If I had been hired at the University of Chicago–my dream job–I would have probably ended up in the Communist Party. That’s where the CP was strong in the Black community. Angela Davis was a hero to our generation and organizing around her case was the focus of work in Chicago in 1971. But I ended up in Minneapolis…
      —August Nimtz

 

 

Urban Louisiana Roots

My father grew up in New Orleans. I know of no rural roots in his background. My mother was born in a rural area outside of the city–St. James Parish. Sometime in elementary school, her mother Octavia, with her older sister Zenobia, moved to New Orleans for better educational opportunities. Summers, we used to visit relatives on the farm. We saw the rural areas as more dangerous in terms of race relations, and sought safety in the confines of the city.

 I was born in 1942 and grew up in the 7th ward, a working class neighborhood of New Orleans, characterized by a layer of Black society known as the Creoles—people of mixed descent–that might be called mestizos in another part of the world. New Orleans had been one of the most residentially integrated cities. My neighborhood became increasingly segregated in the 1950s, but there were still a few Whites. Businesses and rental properties tended to be owned by Italians.

I lived under the Jim Crow system until I went off to college. Like any pervasive system, you come to take it for granted. Luckily, I lived in a political household and became aware of the contradictions at a young age.

 

A Political Household. 

As a young man, my father helped organize a protest during his first year at Xavier University in New Orleans–a Black Catholic College run by racist white nuns. He was kicked out for it. I only heard this story from him late in his life. My sister just found a master’s thesis that mentions that our father’s father and brother were part of a railroad labor class-action discrimination lawsuit.  I didn’t know that growing up. What I knew was that my father worked at the Customs House in New Orleans and was an active member– including serving as President in the segregated U.S. Customs Union. It was years later that I learned the principled reason for his resignation from the Presidency. When the civil rights movement dealt a blow to segregated unions, he supported a merger with the all-White local. When he could not convince the majority to support the merger, he stepped down.

I jokingly say that while he was never a revolutionary like his son, my father was always a rebel. He provided me with radical roots.

So did my mother.

I was lucky to grow up in a household with a father who looked up to his wife. He was proud of her educational achievements. She got a master’s degree in education from the University of Chicago. When I was old enough to go with him to one of his favorite bars, his friends would say, “Oh you’re Marguerite’s son.” He spoke highly of her to his friends. There was never any evidence that he was envious of her, only proud.

As a teacher, my mother was active in her Black teacher’s union, at one time serving as president of the local. She helped organize a school boycott–the first political event I ever participated in.

Every May 1st, New Orleans school children would go to the graveyard of the White philanthropist, John McDonogh, who had donated funds–obtained through slavery–to found Black and White schools in the city. Students from the White schools went first. Black students had to wait outside while the White students did their thing. I was in 7th grade,when my mother and other teachers, parents and Black labor activists, issued a Black boycott, protesting the segregated and unequal nature of the event.

[Protesters took down the statue of John McDonogh, June 14, 2020]

The boycott meant my mother and other teachers challenged their Black Principal who did not approve of their activism. The action had national significance, helping create the political climate that would support the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision in Topeka Kansas.

Two weeks later, Mrs. Barnes, our seventh grade teacher, reported to us news of the historic Supreme Court decision.  We all erupted into cheers and applause. We thought something of significance was about to change.  Five years later, I graduated from a racially segregated high school.

Our teachers were marvelous, inspiring those who wanted to be their best.  But we knew that we weren’t getting the same opportunities that the best white high schools offered their students.  I realized by then that it’s one thing for the Supreme Court to make a ruling; it’s another for it to be implemented.

In my home we subscribed to a number of Black publications: the Pittsburgh Courier, The Louisiana Weekly — based in New Orleans, and Ebony. I remember seeing the photo of Emmet Till’s casket in Jet in 1955. My mother got me a paper route, selling the Pittsburgh Courier to my elementary school teachers. I confess that she did more of the selling than I did.

In 1957, when Ghana gained its independence, we celebrated. My father had a friend who worked for the State Department in Ghana. They were able to send information about the event.  My sister, Sanna, and I put together an exhibition, at our mother’s direction, at our high school.

While I was in college I heard that my mother, then assistant principal at her high school, organized a defensive action against a group of racist forces that planned to march past the school. She got the students to collect a bunch of coke bottles and other things to rain down from the third floor on the racists in case they tried to invade the school. They never showed up– a real story of the “non-violent” civil rights movement.

My parents once wondered why I became a communist.  I responded that they were responsible. I learned my activist values from them.  They didn’t object.

 

School in Jim Crow New Orleans 

I thought about my high school experience in the aftermath of the 2019 Democratic Party debate in which Biden and Harris sparred about busing. A New York Times article adding context to the debate, uncovered the fact that busing was part of the US education system since the 1920s. The argument that people objected to busing, not integration, was always disingenuous.  I took the bus for four years to my segregated high school. I would ride past the White school to get to McDonogh 35, my Black high school in downtown New Orleans. The powers that be, then and since, have never complained about the daily busing drill that I and others were required to do to maintain segregation.

 

We had Black history in school, learned about the heroes/heroines and other significant figures. Our teachers were fairly conscious. My mother taught in my elementary school. A band called the Hawkettes played for our junior high dance — the first edition of the later world famous Neville Brothers.

Because of the reality of the Jim Crow, race was always on our minds. In New Orleans it was complicated by colorism–leading to discrimination within the Black community.  It was acceptable to be a passé blanc, someone who could pass as White during the day at work and be Black in the community afterward.  A look at my eighth-grade class ( photo below), is suggestive—my good buddy Alvin McKenna, standing next to me (far left in dark suit).

 

When I went to high school, all of my elementary school friends went to other high schools. My mother had a friend, E. Belfield Spriggins, who taught in my high school.  He and my mother worked together in the teacher’s union. She told him to watch out for me.  I think, in hindsight, that he was either in or around the milieu of the Communist Party.  He was never public about it. Remember this was in the depths of the McCarthy witch hunt era.

(Mr. Spriggins wrote a column on the jazz scene in New Orleans for the local Black newspaper, one of the first such columns anywhere in the U.S.  His older sister was Louis Armstrong’s teacher at a school a few blocks from my high school.  I wish I’d known all of that.)

I suspect—I can’t say for sure—that Spriggins began to work on me. He took me to the city’s registrar’s office after school, a couple days a week. We sat at a table and counted the number of registered Black voters. He was part of a lawsuit brought on by the NAACP. A court order, it appears, allowed him to look at the registration ledger. I really didn’t understand what we were doing. Now I realize he was recruiting me to what would later be called the Civil Rights Movement.

 

Spriggins also took me to an event in 1955 that forever affected me in terms of left politics. It was the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) hearing on subversion amongst Black dock workers, held in New Orleans — (Senate version of HUAC).  The hearing was run by Mississippi Senator James Eastland—the guy Joe Biden recently invoked. Eastland was a classic southern plantation owner. He was investigating a Black trade unionist for communist ties. For decades I have wished I could remember his name, because he was so uncooperative. He would not be intimidated. He didn’t plead the Fifth. It was powerful. The obituary in the New York Times of Jack O’Dell, on November 19, 2019 revealed that was O’Dell.

I thought that if racists like Eastland hate Communists, there must be something good about Communist. ((Juvenile “the enemy of my enemy” kind of thinking). Even before then, I associated anticommunism with racism. When Stalin died in 1953, I felt sympathy for “Uncle Joe.” Sputnik, 1957, was a big deal for everyone in my generation. For me it cast the Soviets in an even more positive light. It also changed the curriculum in my high school, to focus more on science. And it was the beginning of tracking in the school system for our generation, pushing a cohort of us into college prep.

I was a good student, but I had fun too. Through my girlfriend, Jocelyn Chatters, I got to know two of New Orleans’ great musicians, Alvin Batiste and Kidd Jordan.  I”ll never forget watching their faces as we listened, in Jocelyn’s living room, to Dizzy Gillespie’s classic album, Sonny Side Up. 

I finished second in my class. Jocelyn finished first.

 

House Slave Privilege

I always knew I was going to college, even Graduate School. That expectation came from my parents. My granduncle—David Malarcher— was the first person in my family to go to college. He got a baseball scholarship. He set the standard.

 

Malarcher’s mother had been a house slave, and had been taught by the slave owner’s children how to read and write.  After slavery, and before public education came to rural Louisiana, former slaves who could read opened up “nickel” schools in their homes. That is what she and her sister did in St. James Parish.

I’m very conscious of pointing this out in my own biography. I am the product of house slave privilege. The importance of education in my family goes back to David Malarcher’s mother. She had a head up in terms of education. I am a recipient of that.

 

College in Indiana

I was interested in the sciences. Astro physics was my first love and University of Chicago where my mother went to graduate school, was my first choice. I didn’t get in. I went to Purdue in Indiana because a cousin, Lucien, who was nine months older than me was there. At Purdue, I started as a Civil Engineering major, but calculus and I did not get along–one of the results of the segregated school system. After one semester, I changed over to International Relations.

When I was first got to Purdue, I could not distinguish among White students. Coming out of Jim Crow Louisiana I had no reference point. They all looked the same and their names seemed homogenous. I never felt any sense of discrimination, but more isolation and culture shock.

There were 25,0000 students at Purdue, 100 of them Black. Of the African American students, 90 were men; thus, I didn’t have much of a social life. I joined a fraternity, Omega Psi Phi, that acted as a Black social club. Most of the members were not political.

If I wanted to have a political discussion, I had to do the reading on my own. I was interested in African political developments. In March of 1960 there was the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa. That had a big impact on me. I was taking a speech class. I gave a talk, comparing South Africa to Jim Crow New Orleans.

I was befriended by an older student from Nigeria, Emiko Amoye, who was very political. He went to New York and came back with books from the African National Memorial Bookstore in Harlem, including Joel August Rogers‘  Africa’s Gifts to America (1961) and, We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief From a Crime of The United States Government Against the Negro People (1951) by William Patterson, Secretary of the CP’s Civil Rights Congress.

My Nigerian friend was excited about the Cuban Revolution, and he kept me up to date about how the revolution was progressing. I was aware of Cuba. That was one of the advantages of growing up in a port city. It gave us a global perspective. New Orleans and Cuba had historic ties. There was a regular ferry service to the island. I had friends who were from Cuba. My favorite sports figure, Kid Gavilan, was Cuban and my favorite music was Cuban. I especially liked Perez Prado. Part of my love of Cuba growing up, is that it let me know that somewhere outside of New Orleans, Blacks were not a minority. That was all before the Revolution.

At Purdue, in West Lafayette, Indiana, we were relatively isolated from reality.  We were not aware of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. Yet in October 1962, we were very focused on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Some thought the Soviet missiles in Cuba spelled the end of humanity.

In about 1962, Purdue professor Ken Kofmehl, brought to campus the Black civil rights leader James Farmer when he was organizing the Freedom Rides. I remember seeing him in the cafeteria in our dormitory with other students, but for some reason the professor did not involve me or other Black students in the discussion and I, therefore, failed to recognize the significance of Farmer’s presence.

I’d go home to Louisiana in the summers. I went to a Nation of Islam event in New Orleans during the summer of 1961 or maybe 1962 and learned about Malcolm X. My first picket line was in the summer of ’62, calling for the desegregation of lunch counters. The picket line took place on the exact location of the Hard Rock Hotel that was just demolished.

At Purdue I had a weekly radio show- a one-hour jazz program that was piped out to the dormitories.  The four-year gig allowed for interviews with greats like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, when they were on campus.  I still think my sign-off record, Basie’s Lil Darling,  is the coolest way to end a jazz program.

(In 1966, I and future wife Maxine–a cousin of The Duke–were regaled with a wedding present from her cousin Ruth: a front row table at the famed Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Center in New York City to see Ellington and his band perform.  I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of the occasion, but admit, I didn’t fully appreciate what I was treated to.)

 

My Mother, the Original Helicopter Parent 

One day when I came back to the dormitory, a friend said he had just seen my mother. I had no idea she was on campus. She had visited some of my professors. As she put it to me later: “Boy, you are dealing with these White professors now. They figure because you are from the south, you are poor and disadvantaged. I’m here to let them know you come from educated people.” In other words, she gave me a political explanation for her presence. For that reason, I never took offense at her coming to check on me.

Years later, in 1979-1980, I was on staff at the Militant in New York City. I had taken a sabbatical and was writing for the Socialist Workers Party paper. My mother showed up, unannounced, wanting a tour of the five-story building in the West Village. She saw every floor, beginning with the library on the fifth and ending with the printing press on the ground floor. She was very impressed. She told me on the ground floor as we were exiting the building: “Boy, you pay attention to these White folks, they know what they’re doing.” The thing that impressed her the most: the bathrooms were clean. This was clearly not some hippy dippy operation that her son had gotten involved in.

 

How Thelonious Monk Saved Me

I got my degree in International Relations. Encouraged by my professors at Purdue, I pursued a job in the Foreign Service. I took the exam in Washington DC and didn’t pass. I planned to try again. I was told you had to read the New York Times, front to back, to pass the test. I took that seriously and began reading.

One day in the spring of 1964, I found an article in the Times about the Ford Foundation. It was putting up a half-million dollars in grants to recruit Blacks to staff US embassies. Washington was having a hard time finding African Americans who could pass their culturally privileged exam. I took the ad to the powers that be at Howard University where I was now enrolled to do a master’s in African Studies. They confirmed that the program was being set up, and that they were going to conduct interviews later that spring.

My time to be interviewed was 8 AM on a Saturday morning. But Monk, yes, Thelonious, had been in town for a week at the famous Bohemian Caverns on U Street. With a just-received tax refund, I religiously went, four nights in a row, to see the piano genius and his quartet while sipping my favorite, at the time, Wild Turkey. Come Saturday morning for the interview, I was in no shape to impress anyone. Needless to say, I spectacularly bombed the interview.

For that reason, I am forever indebted to Monk. He saved me from the imperialist project.

(I can’t tell you how much the Caverns meant to me.  I saw so many jazz greats there, including Coltrane, with whom I had a brief chat during a break.  The closest I’d been to such music giants before, was on the southside of Chicago. I’d hitchhike from Purdue to Mckee’s with fraternity brother Brooks Howell. I’m still living off the fumes from the all-night cut session of Sonny Stitt, Frank Forester and Gene Ammons at McKee’s, in–I think–the spring of 1963. I know for sure the day I saw Prince, Sheila E, and Morris Day jam at First Avenue: 7/7/07. The Concert commenced at 2 a.m.–my time of the day!   I call that Minneapolis concert the Unadvertised Second Coming. These memories capture who I am in all my joys.)

 

Watching the Black Struggle on Primetime, Summer, 1963

I spent the summer before graduate school, working in a Steel Mill in northern Indiana and staying with my great Uncle David Malarcher in southside Chicago. We watched Malcolm X and James Baldwin--my first image of Malcolm speaking. I was forever won to what Malcolm represented; Uncle Dave was perhaps a bit leery, but I didn’t ask him.

( In 1979, when I was in New York working at the Militant, I met James Baldwin at Mikell’s, a club on 97th and Columbus Ave, on the Upper West Side on Amsterdam Avenue. Hank Crawford, musician who played with Ray Charles, was playing there. I talked to him during a break from his set. Baldwin joined the conversation, and later in the evening, made a pass at me. I laughed it off and so did he. I felt honored. I learned from the 2016 film,  I Am Not Your Negro, that was the summer Baldwin began work on his unfinished memoir).

Later that summer, I was in New Orleans when the historic March on Washington took place.  I watched it on TV with my family. Getting that kind of attention on the national news was unprecedented for the Black struggle, or any kind of mass mobilization in the streets. The speech that stood out to me was that of John Lewis, because he was critical of the Kennedy administration for being too milquetoast at advancing Black rights. We now know he had to modify his speech. As far as MLK, there was a collective sense of pride in the room about his delivery. He was one of us–a southerner, a preacher who rose to the occasion.

The speech Roy Wilkins gave was also memorable to me. He represented moderate forces in the struggle. The fact that he had to mention the death of W.E.B. Dubois–who had recently joined the Communist Party– was important to me.

 

Graduate School at Howard 1963-5. Becoming a Political Activist

I tell my students I had generational privilege. I got into graduate school without any letters of recommendation, and no GRE scores. At the steel mill south of Chicago, I was able to save $300, enough to pay for one semester’s tuition. The second semester I paid tuition with my earnings from my job as a sommelier at a ruling class restaurant in DC, where I got to see all kinds of ruling class figures, including that racist Mississippi Senator Eastland.  Luckily, I didn’t have to serve him.

I got to DC one month after the March on Washington. Driving there in mid-September with my cousin Lucien, we went through Birmingham, Alabama, days after the four girls were killed in the church. We drove by a gas station in Northern Alabama that had a sign up: Klan meeting tonight. Luckily, we had a Louisiana license plate. Having northern plates made you more unsafe in dealing with such forces.

I was looking forward to the chance to date women while at Howard. We called DC “Chocolate City.” I expected it to be good for my social life. I pursued a degree in African Studies, thinking I would work for the U.S. State Department.

As it turned out, I arrived in DC at an extraordinarily heightened political moment. To give you a feeling, on one occasion I was coming out of a waffle house on 14th and Park Road, near where I lived. In the parking lot was Martin Luther King, giving an impromptu rally with less than a hundred in attendance–no big deal in my youthful and still naïve opinion.

In the Spring of 1964, Mandela was on trial in South Africa. One of my professor’s at Howard was Leslie Rubin, a White South African. He provided details. A group of us decided to organize a picket line in front of the White House on behalf of Mandela–the first political action I helped to organize. We demanded that Mandela be released from prison. There was a counter protest put on by George Lincoln Rockwell’s Nazi grouplet. At the time, it all seemed to me to be par for the course.

In the spring of 1965, there was a conference that, in hindsight, I realize was the beginning of the boycott/divestment/sanction of South Africa movement. Professor Rubin connected us with the conference, at the now famous Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania and 14^th.  At the conference I first saw South African musician Hugh Masekela, and met the poet Nat Nakasa. I was able to talk to the 28 year old Nakasa at a post-conference dinner party organized by my future wife, Maxine. He didn’t appear despondent to me. Sadly, the poet took his own life a few months afterward.

The South Africa BDS campaign began out of a defeat, the imprisonment of Mandela and his comrades. We all felt something needed to be done—not unlike the sentiment that greeted the defeat of the second Intifada in in 2005, that initiated the 21st century BDS movement for Palestine.

The first Vietnam anti-war protest happened in Washington in April 1965. I was oblivious to that, but Malcom X’s assassination in February 1965 in New York City was unforgettable. Also, LBJ gave his famous civil rights speech at Howard in 1965. Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Toure), was a senior on campus at Howard the year I started graduate school. He stood out because he, like other SNCC activists on campus, wore overalls, so unlike the “in-crowd” at Howard. Gloria Richardson, a real grassroots fighter in Cambridge, Maryland, is another memorable figure who spoke on campus, sometime in 1964.  Howard and DC, was such a contrast to what I had just left in West Lafayette, Indiana. My political roots were now being watered.

Being at Howard at that time, also meant I was a few rows back from the stage when the young Aretha Franklin performed at the student union, and got to take in $5 shows at the Howard Theater where Motown stars and brother James, ‘Mr. Brown’ performed. That was icing on the cake– something that will never happen again–at least under capitalism.

 

My History of Voting 

I’ve never voted for a bourgeois politician. Not that I didn’t try.

In 1964, when I was home from Howard University over the summer, I tried to register to vote in New Orleans. I was intending to vote for Lyndon Johnson. Just to be clear–I thought Johnson had been in the KKK—that he still had those robes in his closet—so I tried to vote for someone I considered a racist. But the racist system wouldn’t let me.

I thought Barry Goldwater was a nut who was going to start a nuclear war. He had to be stopped. That is why I am sympathetic toward people who vote for a lesser evil, including those who voted for Trump. I know how you could vote for a racist, thinking they were the lesser evil. I understand those workers who thought he might offer a better deal in the short term. The problem is the electoral system that forces you to vote for a xenophobe with the hope that it will save your job, keep your house. This is what happens when the working class doesn’t have its own political party.

In my attempt to vote in 1964, I attended a workshop organized by  CORE, the purpose of which was to learn the tricks the racists were using to prevent Blacks from voting. There was a long form you had to fill out– an obstacle course. I thought I was prepared. I filled out the form and gave it to the good ole boy in the registrar’s office. He pointed to a line and said:

“Why didn’t you fill this out?” I said, “It didn’t apply to me.”

“Well, you were supposed to put a line through it. Come back in two weeks.”

In two weeks, I had to be back in DC. I didn’t get to vote.

In 1968 I was in Bloomington, Indiana. Someone from the League of Women Voters knocked on my door and registered me. I was again prepared to vote for the lesser evil–Humphrey–but I went off to Tanzania and forgot to get an absentee ballot.

By 1972 I was a member of the Socialist Workers Party. I have never attempted to vote for a lesser evil again.

 

Vietnam, Patriotism, and the Role of Contingency in my History

My focus was still mainly academic. I transferred to Indiana University from Howard in 1966 and declared Political Science my major. A lot of this wasn’t very well thought out. Graduate school was the way to avoid the draft, keep me out of Vietnam.

While in graduate school in Bloomington, I had to sign up for selective service. I assumed I had an educational deferment. I got a card saying I should report to selective service. I ignored it because I assumed they made a mistake. That is an accident of history. About five years ago I was cleaning out my office and going through my graduate school papers and I found the envelope from Selective Service. Lo and behold, I had been called up! I was 1A. Had I known, my wife Maxine and I would have moved to Canada.

When I watched the Ken Burns Vietnam series, I realized how lucky I was to have escaped patriotism. Ken, the late brother of my companion Natalie, got out of being drafted by pretending he was gay. He always felt guilty about it. A few years before he died, I tried to convince him he had no reason to feel guilty. So many people went into the war believing in America. Fellow activist Gary Prevost provided insights.  He too had been patriotic when the war began and lost friends in Vietnam–turning him into an anti-war activist.

I was brought up by a father who had no sense of patriotism, but I had two uncles that did. They fought in segregated units in World War II. They probably saw that slick 1944 propaganda film by Frank Capra The Negro Soldier. After watching it recently, I had a greater appreciation for what my father was up against.

My father cut a deal with the government and went to Nevada and worked in a defense plant. I was there as a baby. My sister was born there. We lived there a year. My father remembered seeing trains filled with Japanese families, headed to internment camps. While there, my parents helped found one of the first NAACP chapters in Nevada, to fight discrimination on the base and in the town. It came out of a successful fight they helped to organize to free an unjustly jailed young Black woman.

I suspect my father’s lack of patriotism had to do with his father. My grandfather was half German and half Native American. He identified as African American because his half older sister, who took care of him, was Black.  He took umbrage at being discriminated against. My father inherited that sensibility. He hated the hypocrisy. Why should he fight in a war for a country that treated him as a second-class citizen?

He wasn’t alone. Other Black men in that generation, including the historian John Hope Franklin wouldn’t go either.

 

Becoming A Revolutionary 

I was on a path to becoming an academic. Politically, I was becoming a pan-Africanist. My then wife, Maxine Letcher, was an aspiring anthropologist. We both got scholarships and grants to do research in Tanzania. On our way we spent three months in London in fall 1968 doing archival preparatory work. We were very focused as aspiring academics, so much so that we blew off an invitation from Maya Angelou to hang out with her there.

Being in Tanzania, was a powerful political experience. It was the unofficial headquarters of the Southern African Liberation movement. I was able to mix it up with revolutionaries of all stripes.Walter Rodney and his wife Pat were neighbors. I went there a Black Nationalist and came back a Communist. I began to see the limitations of the national revolution. I went thinking the solutions would be in Africa. I left thinking if this is the best that the African revolution has to offer, then we’ve got a problem. I decided the future of African liberation would come in the process of dealing with US Imperialism at home.

On a return trip to Tanzania in 1973, I met Angela Davis.  She was on a global victory tour after her release from prison.  I had met the person who was leading it three years earlier in Tanzania but he never told me he was in the CP.  When we ran into one another in Dar es Salaam, he invited me to come to his hotel room to have a drink and talk.  Later, when I told him I was in the SWP, we began a friendly banter about our political differences.  To get a dig in, I told him I’d heard they expelled leading Black member in the Twin Cities, Damu Smith.  He didn’t deny the expulsion, but was defending how it was done, when there was a knock on the door. Davis came into the room.  He whispered: “Don’t mention what we were talking about; she doesn’t know yet.”  I didn’t say anything, but was taken aback by his request.  That a leader of the CP—I think she was on the central committee—was unaware of the scandal was an eye opener for me about the party’s internal modus operandi.

 

Radical Politics in 1970s Minneapolis

I had six job offers. I came to the University of Minnesota because I liked the intellectual possibilities, working with leaders in the field of comparative politics including Bob Holt, John Turner, and May Brodbeck, scholar of the history and philosophy of science. Years later, after I’d found revolutionary politics, I half-jokingly called myself a “recovering logical positivist.”

Our first night in Minneapolis, my wife Maxine and I went to Charlie’s Cafe Exceptionale–one of the best restaurants in town at the time. A couple tables over was Liberace.  He was here to perform at the State Fair — a big deal in Minnesota, I later learned.

I knew absolutely no one, and I knew nothing about the state other than that some of the most amicable people I had met in graduate school were from Minnesota, such as the inimitable Bob Olson from Baudette. Within less than a week of being here, the young Betsy Farley sold me a Militant Newspaper in Dinkytown.

In Indiana I had worked with a group of Black students organizing to defend Angela Davis. I was assigned to put together a fact sheet. I found stories in the CP’s Daily Worker. I found better coverage in the Militant. I had no idea who put the paper out. I thought it was a feminist publication because they had extensive articles on the Women’s liberation movement in those issues.

Had I stayed married to Maxine, I probably would not have joined the Party. She was skeptical of communism. In many ways when I came here I was able to reinvent myself. No one knew me.

After Betsy sold me a subscription to the Militant I started going to Socialist Workers Party forums. I met these old timers–people who had been active in the 30s and 40s, organizing the Trucker’s Strike in Minneapolis. That impressed me. There was something ethereal and not serious about some of the student organizing in 1971. I wasn’t sure how committed the campus radicals were. I needed examples of life-long activism. I invited Harry De’Boer and Jake Cooper to come speak to my class on Social Movements. Jake had been a bodyguard for Trotsky. Both of them had spent time in Sandstone prison.

I began teaching African politics, American government and Urban Politics. My bread and butter course was Race and Ethnic Politics: a comparison of US and South Africa.

In May of 1972, the anti-war movement took over Washington Avenue.in front of Coffman Union. I knew something was going to happen, but being a good first-year untenured professor, I thought it best to show up for class.  When I got to my thirteenth floor office, I could see from the window across the Mississippi River the masses, the police and the tear gas.  I quickly left and went to get as close as I could to the scene.  On my way to the elevators I passed the political science teaching assistants’ office. The image of those graduate students with their heads buried in books while a mass revolt was going on downstairs on the ground, has never left me; my first reality check about the academy.

(An eminent political science colleague asked me not long ago if I knew the old saw about political science and I said no.  “Political Science,” the colleague said, “is for those who aren’t interested in politics and know nothing about science.”  I replied that I wish that someone would have told me that long ago.)

There was a big march, with a contingent of Black students. I was the lone Black faculty member. We walked down River Road, to Summit Avenue, to the State Capitol. My practical political education came in that moment. The students of color–or, to use the term of the time–Third World students–had decided to march in a separate contingent. In the ensuing debates about what role the Black students should play in this movement, I, as a first year faculty just out of graduate school, inserted myself into the Black student group. Many of those ties endure today.

I joined the SWP in summer of 1972. It meant joining the Young Socialist Alliance first. I was 30 then. One of the issues in that period was where did people of color fit into the broader movement. What is the relationship–if any–between Black Nationalism and Socialist Revolution?

I think if I had gone somewhere else, where I knew people in the Black community, I might not have joined the SWP. There was a lot of suspicion among Blacks, of socialism, which seemed like a White movement. But, having no social ties, I was able to reinvent myself. For a long time I was the only Black member of the party in the Twin Cities. I was constantly having to defend that I was working with White people. This was a central debate in Minneapolis, among Black activists, including having personal relationships with people of a different skin color.For myself there was often a conflict with Black women who thought I was betraying the Black community for having personal relationships with White women. I had to learn to navigate that reality as I worked and developed ties in the Black community here.  It wasn’t easy but it was a learning experience; it required me to be most conscious about my politics. I was fortunate to collaborate with two Black women, Barbara Westberry and Janice Payne Dorliae–real fighters–who judged me on the basis of my politics, and not who I happened to be in a relationship with.

 

The Southern African Liberation Movement 

The next big thing I worked on as a member of the SWP, were Twin Cities formations in solidarity with the Southern African Liberation Movement.

There was a national rally in 1972. I couldn’t go to it, but I helped organize the local African Liberation Day march in St. Paul in 1973. It was an all African American march. It was in that context that I got to know Mahmoud El Kati, and Seitu Jones. Those ties go back to then.

There was a split between those who thought we should be working only with Black people and those who thought we should be interracial. That was not resolved until 1976 with the Soweto Uprising, which forced everyone to come together and work together collectively. Before Soweto, it was easy for people who didn’t want to work with Whites to maintain that stand. But the uprising in South Africa forced us to rethink how we were going to bring solidarity to the South African students. Does it make sense to be working in separate groups? We couldn’t jump ahead of what was happening in South Africa. The upsurge in ’76 was so powerful, it forced those who wanted separate groups to band together. We had a huge coalition. The Communist Party and SWP were working together in one coalition. (The left parties did collaborate in Minneapolis around the anti-Vietnam War movement, but with lots of issues.)

It was, of course, fraught with all kinds of tension. I chaired many a meeting, trying to be a diplomat, to bring people together. We protested Control Data who had operations in South Africa. We were going to call a picket line in front of the plant on Selby and Dale, but decided not to do so. The company class-baited us, the “privileged professors” at the U of M.  We hadn’t done the necessary homework amongst the mainly African American workers in the plant, who believed, along with the leadership of the St. Paul Black Urban League, that our protest would jeopardize their jobs. We decided to call off the picket line in front of the plant and simply hold a rally at the nearby Hallie Q. Brown community center. It was an instructive moment for all of us.

Among the many people I worked with were Susan Geiger, who was part of a Southern African solidarity collective in New York.  When a teaching position opened up at the U of M in the African American and African Studies Department, I sought successfully to recruit her.  As hoped for, she proved to be a stalwart in our anti-apartheid work here.  I also worked with the late Jennifer Davis, poet Dennis Brutus, and ANC members Fred Dube / and Albie Sachs  who later served on South Africa’s Supreme Court.

Fall ,1978, I taught aboard the Semester-at-Sea ship–the only way an African American could get into apartheid South.Africa. For one week I was able to visit Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town.  Never before or since have I been so conscious about the privileges my US passport gave me.  Under South African law I was an “honorary White.”  Unsure what that actually meant, I was in a constant state of tension. I learned what “a pain in the neck” means.  Whenever I encountered apartheid signs, memories of Jim Crow New Orleans came back to me.  I knew exactly what they meant and what to do.

I did Southern Africa work consistently until 1990, when Mandela was freed. We celebrated his release with an event at the Minneapolis downtown YWCA.

 

Picking Cotton in Nicaragua

In the 1980s when the Sandinista Revolution happened, I jumped into that effort immediately.  I began working with the Nicaragua Solidarity Committee. It was in that context that I first worked with you [Anne Winkler Morey] and the Central America Resource Center.

I took my first trip to Nicaragua in January 1984, on a work brigade. I half-jokingly call it my roots tour because I picked cotton, but in reality I don’t think anyone I am related to picked cotton. In New Orleans the plantations were all sugar cane. One had to go to Northern Louisiana to find cotton. I had relatives who worked in sugar refineries and a great aunt who cut cane.

 

You know about the 1619 Project?  I especially appreciate their point that the brutality of capitalism is traced to slavery.  They include a picture of someone, bent over, picking cotton. In Nicaragua the plants we picked were higher and more varied so we were able to stand up sometimes as we picked. It was easier. The hardest thing about Nicaragua was that they were using the defoliant, Agent Orange, on the crops.

When the Sandinistas lost the election in 1990, I began, at the initiative of the SWP, doing Cuban solidarity work. April Knutson who was in the CP, and I, wrote a joint letter calling for a meeting to form a committee. We figured Cuba was going to need the solidarity. We had our first meeting at Brian Herron Sr.’s Zion Baptist Church in North Minneapolis. It was April 1990, I think. The young Keith Ellison was there.

 

Leaving the SWP and Engaging in Deep Research of Marx and Engels 

I left the SWP in 1995–involuntarily. I had violated a norm by agreeing to speak at an MLK event that was co-sponsored by the INS (ICE). It took place at the Whipple Building in Bloomington. I accepted the discipline, and continued to collaborate with the party.

It was a blow to me personally. It took me awhile to recover. As a kid, my mother used to joke that they could never really punish me because of my ability to entertain myself. I had this capacity to turn adversity to my advantage. That is what I did after I was expelled. At the urging of party member Jon Hilson, I continued to be active in the Cuba Committee, but I also began a massive research project. I re-recruited myself to the Communist Movement in a much more informed way, diving into the fifty volumes of Marx and Engels’ collected works.

The first product of that research was a book on Marx and Engels. It helped me to see that the SWP was an episode in the larger Communist movement. Parties come and go. The movement continues. It helped me to put the Party and my expulsion into a broader historical perspective.

 

Power in the Streets, not the Suites

The 2000 election was such an instructive lesson about the reality of electoral politics in the US. One person, if you think about it, decided who would be president–someone unelected and in office for a lifetime.  I’m referring to Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor. She cast the deciding vote in the Bush v. Gore five-to-four decision.   When some representatives from the House went to the Senate and asked them to have a discussion about the Court’s decision, no one in the Senate was willing to do so, including even the most progressive members–Wellstone and Feingold.  You can see it all on C-SPAN.

Al Gore, who as Vice-President, was Senate pro-tem, didn’t want to touch it. More telling, those who voted for him, were not willing to go into the streets to challenge the Court’s decision. The U.S. electorate was willing to register its preference, but not willing to impose its  majority power.

Only in the United States could this have happened. In a Third World country, the masses would have been in the streets. That is why, for me, what just happened in Puerto Rico is so significant. (Do you realize the movement led by Pedro Albizu Campos in Puerto Rico in the 1920s began with a leak of a letter written by a US official about Puerto Rico with one of the most disparaging remarks about a people you could imagine?! The parallel is amazing. The recent uprising was also inspired by a leak. History repeats itself.)

A reporter asked me recently my opinion about Jeremiah Ellison, and the broader question of what happens when someone makes the transition from street activist to politician. I have been asked a similar question about Keith Ellison, his father.

It is essential to understand where power for liberation comes from. I can’t tell you how many times students have come to me asking for a letter of recommendation to get into law school, and how much I tried to tell them what was problematic with that route. I use a term I often put on exams: Out of the Streets into the Suites. So many of them say, “If I can just get on the inside…”  They believe that that power comes from within the system and not on the streets, barricades, and picket lines.

Beyond that, a rule of thumb for me in evaluating effective revolutionary leadership, is whether the person is seeking personal fame and glory, or whether they see themselves as part of something larger. There is that famous quote by José Martí: All the glory in the world fits in a kernel of corn….

When I encountered the Impeach Bush movement in 2007, it forced me to think about how to respond. At that time, I said, if you don’t impeach the system, we will have someone worse in the White House. Now we have Trump–and impeachment again. And I say the same thing. If we don’t impeach the system that’s given us Trump, we will have someone in residence on 1600 Pennsylvania who’ll make Trump pale in comparison.

When Obama was elected in 2008, I was one of the few Black faculty who was not enthusiastic. I was teaching my class on the Cuban Revolution. My students thought we had just gone through a revolution. I told them, with Obama we got a new app, not a new operating system. That analogy seemed to click.

Except for the abstainers–the 43% of the electorate who voted for none- of-the-above in 2016–we suffer from what I call “voting fetishism,” the mistaken belief that what happens in the voting booth is the end-all-and-be-all of politics.  If you think that the most important thing you can do is vote, ask yourself: how did someone like me get the right to vote? Because people who look like me and allies of people who look like me, took to the streets, or threatened to do so.

Voting takes thirty seconds. It is done solitarily. Nothing could be more remote from exercising power than an action that is brief and done alone. Exercising political power takes a lot of people, over a long time. When you vote you exercise a democratic right to register a preference for a candidate or policy. To exercise political power, we must impose our will through collective action. Power has to be taken.

 

What Is To Be Done Right Now

We are living in a unique historical moment in all kinds of ways. The recent pronouncement by the Business Roundtable, made up of 181 CEOs, that they are beholden to all the stakeholders not just shareholders, testifies to the increasing fear of the masses on the part of the ruling class. Their statement effectively rejects Milton Friedman’s 1970 defense of capitalism. These CEO”s are trying, as I’ve written, to put “lipstick on the pig.” They are afraid of rebellion, seeking a way to put a lid on it.  Of course, their newfound wisdom is merely cosmetic; but it’s telling.

We have opportunities today that haven’t existed since the 1930s. The radicalism of the 60s was a radicalism in the context of affluence. It didn’t take a lot of courage in 1970s for me to become a Communist. I got tenure while running for Mayor as an SWP candidate….

A young person today faces challenges our generation didn’t have to face; challenges that require greater consciousness about taking the revolutionary road. On the other hand, as opportunities for them begin to diminish, they increasingly have less to lose to take such a step—making the last words in the Communist Manifesto a reality; they “only have their chains to lose.”

The social movements of the ’60s never posed the question about the future of capitalism. Today the system has reached a fundamental crisis that’s unresolvable. And it’s a global crisis; think about what’s taking place increasingly throughout the world—working class masses in the streets on virtually every continent.

Until 1980, life expectancy was increasing in the United States. For the last three years it has actually diminished. We haven’t seen that since the world-wide flu pandemic of 1918. Before 1915 a wealthy woman could expect to live 3½ years longer than an impoverished woman. Now the wealthy woman lives 13 years longer. On a very basic level we are dealing with a system that no longer serves humanity.  And people know it. Think about the suicide rate amongst farmers and veterans!

The best that capitalism had to offer humanity is behind us.  The system has run up against its limits. But the capitalist system won’t die on its own; it has to be overthrown; otherwise it will continue to exact all kinds of horrors on us, to save itself.

As for how the revolutionary process will proceed, perhaps history offers some lessons. We can see, in hindsight, how in Russia, the 1905 revolution was a dress rehearsal for 1917 and Fidel’s unsuccessful attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953, was a rehearsal for the triumph of the revolution in 1959. I believe there will not be a revolutionary showdown in this country without a dress rehearsal. How long that will take to begin and the time between rehearsals and “showdown time” is impossible to know.

Our side’s greatest deficit at the moment is the lack of a revolutionary leadership, which is exactly why dress rehearsals are needed. Real revolutionary leadership comes out a fight. Until we have the fights and the inevitable mistakes that come with them, our side won’t be ready for the showdown. That is why we need to get into the ring and duke it out whenever the opportunities are offered. Current examples in the US include the UAW General Motors strike, the Mack Truck strike, the copper miners strike in the southwest, the CTU teacher strike. It is out of the daily struggles such as these that a new efficacious revolutionary leadership will emerge.

I make no predictions about the outcome, just that this moment offers the possibility of resolving the crisis of social oppression and inequality in a way that serves the interests of humanity, unlike any other time in the past. We are lucky to be alive now. Think about all the noble and courageous fighters who have proceeded us who could only have dreamed to have such an opportunity. As I’ve sometimes said at labor solidarity rallies, not every struggle results in a victory; but without struggles there are no victories.

 

Black Lives Matter and Racial Exclusion 

BLM was an important development. The most important thing about it in my humble opinion has been its multi-racial and gendered character. Police brutality fights in the 1960s and 70s were exclusively Black. And now you also have women in leadership. These changes are essential. You can’t have a movement that excludes people based on gender or color of skin. These developments register progress since the social movements of the 1960s.

I know there has been a discussion, here and elsewhere, about excluding White people from making decisions within the movement. I don’t think you can have such a policy in a movement that seeks to give everyone a sense of self-worth and equal rights in decision-making. Just because someone is Black or a “POC” (a term I’ve been forced to use), doesn’t make them progressive. If anything, the Obama era should have taught us that someone’s skin color, gender, or sexual orientation, doesn’t tell you much about which side of the class struggle they will be on when the shit hits the fan.

A few years ago, our Minnesota Cuba Committee held a forum in St. Paul at the East Side Freedom Library a forum (slide 58) that targeted BLM activists to inform them about the reality of the police in Cuba. I sought to impart in my presentation the lessons of the Cuban Revolution. Cubans had to reinvent the police from the bottom up. Until we do that, any reforms will not change the perpetuation of police brutality, or the persistence of crime within poor communities of color—a product of the “I got mine you get yours ethic of capitalism.” Malcolm X, in the late months of his life, was asked by an interviewer if his efforts were about awakening African Americans to their oppression. No, he quickly said; “they already know that. I’m simply trying to awaken them to their self-worth.” That’s what the Cuban Revolution was able to do for its masses and what we need to emulate. That is the only way to overcome so-called, “Black on Black” crime.

 

Some Thoughts About Affirmative Action and Related Current Realities

I fault my generation a little bit. When we were fighting for affirmative action, there was a tendency to let skin color serve as a proxy for progressive politics. We know now that with upward social mobility, there often comes a move to the political right, regardless of social origins.

Living in downtown Minneapolis, I see the most visible manifestation of the crisis of late capitalism—the local ruling class playing whack-a-mole with the homeless. This is true all over the country. A couple of years ago when I was in Los Angeles, my late cousin tried avoiding my having to see the skid row scene there, which is almost apocalyptic. Like many other successful affluent people who look like me, homelessness, which disproportionately impacts African Americans, is an uncomfortable reality they would prefer to ignore.

Among the homeless, tragically, was a good friend, someone I worked closely with, Chris Nisan. Up until about a year or so ago, I would encounter him in downtown Minneapolis.  I am so grateful to hear that his daughter has found him a safe place to live.   It was a painful situation for all of us who loved and worked with Chris—probably the most effective leader ever in anti-police brutality work here.

I’ve encountered others who are homeless who had once been in my classroom.

I have younger relatives who live in the Washington, D.C. area, where Black homelessness is rampant. They have no idea that when my cousin and I studied there in the 1960’s widespread Black homelessness was a phenomenon that simply didn’t exist. How can we be proud that the first African American president was in residence on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in an era when, within walking distance, people who looked like him were trying to survive in the streets?

For an increasing majority of young people of all skin colors and other identities, the American Dream is fast disappearing.  They remind me of the skepticism I had as a youth living under Jim Crow, about the reality of America. I take heart in polls that show that socialism is more popular than capitalism with the millennial generation. And that’s before the onset of the next recession, which is surely on its way! You would have to go back to the 30s to find similar sentiments. Capitalism is not working for this generation. I see it in the classroom and the discussions I’m able to have that I could not have had a decade or more ago.

My task is to provide some historical perspective.

 

Thoughts on Five Decades of Teaching

I’m often asked why haven’t I retired.  The few of us from that era who are still doing it are an endangered species.  That includes my closest cohorts and friends, Allen Isaacman and Lansiné Kaba, who are here and elsewhere.

Why would I want to retire?  I’m privileged to be still able to do what I do at a major public institution.   Given my politics, how fortunate I am to learn from young people today about current political reality, and maybe have an impact on them.

I just got a note from a conservative-minded former student from 2015, seeking a letter of recommendation We often had disagreements in the classroom. He wondered if I remembered him.  “Of course,” I responded, “I remember you; I always do when it comes to those who keep me on my toes.”  He replied that my class was one of the few he had at the University of Minnesota, “that constantly challenged me to think outside of my comfort zone and helped change my viewpoints on many social issues/injustices.”

I especially treasure feedback like this—from those who enter my classes with very different politics, who think they know what a communist is— oftentimes confusing it with a Stalinist or a liberal.  I look forward to challenging their stereotypes and learning new ways to respond to their concerns. A couple of years ago the U of Minnesota Alumni Association asked former students to name one person affiliated with the University of Minnesota Twin Cities who had a significant impact on their experience as a student.  To my surprise and joy, my name appeared, as one of the 44 most-mentioned faculty by 8800 respondents. Never would I have dreamed to be in such distinguished company.

A long way from St. James Parish and New Orleans.

We make predictions and build movements based on historical experience, but, as August has shown, in our individual lives and our collective endeavors, geography, (where we end up) and contingency- (happenstance), also play a role. August ended our interview by informing me about his new forays into Minnesota recreational pastimes.

My stepdaughter Leah took me on my first Minnesota fishing trip to Coon Rapids Dam. We caught a few keepers and got in some quality quiet time. Leah regaled me with a birthday gift, for Natalie and I to be VIP guests at the concert/session of the incomparable George Clinton aka Parliament, Funkadelic crew, which included a photo op with the legendary artist.

 

 

This summer my co-worker and former student Kyle Edwards, took me to my first Twins game. The great thing about baseball: there is a lot of down time–enough for us to have great political discussions.

Post Covid 19 Pandemic note:    Never could I have imagined the pandemic crisis.  How lucky I am to have a captive audience of 45 young people in two classes who I can discuss with and help them make sense of this unprecedented moment even if we can’t have face to face meetings–which I truly miss.   And to see the crisis from their perspective is all so informative.  I’m privileged to be able to work from home; many friends and family cannot.  So glad I haven’t retired!

 Minneapolis Uprising after the murder of George Floyd 

excerpted and edited from: Its a Big Deal the Outrage Over Floyd’s death was Massive and Multiracial.

 The Tuesday May 26th early evening protest was different. Five thousand people in Minnesota’s largest city gathered peacefully, but determined to vent their anger at the latest outrage on the part of the Minneapolis police force. Though the mainstream media focused on the violent acts of anger at the end of the mass mobilization — and since then — the important story is what happened three hours earlier. The mobilization was one of the largest protests against police brutality since the 1992 Rodney King demonstration in the city.

African-Americans of my generation, still marvel at the racially diverse composition of anti-police brutality protests today. Whites were virtually absent from such protests in the 1960s. On Tuesday they were in the majority. 

 

A Memory Prompted by the Right-wing Invasion of the US Capitol, January 6, 2021

On March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire in the House of Representatives. They were all arrested and served almost a century between them, of jail time. One of the attackers— Rafael Cancel Miranda—wrote later that they were not really trying to kill anyone; just trying to get attention for Puerto Rican self-determination.  ‘If killing someone had been our intention, we knew how to do so.’

I was eleven in 1954. I remember the laughter of my parents–two very political people–about the ‘good ole boys,’ the mortal enemies of Black people, trying to fit their “fat asses” under their desks when the shooting began.  No tears were shed in my household about the attack on the so-called “peoples house of democracy.”  Too many of its occupants were doing all they could to make sure that people who looked like us in Jim Crow New Orleans would remain subservient to their interests.  

A few years ago I had the honor and privilege to introduce Rafael Cancel Miranda at a Cuba solidarity event in New York City. I related the above story in my introduction and it was well-received.  I am sorry he wasn’t around (he died on March 2, 2020, at age 89) to comment on the ignominious and—thankfully—less skillful invaders on January 6, 2021.