Elombe Brath, long-time Black Nationalist organizer and activist, has made his transition after a long career in the Black Freedom Movement.
Elombe, 77, made his passage on May 19th, a day not without irony, for this was the birthday of one of the men he most highly regarded: Malcolm X.
Brath fought numerous struggles, both cultural and political.
When he was 20, he and his brother, Kwame Brathwaite, founded the African Jazz Arts Society in Harlem, where they featured young artists from the community. They were jazz lovers and fans of such icons as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln.
He didn’t just love Black music and culture, he loved Black people, and in 1961 launched the “Black is Beautiful” Campaign, sponsoring shows in Harlem featuring the Grandassa Models -Black women adorned with full Afro hairstyles.
In 1975, he launched the Patrice Lumumba Coalition (the first independent President of the Congo), from which he worked against the racist apartheid government in South Africa. Fifteen years later, he would be a top organizer for Nelson Mandela, when he came to New York, in 1990.
Elombe Brath would work for the freedom of the Central Park 5, the five youngsters condemned in the media, imprisoned and convicted of a gruesome rape that none of them had committed.
Brath, although born in Brooklyn on September 30th, 1936, was a life-long son of Harlem – and there he lived and worked, with the ideas of his nationalist heroes, Marcus Garvey, Carlos Cooks and Malcolm X.
Brath, after a long struggle and illness, returns to his ancestors.
Theauthors of two of my all-timefavorite books (and one of my top movies of all time)! DAMN! Amazing contributions!!!!! Who will be this clear in the 21st century?!?
I kept hearing that Shavar Jeffries was Leonard Jeffries’ nephew. So when I was leaving the Robert Treat Hotel Tuesday night after the election was called for Ras, I found Jeffries–a Newark native, by the way–holding court outside with Eugene Campbell, former Newark Superintendent of Schools and a beneficiary of Amiri Baraka’s Black Power leadership.
I asked “Dr. J” about his nephew losing the Newark mayoral election, and he set me straight: Shavar is of no relation: he’s a friend of his nephew, Hakeem.
“I told my friends of mine who wanted to support Shavar (that this was) not the time for Shavar. He’s a good young man, and he should be running for the congressional seat later, but this is Amiri’s time, this is Ras’ time, this is our time.”
“Ras was not running for Ras. He was running for us. He was running for the people. He is making a statement to the world.
“So what am I going to be, on the wrong side of history?” he said, to the laughter around us.
“I would have told Shavar, ‘This is not your time.'”
“Precisely, precisely,” Campbell interjected.
“And the people who used him, I know what they do. They couldn’t come to me, because I stood against them and prevailed. I’m still here.”
“It’s a people’s struggle,” he said of Ras’ election. “He represents that. His father represented that. I represent that.”
He pointed to an area perpendicular to where we were standing. “That’s where we had the Black Power conference of 1967. That’s where Adam Clayton Powell and all of them were there, in the Black Power conference. Where Frances Cress-Wesling got up and said, ‘You Black men need to go down and get the people out of the jail.’
“I was scared to death because I grew up with these Italian youngsters. And they were now the police officers. And I said, ‘If we move out of the conference to go down to the jail, it would (be) bloodshed.'”
But Black people stayed the course, Jeffries recalled, and Kenneth Gibson was elected mayor, with Amiri Baraka’s help, in 1970.
“So no, this is a part of history, and Ras understands that history.”
NEWARK, N.J.—Ras Baraka, one of the sons of the late poet/playwright Amiri Baraka, handily beat rival Shavar Jeffries Tuesday night to become the next mayor of his father’s city. How he did it was no mystery to those paying attention.
The mayor-elect paid tribute to his father, who died in January, and his mother, Amina Baraka, who was nearby off-stage at the Robert Treat Hotel here.
“I know that my father’s spirit is in this room today, that he is here with us, and I want to say ‘Thank you’ to him for believing in me up into his last days of his life, and him passing out flyers even on his hospital bed. He fought all the way to the end,” he said to his jubilant supporters.
To Amina Baraka he said, “Happy Mother’s Day, Ma. You deserve this more than me. My mother’s whole life has been Newark. She has struggled and fought, and even (fought) with all of us to make sure we go right and do right by the city of Newark.”
Using unofficial Essex County Clerk’s Office results available at deadline, Baraka’s vote total was 23,416 (53.73 percent of the vote) to Jeffries’ 20,062 (46.03 percent).
“Today we told them, all over the state of New Jersey, that the people of Newark are not for sale,” he said, referring to the estimated $2 million that Jeffries’ financial supporters, many of them anonymous donors, poured into his rival’s campaign.
Baraka threw shirts to his supporters that read, “I’m the mayor.” His slogan was, “When I become mayor, we become mayor.” He told the crowd to celebrate, and then get ready to “roll their sleeves up and get ready to be the mayor.”
The mayor-elect and the hundreds of supporters then left the hotel and marched to Newark City Hall.
Baraka, 44, will become Newark’s 40th mayor at his July 1 inauguration.
Newark, an overwhelmingly Democratic city, has no party primary, with officials instead elected on citywide tickets. This situation allowed Jeffries and Baraka, both Democrats, to slug it out over who was best qualified to reduce crime, spur the city’s economic development and fight to repair the city’s struggling school system, the latter controlled by the state for the past 19 years.
The election is seen as important because Newark is the heart of predominantly Democratic Essex County, an important collection of votes for anyone running for New Jersey governor.
Since Newark elections have now been populated by candidates relatively new to the city, the prickly question of “authenticity” has become a real one here in the last 20 years.
A mayoral candidate now has to prove himself sufficiently Black (and soon, sufficiently Latino), urban and progressive. U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), the previous mayor, promised new energy and new investments, but he still had to earn his way from Yale Law School to the Newark City Council, and eventually the mayor’s chair, vote by brick.
When the mayoral race narrowed to two, Baraka kept jackhammering at the main fault line of the Shavar Jeffries campaign: its open hubris.
Jeffries may have been born in Newark, but he appeared from Seton Hall University Law School fully formed and fully funded—by anonymous donors. Jeffries served on the Newark Advisory School Board and was president of the Newark Boys and Girls Club, two very important city positions.
But that just doesn’t carry the same juice as being on the council, where a councilmember is directly responsible for Newarkers’ lives and where people test his or her power and commitment to the city’s decaying working-class neighborhoods and the people who live in them.
The campaign had the atmosphere of history around it because of the obvious question: could the son of Amiri Baraka, a Black communist poet and playwright who was beaten by police during the 1967 Newark insurrection, be elected Newark mayor?
The question became less significant the more time spent on the Newark streets. Baraka received no “sympathy vote” because of his father (or his slain sister Shani, for that matter). Newarkers who were interviewed kept mentioning that they knew, or knew of, Baraka and didn’t know Jeffries.
As a deputy mayor, he accepted only a salary of $1, rejecting the doubling of his school district income. At the last debate, he said that, as mayor, he will actually receive a pay cut from his combined council and high school principal posts.
People on the street notice things like that. They also know well their elected representatives, children’s teachers and principals, and the principles all hold.
The radical Howard Universitystudent activist who returned to Newark and became a city schoolteacher, and later vice-principal and principal, taught outsiders, and reminded returning sons, that many, many Newarkers are actually committed to living here.
That radical faith in maintaining and renovating the old bricks of his city, like the younger Baraka’s ability as a poet, may be partly hereditary, but, in the end, he earned every vote he got every day between his 1991 Howard graduation and Tuesday night.
Drums in the Global Village 