Tag Archives: Malcolm X

My Atlanta Black Star Review of David Garrow’s LOOONG Biography of Barack Obama……..

Posted on by toddpanther

……is here.

Here’s the block that got cut out, about the biographer and the his approach:

If there is ever to be a Hall of Fame for post-World War II American biographers, David Garrow has worked undeniably hard for his statue. The energy and sweat required of a great biographer are present. The book’s promotional material says Garrow does research worthy of Robert Caro, the man who has devoted half his life to writing about Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the hype is right. His thousands of resources include The Chicago Defender and several weekly newspapers, which allows him to use facts and statements others have forgotten. He had access to an incredible amount of detail, and decided to use (almost all of) it, to give the reader almost a month-by-month portrayal of 46 years.

Since the fable is so well-known, Garrow needed to perform a tragedy to give the reader a reason to re-visit this territory. He constantly prepared the reader for disappointment, showing that the potential compromises were there all along under the winning smile and Black Kennedy mystique: “[W]hile the crucible of self-creation had produced an ironclad will, the vessel was hollow at its core.”

The so-called hot news of the book—that Barack Obama, a young, over-educated, tall, handsome, single Black man, had a lot of sex before he got married and that he asked his serious live-in girlfriend, a half-white, half-Japanese woman named Shelia Miyoshi Jager, to marry him—is a complete yawner. The story that Garrow tells as he outs Jager is that Obama broke up with her because he needed a Black woman (World History, meet Michelle Robinson) to be a successful Black politician. So what that he asked another woman to marry him? Choosing a wife is a life-effecting process, not just a political one. It is possible that Obama made the decisions he did for purely Machiavellian reasons, but it is equally possible that Obama, a Half-rican, purposely chose a one-hundred-percent American Negress so he could have an authentic Black family. Just because he loved Jager doesn’t mean he was supposed to spend his life with her, and just because they wanted to marry doesn’t mean history was somehow thwarted by ambition.

Garrow is filled with critique—of Obama and of crush-ing Obama journalists and biographers. In his blistering epilogue, Garrow skips the most obvious reason his presidency was impotent: the intent of the Republican Party to oppose him on everything, from the administration’s first day. The epilogue is so intent on being critical—and it should, considering it’s about a man constantly compromised in ways he sees as pragmatic and necessary—it seems not to care where the criticisms originate. Meanwhile, Garrow ignores the most biting Leftist jabs. Strange choices for a left-of-center author. Garrow finds every disappointed friend, every Obama enemy, every teacher and influence he can, and includes them along with seemingly every colleague who at any point praised him. Jager accusing the president of political cowardice is the high-note of a critical symphony.

JUNE 7th UPDATE: Thanks to Jared Ball for this discussion!

My Root Article On Fidel Castro And Black/African Radicalism……..

Posted on by toddpanther

fidel

…..is here.

Book Review: Black Power, Explained In “Documentary Comic” Form

Posted on by toddpanther

Fanon cover Malcolm X CoverCivil Rights coverBPP cover

 

Civil Rights For Beginners (2016).
Paul Von Blum. Illustrations by Frank Reynoso, et. al.
Foreword by Peniel E. Joseph.
Danbury, CT: For Beginners Books.
ISBN-10: 1934389897; ISBN-13: 978-1934389898.
161 pp., $15.95.

Malcolm X For Beginners (1992).
Text and Illustrations by Bernard Aquina Doctor.
Danbury, CT: For Beginners Books.
ISBN-10: 1934389048; ISBN-13: 978-1934389041.
186 pp., $16.99.

Black Panthers For Beginners (1995).
Herb Boyd. Illustrations by Lance Tooks.
Danbury, CT: For Beginners Books.
ISBN-10: 193999439X; ISBN-13: 978-1939994394.
154 pp., $15.95.

Fanon For Beginners (1998).
Text and Illustrations by Deborah Wyrick, Ph.D.
Danbury, CT: For Beginners Books.
ISBN-10: 1934389870; ISBN-13: 978-1934389874
184 pp., $15.95.

 

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party. Although the Black Power movement officially began months earlier, with Stokely Carmichael, stalwart of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, publicly using the term in Alabama, for this writer the Black Power movement started when two brothers met in Oakland and, borrowing a symbol that SNCC was politically organizing with, developed a 10-point program for Black liberation. Under Carmichael, SNCC stood with the Congress of Racial Equality as the Black Power wing of the Freedom Movement, with an emphasis on organizing Black people to see themselves as members of self-determining Black communities, of miniature Black/African nations in the land of the thief, home of the slave.

Providing art and information to The People—like Fannie Lou Hamer, formally uneducated but politically astute—was a priority for the Black Power Movement. Africana Studies, an idea that had just begun to be implemented in American academia, was still being written in the streets in blood, footnoted with broken glass and Molotov cocktails.

The “For Beginners” books series, originally published by Writers and Readers, are books for The People. The company describes what it produces as “documentary comicbooks.” Being a little more precise, what they create, actually, are well-researched introductory books about complex topics and personalities illustrated by drawings that oftentimes mimic comicbook style. These four books listed were chosen to highlight and celebrate the Black Power movement through their collective analysis and unique presentation. (Although, it is known that this idea is far from new: the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a white liberal group, published “Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story” in 1957, and Julian Bond published an anti-Vietnam comicbook targeting the Black community ten years later.)

The publisher allows description and explanation on its authors’ terms. Von Blum’s book, for example, takes the entirety of Black history and describes it through the lens of the Civil Rights Movement, reminding the reader that Ida B. Wells sat down and refused to move on a train before Rosa Parks was even a gleam in one of her parents’ eyes. It mentions unheralded actors such as the Southern Tenants Farmers Union, which held a sit-in in the U.S. agriculture secretary’s office in 1934. Doctor’s book on Malcolm is a wonderful text-collage combo (done in the pre-digital era!) that is not afraid to go for the symbolic image: seeing a tiny Malcolm being held in the palm of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”’s “Sophia” (Bea), his white lover, makes the statement. Doctor provides an impressionistic history of Malcolm—a story of Black ideas that override chronology (and unfortunately, sometimes biographical facts) and ideological complexity.

Out of the four, the two that stand out overall are Boyd’s BPP and Wyrick’s Fanon. Wyrick blasts the complex Fanon into understandable chunks of intellectual peanut brittle, explaining and dissecting, critiquing and footnoting. Her thoughtfulness, care and talent shows through, since her own illustrations do a wonderful job of supplementing and complementing her deceptively simple text. Her closing chapter on Fanon’s multifaceted legacy, and her beautifully crafted first-person epilogue, is alone worth every tree that was sacrificed to make this book. Boyd’s snappy, bouncy prose style is more than equaled by Tooks’ energetic, playful art. (This reviewer wishes that the publisher would have made Von Blum follow the Boyd/Tooks model, instead of providing dry, trying-to-get-tenure academic text punctuated by even drier art by the Civil Rights book’s main artist, Reynoso. Liz Von Notias, sadly a supplementary artist for the text, provides the narrative’s more vibrant, alive drawings.) Boyd quotes from most of the Panther scholarship that existed at the time of publication, creating a mosaic of first-person recollections from Panthers as well as its public enemies and private informants. The sections on sexism within the BPP and the Huey Newton/Eldridge Cleaver split is very strong, as is the tracing of police plant Gene Roberts from Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity to the Panthers.

With the exception of Von Blum’s Civil Rights, which was published this year, the major problem with these books is that they desperately need updating. For example, at least a score of studies, anthologies, memoirs and biographies have been published on the Black Panther Party since Boyd and Tooks, and Boyd himself is the co-editor of “The Diary of Malcolm X,” a 2014 book that, like “Blood Brothers,” the recent Randy Roberts/Johnny Smith narrative history on Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, must be incorporated into Doctor’s almost 25-year-old “For Beginners” text. The books also can be editorially uneven; for example, some titles have indexes and some don’t. That sloppiness should not be tolerated.

In spite of these flaws, these books need to be supported by The People. (With the eight-year White House national experiment with being adjective-less “Americans” almost over, it’s time for Black America to go back to its socio-historio-cultural basics.) They need to be purchased and passed out to the Black masses, of any age, who, like the high school seniors and college freshmen the “For Beginners” series is apparently targeted to, may be intimidated by “serious,” “scholarly” texts. Google Search, Wikipedia and YouTube need not have the first, and last, word when it comes to African/Black leaders and movements. As unlikely as it seems, mass political education of The People might only be a few million “documentary comicbooks” away.

My Root Article On U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) And His “Graphic Memoir”…..

Posted on by toddpanther

John Lewis

………..is here.

Book Review: In Africa, Cassius Turns His Back, While Malcolm Turns Forward

Posted on by toddpanther

BLOOD BROTHERS COVER

Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X.
Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith.
Basic Books.
392 pp., $28.99.

 

Muhammad Ali, the man who, in this writer’s 1970s childhood, was baaadddd enough to beat even Superman to a bloody pulp, called, essentially, a coward and “puppet in the assassination plot against Malcolm X?” Malcolm a desperate manipulator of his friend and liar? Black America, this reviewer believes, is ready in 2016 for a real Malcolm X and a real Muhammad Ali. Good thing, that, because the authors of this historical depiction of the friendship between the two Nation of Islam followers between 1960 and 1965 provide a gripping, well-documented narrative that expands the understanding of both men by analyzing their individual and collective lives, one week at a time.

Roberts and Smith are good historians but better nonfiction narrators, the kind of storytellers that filled magazines three to four decades ago. They merge primary source materials of white newspaper and magazine sportswriters with Africana Studies texts and Malcolm biographies with FBI files of the Nation, material that normally would not share intellectual space outside one of Ali’s many biographies. The sports historians immerse themselves, to the best of their considerable ability, into that five-year period and bring the two men together, then apart.

Following Cassius Clay and Malcolm as they interact, detailing practically every shared moment by moment, turns out to be a fascinating study of how a friendship dissolves in public. What Smith and Roberts present is a Malcolm—on the outs with the Nation because of his increasing power within the organization—attempting to utilize his mastery of public relations skills to his own benefit through Cassius X. Stated simply, Malcolm, who kept publicly saying he was back in the Nation when he and it knew otherwise, wanted to use Cassius as a bargaining chip to get back into NOI founder Elijah Muhammad’s good graces, and wanted to take the champ with him if he couldn’t get back in. Fresh from his victory against Sonny Liston in 1964, Cassius X—presented in this book as a young follower-type with daddy issues—was the loose football on Black America’s and Africa’s field, and both Clay’s mentor, Malcolm, and Malcolm’s former mentor, Muhammad, were fighting over who was going to be the ball carrier. But it was too late for Malcolm; Muhammad won the scramble, and gave the champ his new name and the kind of visibility within the Nation that only Malcolm had enjoyed.

By the time the two cross paths in front of a Ghana hotel in 1964 (Malcolm had practically run him down), sides had been chosen, the splinters made visible. “Brother, I still love you and you are the greatest,” said the goateed El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, wearing robes and sandals. “You left the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” said the NOI-attired Ali, with his Nation entourage present. “That was the wrong thing to do, Brother Malcolm.” Ali, now believing the NOI whispers that Malcolm had some screws loosened by his ouster (“Man, he’s gone. He’s gone so far out he’s out completely”), turns his back on his former mentor, and both go their separate ways, off to shatter 20th century African/Black history into before-and-after chunks like peanut brittle. When prompted, Ali assisted the Nation’s public campaign to discredit his former friend. Malcolm was a “jailbird,” said Ali on television after the former’s house was bombed in early 1965, and a man who could not be trusted. When Betty Shabazz, Malcolm’s wife, confronts him in the lobby of the Hotel Theresa (“You see what you’re doing to my husband, don’t you?”), he plays dumb. Malcolm X is soon assassinated, and Ali—safe within the iron bosom of the Nation, but afraid that the brothers would harm him like they did his former friend if he ever went AWOL—just shrugs. As the years progressed and the original Nation and Ali evolved to Orthodox Islam, the champ, now 74, has said repeatedly that he deeply regrets how he treated Malcolm.

The authors make the most of their use of space and narrow focus. The many characters of Ali’s life, often seen in film and television documentaries as almost cuddly characters, express blunt, in-real-time 1960s opinions here of Cassius/Ali, Malcolm and the Nation. Assuming these newspaper and magazine articles and previous interviews are accurate, the players’ frank comments in the heat of the moment show nuance that is cut from the summary nature of popular history. The book emphasizes, importantly, that both the Kentucky boxer and the Harlem African internationalist are present at the beginning of the television age they would shortly master.

Smith and Roberts come to the same conclusion as many of Ali’s biographers: that the “real” Muhammad Ali may never be found under the masks he wore so well. But they find an Ali that adjusted and performed in his relationships, while Malcolm X, with no choices in his past left, evolved to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, then Omowale, and then into the world-historical space occupied by assassination and martyrdom. Ali never really replaced Malcolm X, not in the Nation of Islam or anywhere else; he became his own cultural and historical entity, his own noun, one of the world’s greatest men. This book does a good job in taking both Black American icons down off their pedestals, examining them thoroughly, albeit briefly, and finding them wonderful and wanting.

Book Review: Alex Haley, The Storyteller Who Really Did Mean Well

Posted on by toddpanther

ALEX HALEY COVER

Alex Haley: And the Books That Changed a Nation.
Robert J. Norrell.
St. Martin’s Press.
272 pp. $31.50.

 

The story, and stories, of Alexander Murray Palmer Haley (1921-1992) challenge belief in more ways than one. He was the great djeli (griot) who wrote Malcolm’s story down before connecting Africa and America in America’s popular culture and the charlatan story-weaver who made up a phony African past and attached it to his family. He lived as a near-worshipped figure but, after his death, he had been re-labeled a semi-disgrace—a hustler who lied, plagiarized and died in financial ruin, his materials and memories, authentic and otherwise, auctioned off into a faded national memory.

Robert J. Norrell, a white University of Tennessee professor, thinks Haley got the bummest of historical raps. So he makes clear in this biography, billed as the first full one of the 20th century writing legend, that he will take his time to go through the public, long-standing criticisms about Haley, and square it with facts. Norrell believes that the most successful Black author in the 20th century was a victim of celebrity, a man who committed misdemeanors but was mandatorily sentenced in the American sphere.

The main question marks surrounding Haley’s tarnished halo are tackled directly. Did he plagiarize from Margaret Walker’s “Jubilee” and Harold Courlander’s “The African?” Not necessarily—almost, but not quite. Not using the strictest note-taking methods, he settled out of court because he wanted the issue to go away. Did he make up the story of Kunta Kinte and Gambia? He had a story and found people in Gambia who decided to adopt it for tourism’s sake. Doubleday decided to market the tale as nonfiction, and Haley didn’t protest. Was he really the opportunist and quasi-FBI stooge that Manning Marable portrays him in “A Life of Reinvention,” Marable’s controversial Malcolm X biography? Haley, a struggling freelancer, was on the hunt for big journalistic and nonfiction game, yes, but he genuinely admired Malcolm and wanted his people to see themselves as descendants of Africans. Is he a liar and a faker? He is a man who told a story too good to be true too many times, and wound up believing it. He had his hustle tight—until it unraveled fully after his death, when the facts were publicly checked.

To his biographer, Alex Haley was a proud Black man writing in the big leagues during the 1960s and 1970s, a time when white novelists were becoming luminaries by melding fiction and nonfiction in their magazine articles and books. Novelists back then were trying to re-create journalism and nonfiction as art. (As Norrell points out that the Malcolm X autobiography was “the creation of its subject’s life, not a factual recounting of it. That can be said of all autobiographies.”) Inspired by what was happening in America’s literary scene, he took what he knew and created a kind of Black Power and African consciousness that was palatable to white audiences. He was responsible for the creation of timeless Black heroes that countered the worst of the Blaxploitation film era, endless reruns of Tarzan films, and stereotypical Black network television sitcoms: “Kunta was the second great hero Haley had created on the page,” writes Norrell. “Kunta and Malcolm X both were examples of fierce, independent, and manly characters, and together they formed a new and cherished archetype for Black Americans—and indeed for many whites.”  He was a man who stood in the center ring of America’s white centennial and pushed for new Black/African images, unbound by the stigma of slavery.

So yes, Haley was a pioneer on how to fake-it-until-you-make it philosophy, but his fakery is showered in good intentions as well as opportunistic ones. Norrell doesn’t remove Haley’s devil’s horns, but instead places him and his by-all-accounts impactful work in a positive purgatory. The biographer documents a Black man he believes should be celebrated for writing about Black men who forever changed Black people from Black Americans to African-Americans. With Malcolm’s autobiography, Haley pencils in a winding map of Malcolm’s life and thoughts. And with “Roots,” he gives Black America a shining myth of their very own. There are worse ways to be remembered, and Norrell encourages the (re-)formation of this affirmative recollection.

My Root Article On The 50th Anniversary of “The Autobiography Of Malcolm X As Told To Alex Haley” (Its Full Title, BTW)……

Posted on by toddpanther

the_autobiography_of_malcolm_x
……is here.

re: Stokely And Peniel Joseph: Well Said, Jared A. Ball!

Posted on by toddpanther

Stokely Carmichael Speaking in Atlanta

Jared A. Ball is harsh but correct here in this very strong, well-written, well-thought out article. He has said out loud what many in Africana Studies have only said privately. And I think all of us have to be more careful in the future about providing uncritical support, and public platforms, to people who just say some of the right things about our history while omitting things whites don’t like, or just do some of the things we want while ignoring other things. I know many people feel that the larger direction of providing operational unity is more important, but I think we all have to individually decide what the cost of that would be. We can’t teach just half our history. As I said in my critique of Manning Marable: We don’t owe him anything; instead, we owe Africana Studies.