The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (77 page)
Amina had a great innovative and creative influence on the organization as well. She could introduce new ideas, particularly variations on the Pan-Afrikan or neotraditional social organization that we practiced. It was she who actually designed in the most practical way such an impractical idea as communal living under capitalism. She named her collectives Umuzi, after the collective houses of the Zulu. Here the advocates lived together collectively or semicollectively. The Temple would buy the house and the various families would pay rent, stripped down to just the basic mortgage, to the Temple. The advocates would handle the mortgage and the upkeep. The Temple just had title.
But the morality and consciousness of people under capitalism tends to be individualistic. Some of the should-be collectivist families felt that collectivity and communalism meant that they had a free ride while others had to slave to make it. Plus, many of the people were young and they had never had a job or had to be out on their own. The organization was father and mother and all the family they had. The organization provided them with a job and a house and so some of them lost contact with the real world.
As head of social organization for CFUN and CAP, Amina presided over and planned the various weddings (arusi), feasts (karamu), baby showers (akika) that went on in Newark and created ways these should be done
throughout the country. As far as I was concerned, the most important of these was the Afrikan Free School. Named after the first free public school in the United States, the AFS was started in the late '60s out of the Spirit House. It was first called the Community Free School. Initially Amina and the other sisters living at the Spirit House gathered the children around the neighborhood and began to teach them. This was after we discovered that many of the children we wanted to get to act in our plays could not read.
But after the '70 election we expanded our operations. First AFS moved down to High Street, then we got a building just for the school. It was on Clinton Avenue and Amina designed and picked out all its furnishings, the desks and cabinets, the books and maps and globes. The Afrikan Free School was a high level of accomplishment. During that period we also had a public school version of AFS in the Marcus Garvey School (which used to be Robert Treat). After the election we had renamed many of the city's schools. South Side High became Malcolm X Shabazz High; there was a Harriet Tubman School, a Martin Luther King School, a Rosa Parks School, etc. Newark Rutgers was forced to name their student center Paul Robeson Center and even give Robeson a doctorate. By the time we tried to change the name of Belmont Avenue to Malcolm X Boulevard, Gibson had squared up completely along with City Council President Earl Harris whom I had loaned some of my personal money to run, and they, along with other reactionaries, blocked this. Belmont Avenue is now named Irvine Turner Boulevard after the first black councilman, but as these politicians got more and more backward, you could tell from the names that got put on thingsânow there is a Floyd Patterson School! Jesu Christo, Floyd Patterson? In 1980 somebody wanted to name a street after B. F. Johnson, the man who organized the Preachers for Addonizioâto show you how far the shit had turned around.
The Afrikan Free School was a very influential institution not only in Newark, which we now called New Ark, but throughout the country. Under Amina's direction it became a model for independent black schools everywhere. The basic elements of the curriculum were African and African American history; also African and African American culture, what the universities would call humanities of course. But African and African American humanities. AFS taught world history as well and American history; we did not want the children one-sided. Plus mathematics, reading, health, science, physical education. We were accredited by the New
Jersey Educational Association as an elementary school. We even had graduates go on to high school, out of the Garvey class.
Amina organized the parents of the AFS children very well. They were expected to help the school survive, since we charged no tuition. AFS taught not just the children of the CFUN advocates, but got a following of parents from the whole Newark community. Later, when we decided that the AFS still constituted “private education” and that we had to go back to dealing with public education and resume our struggles in the public schools, these parents resisted and opposed our move with all their might.
Amina also came up with the idea that the best way to free up the women and even the men for more political work was to start a twenty-four-hour day-care center at the school where the advocates could leave their children. The women in the organization were organized into shifts so that children could be left there at any time and picked up at any time. So we had twenty-four-hour security at all our buildings (there were now three of them) and twenty-four-hour day care. Amina was concerned that in the Kawaida organization there was a tendency to deal the women out of the politics of the organization. They had their “role,” which Karenga defined as “social organization, teaching the children, and inspiring the men,” in the reverse order. As stated it was about as limiting as “Kinder, Kirche, and Küche.” So the appointment of women to the various other departments, such as Siasa (politics), Uchumi (economics), Kuumba (arts), was important to her, and she reasoned that if the usual institutionalized societal limitations could be somewhat modified, women could participate more in other aspects of the organization and develop more.
The women had ranks within their own group as well. They were either Malaika, the good spirits, or, on a higher level, Muminina, the Believers. Amina really studied African culture, so the women and the men in CFUN and in most parts of CAP reflected that serious study. It was always a drag to encounter a group of cultural nationalists who thought that the ideology deserved no serious study and that the depth and richness of it could be expressed sartorially.
The CFUN/CAP uniform for the men was the dashiki for everyday wear and a version of the Tanzanian national dress suit for special occasions. The women wore the beautiful colorful bubbas and lappas and geles which Amina taught all of them to wear and sew. Later she developed a woman's version of the national dress suit. We established a bookstore which also sold the clothes and suits, with our own label and a department making the clothes to be sold in the store (Duka Ujamaa).
At one point we had the bookstore, Afrikan Printing Cooperative, where we also printed our own books and propaganda. Our newspaper, a monthly, we changed to
Unity & Struggle
to demonstrate our growing familiarity with dialectics. Our publishing company, first called Jihad (Holy War), as we moved to the left was called People's War, showing we had read Mao. The Spirit House Movers still traveled around performing mostly my plays and reading poetry; their name was later changed to Afrikan Revolutionary Movers (ARM).
Amina opened a dining room in our Hekalu Mwalimu (named after Julius Nyerere, president of Tanzania) where the advocates could eat hearty food for next to nothing. We did not eat meat, only fish, and otherwise were vegetarians. The dining room also had a fair-sized clientele of people in the neighborhood who liked to come in and talk and eat Amina's special menu. Many hot political discussions went down in that dining room.
Hekalu Mwalimu was a large, beautiful building. It also had a giant auditorium where we held our weekly Soul Sessions, Karamus, weddings, and other public events. This is also where we performed plays while in Newark.
The auditorium was decorated with huge photographs of Pan-Afrikan leaders, but as we moved to the left we also put up Third World leaders. In the basement, where a bowling alley had been, we built a TV studio. We got CBS and NBC to give us some of their older broadcast equipment and we put together a studio with some money we got through UCC. We set up a communications training program, taught young people television programming, and made over a hundred of taped programs ourselves. Our people in the arts were taught to use the cameras and other equipment first. A brother named David Shakes (Mchochezi) ran all this and he did it well.
The reason we built the studio is that we were determined to get a cable franchise when cable was first being talked about not only as an alternate means of reaching people but as a potential moneymaker. But again Kenneth Gibson in all his new mediocre backwardness opposed this, telling us that cable should be public. He allowed the state government to put a moratorium on all cable franchises just to stop a black organization from getting control of a couple of channels.
We had convinced the chairman of TelePrompTer, the oldest of the cable operations, to institute a training program in Newark for minorities so that they could hire them as they wired the city up. We also made a deal which would give us two channels (one for educational uses, the other to
do regular black programming and sell advertising) plus equity in the parent Newark company. Gibson was so dull that he obstructed the deal and it was killed. We brought in advisers from all over the country to talk to him, including Phil Watson, who put together Howard University's School of Communications; Ted Ledbetter, who later owned a television station in the Virgin Islands and was then a candidate for head of the FCC; and Tony Brown, a television personality who became president of Howard's School of Communications and then became one of Reagan's Cheetahs. Gibson sat us down with a couple of white dudes working for the Rockefeller Foundation at Rutgers and tried to explain why black economic development was unnecessary.
What was really mysterious and unmysterious about the opposition was that shortly after this, Kahn of TelePrompTer was busted. Governor Schapp of Philadelphia was brought in to run TelePrompTer while Kahn was locked up. The moratorium on New York cable franchises lasted right up into the '80s!
We were active in politics and struggled with economic development. We wrote out proposals for all kinds of grants and got money from them but at the same time we set up businesses and profit-making operations. As we expanded, we became more and more of a community unto ourselves. We were ever active in the broader community, in New Ark and throughout other cadres in the other cities, but we provided such an inclusive range of services and goods for the advocates that they had little real interplay with people outside the organization except around political matters. Amina called this to my attention from time to time. But we were deeply and totally involved.
Our day would begin very early; by 9
A.M
. we had been out in the street driving around and coming back to one of the Hekalus for administrative work. Amina would be off to the AFS. We might see each other from time to time during the day, but that would be in passing. I might call her from the Hekalu over at the AFS building, but she was involved with running the women's part of the organization and the Afrikan Free School and the day-care center. I would have meeting after meeting. A staff meeting, a meeting with Siasa or Uchumi, in the evening a rehearsal. I might have to speak in town or someplace else. I would have meetings with community groups. We sent our people to all important public meetings. They always went to City Council meetings and Board of Education meetings to raise or oppose issues we felt critical.
Every Saturday morning I went to the park with all the male advocates and we ran around the lake some two and a half miles and then played football or basketball or even ring-a-leerio (I let them play this by themselves). The advocates not only had their individual assignments in the various departments, but they were in charge of security, driving people home at night (kuchukua), they had to go to various meetings, train in yangumi a few times a week (the women too). One white man seeing a group of us training one Saturday remarked, “You all are like marines.” (A noted black writer came into town one Saturday and the brothers assumed that he wanted to run around with them. They took him around the lake and he fell out on his face. This amazed them since this brother was much younger than I was. But then he wasn't doing this shit everyday!)
Wednesday mornings all the males had to fall in at six o'clock and we drilled and began to study Lenin's works about the “woman question.” On some evenings the males studied Sun Tzu's military works collectively. Amina had the women studying various works as we moved toward the left. In many ways, CFUN was like some militant university committed to black liberation.
But our contradictions were deep and frequently abrasive. The men and women, married couples, frequently didn't see much of each other. They had their assignments, their jobs, their meetings. Often this was an excuse for an even deeper male chauvinism than exists on the outside. When Amina and I saw each other it was late at night and sometimes not every night. The tender sensuality of our early days was often replaced by a weary perfunctoriness which made our lovemaking resemble the way the organization was set up.
This is the fanatical aspect of the petty bourgeoisie. In one sense the organization became a fanatical driving thing that tended to remove us from our community and even from each other. Revolutionary struggle must be integrated within a more or less “normal” life of the people. Certainly, to wage that struggle, we must spend a good deal of our time and energy doing that, but we cannot so distort and limit people's lives that they lose their excitement and even their will to struggle!
As I said before, the women in those '60s and early '70s black nationalist organizations (and even, I'm told, those further to the left) had to put up with a great deal of unadulterated bullshit in the name of revolution. My own wife, who met me in what appeared to be the dying days of my bohemianism, really had got to me when that bohemianism had changed its color. It is my contention that much of the cultural nationalism young
people fervently believe is critically important to the struggle is just a form of black bohemianism. Take away the attention to Africa, and the “weird” clothes and the communalism could be found in any number of white hippie communities. Some of the cultural nationalists we began to recognize when we started to read the history of the Communist Party (Bolshevik). These old Russian hippies and cultural nationalists were called Narodniks. When we read that, we recognized ourselves so clearly. Even the bit about how socialism must model itself on the form of the peasant communes in Russia. Black modern day narodnika say black people have always been communal. All we have to do is style our economic system after the traditional African communalism.