black Marxist group that had formed after the demise of the League of Black Revolutionary Workers in Detroit, was in ALSC. The
Congress never came out directly and tried to organize as it should have; it worked on the inside insinuating and implying but never came straight out. If they had done so, I believe they could have set a clearer direction for people inside ALSC, especially those more advanced forces who were actively seeking to understand how to make revolution.
If the CAP newspaper is analyzed, the organization's move toward the left will be obvious. We went from nationalism-Pan Afrikanism-Ujamaa to nationalism-Pan Afrikanism-African Scientific Socialism. Then A.S.S. became socialism, to which we appended Kwame Nkrumah's definition. We even issued buttons for the CAP cadres which said nationalism-Pan Afrikanism-socialism.
The contradictions in our leftward move were that we were deeply rooted in cultural nationalism of the Karenga-Kawaida variety. The ex-L.A. cadres who came East brought even a heavier dose of this with them. Everyone of them who came East lasted in CFUN only a few months. One ex-L.A. advocate, from East Orange, had been one of Karenga's personal enforcers. In the end, Karenga had turned on him and got somebody to split his head open. We had to put him out of CAP because he had brought the L.A. polygamy trip with him and was running it to the brothers in the organization, implying that I was repressing them by not letting them practice polygamy.
A few months after we kicked this fellow out of CAP he shows up at the Central Committee of a Communist organization preaching against cultural nationalism. It was he who even helped put Karenga's wife out of the house one night in a fit of drowsy pique. She called Amina and sobbed this over the phone.
Mtume, the rock star, was in the US organization. He came East with the ex's but he brought so much of the same L.A. baggage that we could not work with him. The organization was a Kawaida organization, but it was not nor had never been as deeply into all the rites and rituals that Maulanism carries.
We were going to the left, and I was reading Nkrumah and Cabral and Mao. We had started to think about an Africa that was still alive and in chains, actively struggling for liberation. One heavy part of the Kawaida doctrine was based on a never-never-land Africa, the African paradise of the first chapter of
Roots
. We were finding out about an Africa of imperialist domination and class struggle. For Nkrumah and Cabral, the enemy of Africa was imperialism, not just white people. Though we had been influenced by the Black Muslim cosmology, Malcolm's assassination had served
to estrange many of us from the Black Muslims. The “white devil” philosophy was shown to be too narrow and limiting. We could see its reactionary underpinnings. Though the everyday torture white people took us through made our coming out of narrow nationalism problematic.
But CAP was a Kawaida organization. On the positive side, our attention to things African came as the supposed antidote to our deep suspension inside the self-hatred of white chauvinism presented as “learning” or “culture” or simply as “facts.” For the middle-class intellectuals of an oppressed people such suspension has always been quite deep, so the desire to get away from this condition tends to be extreme.
Negatively, merely returning to various forms of African dress and learning a few Swahili words cannot effect black liberation. There is (right now even this very moment) a need for a cultural revolution, but the culture must be that of the black masses, given revolutionary focus and, as a whole, part of the actual political thrust itself.
We were doing political work, much of it successful and necessary. We were setting an example of work and struggle for an entire community of black nationalists and even many others. But the reactionary nature of much of the Kawaida doctrine could not help but affect us negatively. For one thing, it encouraged a feudalistic, even dictatorial style of leadership. It was never my nature to be as absolute in my pronouncements as was called for by Maulanaism; we always had various councils and committees and various checks and balances, but that one-person “godlike” rule was evident and we were criticized for it, mostly behind our backs. Some of the criticism was accurate. We needed even more.
Another deeply negative aspect of Kawaida was its position and social practice relating to women. Some of the doctrine was so far out I never attempted to bring it to Newark. Karenga's peculiar focus on women,
all
women, led me to believe semisubconsciously that many of his statements and prescriptions about women were best left alone.
A third backwardness of Kawaida, even as it was manifest within CFUN and CAP, was the openly metaphysical character of the ideology. Kawaida was and is, if it still exists, a
religion
. On one level this had its tactical uses; for example, it enabled us to go into many of the prisons as
priests
and teach black nationalism. It allowed us tax exemption for various operations. But it was a cultural religion tracing its spiritual origins back to “the first ancestor.” The “priest” appellation for the officers of “the Temple of Kawaida” was real and it was taken by the advocates as such. That is why
the one-man leadership (at whatever level) could get over so easily. That is the priest's relationship to his flockâgodlike.
So the big three cornerstones of our backwardness: feudalistic, one-man domination; male chauvinism given legitimacy as “revolutionary”; metaphysics. These three deeply rooted errors led to many others for which these were the base.
As we moved to the left all three of these things were challenged more and more. My wife, Amina, had always resisted the male chauvinism, not only from me but at all levels of the organization. But the feudalistic structure of the organization meant that I was away and aloof from much of what was going on, which is not to say I was above it, but simply unable to recognize certain problems and correct them, even if I'd wanted to.
To a great degree the women in the organization had developed into a separate organization under Amina's direction. This in itself set many of the male officers against her, as they tried to bring the women under their more direct authority. Her struggle against male chauvanism encouraged the women in the organization to struggle against it as well and this struggle went on behind closed doors or sometimes much more publicly.