The Heath Ledger Joker scared the bejesus out of me, and I had no problem telling him so! LOL! 🙂 The Darth Vader guy was as tall as the original, and he had that breathing sound with him!
The guy at the end of this photo collection (after Kraven the Hunter, complete with Spider-Man mask!), is Ron Wilson, a famous Marvel comicbook artist remembered for Marvel Two-In-One and early issues of The Thing solo series in the late 1970s-early 1980s. I fanboyed all over him!
They had a brother comicbook creator there,DarrellGoza, whose lecture on Black superheroes and Black comics was so well-researched and contextualized, it made me ashamed that I had ever taught a class on comics history during my Morgan State days. It’s always good to run into people who have forgotten more than you will ever know on a subject! I gotta buy the poster (!) he had on the history of Black superhero comics and support his books! I told the organizer Goza’s lecture should be a PERMANENT part of this Comic-Con!
This event proves that Newark is on the move, ready or not!
The word “conspiracy” gets thrown around a lot in African communities, ever since the middle of the last century. And it’s understandable: the assassinations of King and X, the discovery of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTEL-PRO files, and the disposal in one way or another of any leader of African descent who doesn’t toe the blood-dotted line of the West. But how much of a conspiracy is it when the victim doesn’t have the required amount of power for self-determination in the first place? This book, released today, is about how relatively powerless people fought back against their status when, insult to injury added, even their relatively little power was taken from them.
It starts with Cory Booker, the neo-liberal mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and Chris Christie, the conservative governor of the state, secretly deciding all by themselves in the backseat of a Chevy Tahoe in 2009 that they will transform American education by turning Newark into a laboratory for the New York-based, greatly monied education reform movement. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, develops a political man-crush on Booker and signs on by 2011, pledging $100 million (to be matched by other donors) to make New Jersey’s largest city into a charter-school haven in five years, staffed by six-figure, non-unionized teachers. Like the benevolent colonizers of old, all believe they go in with good intentions: self-government by the dark, poor people has not worked in the internal colony, the reasoning goes, or the state would not have taken over the school district back in 1995. The teacher’s unions are stopping progress, the reformers argued to themselves, by making sure they tie the hand of local politicos and school board members. So, they privately reasoned, the only way to change the system is to overthrow it—to go past all the community obstacles. So they hire $1,000-a-day consultants and get to work.
After absorbing the opening shot heard-round-the-world of the revolution it now understood it was a pawn in, the Newark grassroots is then introduced to Cami Anderson, a white woman of hippie background who has been named the school’s superintendent by Christie and Booker. Like education reformer Michelle Rheedid in Washington, D.C., she then sets out, from the community perspectives, to close as many schools and alienate every teacher and parent she can. Meanwhile and not coincidentally, charter schools, some rising out of the closed public ones, begin flourishing in the the old, struggling-against-decay, never-recovered-from-the-1967-rebellion ghetto, providing resources and specialized attention to small, selected groups of poor Black and Brown children the always-struggling public schools can’t match.
Everyone flexes what muscle they have. The teacher’s unions demand their back pay as a condition to their negotiations with Booker and Anderson over being able to fire bad teachers and financially reward good ones, and get it. The money people get their calls answered from the celebrity mayor, who eventually uses his Captain America persona to get elected to the U.S. Senate in 2013. Newark students organize and protest Anderson, with more than a little help from a well-known local name: Ras Baraka, a high-school principal and city councilman (and one of the sons of poet-activists Amiri and Amina Baraka). He seizes the issue that will get him elected mayor in 2014, defeating a Theo Huxtable-type candidate propped up by the same education reform movement. “The festering resistance to Anderson, the backlash against [the top-down reforms], and the first mayoral campaign of the post-Booker era became one and the same.” The street protests grow so large and consistent in Newark that Christie—days away from announcing his Republican presidential nomination run this past summer—makes a deal with newly-elected Mayor Baraka that, at this September 2015 writing, may transfer city education power back to the people a year from now. A bewildered Anderson is sent packing, replaced, amazingly, by a former state education commissioner—one of the chief architects of the neo-colonial plan! Whether the new school district superintendent cleans up his own mess is this story’s next chapter, to be written by today’s journalists and tomorrow’s historians.
Dale Russakoff, a longtime Washington Post journalist and resident of Montclair, a middle class suburb of Newark, embeds herself with Christie, Booker and Anderson while, simultaneously, sits in on more than 100 school-related community meetings (“There it was again: disrespect. The word rose from conversations all over the auditorium”), and the reporting not only shows, but shines. Her spectacular juggling act blames everybody but those whose demonstrated first commitment is to the students. In her telling, nearly everyone involved received something and/or learned something but the city’s least-of-these. She makes a clear observation that needs to be on T-shirts in the city: “For four years, the reformers never really tried to have a conversation with the people of Newark. Their target audience was always somewhere else, beyond the people whose children and grandchildren desperately needed to learn and compete for a future.”
The book’s author might not agree with the following assessment: that her carefully crafted work clearly documents that white supremacy’s psychotic historical urge to covertly or overtly experiment with the lives of poor Black people—whether medically, socially, economically or, in the case, educationally—is not some obscure 19th or 20th century Africana Studies classroom topic, but as current as the next awarded education grant. African-Americans used to be classified as sub-human, because of their three-fifth status under the U.S. Constitution. Then, after the Civil War, they became second-class citizens, because they didn’t have the right to vote or use public accommodations. In this updated 21st century form of pseudo-democracy, poor Black and Brown communities like Newark are filled with sub-citizens: those who have no input on their future, no matter how much taxes they pay and how often they vote. Christie and (especially) Booker should be ashamed of their public actions here, but who could, or would, succeed in shaming them that they would actually respect?
It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television. By Gayle Wald (with photographs by Chester Higgins). Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 288 pp. $25.95 (trade paperback).
This book understands the right story to tell—one of, in author Gayle Wald’s words, “a fragile alliance of liberal and radical interests, both public and private”–and, thankfully, arrives at the right places. “Soul!” (1968-1973), a nationally distributed public television program that could loosely be described as the radical sister of the more commercial “Soul Train,” fired the imagination and reflected the multi-faceted sensibilities of its Black community of viewers. Using largely untapped wells of research about the early days of American public television vis-à-vis Black America, Wald relates a nuanced story of how the condescension of white American public television officials seeking to provide an outlet for the angry Black community in the late 1960s led to a (largely) Black-controlled showcase of the Black Arts Movement on (largely) Black aesthetic terms. It is the restrained approach, however, of choosing as this book’s scholarship basis intellectual sources outside the “soul” of Black/African folks that makes this book strangely appealing and more than a little irritating.
“Soul!” (episodes of which can be found online) was first a product of Black insurrection. Reacting to that outpouring of anger and violence, white funders, somewhat accidentally, allowed a Black producer, Ellis Haizlip, to have his way. WNET-Channel 13 (now known as Thirteen), then and now the New York-based flagship station of the PBS collective, wanted a companion show to “Black Journal,” its Black newsmagazine. The initial and white idea of a “Black Tonight Show” developed under Haizlip into a Black Arts salon that was cooler than the “The Flip Wilson Show” and Don Cornelius’ large Afro. Wald wisely includes as much of Haizlip’s life story into this book as she can fit. (A documentary film on the “Soul!” producer, done by his niece Melissa Haizlip, is struggling to get funding.) The letters of support “Soul!” received are well used in Wald’s book; they show the involvement of the Black community instead of just describing the appreciation of an audience.
“It’s Been Beautiful” builds somewhat on Devorah Heitner’s “Black Power TV,” a pioneering 2013 intellectual narrative on the early days of East Coast Black public affairs television, and does so with great intellectual gusto. Wald, a professor of English and American Studies at George Washington University, rightly uses the New York-based “Soul!”—a program that would feature, for example, Nikki Giovanni interviewing James Baldwin or a studio performance of The Last Poets, or Earth, Wind and Fire—to find “a key TV text of the era or as a cultural project joined by common cause to 1960s and 1970s political struggles.” The show’s arc matches its era: Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed two weeks before the grant to create the show was submitted, and it was cancelled because PBS’ funders, facing the onslaught of the Nixon era and the fading of the Black Power movement, wanted to create programming that would have Blacks and whites interacting.
Chapters Three and Four—which dissect “Soul!” as a program, along with its performers and producers—are worth the price of the book alone. Wald does not shy away from explaining Black American culture in all its glory and anger. But she doesn’t seem to want to dig into the African, non-Western roots of what she is seeing and describing. She correctly emphasizes the ideological and cultural diversity of the performances, and explores the unity-without-uniformity cultural and political ideology present at the time, but doesn’t want to go in-depth into how Africans in America came to create those products and their ideas in a world drenched in white supremacy and anti-African-ness. Instead, Wald chooses to emphasize the gender and sexual orientation undercurrents of the visual text: “’Soul!’ created a television space where Black people—imagined to include Latinos of various hues who were seeking alternatives to whiteness, Black women marginalized by nationalist conceptions of both the public and private spheres, and Black gays and lesbians rendered as ‘unnatural’ and ‘freakish’—could see, hear and almost feel each other.” For example, she seems more interested in Haizlip’s negotiation of his public gayness than the undiluted African thought processes that produced him and his approach to Black art and the Black community. Wald is not ignorant of African-centered thought; she doesn’t think it’s intellectually relevant enough to examine when quotes from Black Arts Movement stalwarts will do.
The 21st century public television landscape is deeply complicated in ways that this book’s bell-bottom era forecasts. The fact that, for example, on “The PBS NewsHour,” one will find in 2015 occasional in-depth discussions of African and African-American artists and their work is the realization of public broadcasting’s assimilation goals. (After reading Wald, the cross-cultural appeal of PBS’ “Tavis Smiley” could been seen as a page out of a memorandum written by the 1970s PBS executives.) And the 2015 decision by the Sesame Workshop to sell first-run rights of “Sesame Street” to premium cable outlet Home Box Office shows that funding and producing these non-commercial programs are still challenging, even for PBS’ signature programs. So Wald accomplishes with her detail the goal of all scholars: to be both historical and current.
Wald’s and Heitner’s approach to analyzing Black media—focusing on the televisual performance and its socio-political and socio-cultural implications, grounded in European-approved disciplines of American (film) studies, (Black) feminism, queer studies, et. al.—provides both a fascinating read and important scholarship. (Anyone interested in continuing their newly-established tradition should seriously consider studying PBS’ “With Ossie and Ruby,” an almost-forgotten treasure of a Black cultural container similar to “Soul!” in important ways. A study from those perspectives would be fascinating, and perhaps a scholar will one day attempt it.) Ultimately though, Black people need scholarly narratives of these Black cultural television programs from the unapologetic point-of-view of African-centered thought and philosophy.
As you get older, acceptance becomes easier. So, after accepting the tragedy of “Fantastic Four,” this No. 1 FF fan (owned hundreds of comics, cartoons, toys, etc.) has accepted that there will never be a good Fantastic Four movie in his lifetime.
If the fight earlier this year for the right of imprisoned writer Mumia Abu-Jamal to get correct care for his diabetes had failed, this book, his eighth, would have been possibly the last he would get to approve under his name. The diabetes complication was not just a shock to his system. There is an insane sense of normality that has now developed around the idea of Abu-Jamal’s work—the assumptions that he is writing, and will be writing frequently, that his commentaries will get emailed around the world, that his recorded voice will be on YouTube. Frankly, Abu-Jamal’s rat-a-tat journalistic contribution would be almost taken for granted if he hadn’t almost died. The ubiquitousness of the author and product shows how much he has succeeded in creating a foothold in Black radical thought in the last 20 years.
And that Panther-inspired bootprint continues here. Following in the steps of Noelle Hanrahan’s 2000 Abu-Jamal column collection “All Things Censored,” Fernandez, an assistant professor of history and Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Baruch College/City University of New York, creates a second unofficial “Mumia Reader” of 107 columns and speeches that span from the former Black Panther Party member’s 1981 arrest for the killing of a white Philadelphia police officer to 2014. The editor takes significant time to explain the how, when, what and why of Abu-Jamal’s essays. She shows that the intellectual scope and depth of Abu-Jamal’s writings precede Hanrahan’s mid-1990s recordings—the ones that, along with a 1995 death warrant and a ready-to-go international anti-death penalty movement, jump-started the “Free Mumia” movement and pushed it straight to the international Leftist stage.
The “new” gems discovered here are, ironically, among his oldest. “Christmas In a Cage,” his rarely read 1981 account of his own arrest and treatment by the police (“Where are the witnesses to the [police] beating that left me with a four-inch scar on my forehead? A swollen jaw? Chipped teeth?”) is worth the price of the book alone.
The editor situates the first few columns in a way that explains him, not just his opinions. Upfront, his love for the MOVE Organization and its founder, John Africa, is clearly articulated, using the 1982 trial and conviction statements he made as an understandably angry young man. (“John Africa is not a slave to this foul, messed up system—he is not bought and sold.”) An example of what he told the court after it decided it wanted his death: “On December 9, 1981, the police attempted to execute me in the street; this trial is just a result of their failure to do so.”
And as the wall writing progresses with a combination of memories, obits and news riffs that, policy-wise, string Reagan to Obama, the reader feels the air from the older Abu-Jamal’s steady, intellectual darts thrown at, for example, the post-911 legalization of COINTEL-PRO under George W. Bush, the devastation that followed Katrina, et. al. Abu-Jamal’s commentaries, taken together, target the contradictions of the established order, pointing to its corrupt nature versus the natural power of people-fueled resistance. (“The objective of all politics is power,” he writes in a 2000 column about the police killing of Amadou Diallo, a Black man shot in his building’s vestibule in New York City. “No major political party in America can even begin to promise Black folks in America the power to stand on their own doorstep[s], or ride their own car[s], or walk the streets of the urban center, without the very real threat of being ‘accidently’ blasted into eternity.”) The book, therefore, is a half-lifetime of well-researched, historically radical Black print rage, from waxing nostalgia about his brief political brush with Huey Newton in and the Black Panther Party circa 1970 to predicting in advance the acquittal of George Zimmerman of the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin.
It is now assured that, whatever his future health in prison, Abu-Jamal’s body of work will outlast his actual one. The writer, as Cornel West discusses in the preface, belongs in “that cultural continuum of struggle that shaped urban Black people between 1950 and 1980.” It remains to be seen in a 2015 world of social media if the masses of “Black Lives Matter” Tweeters will develop the skill, discipline and commitment of their now- elder statesman Abu-Jamal, who wrote in the margins of the society decades before it became cool.
