Die Nigger Die: A Political Autobiography

by H. Rap Brown (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin)
Foreword by Ekwueme Michael Thelwell

(Please note that the printed version of this
book contains ample pictures and illustrations)

Foreword	Page vii
Introduction	Page NA
Body	Page 1
1	Page 1
2	Page 13
3	Page 33
4	Page 47
5	Page 55
6	Page 65
7	Page 75
8	Page 81
9	Page 91
10	Page 99
11	Page 109
12	Page 133

To all of those who have died resisting america's white death and to

Murphy Bell

William Kunstler

Howard Moore

Foreword

H. Rap Brown/Jamil Al-Amin: A Profoundly American Story

This autobiographical political memoir by H. Rap Brown is a vital American historical document — historical almost in the sense of a message found in a time capsule, a missive from another age. But it remains of considerable interest for what it tells us about social and political attitudes, behaviors, and expectations of a time — so my students believe — long past. The time, in this case, is a discrete, relatively short period of domestic upheaval in this country during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time of "revolutionary" black uprising in northern ghettoes following hard on the heels of the southern, nonviolent direct action movement engineered by SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), and SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), a movement usually associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. Rap's book has an added dimension of sociological interest, being a voice from the front lines, the personal and political testimony of a radically militant chairman of SNCC who came to symbolize the defiance of a generation of angry and militant black youth. A third, perhaps less compelling, area of interest is the personal: what the voice and language reveal about the character and personality, the sensibility, if you will, of the speaker. In combination these three factors make a powerful argument for the reissuing of this book. Die Nigger Die! is a cultural artifact that should be generally available.

So you would expect that the author, like any writer, would be immeasurably eager to see his work once more in print. But you would be wrong.

For one thing, the author, H. Rap Brown, is no longer among us. Nor has he really been since 1971, when, as a young man of twenty-six, he made his shahadah (the Muslim declaration of faith). During a period of incarceration by the State of New York, the black activist known to the media as H. Rap Brown converted to orthodox Islam and emerged as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, a Sunni Muslim. Brown went in and Al-Amin emerged. This change was by no means cosmetic or strategic.

By all accounts and the overwhelming preponderance of evidence over many years, this was a genuine religious conversion, a classically "profound transformation of self." Al-Amin ambarked on a life of rigorous study and spiritual and moral inquiry with the same single-minded intensity and uncompromising commitment Rap had brought to militant social struggle.

It is important to mention this because, as we know, not all conversions — religious or ideological — are equal. This was a time particularly famous for instant sudden, public, and apparently infinitely reversible self-reinventions, two of the more dramatic being Jerry Rubin's conversion from the stridently counterculture Youth International Party leadership to Wall Street broker (from yippie to yuppie) and Eldridge Cleaver's from Black Panther Party revolutionary to born-again Christian.

Al-Amin's embrace of Islam, however, proved neither facile nor expedient, as his emergence as a bookish Muslim cleric and his years of work in faith-based social improvement have demonstrated. The fiery and impetuous young rebel who speaks out of the pages of this book has long since evolved into an austere religious scholar, disciplined by faith and projecting the aura of a spiritually disposed ascetic.

After thirty years, Al-Amin has become, in many important ways, a vastly different person from the author of this book. A respected Imam, he now sees — and for some time has seen — the world, his own role therein, and the eventual liberation of his people in quite different terms: those of faith, self-discipline, and spiritual development. This vision is reflected in both his demeanor and his language. Consequently he has, at this time, serious reservations about the appropriateness of reissuing this book of youthful struggle. It is not that he repudiates any aspect of the earlier book — not the tone, the defiant struggle out of which it came, or even the youthful persona of that text. (The Imam, however, did have some concerns whether the vernacular earthiness of some of the street language was now entirely seemly. He also found a number of pejorative street-corner references to certain women to be regrettable, even embarrassing, but decided to let them stand as originally uttered.)

His reservation is more that he considers his more recent work, Revolution by the Book, far more relevant to his current concerns and the work of thirty years, as well as being more indicative of his present personal and professional style. No two books could be more different in style and subject, but what they share, apart from their common paternity, is that both are earnestly addressed to the same audience and purpose: the re-education of the African American grassroots.

This more recent work is not, as might be inferred from a casual glance at the title, a handbook on guerrilla was. The revolution of the title refers very specifically to jihad in its classical Islamic meaning of the daily internal struggle for self-mastery and moral discipline. The book begins with a collection of sermons, each explicating one of the Five Pillars of Islam —Shahadah (declaration of faith), Tauheed (the Oneness and uniqueness of God), Salaat (prayer and worship), Zakaat (the redemptive value of charity), and Saum (purification by fasting and abstinence) — and the expression of all five by the Hajj, or prescribed pilgrimage.

Liberally illustrated with quotations from the Qur'an, the Sunnah, and other secondary Islamic texts, the tone is learned and reverent, exhortatory and precise. It is an eloquent articulation of the fundamental principles, values, and practice of orthodox Islam, affecting every aspect of life, personal and social. The revolution it envisions is a moral one, which begins with the personal, stressing awareness of God and self through piety, study, and self-discipline, and moves through family and out into the larger society.

On family:

The first responsibility of the Muslim is as teacher. That is his job, to teach. His first school, his first classroom is within the household. His first student is himself. He masters himself and then he begins to convey the knowledge that he has acquired to the family. The people who are closest to him.

On struggle:

To be successful in struggle requires remembrance of the Creator and the doing of good deeds. This is important because successful struggle demands that there be a kind of social consciousness. There has to be a social commitment, a social consciousness that joins men together. On the basis of their coming together, they do not transgress against themselves and they do not transgress against others.

On society and revolution:

When you understand your obligations to God then you can understand your obligations to society. Revolution comes when human beings set out to correct decadent institutions. We must understand how this society has fallen away from righteousness and begin to develop, Islamically, the alternative institutions to those that are in a state of decline around us. But we must first enjoin right and forbid wrong to ourselves. That is the first step in turning this thing around: turn your self around.

There is a directness and, if you will, a sincerity to this language, a sincerity that those who know the Imam say has for thirty years been evident in the man's life and example. These qualities are said to have earned him a fierce loyalty and affection from the Muslim congregation to which he ministers in a working-class suburb of Atlanta, respect in the surrounding Christian neighborhood, and a wider regard in the national Muslim-American community. This side of Al-Amin's vocational persona is one I had not been privileged to observe until quite recently.

This was in 1998 at a farewell tribute to our brother Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), who was stricken with terminal cancer and about to leave for Africa, there to die. Perhaps two thousand people had gathered in the banquet room of a Washington hotel: family, friends, admirers, and supporters of Carmichael's, mostly movement faithful, veterans of the "heroic days."

It would have been a remarkable gathering in any place and any decade, though it could probably not have happened in the 1960s, when doctrinal and ideological disagreement had loomed so urgent and divisive. Even recently, perhaps only respect for Carmichael could have assembled such a gathering. Next to each other were Black Nationalists and Southern Baptists; pan-Africanists, native Africans, a few Sunni Muslims, and NAACP integrationists next to Nation of Islam separatists; former Black Panthers next to former Students for a Democratic Society activists; progressive intellectuals — writers and editors — Socialists, Marxists, liberals, black and white, next to Black Arts Movement cultural nationalists; and John Lewis, the majority whip of the U.S. House of Representatives, cheek by jowl with Minister Louis Farrakhan, the ubiquitous leader of the Nation of Islam. It was a fitting tribute to the extraordinary range and reach of Carmichael/ Ture's political and personal charisma and the affection he commanded across lines of ideology and identity.

Prominent at the speakers' table were the former chairmen of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (Marion Barry, Chuck McDew, John Lewis, Jamil, and Phil Hutchens). The talk from the platform was, as might be expected, nostalgic, affectionate, political. The only real departure and my only surprise came when Imam Al-Amin spoke. What he delivered in tribute to his old friend was a thoughtful, Islam-inflected reflection on the nature of oppression and the moral duty, the religious imperative, of the faithful to resist. Liberally adorned with qur'anic quotations, it was, as I recall, an erudite, elegantly constructed, finely reasoned explication of the categories and nature of oppression and the moral dimensions and complexities of struggle as expressed in the prophetic poetry of the Arabian desert some fourteen hundred years earlier. In any terms — culturally speaking — it was scholarly. I found it startling in a curious way: it did not quite fit either stylistically or culturally with what had gone before, yet was completely appropriate.

Its traditional opening in the resonant cadences of classic Arabic poetry — "Al-landu lillah; Al-hamdu lillahi; rabb-il aalameen; bismi-llah-ir-rahman-ir-rahim. . ." ¹ — seemed to me and others a voice and sensibility out of a different culture and another time. Its text, taken from Sura 42, verse 41 of the Holy Qur'an — "All those who fight when oppressed incur no guilt, but Allah shall surely perish the oppressor" — seemed appropriate as a personal credo both for the speaker and for the life of struggle being recognized.

As he spoke, I remember thinking: Ah, so this is what a serious Islamic sermon sounds like, huh? Rap really takes this calling seriously. The brother is indeed an Islamic scholar, an Imam. (I took the long-jawed look of astonishment and professional respect that crossed Minister Farrakhan's face as he listened to be confirmation of my impression.)

I'd known the youthful Rap at Howard University as the younger brother of my friend Ed, and, of course, later with SNCC in Mississippi and Alabama, before he erupted in the nation's headlines as the black militant from Hell, the Negro America loved to hate. I remembered a laconic, rangy (six-foot-five), hawk-faced youth, mostly silent, a preternaturally watchful, almost brooding presence. Said to be an extraordinary athlete, he looked the part.

"Yeah, the boy can play him some ball, Bro. Everything from point guard to power forward and some quarterback too," his brother told me. "An' there ain't no dawg in mah boy either. He a competitor from his heart. No quit in him."

Given the times, it was natural that the movement would draw him away from the courts and the possibility of athletic scholarships. He listened to our endless debates, read voraciously, joined our demonstrations, and volunteered for the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964. In 1965 he was back in D.C., where he became chairman of NAG (Nonviolent Action Group), the local SNCC affiliate. This led to the infamous White House confrontation with President Lyndon B. Johnson (see pp. 51-53).

I believe it was a Saturday morning a week following the vicious police riot known as "Bloody Sunday" on the Elmer Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. I was alone in the SNCC office when the telephone rang from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. Responding to international outrage over the atrocity in Alabama, President Johnson had suddenly agreed to a meeting with the Civil Rights leadership. However, the meeting was that afternoon and the leadership was scattered all over the country. The Washington representatives would have to stand in. Would I be representing SNCC? Hell, no, I most certainly would not. Just then in strolls Rap, attired, as I recall, for athletic endeavor.

"Hey, aren't you the chairman of NAG? Feel like going to the White House this afternoon?" Rap considered it for several moments.

"Well," he drawled, "why not? I ain't really doing much this afternoon."

Later, when he gave his report, I remember his indignation and amazement at the fawning subservience toward the President displayed by a delegation ostensibly there to represent the urgency of our people's struggle, courtiers so effusively grateful for the privilege merely of being there and so anxious to preserve their access that none dared be forthright with the monarch. So it had fallen to him to raise the questions of presidential responsibility for federal inaction in protecting the rights of black citizens that the group was there to represent. He described the delegation's shuffling during the meeting and their not-very-subtle distancing of themselves from his intemperance, in some cases even going so far as to apologize for him. Yet once outside they effusively praised his courage for saying the things that "needed to be said." Then, within the week, an insidious column in the Washington Post (Evans and Novak) described how "deeply embarrassed responsible Civil Rights leaders" were professing to be at the "disrespect" shown the President by the young student.

(Rap told me that LBJ had entered the meeting expressing his great displeasure at all-night demonstrations outside the White House, which were so noisy that "his little girls" had been unable to sleep. The courtiers each in their turn had expressed distress and apologies for this inconvenience to the presidential family. Rap, when his turn came, said that he too was real sad that for one night the presidential daughters' repose had been disturbed, but black people in the South had been unable to sleep in peace and security for a hundred years. What did the President plan to do about that? He had thought that this was what they were meeting to discuss. Which apparently so upset the President that the courtiers subsequently felt a need to run to the press to put their disapproval on the public record. It must have been a generational thing.)

When, in 1967 at the age of twenty-three, Rap succeeded Carmichael as SNCC chairman, it was at a tense and desperate moment in the country. SNCC's call for Black Power, coupled with its stand against the Vietnam War, had isolated the organization and left it exposed. Deep fissures had appeared in the Civil Rights "coalition." The long-simmering anger at racism and economic injustice of alienated black youth in the ghettoes was erupting into violent and destructive urban insurrections. In every case these "riots" were triggered by police brutality or misconduct, most usually the killing or brutalizing of an unarmed black man.

The black insurrections traumatized white America, which was further divided, usually along generational and class lines, by the Vietnam War. Suddenly, middle-class white youth — the ostensible beneficiaries of the system — were, to an unprecedented degree, also alienated from their government. The "New Left," a generation of white student activists, was becoming increasingly strident in its denouncement of the American establishment, adopting an increasingly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist "revolutionary" rhetoric.

About this time, the Black Panther Party made its appearance in Oakland. A "revolutionary" organization of urban black youth, they had great style. A variation on gang colors, their black leather jackets, black berets, and blue shirts — with firearms either visible or implied — were an expression of ghetto youth culture. Appearing as if on cue out of America's Third World, the Panthers were the New Left's home-grown surrogates for the Viet Cong. Black, virile, menacing, hip guerrillas, the Panthers were — depending on one's orientation — the incarnation of white America's most primal fantasy or its worst nightmare: angry Negroes with guns.

Their leadership, with a well-developed sense of theater and an instinct for hustle, permitted the white New Left to declare them the revolutionary vanguard, with predictable results. Their members paid a terrible price: some were killed and many are still in jail, often on very dubious charges.

All of which, in the media's dependably sensationalist presentation, contributed mightily to a pervasive mood of racial tension and impending doom across the nation. Wars (abroad) and rumors of (race) was at home — mere anarchy is loosed, the center cannot hold? Something like that.

Well, not by a long shot, pilgrim. Not if J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI had anything to say, which they did. If brute force, illegality, and criminal anarchy were to be the order of the day (which was by no means clear), why, then, it were best it came from good ol' Uncle Sam himself, yes, indeedy.

The Bureau's response, a "hard-hitting" national counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO), was of surpassing ruthlessness in its contempt for law and the civil rights of the citizens. COINTELPRO cast a wide net covering the Peace Movement, the New Left, student activists, black militants ("Black nationalist hate groups"), and pacifist clergy, including even the very churchly Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Director's specific instructions were to use all necessary means to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize . . . black nationalist hate type organizations [sic], their leadership, spokesmen, membership and supporters . . ." Programs designed to "convince them," the Director instructed his agents, "that to be a black revolutionary is to be a dead revolutionary."

The Bureau, taking him at his word, came up with a repertoire of dirty tricks — each authorized by the Director and usually illegal ² — ranging from character assassination, disinformation, false arrest on bogus charges, manufactured evidence, perjured testimony, and cynical frame-ups to physical assassination by either uniformed officers or hired agents. All of this has been documented by Congressional investigation and none of the perpetrators — the "rogue agents" — within the Bureau has ever served a day of jail time.

This being the context in which H. Rap Brown undertook the SNCC chairmanship, it is therefore not surprising that his term of office, a succession of indictments and arrests, was spent mostly in court, out on bond, or in jail. Some of this is recounted in this book.

It began in July 1967 after an appearance in Cambridge, Maryland, where he had given an "incendiary" and — in the presence of the media — politically ill-advised speech in which he urged black people to arm themselves, be "ready to die," and to meet violence with violence. "This town is ready to explode . . . if you don't have guns, don't be here . . . you have to be ready to die." This proved rather quickly prophetic: immediately after the speech he and two companions were fired on from an ambush, and the community exploded.

After I spoke people were just milling around. A young lady who lived up towards Race Street where a bunch of white policemen were gathered asked for an escort home because she was afraid to walk by herself. Myself and two other people were walking her home and some dudes opened fire on us with shot-guns from some bushes. We found out later they [the shooters] were black policemen. They were shooting at us a long time. I was hit, I dove to the ground, rolled into a ditch and made my way into someone's yard.

After the shooting there was a lot of commotion. People went into the street and just started tearing everything up. A few hours later they burned the school again. Two weeks earlier people had burned the black elementary school because it had been a rat infested, roach infested place. People were paying taxes and their children were forced to go to school in those conditions. It is these conditions which cause riots. Not anybody's rhetoric. (H.R.B., 1992)

Shortly after this incident, Brown was charged by the State of Maryland with incitement to riot, beginning a succession of charges and protracted legal maneuvering drawn out over a two-year period.

I can remember following the process as it unfolded in an almost Kafkaesque absurdity in the press. It seemed like every few months he would be hauled into court in a new jurisdiction on a different charge and held under an oppressively large bond. His attorney — the late Bill Kunstler — would struggle mightily to win a reduction. Rap would eventually come out and in a matter of days be reported somewhere else making even more "incendiary" utterances and be back in custody, there to begin the dismal cycle all over again. At least that's how it seemed to me. I can remember saying, "I guess you're right. Rap don't have no quit in him after all, but maybe he should." And Ed growling, "That boy hard-headed, Bro. Jes' too damn stubborn."

Subsequently released FBI documents make it clear that this process of paralysis by indictment and legal intimidation was by no means limited to H. Rap Brown. It was a deliberate, across-the-board COINTELPRO strategy designed to cripple radical organizations by misusing the courts. First, arrests of targeted activists on serious charges carrying potentially long sentences. It was of little importance to the government whether or not they had a legitimate case strong enough to secure a conviction. The point was to silence and immobilize leadership while forcing groups to redirect energy and resources into raising funds, organizing legal defenses, and publicizing these cases. It was a government subversion of the American justice system resulting in drawn-out Soviet-style political show trials that became common-place in the America of the 1970s: the Chicago Seven, the Panther Twenty-One, etc., etc. Although the overwhelming majority of these cases did not result in convictions, ³ government documents show that they were considered great tactical successes. They kept the movements off the streets and in the courts.

However, a few convictions were attained, and it is clear that at least some activists who ended up serving long sentences — some of whom remain in jail to this day — were flat-out framed by their government. People were convicted on perjured testimony as witnesses were bribed or coerced into lying. Exculpatory evidence was withheld from the defense and made to "disappear." As I write, Leonard Peltier of the American Indian Movement is still in jail. Elmo "Geronimo" Pratt of the California Panthers, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was recently released after spending nearly half his life in jail for a murder the FBI had clear evidence that he could not possibly have committed. Similarly, Dhurubah Moore, a New York Panther, has only recently been freed after a review of his case indicated similar government misconduct. These are only a few cases that have surfaced into public awareness. But there remain a great many such cases — some estimates say more than fifty — that seem irretrievably buried in the catacombs of legal bureaucracy. So that there are activists of that generation — fellow human beings and American citizens — in effect political prisoners still serving time in an American gulag, often on very questionable evidence indeed.

For instance, have you heard of the Angola Three? These are three black men in the Louisiana State Penitentiary — Herman Wallace, Robert Wilkenson, and Albert Woolfort — who have been held in continuous solitary confinement for twenty-eight years. These men are inmate activists responsible for organizing a functional chapter of the Black Panther Party among the inmate population of Angola. In 1972 the men were convicted of the murder of a guard and have been held in isolation ever since. It is now possible, and it is the duty of every thinking American, to take the opportunity to review the facts of these cases and the state's evidence on the basis of which these three men have been buried alive for nearly thirty years. (www.prisonactivist.org/angola)

Back to the Rap. In March 1970, after two years of tortuous legal jousting, he failed to appear in court for trial on the incitement charge and simply disappeared. For eighteen months, despite the best efforts of the FBI and an international dragnet, he appeared to have dropped from the face of the earth. To my knowledge he has never publicly discussed this period, so it remains something of a mystery. At the time, speculation was rife.

None of our mutual movement friends seemed to know — or would admit to knowing — his whereabouts. He was variously reported in Cuba, in Algeria, in West Africa, or deceased. His brother Ed was "pretty sure" he was alive, but so completely incommunicado that even he had not a clue as to where Rap might be.

When he finally surfaced in 1972 it was in truly astonishing circumstances and surprisingly close to home — midtown Manhattan, in fact. His friends and supporters in the movement were stunned when large New York Times headlines proclaimed his capture, gut-shot and seriously wounded, following a running gun battle with police during "an attempted hold-up" of an uptown Manhattan bar. To us this made no sense. Armed robbery of a bar? C'mon, that was completely at odds with the political principles were considered ourselves to share with Rap. And, besides, why would he, having successfully eluded capture for so long, now choose to chance so dubious, dangerous, and criminal an enterprise? It just simply made no sense. Indeed, had Rap not been in critical condition in a Harlem hospital, one would have been tempted to simply dismiss the entire story as false identification.

To many black Americans, this was an astonishing and dismaying development. The young SNCC chairman seemed to have crossed the line between militant political defiance and flat-out criminality. Some of the support he had enjoyed, both within the movement and in the general community, evaporated.

But by no means all. Some years afterward, the venerable and legendary New York Mookie, a retired player wise in the ways of the street, clued me in to the word. "It was some black nurses saved that boy's life, Prof." He nodded emphatically. "Yeah, them white doctors was goin' let the brother die, man. But they say it was some sisters from the islands, man, raised hell in that hospital. Took care of the brother. Protected that boy. Made them doctors do what they s'posed to do. Yeah, Prof, it was them West Indian nurses saved that boy's life."

Another persistent story from the street, which Rap himself has never — at least not to me — confirmed nor denied, goes as follows: Some of his time underground was spent in a blighted Brooklyn community, an area ravaged by drugs. Along with some like-minded brothers, under arms, the fugitive ran those dealers out. Emboldened at having cleaned up one local community, they looked north. The bar in Manhattan was not just any bar. In close proximity to a police precinct, it was a favorite watering hole of some of New York's finest. It was also reputed to be the location where, once weekly, Harlem dealers gathered to settle accounts with their partners and protectors on the police force.

So, according to the street, the "stickup" was more accurately a punitive action intended to reinforce earlier warnings the dealers had ignored. If the law wouldn't stop them, then they would. A bad idea, poorly timed. In one version, the late shift at the precinct changed during the operation, bringing a new wave of armed, thirsty men into the bar. In another version, the crew simply walked into a carefully laid ambush. Whatever the case, the only ones who know for sure are, for their own good reasons, not about to talk, so H. Rap Brown's last public act went into the official record as an attempted armed robbery.

After recovering from his injuries, Rap served five years of a fifteen-year sentence. Having theoretically discharged his debt to the law, and re-emerged into society as Jamil Al-Amin, H. Rap Brown, for all intents and purposes, should have been history. Paroled in 1976, Jamil Al-Amin, after making his Hajj to Mecca, settled in Atlanta, where his brother Ed was director of the Voter Education Project, and set out to construct a new life outside the glare of the media. A story from those times illustrates something of the ironies and difficulties attending attempts at anonymity by previously public figures.

The Johnson administration's response to urban unrest and the Kerner Commission's warning that "our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal" was something called the National Urban Coalition. This initiative was intended to "save our cities" by mobilizing leadership of the public and private sectors to address the absence of viable educational and economic alternatives for minority youth, which was thought to be at the root of black alienation and anger. The argument was persuasive: people who have hope in their lives and a meaningful investment in their futures simply do not put the torch to their communities. Therefore the administration was calling for a national coalition at the highest level of corporate, philanthropic, religious, educational, and political leadership to mobilize the necessary resources — human and financial — to address the urban crisis. At the initial meeting McGeorge Bundy made the administration's pitch to a blue chip gathering of the American establishment.

At the end one "crusty old codger" allowed as how it seemed to make sense. But, dad-gummit, something about it just didn't sit quite right with him.

"And what might that be, sir?" Bundy asked.

"Well, Mr. Secretary, it just sounds to me like you're asking us to reward people for rioting, an' something about that just plain rubs me the wrong way." Murmurs of approval around the room. Not a penny for tribute?

"Well, sir, I can fully understand that," Bundy is reported to have said. "But let me put it to you this way . . . (thoughtful pause) . . . Wouldn't you, wouldn't all of us, sleep much better tonight if we knew that H. Rap Brown . . . (pause) . . . was somewhere quietly running his own little drugstore?"

When the friend who had been present told me that story a few years later, we both laughed. Not a any prescience on Mr. Bundy's part but at a certain dramatic irony: that classic device in which an ignorant speaker occasionally utters unintended truths layered with meanings he neither understands nor suspects. Because, when I heard the story a few years later, not H. Rap Brown but the Imam Al-Amin, peaceably studying his religion and building an Islamic congregation, was indeed the proprietor of a small community grocery store cum culture center in Atlanta's West End. . . .

The next episode in this remarkable story might be seen as a tale of two utterly incompatible and mutually exclusive stories. One is the narrative of H. Rap Brown, the armed militant, prone to violence, "revolutionary" or "criminal" depending on your take. This old narrative is preserved alive and well in the computerized memory banks of law enforcement and the film clips and sound bytes of the media, a convenient ghost to be summoned up at will over the next thirty years.

"Y' know," Ed explained. "Something happens. Say the first attempt to bomb the Trade Center, right? They feed their infallible profile into their computer. Muslim . . . radical . . . violent . . . anti-American, whatever, who knows. Anyway, boom, out spits the names, H. Rap Brown prominent among them. Next thing the Feds come storming into the community and haul Jamil in. This actually happened. Of course it's stupid. And every time they have to let him go. But how do you stop it? A goddamn nightmare, they never quit."

Then there is a more contemporary contending narrative, that of the Imam Al-Amin — pious ascetic scholar/teacher and community leader widely perceived to have renounced violence — only to have his hard-won peace plagued at regular intervals by the ghost of the past persona, conjured up to that end.

Or, some suggest, could not the narratives occasionally merge: with the clerical robes and books by the Imam being occasionally discarded for the weapons and fatigues of the militant?

One person had no doubt. "No, Bro. It was just continuous harassment, pure and simple," Ed Brown says. "Harassment, sometimes routine and petty, sometimes pretty serious. Just one damn thing after another. No matter how absurd. The police simply would not leave my brother alone . . . an ongoing police vendetta."

Out of this series of low-level annoyances two incidents stand out. Immediately after the first bombing at the World Trade Center, Imam Al-Amin was arbitrarily hauled in, interrogated, and released under heavy and continuous surveillance, all in the absence of any evidence at all connecting him to the bombing — at least none the authorities cared to disclose.

Another such incident took place in August 1995. A month after a local shooting, agents of the FBI's Domestic Terrorism Task Force and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms converged on Atlanta and arrested Imam Al-Amin as the shooter. At a press conference, they informed the press that the victim had identified the Imam as his assailant. The charges were dropped when the victim — who subsequently joined the Imam's mosque — told the press that he had not seen his assailant but had been threatened by the authorities with jail if he did not implicate Imam Al-Amin. The whole thing stank of set-up and police impropriety. However, the mainstream civil liberties establishment was silent, so it was left to the national Islamic community to question the irregularities surrounding this incident.

On August 28, 1995, the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), joined by several other national Muslim organizations, called a press conference calling for a Justice Department investigation.

AMERICAN MUSLIM ORGANIZATIONS CALL FOR JUSTICE DEPARTMENT INVESTIGATION OF MUSLIM LEADER'S ARREST

WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 28, 1995) - On Monday, August 8, several national Islamic organizations held a news conference in Washington, DC, to call for a Justice Department investigation into the recent arrest of Imam Jamil Al-Amin. The groups represented at the news conference included the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), American Muslim Council (AMC), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Imam Al-Amin was also in attendance. The joint statement released at the news conference read as follows:

"We the undersigned American Muslim organizations wish to express our deep concern over the recent arrest of Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, one of the Muslim community's leading figures. The manner of his arrest for aggravated assault and the events that have transpired since the arrest indicate that there is apparently much more to this incident than has been revealed so far. We have several questions about the handling of this case:

1) Why were agents of the FBI, the FBI's Domestic Counterterrorism Task Force and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms involved in a case that the police themselves described as a "routine aggravated assault?"

2) Why was the victim in this case, as he himself has stated and The Atlanta Journal reported, threatened with legal charges if he failed to identify Imam Al-Amin as his assailant? And why did authorities refuse to accept the victim's repeated statements that he did not see who the assailant was?

3) Why would the authorities in Atlanta wish to implicate Imam Al-Amin in this case?

4) Why was Imam Al-Amin arrested weeks after the alleged incident, even though he is easily accessible to law enforcement officials at his public place of business? Why was he arrested in his car and not called in for questioning at police facilities?

These and other questions must be answered by those who are in a position of authority over those involved in the incident.

It is with this goal in mind that we call upon the Justice Department to initiate an immediate investigation into this matter and to report its findings to the American public.

On August 7, Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, was arrested in connection with a July shooting. At the time of the arrest, law enforcement authorities, including the FBI's Joint Counterterrorism Task Force and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), claimed the shooting victim had identified Imam Al-Amin as the assailant.

The shooting victim, who attended the news conference, now says he does not know who wounded him and that the police pressured him into making the identification. News articles in both The Atlanta Journal and Constitution and The New York Times quote the shooting victim as saying he repeatedly insisted to the police that he did not see who shot him and that it was the police who first presented him with the name and photograph of Imam Al-Amin. The alleged complainant also said he was threatened with legal charges if he did not agree to identify the Imam as the person who shot him.

Imam Al-Amin became a Muslim in the 1970s and has lived in Atlanta for the past 19 years. He is the Imam, or leader, of the Community Mosque in that city. Imam Al-Amin is also recognized as one of several national leaders in the American Muslim community.

Good questions. I am not aware of a response from the Department of Justice. Unfortunately, this is not where the story ends.

Five years later, on Thursday night, March 16, 2000, the troubled relationship between the brother and the various law enforcement agencies would escalate from farce to tragedy. As I write, Imam Al-Amin sits in prison awaiting trial on four felony murder charges for which the state is seeking the death penalty. By the time you read this, the trial will have taken place, so we will have learned the quality and extent of the evidence the state has been able to produce in support of the thirteen charges it has brought. Here is the background — what we know of it at this time.

On the night of March 16, an exchange of gunfire between two Fulton County Sheriff's deputies and persons unknown resulted in the death of Deputy Richard Kinchen and the serious injury of Deputy Aldranon English. The incident took place in the vicinity of the community mosque founded by Imam Al-Amin. According to the authorities, the deputies were attempting to serve an arrest warrant on Al-Amin, who had missed an earlier court appearance. (These charges, while not insignificant, were relatively minor compared to the ones he now faces. Imam Al-Amin maintains that he never received notification of this court date, even though his residence and business address were well known to authorities.)

In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, the Atlanta police released in rapid succession, and the media reported, four significantly different accounts of the incident. The precise location, the sequence of events, the description, and even the number of assailants were all revised in these early accounts, the only constant being a "trail of blood." Deputy English was certain he'd seen, spoken to, shot, and seriously wounded his attacker. The investigators reported following a "heavy trail" of blood up the steps and across the porch of an empty house. From photographs shown him, the wounded officer identified the shooter as Al-Amin, although there were discrepancies in his initial description of the shooter. A regional manhunt was launched. The local media had a field day with H. Rap Brown, whom they identified as a former Black Panther leader and all-around desperado. Apparently the most recent picture they could find was a police mug shot of a fierce-looking Black Power militant out of the 1960s. This image saturated all media (except radio) and is indicative of the general tone of the coverage. However, a few days after the shooting, when Al-Amin was arrested in Alabama, he was found to be completely free of any physical injury. Subsequently very little was heard of the "wounded assailant" and the "trail of blood" motif.

There are other significant discrepancies between police and media reports and the known facts, but there is no need to recapitulate those here. They will come out in court, and I am no more the imam's lawyer than you are a jury of his peers. There is, however, one important dimension to this story that seems to have escaped the notice of the media.

Neither I nor the media commentators, not having been present, can say exactly what happened that night: who was present, or why and how things happened as they did. All that is indisputably clear is that an eminently avoidable human tragedy took place. One young black man was dead, another seriously injured, and a leader of the community was on trial for his life. Was this inevitable? Did any of it have to happen or was it at all avoidable? Recall with me the prevailing context against which these events unfolded.

In March 2000, there was a particular mood in working-class African American communities across the country. Our communities had been traumatized by a series of shootings of unarmed black men in urban centers, most of them innocent of any crime, at the hands of police. In black Islamic communities in particular, feelings were extremely raw over the police shooting of a devout, law-abiding, unarmed young African Muslim named Amadou Diallo as he stood in the foyer of his apartment building in New York. Although over forty shots were fired at or into the young man, the four police perpetrators had been found innocent of any wrong-doing. The Diallo case had been the subject of sermons in mosques across the nation, and the Atlanta mosque was no exception. Let us remember Sura 42, verse 41, "Those who fight when oppressed incur no guilt . . ."

The Atlanta shootout took place within a month of the acquittal of the four cops. One has to wonder, therefore, why, in the climate created by those events, the Atlanta authorities chose to act as they did. Why was it necessary to send into a Muslim community, under cover of darkness, heavily armed men wearing flak jackets to bring in a respected and beloved religious leader, a figure of fixed address and regular and predictable habits, at night? And this in service of a warrant for charges they describe as relatively minor. Who authorized this action and in this manner? Was this abysmally poor judgment or deliberate provocation?

His neighbors also found it passing strange. "He understood the process, how City Hall works, how federal government works," one lady recalls. "So he was like a mayor to many people. Someone people could go to to make things happen." Another pointed out that "Jamil walked up and down the street all day, from the house to the shop to the mosque. So why would they wait 'til ten o'clock at night? The man certainly wasn't hard to find."

There was a conference marking the foundation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee a few months after the Atlanta shootings. The prisoner's colleagues from the movement said it well in a statement from the conference:

While we are deeply saddened by the bloodshed and loss of human life in this tragic and very avoidable incident, we are equally concerned by the presence in the record of a number of factors which threaten to compound tragedy with injustice. We refer to the number of glaring discrepancies in the official version of events and what appears to us as a precipitous and uncritical rush to judgment by the public media.

What further distresses us is that the facts as alleged are so completely out of character with the man we have come to know as Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. For twenty years, our brother has shown himself a serious student of religion, a devout spiritual teacher as well as a public spirited community leader.

We ourselves know him as a principled, compassionate, mature black man committed to justice for his people and the moral welfare of his community. These allegations are totally antithetical to the character of a man we greatly respect. We urge therefore a suspension of judgment pending a thorough investigation, not only of the tragic events of March 16, but of the chain of events preceding them. (SNCC 40th Anniversary Conference, Raleigh, N.C., April 16, 2000)

Imam Al-Amin has been incarcerated since March 2000 under conditions that seem unnecessarily draconian. In solitary confinement, he was for a time deprived of his Holy Qur'an, and he has never been permitted to participate in weekly Jumu'ah services with other members of his faith. He is silenced by a gag order imposed by the court. However, prior to this order he was able to make a personal statement. In the manner of his vocation and faith, the statement is issued in the name of his God, which inclines me to assume its sincerity. We should let him speak in his own voice:

In the name of Allah, the Beneficent the Merciful
Praise be to Allah,
The Cherisher and Sustainer of the Worlds;
Most Gracious, Most Merciful;
Master of the Day of Judgment.
Thee do we worship,
And Thine aid we seek.
Show us the straight way.
Peace be upon those who do good.

My name is Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the former H. Rap Brown. I am a devoted servant of Allah, and an unwavering devotee to His cause. For more than 30 years, I have been tormented and persecuted by my enemies for reasons of race and belief. I seek truth over a lie; I seek justice over injustice; I seek righteousness over the rewards of evildoers, and I love Allah more than I love the state.

On March 16, 2000, Fulton County Sheriff Deputy Ricky Kinchen was killed and Sheriff Aldranon English was shot and injured in the neighborhood where I have lived, worked, and prayed. Indeed, this tragedy occurred across the street from the Mosque I founded. I have been accused by the State of Georgia of having committed these crimes. Let me declare before the families of these men, before the state, and any who would dare to know the truth, that I neither shot nor killed anyone. I am innocent of the 13 charges that have been brought against me. Let me also declare that I am one with the grief of this mother and father at the loss of their son. I am joined at the heart with this widow and her children at the loss of a husband and a father. I drink from the same bitter cup of sorrow as the siblings at the loss of a beloved brother. I am powerless to do anything to ease your pain and suffering except pray that Allah comforts you in your hour of need and grants you peace for the remainder of your days.

. . . Fulton County District Attorney, Paul Howard, as a representative of the state, has asked for my death.

. . . They have sought to marginalize my humanity and humiliate my family. They have done their level best to reduce me to a one-dimensional monster. . . . I am no monster. I am a human being created by Allah and am an instrument of his purpose. I am entitled to every right and every consideration as every other human being including fairness, a fair trial and the presumption of innocence.

. . . Let me declare before the families of these men, before the state, and any who would dare to know the truth, that I neither shot nor killed anyone.

It is now for the state and his fellow citizens to speak. In the national mood following the horrific events of September 11, it will be instructive to see what they say.

Ekwueme Michael Thelwell

Moor of Pelham

December 24, 2001

Pelham, Massachusetts

Introduction

Racism systematically verifies itself when the slave can only break free by imitating the master: by contradicting his own reality. ⁴

When a Black man looks at Black people with a Black mind and Black soul, it is immediately apparent that Black people possess certain unique characteristics which not only distinguish them from whites and negroes, but which have greatly contributed to the survival of Blacks. Whites recognize this and have always attempted to eradicate these characteristics or discredit them. In instances where they have succeeded, negroes have been created.

Negroes have always been close allies of whites in trying to eliminate Black resistance to undesirable acculturation. Negroes see poor and uninstitutionalized Blacks as niggers. They find it necessary to prove to whites that they are not niggers, failing to realize that whites see all Black people as niggers, no matter how rich or how poor.

Some Blacks prefer to be called negroes because they like to distinguish themselves from other Blacks. They fear that if they called themselves Blacks, they might antagonize whites. And if they antagonized whites, they would lose their position as negroes — the white-appointed overseers of Blacks. Thus, negroes have always tried to aid and impress whites by eliminating Blackness. Negroes know that whites prefer institutionalized Blacks, i.e., Blacks who give their allegiance to white cultural, political, social and economic institutions. Non-institutionalized Blacks are difficult to control, because their allegiance is to Blacks and not to white institutions. It is negroes who strain to send their children to white schools so that the nigger in them may be killed and they may thereby become better institutionalized.

Any action or behavior which is not endorsed by whites, negroes consider "acting a nigger." What was "acting a nigger" two years ago is now accepted as "soul." Naturally, this was endorsed by whites before being accepted by negroes. The conversation in negro america has always been, "What are we going to do about them niggers?" never, "What are we going to do about them white folks?" Negroes always said, "Niggers holding us back!" "Niggers ain't shit!" "Don't go around acting a nigger!"

Negroes say:

Nobody but niggers curse and use "poor English."
Nobody but niggers steal.
Nobody but niggers are always loud.
Nobody but niggers listen to the blues.
Nobody but niggers burn and loot.
Nobody but niggers eat watermelon.
I don't call you nigger 'cause you're mine,
I call you nigger 'cause you shine.

While negroes are saying this about poor and uninstitutionalized Blacks, whites say this about all Blacks. The negro, being unable to recognize who is the true enemy, becomes an enemy of Blacks. Negroes prefer "living" to being free.

To be Black in this country is to be a nigger. To be a nigger is to resist both white and negro death. It is to be free in spirit, if not body. It is the spirit of resistance which has prepared Blacks for the ultimate struggle. This word, "nigger," which is taboo in negro and white america, becomes meaningful in the Black community. Among Blacks it is not uncommon to hear the words, "my nigger," (addressed to a brother as an expression of kinship and brotherhood and respect for having resisted), or "He's a bad nigger!," meaning, He'll stand up for himself. He won't let you down. He'll go down with you. When Blacks call negroes "niggers," however, it takes on the negativeness of white and negro usage.

Negroes and whites have wished death to all Blacks, to all niggers. Their sentiment is "Die Nigger Die!" — eitehr by becoming a negro or by institutionalized or active genocide.

Blacks know, however, that no matter how much or how hard negroes and whites may try, ultimately it will be the negro and his allies who will "Dye, die, die!"

America calling.
negroes.
can you dance?
play foot/baseball?
nanny?
cook?
needed now. negroes
who can entertain
ONLY.
other not
wanted.
(& are considered extremely dangerous.)
Don L. Lee

Body

1

My first contact with white america was marked by her violence, for when a white doctor pulled me from between my mother's legs and slapped my wet ass, I, as every other negro in america, reacted to this man-inflicted pain with a cry. A cry that america has never allowed to cease; a cry that gets louder and more intense with age; a cry that can only be heard and understood by others who live behind the color curtain. A cry? Or was it a scream? Whatever it was, we accepted it.

I had been born in "america, the land of the free." To insure my country's freedom, my father was somewhere fighting, for this was a year of the second war to end all wars — World War II. This was October 4, 1943, and victory was in the air. The world would now be safe for democracy.

But who would insure my freedom? Who would make democracy safe for Black people? America recognized long ago what negroes now examine in disbelief: every Black birth in america is political. With each new birth comes a potential challenge to the existing order. Each new generation brings forth untested militancy. America's ruling class now experiences what Herod must have at the birth of "Christ": "Go and search . . . and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also." America doesn't know which Black birth is going to be the birth that will overthrow this country.

The threat to america, however, does not exist in negro america, but rather as a result of negro america. If one examines the structure of this country closely he will note that there are three basic categories: they are white america, negro america, and Black america. The threat to the existing structure comes from Black america, which exists in contradiction to both white and negro america. It is the evolution of these contradictions that has given rise to the present revolutionary conditions. Revolution is indeed inevitable, and, as the cycle of change closes around america's racist environment, the issue of color becomes more pertinent.

Color is the first thing Black people in america become aware of. You are born into a world that has given color meaning and color becomes the single most determining factor of your existence. Color determines where you live, how you live and, under certain circumstances, if you will live. Color determines your friends, your education, your mother's and father's jobs, where you play, what you play and, more importantly, what you think of yourself.

In and of itself, color has no meaning. But the white world has given it meaning — political, social, economic, historical, physiological and philosophical. Once color has been given meaning, an order is thereby established. If you are born Black in america, you are the last of that order. As kids we learned the formula for the structure of american society:

If you're white,
You're all right.
If you're brown,
Stick around.
But if you're black,
Get back, get back.

Because of the importance assigned to color, negroes choose only to legitimatize two americas: white and negro. When one examines the way in which these two americas are structured, it is obvious that the similarities between them are greater than the differences. The differences exist only in the external control of each and their internal order, which, in turn, create value contradictions. In other words, whites control both white america and negro america for the benefit of whites. And because of this kind of external control by whites in their own self-interest, negroes who structure their communities after those of whites are forced to enforce values of whites. They attempt to explain away their lack of control by saying that they are just members of the larger community of "americans."

A monologue is perpetually expounded by white america which is echoed by negroes afflicted with white patriotism.

white america:
Think white or I'll kill you.
And if you think too white, I'll kill you.

negro america:

Think white or I'll kill you.
And if you think too white "the man" will kill you.
So think colored.
Imitate the white man,
but not to perfection in front of him.

As Julian Moreau says in his novel, Black Commandos:

Attitudes necessary for survival were vigorously pounded into the wooly heads of black boys and girls by their loving mothers. The boys were reared to be Negroes, not men. A Negro might survive a while, but a black "man" didn't live very long. . . . A black boy aiming to reach "manhood" rather than "Negro-hood" rarely lived that long.

For 400 years the internal contradictions and inconsistencies of white america have been dealt with through its institutions. In regard to race or color, these contradictions have always been on a national, never a local or individual level. Whites as individuals have always loved to be thought of as superior. They have always known that if they could justify and make their actions legal, either through their religion, their courts or their history (educational system), then it would be unnecessary to actually rectify them because the negro would accept their interpretation. White america's most difficult problem thus becomes how to justify and not rectify national inconsistencies. If white nationalism is disguised as history or religion, then it is irrefutable. White nationalism divides history into two parts, B.C. and A.D. — before the white man's religion and after it. And "progress," of course, is considered to have taken place only after the white man's religion came into being. The implication is evident: God is on the white man's side, for white Jesus was the "son" of God.

White america has used religion and history to its advantage. Thus, the North never really differed from the South for they both taught the same history. Catholics never differed from other religions for they taught from the same text. Republicans are no different from Democrats, as Democrats are no different from Dixiecrats. As for liberals, Fanon says they are "as much the enemy of oppressed people and Freedom as the self-avowed enemy, because it is impossible to be both a member of the oppressor class and a friend of the oppressed." So we can see that for white america the only real contradictions are those that arise from the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of her Constitution. These contradictions give rise to negro america.

Most Black persons of my time were born into negro america. The first thing you learn is that you are different from whites. The next thing you learn is that you are different from each other. You are born into a world of double standards where color is of paramount importance. In your community a color pattern exists which is closely akin to the white man's, and likewise reinforced from both ends of the spectrum. Light-skinned negroes believe they are superior and darker negroes allow them to operate on that belief. Because of the wide color range which exists in negro america, an internal color colony has been created. Dark negroes are taught that they are inferior not only to whites but to lighter-skinned negroes. And lighter-skinned negroes assume a superior attitude.

Negro america is set up the same as white america. The lighter skinned a negro, the more significant a role he can play. (It has always been the one who looked white who made it in negro america. This was the man with the position, the influence, this was the man who usually got the white man's best job.) In between light negro america and Black negro america (in terms of color), there is a special category of people, who are assigned the name of red niggers. These are the people who are light enough to go into light negro america, but do not have caucasian characteristics. They don't have straight hair or white features. So they can go either way, depending on them. They can operate in Black negro america or at the outer fringes of light negro america. Race prejudice in america becomes color prejudice in negro america. That which is cultural prejudice by whites against Blacks becomes class prejudice in negro america. To distinguish themselves, negroes assign class distinctions. Here we find the instituting and substituting of parallel values. Negroes assume that what is good for white america is good for negro america.

Negroes are always confined to what can be called the "shit regiment." I first became acquainted with the shit regiment in the cub scouts. In every parade, we always marched behind the horses, which meant that we always had to march in horseshit. All the way through life there are shit regiments in the negro community and negroes adhere to them. As a matter of fact, negroes will protect these regiments. The debate was never whether or not we had to march, but whether or not the whites were going to put machines down there to wash the horseshit away before we marched in it. There was never any discussion as to whether or not we should march behind the horses. Uh-uh. Everybody accepted that. They just wanted the horseshit washed out of the way before we came through. White america's largest shit regiment is negro america.

Given that negroes are a colonized people, the most important phase of colonization is the sub-cultural phase. In negro america, negroes relate only to negroes of the same educational background. Dr. So-and-So talks only to Dr. So-and-So and the brother on the block better not act like he thinks he can go up to Dr. So-and-So and talk to him man-to-man. To Dr. So-and-So, the brother on the block is nothing but a nigger who's holding the race back. Dr. So-and-So goes to the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian or the Catholic Church. The brother on the block goes to the Baptist Church, the Holy Rollers or the Sanctified Church. And the Methodist Church is in between the two. It ain't as niggerish as the Baptist Church, but it's not as high class as the Episcopal Church. As negroes become more "white-educated," the transition in religion begins. All of a sudden, it's beneath them to go to church and shout and get happy. That's not dignified. As they get more "educated," their religion gets more like the white man's religion as if their heaven will be segregated too. "Education" even extends down to the naming of the children. The more "educated" the negro becomes, the more European names he picks for his children. Michele, Simone, Hubert, Whitney. All of a sudden, Sam and Bertha Lee ain't good enough anymore. In other words, values are assigned to names. Names must now be more than functional.

The poor negro doesn't aspire to be white, he just wants to make it into negro america. So he works hard all his life and finally rents a little house and puts some furniture in it which he keeps covered with plastic so it won't get dirty. And he gets mad if anybody sits on it, because he's trying to imitate negro america. Once he gets into negro america, he learns of so-called middle-class values, white values. Then he wants to get into white america.

When he tries to enter white america, he is rejected. The doors are shut. Even if he has a big job in some white firm, if he's one of those "only" negroes, he still finds out that he's Black when it's quitting time. The white workers go their way and leave him to go his. They're nice and friendly on the job and all buddy-buddy, but that doesn't go outside the office. They don't want their friends thinking that they're nigger lovers. So this sets up a reaction in the negro. He gets frustrated and tries to live a contradiction and that's why when the rebellions start, he's all for them. He doesn't have the courage to admit it to the white man. When the white folks he works with ask him what he thinks about "the riot," he says it's hurting the cause and all sorts of bull like that. But that night after work, he breaks records getting home to watch it on t.v., cheering like a muthafucka the whole time. Take the Washington, D.C., rebellion, for instance. They arrested something like 3,000 people and when they booked 'em, they found out that the great majority of them worked for the government. Had jobs, making money, still these were the dudes who were out in the street. In Detroit it was the same thing. It wasn't only the unemployed brother. It was the one who was bringing home $110 every Friday. It was the one who had a Thunderbird, and some clean vines. He was the one who had tried to enter white america and had found that no matter what he did, he was still a nigger to the white man.

Those Black people who remain in the Black community, however, remain a viable force. They don't have the frustrations that exist in negro america. In Black america the bonds are tighter. The fight is for freedom, not whiteness.

Negroes have always been treated like wild, caged animals by the white man, and have always felt the passions of caged animals (because they were living in cages), but they would always act civilized with whites, that is, what white people told them was civilized. But inside this "civilized" negro was an undying hate. This hate, however, could only be released in negro america. If it was ever released in white america, it would prove to white people that negroes were savages. That hate became a self-hate. So to preserve their sanity, their humanity and their white civilization, negroes had to hate themselves. And when they hated, they distinguished between those who were most like white people and those who were Black. And they hated Black people and poor negroes. (Poor negroes are those Black people with the values of negro america, but not the means.)

It is clear that the revolution will not come from negro america but from Black america, and Black america is growing. Black america is important because it is here that you will find the self-imposed exiles from both white and negro america. Black america has always offered Blacks human freedoms — a humanism uncommon to white and negro america. Some enter Black america because negro america rejects darker-skinned negroes, and, of course, if a person is rejected by negro america, he is automatically rejected by white america. Other people enter Black america because of some experience they had in their childhood. Still others, because of something they may have read that was written by someone in Black america. Black america has existed ever since the first slave despised the injustice that was done to him and did not seek to accommodate himself to that injustice. Thus, there have always been people who could articulate these injustices and could discuss what the response to these injustices should be. It is self-evident that people always rebel against oppression and there has been one continuous rebellion in Black america since the first slave got here.

2

I was born into a family of dark-skinned negroes, but I'm what many consider a red nigger. My mother, my father, my brother Ed and my sister are all darker than I am. Because I was lighter, it meant that I was supposed to get ahead. So my mother gave me what I would call preferential treatment. Because of this there was a lot of rivalry between my brother Ed and myself. He and I weren't "tight" when we were young. He thought that our mother treated me better than she did him. In negro america the more you look like buttermilk, the prettier you're supposed to be. This is color prejudice. I don't think that my mother was conscious of all this, but it happened a lot of times. So Ed and I used to have a lot of conflicts. I didn't want it that way. Ed was my older brother and I looked up to him. But he didn't want me hanging around him.

Ed and I are very close now and that color thing doesn't come between us anymore. But it's a thing which could really damage the Black community if people don't begin to understand it. There are nationalist groups that won't accept light-complexioned Blacks. What they're doing is helping the white man, because they're creating the potential for a divisive fight inside the Black community. And it's totally unnecessary and damaging. The government is doing enough to try and divide the Black community. We shouldn't be helping them. We must learn that Black is not a color but the way you think.

If we are to succeed in the struggle we must eliminate the significance that we have assigned to color in our community. The range of Black runs from the brother who is Black enough to poot smoke, to the blood who is pale with the rape of Mothers. Among Black people color can have no value, no significance. Commitment will determine the value of individuals. If I had identified with the attitudes of white-minded negroes and then come home to my dark-skinned brother and family, I wouldn't have been able to accept them. But that wasn't a problem for me, because I knew who I wanted to identify with. It was the bloods in my neighborhood, the guys who hung out down on the corner. The Black community, in other words. I always hung out with cats who had made hanging out a profession. I found that it took special skills to hang out 14 hours just laying and playing.

My first institutionalized schooling came in an orphanage — Blundon Orphanage Home. It was operated by white missionaries whose role was similar to that of whites in Africa. Civilize the savage through Christianity. Savages in this case being Black kids from families too poor to support them. The school had the look of a huge plantation with two big shabby old buildings located near the bottom of the hill and a relatively well-kept building at the top. The grounds around the building at the top of the hill were also well-kept with trees and shrubs and Keep-Off signs. More attention, in fact, was paid to the grounds on the "hill" than was paid to the two buildings in the "Bottom." Each of the "Big Houses," as they were called, had classrooms on the bottom floors and living quarters above. All of the teachers and students in the school were Black. The Black residents were of all ages and basically responsible for each other. The older children attended to the needs of the smaller children. Children of all ages were expected to work and were assigned jobs.

This was my first real contact with a world bigger and badder than that of my street. You had to excel in either fighting, running or tomming; I integrated the three. In this world, the heroes were bloods who will never be remembered outside our Black community. Cats like Pie-man, Ig, Yank, Smokey, Hawk, Lil Nel — all bad muthafuckas. Young bloods wanted to be like these brothers. They were the men in our community. They had all the women and had made their way to the top through sports and knowing the streets. So to us, the most important thing was to excel in athletics. Recess was the most essential part of the school day, for we could practice our skills. One play could make or break you. We all lived for the big play. For many it never came.

Once I'd established my reputation, cats respected it. "You don't mess with Rap, cause he's our man." If I went out of my neighborhood, though, it was another story. I'd be on somebody else's turf and would have to make it or take it over there. So there was always a lot of fighting and competition among the young brothers.

It really gets bad when you get to high school. In high school there's always rivalry between the football teams of the two high schools in town or something like that. But it's more than athletic rivalry. It may start on the football field, but it's carried to the street. In Baton Rouge there was a rivalry between McKinley High and Capitol High. You'd think the students were two totally different races. People were perpetually at war. I mean they were really at war. Gangs from South Baton Rouge would be expected to fight dudes from the Park. Dudes from the Park couldn't come to South Baton Rouge and vice-versa unless they were bad muthafuckas. And if they were caught, being bad didn't make no difference.

That type of rivalry still exists. It's perpetuated by the schools, by the negroes in authority who pretend they're handling it, but don't. The whole fever pitch which builds up in those gangs is transferred from the people who are being "educated" to the cats who hang around the streets.

But when most of us rivals went on to college, then college made a kind of bond between us. The athletes who had scholarships and the cats who worked during the summer to get that tuition came to college and then they became allies against dudes from other cities. Like, "you my homeboy, and the dude who ain't from around here, he ain't one of us." Yeah, well that's part of that whole primitive thing and it's very dangerous. Given the destruction by slavery of both tribe and culture, negroes created a new kind of american tribalism. A tribalism based on the exclusion of certain types. A deliberate attempt to make race a secondary consideration. There are tribes and tribes of negroes. The A.K.A. tribe, Kappa tribe, Doctor tribe, Teacher tribe, Entertainer tribe, High School tribe, College tribe, etc. This tribalism has extended into what is called the "Movement." "Militant" tribes compete against other "militant" tribes and "moderate" tribes, to promote tribal interests and not the interests of the race or the masses. We treat revolution as if it is an historic process rather than an evolutionary movement. In other words, we all got a monopoly on truth. Whites who consider themselves allies add to this by deciding which tribe is "correct" and which is "incorrect." In other words, the one which best fits their needs. As a result of this kind of external control, tribes engage in fratricide (unknowingly in most cases) to gain the favor of the white "ally." Tribe is placed above race. It is not uncommon to hear negroes say, "My loyalty is to my Frat., God, and my country, in that order."

When a race of people is oppressed within a system that fosters the idea of competitive individualism, the political polarization around individual interests prevents group interests. Each negro prides himself on his ability to reason or think as an individual. Therefore, any gains are to the individual and not to the group. So individuals join tribes or groups to further their own personal ambitions. It's one of the things that keeps us fighting ourselves instead of the enemy. Black people have always been ready to shoot and cut each other up. The weekend is always wartime in the Black community. Every week when Friday rolls around, you know that somebody is gon' get killed before church time Sunday morning. But let one white man come down the street acting bad and all he got in his pocket is a toothpick, all of them bad niggers, niggers ready to kill in a minute, be hiding in the alleys or be grinning and bowing. "Yassuh, Mr. White Man." White bleeds just as red as Black does, but you can only prove it by hearsay. And the press has done a job on negroes and whites, because it makes you think that Black people are killing 14 white folks a day. But even J. Edgar Hoover, with his faggot ass, admits that more Black folks kill Black folks than Blacks kill whites. But everybody thinks that we're killing white folks. Uh-uh. We're still killing off each other. Even a lot of these so-called "militants" go around pulling their 22's on Black people and "tomming" when the white man comes around. And they supposed to be so muthafucking bad. Yeah, we are bad when it comes to us. And the white man sits back and laughs 'cause niggers ain't got no better sense than to be fighting one another.

However, we must understand the many ways in which the white man brainwashes people into acting and thinking like he wants them to so he can continue to control them.

You grow up in Black america and it's like living in a pressure cooker. Babies become men without going through childhood. And when you become a man, you got nothing to look forward to and nothing to look back on. So what do you make it on? The wine bottle, the reefer or Jesus. A taste of grape, the weed or the cross. These are our painkillers.

I knew dudes who were old men by the time they were seven. That's the age when little white kids are dreaming about fairy princesses and Cinderella and playing in tree houses and wondering whether they want two cars or four cars when they grow up. We didn't have time for all that. Didn't even have time for childhood. If you acted like a child, you didn't survive and that's all there was to it. Hell, you be walking home from school and up come some high school dudes who'd jack you up and take the little dime your mama had given you to buy some candy with. So what'd you do? Jump some dude who was younger and littler than you and take his dime. And pretty soon you started carrying a razor blade, a switch blade or just a pocketful of rocks so you could protect yourself as a man. You had to if you were going to survive.

White folks get all righteous and wonder why Black people steal and gamble. Same reason white folks do. We need money, because the society says you must have it to keep from starving. If you got it, you eat. If you don't, tough. But white people are able to make their stealing and gambling legitimate. White man'll sell you a $20 suit for $50 and call it good business. What he actually did was steal $30. White man'll buy a watch for $5.00 sell it for $49.95 and call the difference, profit. Profit is a nice word for stealing which the society has legitimatized. Catholics go to church every week and gamble, but they call it Bingo. The Pope blesses 'em, so it's all right. The state of Nevada is built on a deck of cards and a roulette wheel, but that's okay, 'cause it's white folks that passed the law saying it was okay. But you let us get over in the corner of the alley with some dice and try to make a little profit and here come the police, the judge, the jailer and the sociology student. We get thrown into jail for gambling or stealing. White folks go to Congress for stealing and they call that democracy.

America is a country that makes you want things, but doesn't give you the means to get those things. Little Black children sit in front of the t.v. set and all they see are fine cars, perfumes, clothes and everything else they ain't got. They sit there and watch it, telling the rats to sit down and stop blocking their view. Ain't nobody told them, though, that they don't have any way of getting any of that stuff. They couldn't even get full at supper, but that don't matter. They want an Oldsmobile. So next day during recess, they go off in a corner of the schoolyard and pitch pennies, play Odd Man Wins, Heads-up Basketball for a quarter, Pitty-Pat for a nickel, Old Maid for a penny. Once they become pros at that, they move on up to Tonk, Black Jack and Craps. After school, there's the pinball machines. Some of them little dudes could barely see the game board, but they would be there, jim, shoving nickels in the machine, trying to manipulate the lights into a straight line. You could win 50 cents or a dollar and if you were lucky, $5.00. Once you graduated from the pinball machine, you entered the poolroom.

America's a bitch. Being Black in this country is like somebody asking you to play white Russian roulette and giving you a gun with bullets in all the chambers. Any way you go, jim, that's your ass. America says you got to have money to live and to get money you got to have a job. To get a job, you got to have an education. So along comes a Black man and he gets a worse than inferior education so he can't qualify for a job he couldn't get because he was Black to begin with and still he's supposed to eat, keep his family together, pay the rent and buy an Oldsmobile. And white folks wonder why niggers steel and gamble. I only wish we would stop this petty stealing and take care of Chase Manhattan Bank, Fort Knox or some armories.

There was this blood I grew up with named J.S. He was a smart dude, particularly in math. Dude would have given a computer competition. He lived with his aunt, who worked as a maid, and three sisters. Cause his aunt was a maid, she didn't make hardly nothing. White folks love to pay their niggers in old clothes and leftovers. So he couldn't dress like some of the other students whose parents were making it in negro america. The teachers were all trying to make it in negro america too. They took a bath once a day and wiped under their arms and between their legs twice a day and always tried to smell like they lived in perfume bottles. Well, I know how my man must've felt sitting in class in front of some bitch like this. He felt like a piece of shit, particularly when the teacher would stand up in front of the class and talk about him 'cause his clothes were dirty. You damned right his clothes were dirty! His aunt worked from can to can't, and by the time she got home at night she was too tired to bend over the scrub board to wash out some clothes for J.S. to wear every day. She did the best she could.

J.S. was as smart as anybody in school and he showed it, too, but in negro america if you didn't have the right color, the right clothes, and the right manners, sorry for you. Them teachers were slick, though, when it came to telling a kid he wasn't shit. They were always going out of the room to stand in the hall and gossip with the other teachers. When they did, they'd leave a student in charge to sit behind the desk and take the names of the students who talked or cut up. And always, the one left in charge was light, bright and almost white. If a light-skinned student was reciting in class, the teacher had the patience of Job, the understanding of Solomon and the expectations of God Almighty himself. But you let a sho-nuf blood just pause when he was reciting and the teacher told him to sit down in a voice filled with hatred. "I didn't expect you to know it anyway," the teacher would sometimes say, meaning, you're black. You're black! You're black!

The teachers had to tell J.S. he was smart, 'cause it was so obvious. But they made a point of letting him know that being smart wasn't enough if your hair was uncombed, your clothes a little dirty, your skin a little ashy and your manners not the best. In other words, you may be smart, but you black! So J.S. learned pretty quick that there wasn't no reward in being smart and that it didn't have a damned thing to do with surviving.

But this is the kind of education we were subjected to. Education ain't just what comes out of the books, but it's everything that goes on in the school. And if you leave school hating yourself, then it doesn't matter how much you know. Education in america has to be viewed as propaganda machinery. All educational systems are propaganda machines, but for Black people, the american educational system is a propaganda machine we don't need. It propagandizes against us. It makes us hate ourselves.

I began realizing this when I was in high school. I saw no sense in reading Shakespeare. After I read Othello, it was obvious that Shakespeare was a racist. From reading his poetry, I gathered that he was a faggot. But we never discussed the racist attitude expressed in his works. This was when I really began to raise questions. I was in constant conflict with my teachers in high school. I would interpret the thing one way and they would say it's wrong. Well, how could they tell me what Shakespeare was thinking. I knew then that something was wrong, unless the teachers had a monopoly on truth or were communicating with the dead.

Part of my mother's whole attempt to make us a part of negro america was that she took us out of McKinley High and sent us to Southern High. Anybody who could pay $12 a year could go and that was for the activities card. So, you see how jive the thing was. It was connected with the negro college in Baton Rouge, Southern University, and it was really set up so the teachers at Southern wouldn't have to send their children to school with Black kids. It was a crock of shit, but it had an air of "respectability." This was where all the bourgeois negroes were supposed to go.

It could've created problems for me, because if I had identified with most of the white-minded negroes at school, I wouldn't have been able to relate to brothers on the block. Worse than that, I would've thought that I was better than them. It's like the whole school busing thing now. Busing Black children to schools outside the Black community is nothing but a move to divide the community. If integration is what's wanted, then bus the whole community. But to take individuals out of the community is a very dangerous and immoral thing. The "brightest" students are taken, students who can fit into the white man's program best, and they're bused out of the community so they can come back and articulate the white man's program. That splits the community. Parents who sent their children to white schools in the South made a mistake. They injured those students mentally for life. To send a Black kid to a school full of howling maniacs. Madmen! Wildmen! Animals! And those Black kids got their minds messed up. You send a student to a white school and he has to come home to a Black family and a Black community. It messes him up and it messes the community up. This is a deliberate part of "the man's" game.

I could've gotten messed up like that at Southern High if I hadn't known where it was at and what was happening. But I didn't change myself to fit that phony-ass atmosphere and try to be respectable and all that shit. Me and Southern High had quite a few conflicts. One time I got put out of school for wearing my shirt out of my pants. Another time I got put out for cursing out a teacher.

Ed and my sister, who're both older than I, went to the same school. So when I came along, I had to go through the same teachers they'd gone through. The teachers said I should be just like them. I should open doors for them and shit like that. Just like my family had always said I should do things like Ed. So when I wouldn't do all these things and started raising hell, my homeroom teacher started criticizing me. One day I got sick of that shit and I cussed her out. I got put out of school for that.

I was always at odds with teachers. There are certain things in negro institutions that you have to do if you expect to make good grades and certain things you don't do. One of those things is you don't talk back. You don't challenge the existing order. Well, I challenge anything that doesn't make good sense.

Another time in high school they called my mother in about me because I got into it with one of the dudes teaching shop. I knew he was screwing my homeroom teacher, so I didn't have no respect for him, especially since I knew his wife. Us young dudes in the Black community directed our aggression against negroes who had these positions because there was a failure on their part to take out their aggression against white people. But, these negroes in position would always direct their grievances toward Black students. They got mad at us 'cause the white man was mistreating them, and we got mad at them 'cause they let the white man mistreat 'em and then turned around and mistreated us, on top of the white man mistreating all of us.

But I stayed in school, 'cause I wasn't willing to get caught in another trick that eventually led to long sentences in jail or ending up in the gutter one night with a knife in your back. A lot of bloods, though, couldn't cut school. When they came, it was to practice the education they'd been getting out in the street. While we were still in elementary school, J.S. would wait for recess to get out to the playground where he'd sneak a deck of cards out of his pocket, get way off in a corner and start gambling. After school, we'd go home and J.S. would go on down to the pool hall. By the time he was fourteen, he was dealing in a gambling club in West Baton Rouge. After a while he quit school. Working at the club like he was, he was ready to go to bed when the rest of us were getting up to go to classes. We used to see him in the afternoon, though. He'd drop by the school and be vined down. He was clean, jim. Had him a conk then and he knew he was ready.

After a while the state police started cracking down on gambling and J.S. cut out of Baton Rouge and started following the action from Biloxi, Mississippi, over to Houston, Texas, and back again. He was sixteen.

It was a couple of years later when I saw him again. I'd just entered college. I was thumbing my way to school when who should I see hanging out on the corner but J.S., looking clean. I went up to him. We greeted each other like we were ol' cut-buddies, but after all the greeting and slapping hands, we found it hard to talk to each other. Too many different kinds of experience had come between us. He was my nigger, but J.S. had made a way of life on the block which I just figured had aged him. It was a rough life. Drinking, fighting, dodging the police, gambling — it can wear a man down fast. I looked at J.S. and it was beginning to show on him. His eyes once used to shine, but they'd gotten dull and red. His face was getting tight and there were wrinkles starting to crawl across his forehead. He told me that he'd just gotten out of the joint on a concealed weapons charge. Plus he told me that when gambling and living off women wasn't enough to survive, he'd become a cat burglar and a fence on the side. But he definitely wasn't feeling sorry for himself. Only thing he was unhappy about was that his luck in gambling was off. We went and got some "pluck" (wine) and I told him I was in college. He asked what I wanted to be. I told him rich. He looked up at the ceiling and paused for a minute before he said, "You know, I've never given any thought to what I want to become." I told him he should think about it, but I knew I was shuckin' and jivin'. Hell, hardly any of us had ever thought about what we wanted to become. What was the future? That was something white folks had. We just lived from day to day, expecting whatever life put on us and dealing with it the best way we knew how when it came. I had accepted the big lie of a Black man succeeding.

I remembered that J.S. was always good with math. I knew how to count money and always figured I didn't need to know no more about numbers, but I had to take math in college. So I showed J.S. some of the math problems I had been having trouble with and he looked 'em over for a short while and knocked 'em out in no time. He said he'd tutor me in math. I told him that was cool. But that was the last time I saw him. A couple of weeks later he shot and killed some dude and the judge gave him life. He was eighteen.

That's the way the deal goes down for a lot of bloods. Wiped out by the time they're eighteen and don't ever really know why. He was rebelling against the way the cards were stacked against him and even his rebellion was a stacked deck. He lived his life the way he saw it, made his own laws, but what was legal in our world wasn't "legal" in the white world and eventually he went down.

My ol' lady wanted to keep all that away from me. Didn't want me to know anything about it. I guess she called it protecting me, but I had to be out there where the action was. She thought I should be in the house reading books like Ed so I could make my way in negro america, but I wasn't hearing that. I never was one for too much reading anyway. Too, how was I supposed to stay on top of what was going down if I was sitting up in the house with a book. If you were going to stay in control, you had to be in the street.

The street is where young bloods get their education. I learned how to talk in the street, not from reading about Dick and Jane going to the zoo and all that simple shit. The teacher would test our vocabulary each week, but we knew the vocabulary we needed. They'd give us arithmetic to exercise our minds. Hell, we exercised our minds by playing the Dozens.

I fucked your mama
Till she went blind.
Her breath smells bad,
But she sure can grind.
I fucked your mama
For a solid hour.
Baby came out
Screaming, Black Power.
Elephant and the Baboon
Learning to screw.
Baby came out looking
Like Spiro Agnew.

And the teacher expected me to sit up in class and study poetry after I could run down shit like that. If anybody needed to study poetry, she needed to study mine. We played the Dozens for recreation, like white folks play Scrabble.

In many ways, though, the Dozens is a mean game because what you try to do is totally destroy somebody else with words. It's that whole competition thing again, fighting each other. There'd be sometimes 40 or 50 dudes standing around and the winner was determined by the way they responded to what was said. If you fell all over each other laughing, then you knew you'd scored. It was a bad scene for the dude that was getting humiliated. I seldom was. That's why they call me Rap, 'cause I could rap. (The name stuck because Ed would always say, "That my nigger Rap," "Rap my nigger.") But for dudes who couldn't, it was like they were humiliated because they were born Black and then they turned around and got humiliated by their own people, which was really all they had left. But that's the way it is. Those that feel most humiliated humiliate others. The real aim of the Dozens was to get a dude so mad that he'd cry or get mad enough to fight. You'd say shit like, "Man, tell your mama to stop coming around my house all the time. I'm tired of fucking her and I think you should know that it ain't no accident you look like me." And it could go on for hours sometimes. Some of the best Dozens players were girls.

Signifying is more humane. Instead of coming down on somebody's mother, you come down on them. But, before you can signify you got to be able to rap. A session would start maybe by a brother saying, "Man, before you mess with me you'd rather run rabbits, eat shit and bark at the moon." Then, if he was talking to me, I'd tell him:

Man, you must don't know who I am.
I'm sweet peeter jeeter the womb beater
The baby maker the cradle shaker
The deerslayer the buckbinder the women finder
Known from the Gold Coast to the rocky shores of Maine
Rap is my name and love is my game.
I'm the bed tucker the cock plucker the motherfucker
The milkshaker the record breaker the population maker
The gun-slinger the baby bringer
The hum-dinger the pussy ringer
The man with the terrible middle finger.
The hard hitter the bullshitter the poly-nussy getter
The beast from the East the Judge the sludge
The women's pet the men's fret and the punks' pin-up boy.
They call me Rap the dicker the ass kicker
The cherry picker the city slicker the titty licker
And I ain't giving up nothing but bubble gum and hard times and I'm fresh out of bubble gum.
I'm giving up wooden nickels 'cause I know they won't spend
And I got a pocketful of splinter change.
I'm a member of the bathtub club: I'm seeing a whole lot of ass but I ain't taking no shit.
I'm the man who walked the water and tied the whale's tail in a knot
Taught the little fishes how to swim
Crossed the burning sands and shook the devil's hand
Rode round the world on the back of a snail carrying a sack saying AIR MAIL.
Walked 49 miles of barbwire and used a Cobra snake for a necktie
And got a brand new house on the roadside made from a cracker's hide,
Got a brand new chimney setting on top made from the cracker's skull
Took a hammer and nail and built the world and calls it "THE BUCKET OF BLOOD."
Yes, I'm hemp the demp the women's pimp
Women fight for my delight.
I'm a bad motherfucker. Rap the rip-saw the devil's brother 'n law.
I roam the world I'm known to wander and this .45 is where I get my thunder.
I'm the only man in the world who knows why white milk makes yellow butter.
I know where the lights go when you cut the switch off.
I might not be the best in the world, but I'm in the top two and my brother's getting old.
And ain't nothing bad 'bout you but your breath.

Now, if the brother couldn't come back behind that, I usually cut him some slack (depending on time, place and his attitude). We learned what the white folks call verbal skills. We learned how to throw them words together. America, however, has Black folk in a serious game of the Dozens. (The dirty muthafucka.) Signifying allowed you a choice — you could either make a cat feel good or bad. If you had just destroyed someone or if they were just down already, signifying could help them over. Signifying was also a way of expressing your own feelings:

Man, I can't win for losing.
If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all.
I been having buzzard luck
Can't kill nothing and won't nothing die
I'm living on the welfare and things is stormy
They borrowing their shit from the Salvation Army
But things bound to get better 'cause they can't get no worse
I'm just like the blind man, standing by a broken window
I don't feel no pain.
But it's your world
You the man I pay rent to
If I had your hands I'd give 'way both my arms.
Cause I could do without them
I'm the man but you the main man
I read the books you write
You set the pace in the race I run
Why, you always in good form
You got more foam than Alka Seltzer. . .

Signifying at its best can be heard when brothers are exchanging tales. I used to hang out in the bars just to hear the old men "talking shit." By the time I was nine, I could talk Shine and the Titanic, Signifying Monkey, three different ways, and Piss-Pot-Peet, for two hours without stopping.

Sometimes I wonder why I even bothered to go to school. Practically everything I know I learned on the corner. Today they're talking about teaching sex in school. But that's white folks for you. They got to be taught to screw. They got to intellectualize everything. Now how you gon' intellectualize screwing? At the age when little white kids were finding out that there was something down there to play with, we knew where it went and what to do with it after it got there. You weren't a man if you hadn't gotten yourself a little piece by the time you were seven. When the white kids were out playing Hide and Go Seek, we were playing Hide and Go Get It. One dude would count to a hundred while the girls hid. Once the girls were hidden, you went and found one and you got it. That was the game. Hide and Go Get It. None of that ol' simple tagging a tree and yelling, "I got in free." Yeah, we got in free.

Some of the dudes started pimping early for their sisters and, sometimes, even their mama. Survival'll make you do anything, jim. Anything! You'd be walking down the street one night and some white dude in a car would pull up next to you and say, "Hey, boy, you got a sister?" or, "You know any nice colored girls?" So whitey would get him a little taste of black gold for $10 or $15 and Black people helped him. It shows you just how low you can get when you sell your own women to a white man — or any man for that matter. But it's particularly bad when they're sold to white men. To this day, you can find the snakes in the Black community on the weekends trying to buy some Black pussy. And Black men see 'em, know what they're there for and don't run 'em out. Not even the so-called big, bad militants.

3

So much of the life story of any negro growing up in america is the story of what has been done to him and how he reacts to that. That's it. White man acts. Negroes react.

My father is a good example of that. He is a laborer. He works for Esso Standard Oil! Mr. Jesse James Rockefeller! When I was young, it often seemed to me that my father appeared to be pissed off. Now I can understand why. He wouldn't take his frustration out on the people he'd like to. So he would take it out on other people. I remember we were one of the first families in the community to get a t.v. First in the sense that all the kids could come and watch it. Other people had sets but they wouldn't let us watch them. So everybody used to come to our house to watch t.v. My ol' man used to come home, cut the set off and just walk straight on through. And we'd all be sitting on the floor digging this and we knew better than to get up and turn the muthafucka back on. Best we get on out of there. It was time to get in the wind! That was some of the light shit he would pull.

He's an old type of negro dude in terms of what he thinks people should say, and that you should respect people who have position. That kind of thing. He still has that in his mind. I think inwardly he agrees with the Movement and all that. But when I talk to him, he'll tell me I shouldn't talk about the President like I do. I'm sure that it's the position he respects and not Johnson. My old man has been working at the same place for over thirty years. They gave him a medal. Dig it? But he's still a laborer. So now he's going to night school. He's got a good mind. But for negroes it will always be matter over mind.

He was never home. He'd come back from work and he'd split. He'd either go hunting or go out somewhere. His attitude toward white folks was they were wrong. He knew they were wrong, but he had the confidence that the law would take care of it, that it was a problem for the law. Although the white folks were doing us wrong, the good white folks were there, too. You know, like there's good and bad in every race.

I remember when the house behind ours caught fire and my ol' man made several trips inside it while it was burning, bringing people out. He got everybody out but a young baby he couldn't find. They gave him a medal for this too. They gave him this medal and put his picture in the paper. He was a hero and he knew everything was ready then. But the master trick that the muthafuckas pulled on him was that the bank sent him $1,000,000 worth of best wishes, so he was trying to figure out when they were gonna give him some money. He was really hung up over that shit. He was trying to convince himself that some whiteys might send him some dough 'cause he'd saved some other niggers. And they gave him a medal at Standard Oil, where he had been working for 30 fuckin years. Yeah, they gave him a medal. He was all-american. That's the way the psyche of our people works. Yeah, he had been in the burnin' house several times and they sent him $1,000,000 worth of best wishes. That's funny, you know. $1,000,000 dollars worth of best wishes. Explain that shit.

Watching my teachers and my old man did a lot toward shaping my thinking about what needed to be done in this country. At the same time this kind of thing was happening, I was also finding out about the white man. Once when I was young, we were coming back from across the river where we had been visiting some relatives. It was raining and a cop pulled my old man over. I was about seven or eight at the time. I looked out the window and saw him and got down on the floor. He was a white cop, a cracker, and this was america. I was little, but somehow I knew then about white cops. This white cop started hollering and cursing at my old man in front of the whole family. And my old man hadn't done anything. So, I definitely had had my fill of cops after that.

I'd had experience with cops before, because they didn't want the Black kids to shoot off firecrackers at Christmas time. In the white community, you'd think there was a war going on, there'd be so many firecrackers going off. But they'd drive through the Black community to make sure we didn't shoot off none. We did anyway and would just run and hide when we saw the police car coming. But the point of their doing this was to instill fear of the police and of authority in us while we were still quite young.

When I was in the sixth grade there was this old white cop who used to patrol the corner right in front of the elementary school. One day at recess, I organized some little brothers to lay up on the hill and throw some rocks at him. And we bombed his ass. Some ol' negro lady across the street told the principal. I didn't even know she saw us. The principal called us in and beat us with a fan belt. Then she gave us notes to take home. Naturally, the notes told our parents what we'd done. "Well," I said, "I got to be a fool to take this note home to get another beating." So I threw mine away.

At that young an age, I was hostile toward white cops. That ol' white cop hadn't done nothing to us, but I didn't like him. There were a few white people in our community, and we didn't have anything against them. We used to play with the dudes. They all appeared to be slow learners.

That didn't last too long, though. One year when I was a cub scout, I went to the boy scout circus. I had on Ed's old uniform, so I was ready! It was held at the Coliseum on the Louisiana State University campus. In the back of the Coliseum they have the stalls where they keep the animals and this was where all the scout troops assembled. But there was a white section and there was our section. I was told that we shouldn't go around to the white section, because the crackers would shoot us with B.B. guns. "I ain't done nothing to the muthafuckas," I said, "and they ain't gon' shoot me. I'm going to go around there and see what's going on." So I went around there and as I was walking through one of the stalls, I heard a chump say, "Nigger! You have been sentenced to death!" And they started shooting with them B.B. guns. So I turned around and hauled ass getting out of there. I was climbing over a stall and I tore my pants. Right in the seat. A great big tear. My cub scout pants. My only cub scout pants! But I'm still getting up. I ain't stopped. I got back to our section, but I couldn't tell none of the brothers, because they'd told me not to go around there. So I decided I'd tell one of the white scoutmasters on them muthafuckas. I told one, "Mister, I went around there and the dudes shot me with a B.B. gun." The muthafucka looked at me and said, "Look here. Be a good sport about it, scout." Now how am I gon' be a good sport about getting shot? I realized then if I was going to get them muthafuckas back, I was gon' have to get 'em back on my own.

Well, the white troops always went out before us to entertain. So when they went out, I went back there and fucked up all their food. I peed in the tuna fish, spit in the potato salad, threw the hot dogs on the ground, stepped on the potato chips. I messed up everything. And the next year I brought by B.B. gun with me and I further fucked 'em up. Them crackers had made me tear my only cub scout pants — right in the seat — and shot me too.

As if that wasn't enough, I had a confrontation with the police when I was going home. I was going home to take my pants off. The ol' blood scoutmaster had given me some tape to tape 'em up in the seat. I told him I'd torn 'em on a fence, 'cause I knew if I told him what I'd done, he would get mad at me for being around there. He gave me some masking tape. Some white masking tape to put on the seat of a pair of blue pants! And it was taped up like a big L right on the seat of the pants. So I said, hell, I'm going home, take these off, put on some regular clothes and come back later tonight. As I was walking home this cop car pulled up. I was young and his voice yelled out, "Hey, boy!" So I stopped and went over to the car and he said, "Where you going with your pants like that? Don't you know better than to be on the street wearing shit like that? You better get off the damn streets. Don't you never let me catch you out here with shit on like that again." After that I just decided to turn around and go back to the meeting. We didn't live more than a mile from LSU, but I didn't want to chance walking it after that. I thought I'd broke the law. My pants tore! It wasn't my fault, but I didn't know no better and I knew I better not say nothing to him or else I'd end up in jail.

I began to recognize then the value of being violent. I knew I hadn't done anything to make them white muthafuckas shoot their B.B. guns at me, so I knew that the world didn't run on love. The only thing that was gon' keep white muthafuckas off you was you!

The best example of that in the world today is america. America has made it clear that she respects only violence. When the rebellion went down in 1967 in Plainfield, New Jersey, the cops and the National Guard came into the Black community and were raising hell until the brothers sent word that they had guns. The cops and the Guard said, hell, them niggers got guns. We can't go over there and mess with 'em. America does not love China, but she refuses to move against China because she has the bomb. And all those troops. So what it means is that Black people have to address themselves to defending their communities and their homes, because if you can't defend them, you can't control them. Black folks got guns, but every time somebody says we're violent, Black people get up tight. Hell, we've been violent toward each other every Friday and Saturday night since there's been a Friday and Saturday night. Go to the emergency room of any hospital and see who they're bringing in on the weekend. The brother, and didn't no cracker shoot him.

Violence is accepted in america as long as it's white folks doing it. Turn on the t.v. and you go deaf from all the gunfire. Let two fighters get in the ring and let neither one of them hit the other and see what the real savages out there are going to do. They're going to scream for blood. It's no different than the people in ancient Rome who put lions on people.

So the question is not can Black people be violent. They send us to Vietnam and brag about what good fighters we are. It's legitimate for a Black man to go over there and kill 30 Vietcong and get a medal, but you come back here and kill one racist, red-necked, honky, camel-breathed peckerwood who's been misusing you and your people all your life and that's murder. That's homicide, because the white man has the power to define and legitimatize his actions. He can legitimatize violence. At this point we must address ourselves to defensive measures, something that will counteract that violence.

Violence also has a way of unifying a people. In the army a camaraderie is always found among the guys in a regiment who've fought together. Years later when the dudes are fat, middle-aged men they get together and reminisce about all the "gooks" they killed and all the "enemy" chicks they screwed. One significant thing about Detroit and Newark was that the violence created a peoplehood. Black people had walked around under the illusion that they had a class system in the Black community. But the white man changed all that. He went in and beat "middle-class" as hard as lower-class Blacks. And "middle-class" Blacks were throwing as many fire bombs as the brother on the block. And afterwards, there was a real sense of community among the people, a real feeling of pride and togetherness. That came from the fact that they had fought together. It also came from the fact that they recognized that the honky cop kills Black people because they're Black. He doesn't put his gun away when he sees one in a suit or one who speaks so-called "good English." He will shoot just as many bullets at him as he does at the brother with a conk. So a peoplehood was forced upon Black people, through white violence.

The white man is our best teacher, up to a point. It was from watching white people, what they had, and what we had, that I learned about this country. I lived near Louisiana State University and I could see this big fine school with modern buildings and it was for whites. Then there was Southern University, which was about to fall in and that was for the niggers. And when I compared the two, the message that the white man was trying to get across was obvious. Nigger, you ain't shit. Die Nigger Die!

Negro america would do all sorts of ridiculous things to get close to that white world. I had an uncle who was supposed to be one of them big negroes and he used to go to LSU football games. One time he took me, because I dug football. We went down there and they had a little section for the niggers. A little section where the wind blew in. It seemed like they strategically located the niggers where the wind would blow right on 'em. It was a little fenced-off section and the negroes would sit there with cowbells and trumpets and act a fool for LSU. I sat there and froze. It was as cold as a witch's titty. I was cold and the game wasn't good. I'd seen better games at the blind school. But the negroes just sat there and enjoyed themselves. Later I found out that the real enjoyment was that they thought they was mingling with white folks. It was supposed to be big stuff to come down to white folks' games. But I said fuck that LSU game shit. I wasn't gon' sit there and freeze just so I could think I was mingling with white folks.

But that made me aware of where a whole lot of negroes was at. That was negro america again and it wasn't saying a thing. Negroes thought they were somebody, but all I had to do was look at the facilities LSU had and look at what Southern University had. The physical plant of LSU, even today, says the same thing it was saying when I was a kid — negroes ain't shit.

All of white america is a structure of institutions that says to Black people, "Nigger, you ain't shit." All standards of excellence, beauty, efficiency and civilization are such that any comparison between Black and white is designed to favor white and put down Black. And it's ground into a Black person every minute of every day, whether you're at work or whether you're out trying to have some fun, it's Nigger, you ain't shit. Die Nigger Die!

Then, if one examines negro institutions and community structures he finds the message is the same. Die Nigger Die!

Negro athletes run, jump and shuffle for white money as if to say, Die Nigger Die!

Negro politicians tell Black people to be nonviolent and patient and still they send Black people to jail, to make sure they die. However, after these politicians have been used, they will be next.

Negro entertainers sing "America is My Home," and play white roles on t.v. as if to say, "Let me help kill niggers."

Ebony, the negro Life magazine, the journal of negro culture, a "responsible" negro publication, raises the question, "Are Negro Women Getting Prettier?" while advertising for bleaching creams on the next page. Dye Nigger Dye!

Negro preachers steal money from poor Blacks on Sunday and drive Cadillacs all week. To the preacher money is God and he expects his God to travel with the poor.

Negro newspapers carry AP and UPI wire services. They steal misinformation from white nationalists and sell it to Black people, saying it's right 'cause it's white. Negro publications always oppose the Black liberation struggle until it is endorsed by whites. They speak to the needs of white people and never to Black people. Jet magazine, the cullard Playboy, a cross between a stag magazine and the Pittsburg Police Gazette, talks Black and sells white. These negroes, like whites, are all motivated by profit; money. But, "money won't change ya."

These attitudes assure the death of both negro and white america.

Nigger, Nigger never die
Shining face and bulging eyes!

I only vaguely remember my grandfather but somehow his life has shaped some of my thinking. He was my mother's father, I never knew my other grandfather. He was a kind old man, simple in manner with a small graying mustache and a face that proudly wore the imprints of time. He was a good, hardworking, churchgoing man who was always ready for a good fight and a good drink of whiskey. Papa, as he was affectionately called, spent all of his life in agriculture of one kind or another. He worked at the dairy at Louisiana State University and scraped together enough to build the little house we grew up in. He was the only grown man that I knew during that first period of my life because my father was away fighting for the land of the Ofay. The death of my grandfather did not come as a great shock to me because I was too young to understand death. I learned later that he died as a result of overwork. He worked himself to death. My mother would tell us stories about him and there is one that I will always remember. She told us that Papa worked for some rich white people in the evenings when he came from working at the dairy. During the depression they lost nearly everything they had. They asked my grandfather to continue to help them work the farm and, although they could not pay him at the time, promised to pay him a cumulative wage at a rate of $2.00 a day once they got on their feet. My grandfather worked that farm for 12 years. Once the farm became stable and the people recovered a lot of money they dismissed Papa without pay. He attempted to sue for the amount but the white lawyer said nothing could be done because there was no written contract. This story was my first encounter with flagrant injustice. I sensed that, for some reason I did not understand, the world was out of balance and that it rested disproportionately on the shoulders of Black people. My mother had to hold two jobs some of the time. She worked as a maid, taught at the orphanage home and then went to night school to try and get a better job. All that just to put us through school.

The first job I had was cutting grass for white folks. Ed and I used to cut acres of grass for two dollars. We'd finish that and they'd want us to trim the hedges and clean out the flower beds, all for $2.00. We did that for quite a few summers. And that whole concept of white people working Black people for nothing became very real to me, because I did it. In actuality, whites resent having to pay you anything, so they pay you as little as possible.

When I got to high school I had a job waiting tables in a night club. I worked three nights a week. One night I was waiting on these crackers and this cracker gave me a twenty-dollar bill and he thought he was giving me a five. But I was gon' to be honest and give him all his change. I gave it to him and he looked at me and frowned all up, as if to say, Nigger, you trying to be smart? That was the last time I played Reverend negro.

In the summers I did construction work. In other words, I was digging ditches. Couple of summers of that and I'd had enough of God's earth, so I got a job working on a ship. I was working from eight at night until eight the next morning for $1.00 an hour. What I was doing was cleaning the bottom of the ship out. You're so far down in the ship that you're in the part of the ship that's under water and it's hot as hell down there. Sometimes the ship would bring in oil and would be taking grain out, so you had to clean up all the oil. Everybody there was a brother except one little ol' young ass white boy. Naturally, they didn't put him down there with us. They had him goofing off up on the deck. He thought from that that he could tell us what to do. I wasn't buying that shit and I let him know right off he wasn't gon' say a damn thing to me. The dude in charge saw that I could influence the other brothers, because when I jumped bad, they jumped bad. So he decided he was gon' make me straw boss. Cut my work load, and my job would be to make the brothers work. What would happen was that we would go and hide. We would go climb some beams and cop some sleep and shit like that. So they needed somebody to make the brothers work and they wanted me for the job. I said, Cool. And I would tell the brothers to go sleep! Show 'em a good hiding place. I didn't give a shit.

The white boy soon saw that wasn't no more work getting done with me in charge, so he tried a new thing. He tried to get friendly with me. He was in charge of hiring and firing all the brothers who worked down there and I was working down there. But he tried to get friendly, telling me he remembered when he and I used to play football in City Park. I remembered. We used to whip their asses every week. We beat 'em once 106 to 6. And these were LSU's best football players. We used to kick their ass like ass-kicking was going out of style. So he tried to be buddy-buddy with me, but I wasn't buying that either.

One night he said something off-the-wall to one of the brothers and I told the brother to whup his ass. And the brother took that little white boy up on deck and picked him up and was about to throw him off the ship. Ninety feet above the water and he had this little cracker in his arms like he was a sack of rotten potatoes. I didn't say nothing. I was just standing there and digging it.

He didn't throw him off, though, but he scared the shit out of him. Well, soon as that little white boy got himself halfway back together he went and told some whiteys. And they came down and started talking bad to the brother who'd whupped the white boy. Then I jumped up and told 'em that we were ready to go to war any time they were and if they wasn't ready to go to war to shut the fuck up 'cause I was tired of all that damn talking. So a whole bunch of us got fired that night and I was happy to be rid of that job.

After that I got a job cleaning out petroleum tanks at one of the plants. That was

Die Nigger Die: A Political Autobiography

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Body

1

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