Mau Mau in Brief

The scriptwriters really had to develop the white characters. They were unevenly developed as seen through the eyes of Haley's ancestors, who knew only what they perceived. This point of view extended even to what was going on throughout the country as a whole. Haley did it through black eyes by surmising that Bell had the ability to read and write, which she kept secret. But she did secretly read the newspapers that Dr. Reynolds left around the house. And so she knew what was being written in the newspapers about the slave revolts and slavery. She didn't tell even Kunta Kinte until after they were married, and she found out that he could read Arabic and could show her what is name looked like in Arabic. Roots Impact

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Mao’s position on white revolutionaries was more practically based in his fight against Western imperialism. He supported anyone who fought on the domestic front against the United States of America--the strongest anti-revolutionary force and the greatest imperialist power in the world. Whites who proposed revolutionary change in America, for Mao, came under the united front strategy of : "The enemies of my enemy are my friends." Mao and the Chinese Revolution had trouble with a white, Russian Revolution that constantly fought Peking for world-wide control of the "international" Communist movement. 

If revolutionaries as legendary as Malcolm X and Mao had their suspicions about white revolutionaries, then why was Cleaver so eager to embrace them? Retrospective on Soul on Ice

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We always knew the crazy tales our people told about the vicious madness of White Supremacy, enforced by Uncle Sam Gestapo Good Old Boy Cracker Nazis, Spawn of the “Soul Thieves” (Fred said) who bought our bodies to work for them free, forever, so they could be rich and rule the world.  Sunday School and one people and friends and brains had told us clearly to recognize:  Heathens, jealous Crackers the old folks called them.  Racists.  Lynchers.  The spiritual KKK in America’s soul.

We are its Blood, ourselves.  Sucked out of our homes by our African selves as captors, then sold to vampire-like European and American slaves traders.  They are the meaning of Halloween.  The Skull and Crossbones is their only flag. From Parks to Marxism

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McKay always evinces a sensitive identification with his people, both in their sufferings as well as in their joys.  Proud of his race, the wrongs they suffer hurts him.  But in his early work there is no strident racial protest except for two poems "Jim at Sixteen"  and "Strokes of Tamarind Switch."  "Jim at Sixteen" shows the raw wound McKay’s tight handcuffs make on the wrist of the arrested lad.  But with patience, he kept saying that he knew he could not help it, confessing how sad and ashamed he felt even though it was accidental.  "Strokes of Tamarind" is written in reaction to a judicial flogging he had witnessed;  "I could not bear to see him – my own flesh – stretched out over the bench, so I went away to the Post Office near by."  The boy who had cried during the flogging broke down later while talking to McKay who was so moved that he gave him tickets for his train journey.  Such gentleness of spirit for a policeman is softness, unmanliness, and sentimentality.  But this brings about the finer verse based on an instinctive feeling of sympathy for a suffering people, and no less for an individual. Black Consciousness Poet

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Later, I returned to Harlem, in ' 68; and Comrade Ernie Allen, co-editor of Soulbook, and I participated in Part II of the BAM, by organizing the "Loft" movement on 125th St. Our Loft was called "The Black Mind," and we joined in with the Original Last Poets (of whom I became a mentor), whose Loft was named the "East Wind."

These lofts, in conjunction with Barbara Ann Teer's National Black Theater Workshop, the Studio Museum in Harlem, led by our Black Dialogue editor, and comrade, Ed Spriggs and with Robert McBeth and Ed Bullin's New Lafayette Theater, and Ernie McClintock's theater, became the major institutions which led the Second Phase of the Harlem BAM (roughly '68 to '74) which was in continuous contact w/Imamu Baraka's Spirit House in New Ark. Baraka's "Spirit House Movers" often performed @ our Loft-theaters, and visited the New Lafayette Theatre. Rudy Interviews Askia Touré

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There is perhaps more discomfort now in the fact that a large percentage of the twelve million undocumented are poor and brown and from the developing world. For years, people like Pat Buchanan have bemoaned the fact that there was no melting taking place in the pot. They consider un-American what they see as the immigrant’s backward glance at their sometimes poverty stricken and politically heated homelands.

Monies sent back are equated with taxes not being paid. Newborn babies are health care thieves. And since good fences make good neighbors, especially when only one neighbor can afford to build or would seemingly benefit from the fence, images of barbed-wire topped walls with armed Minutemen on the other side dance around in wistfully nativist heads. Out of the Shadows

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updated 4 October 2007