Africa World Now Project

What we you hear next is a recent community dialogue that explored the impact of Africa on El Hajj Malik El Shabzz’s thought and practice and Malik Shabazz’s impact on Africa. What we are concerned with, specifically, with this dialogue is the impact of East Africa, generally, revolutionary Kenya, in particular on Malik Shabazz’s thought and practice. We pay attention to attention to the evolutions of Malik Shabazz’s clarity on the role of revolutionary struggle through his direct relationship with revolutionaries in Kenya [East Africa more broadly]. The question[s] that framed this dialogue were: 1.What was the influence of revolutionaries in East Africa, generally, Kenya, specifically on Malik El Shabazz political, cultural, and economic praxis? Here, we mapped the Land and Freedom Army [known in colonialist discourse and historical memory as the Mau Mau Rebellion as well as was his relationship with Pio Gama Pinto, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, and Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu? 2.What strains of Malik Shabazz’s praxis are important to contextualizing current geopolitical and national questions, and are applicable to this current moment? Here I think it would useful to suggest to you, our listeners, to explore some of his work; intentionally engaging his speeches, lectures, and/or talks as well as his project to take the U.S. [in relation to the colonial question that includes people of African descent in the US, and ultimately Western nations] to a world court, his developing application [and it can be argued implicitly, critique] of human rights [where there is a clear sharpening of human rights theory and practice to engage an African world perspective]; his contributions and attempts to extend Pan Africanism, challenging Black Internationalism as framework to understanding national oppression, autonomy, and personhood. For more, it is highly recommended to explore the work of Africa World Now Project Collaborative … as well as the •Kenyan Organic Intellectuals [a very important collective of revolutionaries in Kenya who are extensions of this history and more!] •Engage an article titled: El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz: the Continuity and Legacy of a Critical Africana Human Rights Consciousness [an article that extends and expands on many of the points made in the lecture, which is also available if you follow Africa World Now Project Collective’s social media and look in the bios of our various social platforms for access to the this article and extensive archive] •Visit https://alkalimat.org/ and https://www.brothermalcolm.net/mxcontent.html, where Professor Abdul Alkalimat has developed a series lectures called MalcolmX100 as well as an absolutely incredible archive of work on and by Bro Malcolm complied by Abdul Alkalimat] [Selected Work on Malcolm X]. •Black Men Build where you can find work on contemporary implications of Malcolm X as well as a re/released and update of a Study Guide on Malcolm developed by Abdul Alkalimat and co. •Of course, you can explore the work of Africa World Now Project Collective, where you will find a playlist of programs that explore, in more depth, some of these questions. As well as explorations and extensions of Africana sociopolitical thought and practice. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly. Enjoy the program!

History, the writing of history, can be a messy process. Movement history, that is an exploration and examination of the forces that constitute struggle, its successes and on-going defeats adds even more complexity to understanding and the uses of history. Specifically as it relates to the building of a historical consciousness that is necessary to wage contemporary struggle. This notion, when applied to Southern Africa’s liberation struggles, is useful when attempting to delineate and extract frameworks for understanding current conditions and building liberatory objectives, particularly if the objectives are motivated by the desire to not reconstitute past mistakes. The process to identify where to extend and expand upon practices that were left incomplete and needed to continue struggle, cannot negate the centrality of the impetus to ‘tell no lies, claim no easy victories.’ This means, above all, developing the requisite historical consciousness to understand what was done in order to know ‘what is to be done’. “Success” in southern Africa came, paradoxically, when capital, finding itself under substantial political pressure (especially in South Africa) came slowly but surely to be convinced that the profitable links that the global capitalist system had forged with racist and apartheid-defined structures in southern Africa were making capitalism itself dangerously vulnerable to mass action. And this in turn moved capital to reconsider its options and to admit to itself that its links to race-defined rule were now best understood as having been merely a contingent, time-bound tactic in its quest, most centrally, for class privilege and power. How much wiser, capitalists increasingly thought, to abandon apartheid, to coopt the vanguard of the popular movement into capital's camp, and to thus preempt any more radical, even revolutionary possibilities [Saul, On Building a Social Movement: The North American Campaign for Southern African Liberation Revisited, 2017]. The fact is that it was on such grounds that liberation movements conceded to capital for change in South Africa. Martha Biondi is Lorraine H. Morton Professor of Black Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University and author of The Black Revolution on Campus and To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. Born in Chicago, Illinois, Prexy Nesbitt was educated at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, earning a degree in Political Science with a minor in Nineteenth Century Russian Literature. He went on to attend the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Northwestern and Columbia University. His work includes direct and indirect activity in six Southern African liberation movements: African National Congress (ANC); Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO); Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA); Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU); and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU); the Southwest African People's Organization (SWAPO), as well as with the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Returning to Chicago in the 1980s, he worked as a labor organizer and as special aid to then Chicago mayor Harold Washington. He was later appointed consultant to represent the country and its interests in the United States, Canada, and Europe by the independent Mozambican government. As an activist and an educator, he has organized and taught throughout the U.S. and around the world. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly. Enjoy the program!

We are honored to have with us, again, The Honorable Fravia Marquez Silva, 2nd Advisor To Venezuela’s National Assembly and Spokeswomen for Cumbe International and recently launched Bring The Back Movement and Venezuela’s Charge D’Affaires to Belgium and Venezuela’s Preeminent Trade Unionist H.E. Ambassador Marcos Garcia. This program explored: 1) The effects of US imperial aggression on the working class in Venezuela? 2) The [immediate and long term] impact on the working class throughout the hemisphere? 3) What are some ways the working class in the Americas can support the working class in Venezuela that can possibly be expanded to other regions under attack? 4) How can we think about this moment in a way that can increase class solidarity in the hemisphere and throughout the world? This program is a collaborative project between Shirley Graham Du Bois/William Worthy Media and Friendship Collective & Africa World Now Project Collective.

The struggle of the LRBW was centered on the political development of Black workers inside the development of global capitalism in the United States and within a leading sector of capitalist production in the early and mid-twentieth century, which was then, the auto-industry. This socio-economic location molded a section of Black workers into working-class revolutionaries. The historical moment that shaped LRBW was located at the nexus of the post-World War II capitalist expansion and the beginning of capitalist globalization, rooted in the new technical evolution of the forces of production: a turn to industrial automation of the workplace. The very process of their pedagogy of revolution, was their study of theory and what is produced when this theory is applied to real-world experiences, which shaped their practice into workers power. To study the intellectual processes of the LRBW in the context of a developing global capitalism, as they are identifying a pedagogy of revolution is an essential frame of reference that can offer contemporary working-class movements a guide of action. Meaning, the point of discovering the intellectual processes (theoretical development) of the LRBW opens space for us to understand the processes of how [and in what ways] they were intent to developing a worker’s movement. As we pay attention to their ability to identify and name the world around them and the steps they took to then engage their realities in a larger context is an important point of entry to building working class unity. This development, seen as a process, serves to situate them historically, while also guiding us to identify what to extract from their practice that can be applied to the [static] and evolving conditions workers find themselves in today. What questions were left for us to take up, what are the contours of their thought and practice that be extended and expanded? What are the similarities and dissimilarities in the conditions that workers find themselves across sectors? And What is to be done? The LRBW is an interesting and complicated expression of the relationship between Black workers in Detroit and the global capitalist system. It was a struggle between autoworkers, the union, and the automobile industry. It encompassed the struggles and contradictions between the workers and the bosses, as well as between workers and the union of which they were a part. This period exposed the glaring internal and external contradictions of racism within and around the workers movement, historically and in that moment. Yet, the LRBW was able to develop a process of struggle combining both theory and practice. Today, we explore the story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers with Jerome Scott and walda katz-fishman, authors of Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. walda katz-fishman is a scholar activist and professor of sociology at Howard University. A founding member and former board chair of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide, she is a contributing author or editor of popular education toolkits and books, including The United States Social Forum: Perspectives of a Movement and The Roots of Terror, among others. Jerome Scott is a former autoworker, labor organizer in Detroit auto plants, and member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The founding director of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide, he is a contributing author or editor of popular education toolkits and books, including The United States Social Forum: Perspectives of a Movement and The Roots of Terror, among others, as well.

This cannot be repeated enough, as the dialectical relationship between anti-colonial praxis and the colonial logic of capital becomes ever more fascistic, we must be ever more clear on how violence is necessary to distort and make imperceptible … the possibilities of a future. Simply put, the ever more overt application of violence as a means to maintain oppressive social structures that guide the formation of consciousness, the more it arrests our ability to engage with ‘the beyond struggle’, beyond the now moment. The vast majority of us are caught within the cyclical patterns of manufactured realities of capitalist imagination. Capital needs the literal life-[blood] of those who are constituent parts of these manufactured realities; realities captured in incorrect notions of the inevitability of conflict, induced resource scarcity, the logic of private property, aggressive individualism, and the insolvability of the climate crisis. We are expected to spend majority of our time and energy surviving the daily crucible designed by capital. Ok, I can go on … but let’s not get lost in the rhetoric and now that you are probably equally lost in this long opening thought, we should, at this point, circle back to what I suggest cannot “be repeated enough” …: And that is…: Colonial violence and colonial discourse are at the heart of Western modernity. They are constituent features of Western European modern ontology, knowledge production and distribution, and sociopolitical thought and economic practice codified in the 14th century. The use of ontology is another way of saying, the study of the reality of ‘being’; in simpler terms, what makes a thing, a thing. It is clear [or at least it should be] what and who the ‘monsters’ are, so it is not necessarily novel in itself. But it still bears repeating. To add more clarity, adding more perspective, hoping to make more sense, what I am suggesting here is that we are living in the 21st century with 14th century conceptualizations of reality produced from the subsequent violence inherent in the contradictions built over centuries through capitalist logic … all interdependent on supremacist notions of a constructed whiteness. A world where false notions of reality are attached to color [and class, culture, gender, and formations of consciousness]. This violence we are facing is what Fanon was unpacking. Structures of violence is what Fanon was intent to deconstruct, and one of his important contributions to a: decolonial imperative. Therefore, it is, here, within the material and nonmaterial parameters of violence that we can explore and examine Fanon’s corpus to construct frameworks of analysis. Though we should never neatly apply, nor seek to use linear logic, without taking into consideration the historical evolution in the material [and nonmaterial] conditions over time and space, Fanon’s decolonial imperative stands as an important point of entry to understanding the current historical moment. Nicholas Mwangi is a writer, organiser, and member of the Ukombozi Library in Kenya. He contributes regularly to People’s Dispatch. Nicholas has co-edited Breaking the Silence on NGOs in Africa and Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Reflect on the Legacy of Pio Gama Pinto. He is currently working on a forthcoming book titled The Crisis of Capitalism in Africa with the Organic Intellectuals Network in Kenya. Waringa Wahome is an organizer, political theorist, lawyer and also the coordinator of the legal empowerment hub at Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC). Waringa Wahome is a lawyer at Waringa Wahome & CO Advocates as well as member of the Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Network. Please forgive the quality of audio in certain parts of our conversation, the ideas and voices are essential and vital, so we choose to share with you. Not to mention one of our comrades/colleagues was outside of Nairobi at the time of the recording.

It was 1839 and Frank and Lucy McWorter were getting married for the second time. The wedding was a reaffirmation of their love and a recommitment to all they’d built together. They had come to Illinois with four of their children and built a farm of golden wheat fields and towering stalks of corn. Though there was plenty of symbolism in their renewed vows, the McWorters remarried for a more pragmatic reason — they had been enslaved in Kentucky when they first committed to each other, but such marriages were rarely respected by U. S. courts. They had still been enslaved when they started their family, but Frank quickly began to plot their way to freedom. Frank’s owner and father, George McWhorter, trusted Frank to manage his farm and gave him leeway to earn money doing extra work. So, Frank learned how to mine and manufacture his own saltpeter, a necessary component in gunpowder. He used the money he earned selling saltpeter to buy freedom for him and his family. He began freeing his family in 1817. By this time Lucy and Frank were raising Judah, Frank Jr., Sarah, and Solomon, but Frank first bought Lucy’s freedom. She was pregnant at the time, so not only did he free Lucy, but his purchase also ensured that their son, Squire, would be born free. In 1819, he bought his own freedom, becoming Free Frank, and later changed his name to Frank McWorter — dropping the “h” from his former enslaver’s last name. Frank and Lucy, along with several children they had managed to free, moved west to Illinois in 1830 to the land that would become their farm in Pike County. He traded his saltpeter operation for Frank Jr.’s freedom after Junior had fled his enslavement to Canada. Frank made trips back to Kentucky to purchase the freedom of each of his three remaining enslaved children and at least one grandchild. On each trip, Frank McWorter had to make the gut-wrenching decision of which child he would free and which he would leave behind to endure slavery. The McWorters spent $14,000 to free their family. Adjusted for inflation, that is nearly $500,000 in 2023. Frank McWorter began his farm with 160 acres and eventually increased those holdings to over 500 acres. Along with his corn and wheat, he grew oats and raised cattle, hogs, and horses. In 1836, Frank divided forty-two acres of his land into town lots and founded the town of New Philadelphia. The town, the first officially founded by African Americans, prospered with both Black and white residents and formed part of a larger rural community of farmers. The town’s very existence as a biracial community in a state with repressive Black Codes on the books until 1865 was a defiant statement against racial inequality. New Philadelphia was an audacious project, a prelude to Black communities like Nicodemus, Kansas; DeWitty, Nebraska; Blackdom, New Mexico; and Boley, Oklahoma, founded in the West after the Civil War. For more: New Philadelphia, Gerald A. McWorter and Kate Williams-McWorter Sign the petition: https://chng.it/q5Q5XS9cFd

Colonial violence and colonial discourse are at the heart of Western modernity. They are constituent features of Western European modern ontology, knowledge production and distribution, and sociopolitical thought and economic practice codified in the 14th century. The use of ontology is another way of saying, the study of the reality of ‘being’; in simpler terms, what makes a thing, a thing. It is clear [or at least it should be] what and who the ‘monsters’ are, so it is not necessarily novel in itself. But it still bears repeating. To add more clarity, adding more perspective, hoping to make more sense, what I am suggesting here is that we are living in the 21st century with 14th century conceptualizations of reality produced from the subsequent violence inherent in the contradictions built over centuries through capitalist logic … all interdependent on supremacist notions of a constructed whiteness. A world where false notions of reality are attached to color [and class, culture, gender, and formations of consciousness]. This violence we are facing is what Fanon was unpacking. Structures of violence is what Fanon was intent to deconstruct, and one of his important contributions to a: decolonial imperative. Therefore, it is, here, within the material and nonmaterial parameters of violence that we can explore and examine Fanon’s corpus to construct frameworks of analysis. Though we should never neatly apply, nor seek to use linear logic, without taking into consideration the historical evolution in the material [and nonmaterial] conditions over time and space, Fanon’s decolonial imperative stands as an important point of entry to understanding the current historical moment. Nicholas Mwangi is a writer, organiser, and member of the Ukombozi Library in Kenya. He contributes regularly to People’s Dispatch. Nicholas has co-edited Breaking the Silence on NGOs in Africa and Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Reflect on the Legacy of Pio Gama Pinto. He is currently working on a forthcoming book titled The Crisis of Capitalism in Africa with the Organic Intellectuals Network in Kenya. Waringa Wahome is an organizer, political theorist, lawyer and also the coordinator of the legal empowerment hub at Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC). Waringa Wahome is a lawyer at Waringa Wahome & CO Advocates as well as member of the Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Network.

Abolition, Labor & the Palestine Question by Africa World Now Project Collective

This year represents an important historical conjuncture that has very important implications for our contemporary moment of crisis, yet extremely instructive in how we can move toward a different future. It is the 100th year recognition of the birth of Malik El Shabazz [aka Malcolm X] as well as Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, Robert F. Williams, and Medgar Evers. There are, have been, and will be an assortment of panels, programs, conferences, talks, and colloquium that explore and contextualize them, individually, and together. What we intend to offer is an identification of the continuities and discontinuities with the conditions and structures that produced the thought and practice of this group, not intended to isolate them for the many others, but to provide a lens to telescope up, down, above, and under the temporality of human geography, paying acute attention to how people resist in the face oppressive forces. Simply stated, we intend to connect the dots across time and space, attempting to read deeply the instructive details of how to construct a new society, a global society that undergirds these and other people’s thought and practice who resist the backwardness of capital, no matter the cost. With this, today, in this Part II of our collaboration with the Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Network, we explore Lumumba’s Pan Africanism. In this session, we intentionally examine the Pan Africanism of Patrice Lumumba, paying attention to role and importance of the Congo in African liberation struggles asking: •What strains of Lumumba’s thought are important to the current struggles, globally? •Why is the Congo region important in Africana liberation struggle? •What is the connection between ecological struggles and the Congo? We are, ultimately, for the entire series, in general, this session, in particular, interested in thinking collectively about: •What are some of the ideas that each of these figures offer for expanding and informing our practice today? And •Most importantly, how do we understand these figures in the long struggle for liberation in the African/a world? Joining us for this conversation are: Gathanga Ndungu is a community organiser with Mathare Social Justice Centre which is under the Social Justice Centres’ Working Group. He is also part of the Revolutionary Social League brigade that organizes political education in different political cells in the respective centres in Nairobi. As well as the Organic Intellectuals Network. Okakah Onyango is a member of the Revolutionary Socialist League, Organic Intellectuals Network and Social Justice Movement. He is a dedicated tech-driven community organizer, blending roles of revolutionary intellectualism and communications strategist. Gerald Kamau is an ecological justice activist based at Kayole Community Justice Centre as well as Organic Intellectuals Network.

This year represents an important historical conjuncture that has very important implications for our contemporary moment of crisis, yet extremely instructive of how we can move toward a different future. It is the 100th year recognition of the birth of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz [aka Malcolm X] as well as Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, and Medgar Evers. There are and have been, thus far, an assortment of panels, programs, conferences, talks, and consortium on the life of Malcolm. All of them are important in one way or another. We are not here to critique, diminish, distort any of them as they all offer something important, from entry points to study the life of Malcolm to conversations of political and ideological trajectory of Malcolm’s work with those who worked and knew him. What we intend to offer in this ocean of programs, talks, etc is an engagement with the political praxis of Malik El Shabazz, paying attention to the ways we can extend the work of Malik El Shabazz, asking: how are organizer-intellectuals in the long tradition of Malik El Shabazz and those who came before him - Hubert Harrison, Claudia Jones, Esther Jackson, Ella Baker, Vikki Garvin, Marvel Cooke, etc - are working at the contours of the collective work he [& they] left to be undertaken? Today, we will hear a conversation on Malik El Shabazz, part of a collaboration between Africa World Now Project and the Kenyan Organic Intellectual Network, where we will intentionally think through the impact of revolutionary Kenya on El Hajj Malik El Shabazz’s thought and practice. Paying attention to Malik El Shabazz’s clarity on the role of revolutionary struggle as formulated through his relationship with revolutionaries in Kenya specifically, East Africa, more broadly etc … We explore how Malik Shabazz is part of a tradition of African revolutionary thought and practice, which informs us collectively. Mapping the influence of revolutionaries in Kenya … such as the Land and Freedom Army, Pio Gama Pinto, Odinga Odinga, Mohamed Babu and others on Malcolm? And What strains of Malik El Shabazz’s thought, and practice are important to the current struggle? Joining us for the Mailk El Shabazz session of the collaboration [The Impact and Legacies of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, Frantz Fanon & Patrice Lumumba x 100] were: Gacheke Gachihi, Coordinator of Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC) and a member of the Social Justice Centres Working Group Steering Committee in Nairobi, Kenya. Coordinator of the Kenya Organic Intellectuals Network. He is also involved in regional social movements and politics. He researches and writes about police violence, criminalization of the poor, social justice and social struggles, amongst others. His articles and video interviews are published in the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE), Africa Is a Country (AIAC), Daraja Press, Verso Books, and others. Mzalendo Wanjira Wanjiru is co-founder of Mathare Social Justice Center and a member of the social justice movement and organic intellectuals network. Maureen (Mo) Kasuku is a feminist organiser and digital rights advocate based in Kenya. Her work is a dynamic exploration of the crossroads between feminism and technology. With a keen eye on the intricate interplay of gender equality, social justice, and technological advancement in grassroots communities. She is member of Ukombozi Library, Nairobi. And Cadre with the Revolutionary Socialist League. listen intently. think critically. act accordingly.

Writing in ‘How music defines D.C.’s history of ‘resistance and resilience,’ according to historian Maurice Jackson’, Josh Myers, building on the thought of Fred Moten, opens with this: “the history of Blackness in D.C. is a testament to the fact that a sound can and did resist. Myers article is derived from a conversation he had with Maurice Jackson where they explored his work titled, Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience: How Black Washingtonians Used Music and Sports in the Fight for Equality. In it, Maurice Jackson explores what he calls “Great Black Music” and sports in both the history of Washington, DC and the larger history of opposition to racism. Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience is a portion of Jackson’s ongoing research into the people that have shaped Washington, D.C. And is a prequel to his larger work, Halfway to Freedom, forthcoming from Duke University Press. It is the research of research, the figurative rich soil that birthed this forthcoming work. Jackson opens Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience with this line: “The ideas for this book were polyrhythmic, describing many circular currents” [1]. Polyrhythmic, indeed. Africana histories are an ocean of experiences that flow continuously across the known and unknown temporal lines that connect human history. What also must be noted, is that it also takes one who is able to move up and down, in and out, above and below these rhythms, mapping, connecting, and reconnecting, unpacking, repacking the narratives, the experiences, the ideas, the words, the emotion in order that we can make sense of the past that has informed our present, yet open to the possibilities of the future. Maurice Jackson is clearly one of these memory keepers and story tellers. Today, you will hear the full conversation that informed Josh Myers article, ‘How music defines D.C.’s history of ‘resistance and resilience,’ according to historian Maurice Jackson’. This conversation is based on Maurice Jackson’s recently published, Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience: How Black Washingtonians Used Music and Sports in the Fight for Equality. Maurice Jackson is an Associate Professor who teaches in the History and African American Studies Departments and is an Affiliated Professor of Music (Jazz) at Georgetown University. Before coming to academia, he worked as a longshoreman, shipyard rigger, construction worker and community organizer. He is author of a range of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters as well as Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism; co-editor of African Americans and The Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents; Quakers and their Allies in the Abolitionist Cause,1754-1808; and DC Jazz: Stories of Jazz Music in Washington, DC. He has lectured in France, Turkey, Italy, Puerto Rico, Qatar, served on Georgetown University Slavery Working Group, and is a 2009 inductee into the Washington, D.C. Hall of Fame. He was appointed the Inaugural Chair of the DC Commission on African American Affairs (2013-16) where he presented “An Analysis of African American Employment, Population & Housing Trends in Washington, D.C.” [2017]. He has completed Halfway to Freedom: The Struggles and Strivings of African American in Washington, DC to be released by Duke University Press soon. His next projects will be We Knew No Other Way: The Many-Sided Struggle for Freedom and Black Radicalism: A Very Short Introduction. Josh Myers, in addition to being part of the AWNP collective, is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. A central thread that guides all of this work is an approach to knowledge that takes seriously that peoples of African descent possess a deep sense of reality, a thought tradition that more than merely interprets what is around us but can transform and renew these spaces we inhabit—a world we would like to fundamentally change.

Southern Worker Action Summit 2025 by Africa World Now Project Collective

Notions of time and space are fundamental to orienting one’s place in various experiences. Mapping time/understanding temporality allows us to coordinate ourselves on the map of human geography [shout out to John Henrik Clarke]. But what happens when we understand that time is colonized – a colonial construct – devised as a mechanism of capitalism that maximizes aggressive accumulation and deteriorating processes of human and natural resource extraction? A faint distortion, intentionally designed, to arrest the capacities of a people or peoples to see beyond the moment, limiting the collective capacity to envision a future, not only materially, but non-materially. A process necessary to self-incarcerate our innate ability to map, coordinate, envision, and realize freedom. It is here, Rasheedah Phillips adds more insight by asking, why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature. Phillips dives deeper into understanding and exploring Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations. Rasheedah Phillips unpacks the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression, from colonial exploration and the plantation system to the establishment of Daylight Savings. While simultaneously, highlighting how Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. Ultimately, Rasheedah Phillips is interested in the provocation that posits: What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future? Thinking deeply about the limited capacity of time as defined and redefined within the historical and material reality of capital, Dismantling the Masters Clock, fits into the long durée of revolutionary praxis, from marronage , self-emancipating Africans who utilized their ancient forms of knowledge of land, warfare, and foodways always with an eye on the undetermined future, freedom, to graffiti artists in Nairobi, merging afro-futuristic concepts with the natural world as way to invoke a radical imagination to redefine their current moment with the multiplicity of future moments. Rasheedah writes, “this book ultimately posits that by decolonizing time – by breaking free from the master's clock that has been instrumental in sustaining systems of oppression – we can forge new pathways for liberation that are attuned to the realities, histories, and futures of Black communities. The act of reclaiming both time and nature of reality itself is a profound step toward manifesting temporalities where Black experiences and knowledges are centered” [23].

Frantz Fanon wrote, you know the famous, often quoted but less applied dictate: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” What if we are to intentionally engage this thought by asking, are we on the edge of betraying our mission? Have we even discovered it? Moreover, what can we do to fulfill it? How we go about engaging Fanon’s work gives rise to the corresponding need to reflect on what is urgent, usable, and instructive about his work – identifying the reason that his work matters and is of political consequence in the current moment. There is a need to be more intentional and critical in identifying what ideas and/or concepts and frameworks Fanon offers us that are useful [no, necessary] to us, now? In recognition of Fanon's 100th, we speak with Lou Turner. Professor Lou Turner is Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and former Academic Advisor for the Department of African American Studies, 2008-2017. Lou Turner was Research and Public Policy Director for Chicago South Side community organization Developing Communities Project (2000-2014). He is a board member of the African American Leadership & Policy Institute. Turner is the Principal Investigator for Hal Baron Digital Archival, Research, and Publication Project at UIUC. A colleague of the late Hegelian-Marxist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya, he has written extensively on Fanonian, Marxian and Hegelian dialectics. With Dr. Helen Neville, Lou Turner co-edited Frantz Fanon’s Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Clinical Work: Practicing Internationally with Marginalized Communities (2020). Lou Turner is coauthor of Frantz Fanon, Soweto and American Black Thought (1978; 1986), which circulated in the anti-apartheid underground of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. listen intently. think critically. act accordingly.

“Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its Bosom … There is no doubt in the minds of those who have lived through it that colonialism is one variety of fascism.” Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized With the echoes of George Jackson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Cedric J. Robinson, Aimé Césaire, Angela Davis et al., Felicia Denaud & Josh Myers meditate on the moment in crisis.

What you will hear next is Pt II of a four (4) part series where we explore, autobiographically, the origins of Modibo Kadalie’s perspectives on direct democracy, autonomy, Black radical labor history, and Pan Africanism. Pt. II builds upon the autobiographical framework, Modibo outlined in Pt. I [so, do not forget to tap in]. This part of the conversation will explore, in more detail, Modibo’s experience in Detroit, paying attention to the efforts to develop a sharper analysis that can inform various movements more clearly, then and now. Pt. IV will provide a few thoughts on moving forward. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. listen intently. think critically. act accordingly.

What you will hear next is Pt III of a four (4) part series where we explore, autobiographically, the origins of Modibo Kadalie’s perspectives on direct democracy, autonomy, Black radical labor history, and Pan Africanism. Pt. I + II builds upon the Modibo’s autobiographical framework [so, do not forget to tap in]. Pt. III will explore, in more detail, Modibo’s experience in Detroit, paying attention to the efforts to develop a sharper analysis that can inform various movements more clearly, then and now. Pt. IV will provide a few thoughts on moving forward. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. listen intently. think critically. act accordingly.

The idea of democracy and its attendant operative mechanism, democratic citizenship, specifically the right to belong, is often lauded as a gift of Greco-Roman sociopolitical thought and Western European and American cultural contributions to a specific conceptualization of what comes to be known, in academic discourse, ‘modernity.’ From this historico-cultural perspective, a concept was needed to determine what it means to be human and belong in a particular form of sociopolitical organization and economic logic. However, moving beyond rhetoric and paying critical attention to the origins of this worldview, democratic citizenship—as expounded by the Athenians, the lauded form of sociopolitical organization that was intellectualized by an Athenian elite class—was conceptualized to exclude others. The inclusion of ‘Others’ was seen as a negation of order and the rule of law. After all, was it not Aristotle who invoked the notion of ius sanguinis (meaning ‘right of blood,’ or ‘by blood’) to be an exclusionary tool serving the interest of the dominant class? This operative mechanism in the application of ‘democracy’ or democratic citizenship as formulated in this cultural worldview was/is structured in the fabric of political discourse we hear today. What is clear in our current historical epoch, as Modibo Kadalie aptly points out, younger people “are convinced that the nation-state is not offering them a future. Newer generations of researchers are now beginning to look for evidence of community and collectivity” (Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, The Great Dismal Swamp and The Human Quest for Freedom: 153). A collectivity that lies in the very fabric of Africana forms of knowing and ways of being, fully articulated in the various forms of resistance such as those found throughout the Americas, expressed as maroon communities. Dr. Modibo Kadalie is a social ecologist, movement intellectual and lifelong radical activist within the Civil Rights, Black Power and Pan-Africanist movements and the Founding Convener of the Autonomous Research Institute for Direct Democracy and Social Ecology (ARIDDSE). He is the author of Pan-African Social Ecology: Speeches, Conversations and Essays (2019); Internationalism, Pan-Africanism and the Struggle of Social Classes (2000); Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Human Quest for Freedom (2022) and a number of other articles. During the 1960s, early and middle 1970’s, Modibo Kadalie was an active member of a number of radical formations. In the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), he served as a member of the Central Staff and Chair of the People’s Action Committee in Highland Park, Michigan. In the International African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC), Kadalie was a founding member of the National Steering Committee. He chaired the Detroit local committee in 1972 and 1973 and then continued as a member of the expanded International Steering Committee as a representative from Atlanta, 1973-1975. Within this Sixth Pan-African Congress, he chaired the Southern Regional Organizing Committee from 1974-1975 and was also a member of both the North American Delegation and the North American Left Revolutionary Pan-African Caucus. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. listen intently. think critically. act accordingly.

In the introduction of his recently published, Jacob H Carruthers and the Restoration of An African Worldview: Finding Our Way through the Desert, Kamau Rashid [2024] posits that: “One of the central concerns evident in the scholarship of Jacob H. Carruthers was the intellectual foundations of the modern world. Although he acknowledged the importance of studying systems of oppression, he argued that such structures rested upon the foundation of Western thought, forms of knowledge that facilitated the formation of our most current systems of domination. In addition, these forms of knowledge also serve the primary function to maintain a particular world order as their application is constantly being refined and reinforced through false ideas about reality [Rashid, 2024; Carruthers, 1972/1999]. Carruthers work is occupied by a fundamental question that asks: how can African people who hope to free themselves from these structural and reinforcing mechanisms of domination do so when their conceptions of reality are constantly measured and derived from these very same ways of knowing that support these mechanisms of domination? Kamau Rashid, thinking with Carruthers, writes further that “knowledge, its production, legitimization, and transmission are shaped by the power relations of a society and through this, society’s institutions, therefore “the elite members of the politically dominant culture strategically impose their knowledge and worldview priorities” in a way that legitimizes their authority through these institutions [Rashid, 2024; Shujaa, 2003, 18]. Accordingly, there is little room for debate when it is argued that “schooling in the United States is a principal instrument of this hegemony.” “It is a process that does not typically privilege critical thought and action, but instead encourages conformity to hegemony, rewards apathy to the status quo, and punishes agency with regard to ideation or advocacy for revolutionary social change. From this perspective, it is with no surprise then, that “the operationalization of schooling is little more than a means for sustaining the legitimacy for a specific form of sociopolitical and economic order [Rashid, 2024].

The collectively generative nature inherent in the interdependent relationship between technology, the communal means of production and distribution and innovative physical and creative intellectual work is distracted and co/opted by the need to extract the value of this relationship as structured from the capitalist logic of labor. The sole purpose of this is to maintain an aggressive and exclusionary accumulation of capital in the hands of a few. The creative and inquisitive nature of human social and cultural capacities feed the extractive forces of capitalism. The necessity to disembody knowledge production and sever the symbiotic relationship between all sentient beings from nature and the universe is a muti-complex process of maintaining the supremacist ethic that organizes current political and economic relations. This fact, in its most theoretical and practical form, permeates the very cultural fabric of the dominant expression of global dis/order. In short, capitalism is the form that functions to create life itself, therefore work is re/defined as labor in order to extract its value in all forms, not for communal benefit but the aggressive and exclusionary aggregation of capital through intentionally violent processes. What are the material and intellectual contractions that indigenous African and African Diasporan communities must contend with in order to reconcile the social realities produced by capitalist logic today? At present, the dominant discourses of this reconciliation are centered around inherently detrimental practices, i.e., capitalism with a Blackface, the reproduction of the logic of private property as foundation to capital accumulation, etc. Where do we re/turn to find a path toward freedom as move down the road to liberation? Where do we find a platform or practice to reintegrate with our collective selves? It can be, and in the conversation with Georie Bryant you will hear next, found figuratively and literally with our hands in the soil. A re/connection with the Earth itself. In a material and non-material synthesis of struggle and building. The conversation you will hear next is a de/linking of capitalist logic of land as private property, food as African indigenous knowledge practices, and cooperatives outside of capitalist interpretations. In short, we explore African indigenous relationships with land and food, as inherited throughout the African world as means to freedom. Georie Bryant is a community organizer, chef, and agriculturalist native to Durham, N.C. Working both through his organization SymBodied and in collaboration with other organizations in the region, Georie seeks to address issues of historical and contemporary oppression, particularly those centered around food insecurity, cultural erasure and appropriation. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayati; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.

ADIFF DC Aug. 2, 2024 on Latino Media Collective @ WPFW ADIFF DC 2024 film NEGRITA is featured on WPFW'S Latino Media Collective. Guests include Magdalena Albizu the director and producer of NEGRITA and Eddie Bailey producer and editor of NEGRITA and CEO of the Savoy Media Group. NEGRITA is a documentary about the Afro-Latina identity and experience in the United States. In their own words, empowered, self-affirming educated Afro-Latinas, located around the United States, share their experiences of living with a changing, often contested identity in a racialized society and how it affects their personal and professional lives. Originally broadcast on WPFW 89.3FM, Washington, DC. Tune into Latino Media Collective live on WPFW 89.3 FM in the Washington, DC Metropolitan area or visit www.wpfwfm.org on Fridays from 1:00 to 2:00PM (U.S. Eastern).

ADIFF DC Aug. 1, 2024 on #UMustLearn @ WPFW ADIFF DC 2024 film ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE? is featured on WPFW'S We The People guest Maximina Juson the director of ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE? ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE?--Throughout American history, the Electoral College has dramatically impacted American politics and society, particularly with respect to vote erasure of the minority party vote. Featuring commentary by scholars Dr. Jelani Cobb, Dr. Carol Anderson, and Dr. Paul Finkelman, cameo performances by Kelly McCreary, Boise Holmes, Tyee Tilghman, Veralyn Jones, Peter Jerrod Macon and stunning animation by Pierre Bennu. Originally broadcast on WPFW 89.3FM, Washington, DC. Tune into #UMustLearn live on WPFW 89.3 FM in the Washington, DC Metropolitan area or visit www.wpfwfm.org on Thursdays from 6:00 to 7:00PM (U.S. Eastern).

ADIFF DC Jul. 31, 2024 on We The People @ WPFW ADIFF DC 2024 film THE WALL STREET BOY, KIPKEMBOI is featured on WPFW'S We The People. Guests include Charles Uwagbai the director of THE WALL STREET BOY, KIPKEMBOI and Diarah N'Dow Spech Co-Founder and Co-Director of African Diaspora International Film Festival. THE WALL STREET BOY, KIPKEMBOI--With his life in jeopardy and jail almost a certainty, one question remains, how could a farm boy bring down the global financial system and how far is the international world order willing to go to silence his story? The Wall Street Boy, Kipkemboi tells the story of a young math genius from rural Kenya who uses his understanding of patterns in nature to develop a successful stock market algorithm. His remarkable success from a makeshift setup in his village draws attention from international financiers and local authorities, forcing him and his girlfriend Chepchirchir to flee. “The Wall Street Boy, Kipkemboi has a strong socially conscious subtext as the village youth becomes a political prisoner. If redistribution of wealth to the least of these among us is a socialist principle, suffice it to say that “Kipkemboi” cleverly achieves this – but through exploiting the capitalist system. The film also is very positive about the role of women as strong equals. Not only is Kipkemboi’s mother supportive, but Chipchirchir is no mere cheerleader. She does more than inspire Kipkemboi; she drives their getaway vehicle and this village lass has dreams of her own, aspiring to become an attorney. Watching the romance of the appealing leads blossom is also beguiling." ~ Ed Rampell, The Progressive Populist Originally broadcast on WPFW 89.3FM, Washington, DC. Tune into We The People live on WPFW 89.3 FM in the Washington, DC Metropolitan area or visit www.wpfwfm.org on Wednesdays from 11:00AM to 12:00PM (U.S. Eastern).

ADIFF DC Jul. 30, 2024 on Voices with Vision @ WPFW ADIFF DC 2024 film CLAUDE MCKAY: HARLEM TO MARSEILLE is featured on WPFW'S Voices with Vision. Guests include Matthieu Verdeil the director of CLAUDE MCKAY: HARLEM TO MARSEILLE and Diarah N'Dow Spech Co-Founder and Co-Director of African Diaspora International Film Festival. CLAUDE MCKAY: HARLEM TO MARSEILLE--Rebellious figure of the Harlem Renaissance, precursor of literature and of the black cause, this unclassifiable author wandered for more than 10 years in Europe, frequenting the artistic and political avant-gardes. Originally broadcast on WPFW 89.3FM, Washington, DC. Tune into Voices with Vision live on WPFW 89.3 FM in the Washington, DC Metropolitan area or visit www.wpfwfm.org on Tuesdays from 9:00 to 10:00AM (U.S. Eastern).

The use of forum, colloquium, and festivals to center African/a intellectual creative cultural production flows rhythmically alongside the long tradition of Pan-African tendencies. This historical continuity and our duty to move within its legacy is a project that the International Colloquium at the International Black Theatre Festival, that we [AWNP collective] have the pleasure to coordinate, is the explicit dictum that guides it creation. Furthering our work in this Pan-African genealogy is intentional. Our theme this year was titled: ‘Echoes of FESTAC ’77’. The primary objectives of FESTAC ’77 was to “provide a forum for the focusing of attention on the enormous richness and diversity of African contributions to world culture and the ‘opportunity for recounting the achievements of [their] ancestors’ (quoted from Lt.-General Olusegun Obasanjo, Head of the Federal Military Government and Patron of FESTAC, in Africa, No. 65 [January 1977], p. 6 FESTAC).” For the 2024 iteration of the international colloquium, as we continue think deeply about form and function and its relationship to critical consciousness formation and radical practice in the use of the arts to map and proliferate Black/African sociopolitical and cultural life, we had the pleasure of being in dialogue with Dr. Abdul Alkalimat, who was at FESTAC ’77 [for more, visit https://www.alkalimat.org/festac/]. In fact, you will hear his presentation given at FESTAC ’77 in this program. As part of a consortium of cultural workers, intellectuals, activists/organizers, Dr. Alkalimat along with Dr. Ron Walters, Dr. Maulana Karenga, and a host of others took part in the colloquium. Dr. Abdul Alkalimat is one of the founders of Black Studies and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. A lifelong scholar/organizer with a PhD from the University of Chicago, he has lectured, taught, and directed academic programs across the U.S., the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and China. I would be remiss to not highlight that along with Dr. Alkalimat, we were joined by artists and cultural scholars from Nova Scotia, Canada, where they explored the continuities in the histories of people of African descent in Canada. We had the pleasure to be in conversation with Walter Borden as he presented: The Last Epistle of Tightrope Time, a powerful autobiographical play and the story of Walter Borden’s life, his life’s work, and his letter to the world. An artist and cultural worker, Mr. Borden is an internationally acclaimed and nationally honoured African/Indigenous actor and activist born in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. His activism spans six decades while his professional acting career is in its 54th year. He has performed throughout Canada, Europe and the United States. We look to bring you his thoughts and meditations in the coming programs on Africa World Now Project. As you prepare to engage this program … we share this meditation we hope will guide you as you share your time and energy with us … The universe of thought and ideas are the playground of Africana creativity. Black life lives on the fulcrum of the seen and unseen, constantly merging theory and practice … Effortlessly creating, recreating – through radical acts of remembering moving in and out of the deep well of Africana ways of being and forms of knowing, this is the essence of Black cultural production, the production of life itself. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayati; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly. Link to paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h_NFkkpy8dSySP6PtmqjBF5aM-3aTM8m/view?usp=sharing

On August 31, 1967, several thousand delegates gathered at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago for the opening rally of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) convention. This event was an ambitious attempt to develop a broad coalition of over 200 different organizations, that included the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Students for a Democratic Society, the Socialist Workers Party, and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. According to Arun Kundnani [2023] in ‘The New Malcolm X’: Who was Jamil Al-Amin – The Forgotten Radical of the Civil Rights Movement?, “On the opening night, Dr. King outlined an anti-capitalist politics that had become essential to his worldview.” This, of course, has been erased from dominant discourses on Dr. King. For King: “Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of Black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both Black and white, both here and abroad.” The only solution: “a radical redistribution of political and economic power” (Kundnani, 2023). Another key point to highlight was that there was talk at the convention of running King as an independent candidate of the Left in the following year’s presidential elections.” Despite the prominent role of King and SCLC, the leading Black organization at the NCNP convention was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), chaired by Jamil al-Amin, then known as H. Rap Brown. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Jamil al-Amin worked with the civil rights movement in Alabama and Mississippi in the mid-1960s. He was only twenty-three years old when he was elected SNCC’s national chair, four months before the NCNP convention. As he traveled the US that summer, federal agents and informants constantly tailed him. In the month and a half before arriving in Chicago, he had been shot in the face with buckshot by a deputy sheriff and arrested twice, on incitement to arson and riot in Maryland (a state attorney later admitted to fabricating the charges) and on firearms charges in Louisiana (these were voided on appeal when it emerged that the judge had announced at the state’s Bar Association convention before the trial that “I’m going to get that ni**er”). A few days before the NCNP convention, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to all the bureau’s field offices, instructing them to establish new, secret “counter-intelligence endeavors,” to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings.” Arun Kundnani is a writer interested in race, Islamophobia, surveillance, political violence, and radicalism. Born in London, he moved to New York in 2010 and now lives in Philadelphia. Kundnani is the author of What is Antiracism? ([published by Verso Books, 2023), The Muslims are Coming! (Verso Books, 2014) and The End of Tolerance (published by Pluto Press, 2007), which was selected as a New Statesman book of the year. He has written for the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Vice, and The Intercept to name a few outlets. Educated at Cambridge University, he holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University. He has been a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a former editor of the Race & Class, the quarterly journal of the Institute of Race Relations in London. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayati; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.

Today, we will listen to General Baker from a 2010 talk he gave at the U.S. Social Forum held in Detroit where he maps the history of struggle in Detroit, the formation of radical workers movements, and the legacies of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 6, 1941, right after his family had moved north from Augusta, Georgia. General Baker’s father worked for Midland Steel in the 1940s, and later in a job with Chrysler. The Baker family settled in a home in Southwest Detroit. Gen Baker grew up in a union household, and often attended union events with his father. Baker graduated early from the nominally integrated Southwestern High School in 1958. General Baker is one of the founding members of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in 1968 and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in 1969. Baker’s involvement in radical politics dates from the early 1960s. He had been a member of UHURU and the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and later the Communist League. Following the Detroit riot of July 1967, an event known to some as the Great Rebellion, General Baker and his fellow radicals sensed an opportunity for new organizing efforts. In September 1967, Baker, John Watson, Mike Hamlin, and Luke Tripp started a newspaper called the Inner-City Voice. The paper focused on issues of concern to Detroit’s Black population, including working conditions, housing, health care, welfare programs, and schools, all from a Marxist perspective. In addition to publishing the Inner-City Voice, Baker, Hamlin, and other Inner City Voice staff members formed a study group to discuss how to implement revolutionary political change. On May 2, 1968, in response to a work speedup at the Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck, Baker led several thousand workers out of the plant in a wildcat strike. On May 5, the Chrysler Corporation dismissed Baker from his job for violating the no-strike clause of the collective bargaining agreement between Chrysler and the United Auto Workers (UAW). As a result of this strike, Baker and his fellow activists formed DRUM. DRUM saw both Chrysler and the UAW as enemies of workers of African descent, and from 1968 into the early 1970s, DRUM worked to gain more power for African American workers and to improve working conditions at Dodge Main. General Baker is and will continue to be one of our important sociopolitical and cultural theoreticians of the 20th century that provided essential perspectives for the 21st century. As part of the collective of revolutionary workers who sought to organize the Black working class in conjunction with addressing issues in the larger Black community, Gen Baker was a living example of theory and practice in context of Black liberation, globally. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayati; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.

re/posting from our archive ... from 7+ years ago. a lot to grasp here!

This discussion features Mukasa Dada and Obi Egbuna Jr. We focus on contemporary struggles of youth and student movements, globally. With a focus on the ongoing fight for Black liberation and the need for solidarity across different oppressed groups. In order to accurately understand the potentialities of the moment, the development and maintenance of a historical consciousness alongside organizing efforts that challenge imperialism, neo-colonialism, and police brutality through direct action and community engagement are presented for discussion.

Black working-class contributions to the Cuban revolution are immense, yet somehow often neglected in discourses around revolutionary Cuba. The long history of African resistance and cultural contributions to Cuban society, which has been intricately connected to global Black freedom movements has been in rhythmic continuity til present day. The continuities are clear and important on many levels – that is on the level of internal, as confronting internal contradictions specifically the necessity to fight the colonially structured vestiges of racism in Cuban society is an added terrain of struggle. As well as external, the constant assault on the Cuban peoples by U.S. and its ally’s imperial logic, captured in the current embargo and attendant sanctions. It is here, the dialectical process of liberation finds its most articulate expression, now that the process of decolonialization has been initiated it is the continued anticolonial struggle that takes precedence. The struggle to heighten the internal contradictions, which is a struggle, in its totality, a struggle against the coloniality of being. Where the vestiges of old forms of oppression are presented in new ways. In the case of Cuba, where the colonial structures of race/racism are used to try to undo the revolutionary processes. Today, we present a conversation from a few weeks ago with Pedro Sarduy where we engage in a discussion that is in its essence, a mapping of the anticolonial process through an exploration of Race and Revolution in Cuba: from an Afro Cuban Working Class Perspective. Pedro Pérez-Sarduy is a poet, writer, journalist, and broadcaster living in Puerto Rico, London and Havana. He is the author of Surrealidad (Havana 1967), Cumbite and Other Poems (Havana 1987 and New York 1990). He is also co-editor with Jean Stubbs of Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (1993) and co-author for the anthology No Longer Invisible/Afro-Latin Americans Today (1995). His Journal in Babylon is a series of chronicles on Britain. His first novel, Las Criadas de la Habana (The Maids of Havana), is based on his mother's life stories about pre-and post-revolutionary Havana. This is the first novel by a contemporary Afro Cuban writer on family life in Cuba. He has written numerous articles, some of which we present on this site. Together with Jean Stubbs, he wrote Afro-Cuban Voices on Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba (2000), a book based on interviews with Afro-Cubans (living in the Island), which has been published by the University Press of Florida. He also co-edited with historian Jean Stubbs Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (1993).[5] Sarduy has read his work internationally and lectured regularly on race, politics, and culture at academic institutions, globally. He was Writer in Residence at Columbia University, New York (1989), on the CUNY Caribbean Exchange Program at Hunter College (1990), a Visiting Scholar at the University of Florida, Gainesville 1993), in 1997 at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, and on the Rockefeller Fellowship Caribbean 2000 Program. He has also been a Charles McGill Fellow & Visiting Lecturer at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut (Fall 2004), and Associate Fellow of the Caribbean Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University. Awards he has received a number of awards for his poetry. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.

Matthew Quest in CLR James and George Padmore: Hidden Disputes in The Black Radical Tradition, examines the collaboration between James and George Padmore since their partnership within the International African Service Bureau in the 1930s. Despite their joint activism in Pan-African affairs, political rifts emerged on democracy, socialism, and revolutionary strategy. Quest specifically explores James’ portrayal of Padmore to highlight the political tensions underlying their friendship. James’ and Padmore’s different perspectives on anti-imperialism reveal hidden disputes in the Black radical tradition, disputes that promoted evolution in thought and practice that must be taken up today. CLR, the elder, was not always able to rigorously explain, save for the most attentive, where he came from politically. James began to recognize the fact that, for youth who wanted him to tell stories about the Black radical tradition, chronicles which included George Padmore, the distinctions of ideological and party affiliation among the Red and Black were irrelevant — it was all “communism” because the white racists and capitalists said so, and because conservatives appeared to be threatened by such ideas. The next generation did not understand that many of the Old Left had also come to this conclusion, to the qualitative detriment of how one viewed white workers, imperial nations, and national liberation in colonized nations. This conflict between workers’ self-management (increasingly seen as a “white” idea) in metropolitan centers and national liberation struggles tore apart the last manifestation of the Facing Reality group, James’s last small revolutionary organization in 1970 — this was expressed through internal uncertainty about where Mao Zedong and Kwame Ture [Stokely Carmichael] were going. Ironically, it was at this moment the direct democratic tendency of the Caribbean New Left (in Trinidad, Antigua, Guyana, Grenada, and Jamaica — many who met each other in Canada) and certain dissident currents in Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers began to see the merits of direct democracy and workers’ self-management for Black post-civil rights and post-colonial revolt. These are evidence of other hidden disputes in the radical tradition stimulated by CLR James. Today, we present Pt. III, the final installment of our three-part series where we unpack C.L.R James’s thought, paying specific attention to his articulation of notions of direct democracy, worker’s self-emancipation/management, and meditations on autonomy with Matthew Quest. We intentionally explore CLR James as a frame of reference in the context of current labor struggles, the opportunities, and potential limitations of demands within labor movements [where we think through the limitations of labor demands being divorced from direct critique of imperialism and colonialisms]; and how does CLR James’ conceptualization of autonomy and direct democracy have an important part to play in conceptualization of labor movements today. Matthew Quest is an editor of Clash! a collective of writers who advocate for Caribbean unity from below. He has taught African, African American and Caribbean History at universities in the United States. He is known as a scholar of the legacies of CLR James. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.

According to Renault in Toward a Counter-Genealogy of Race: On CLR James, it is argued that James always stressed the fundamental importance of the notion of class struggle, and closely followed developments in revolutionary working-class struggles in Europe and the United States. “This did not prevent him, however, from analyzing and taking part in movements for decolonization: In 1938, he authored the famous history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins; in the 1940s, he was seen as a specialist on the “Negro Question” within North American Trotskyist movements; he also had ties to African independence leaders – Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, and later, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania – and he became involved in “party politics” himself during the time leading up to Trinidadian independence. James strove to reposition Pan-Africanist struggles within a global revolutionary history, by interpreting them in light of Marxist theory and historiography; the latter, in turn, was reshaped through the lens of the experience of (de)colonization. He foregrounded and thematized the relations between class oppression and racial oppression as well as the connections between struggles for emancipation waged by subaltern groups with their own autonomous demands.” But does this necessarily mean that as a Marxist, James thinks of race in the same way he thinks class? Does a concept of race exist in his writings, one invested with a specific theoretical and/or political function, beyond the attention he pays to actual instances of racial domination? In Observing Properly Changing Forms of Spontaneity and Organization: Creative Conflicts in C. L. R. James' Hegelian Dialectics and Political Philosophy, Matthew Quest writes that C. L. R. James argued philosophy must become proletarian, not, importantly, that philosophy must be brought to the proletariat (James, Dunayevskaya and Lee, 1986, 128-132). James suggested he had no interest in teaching, and thought it not productive to teach, popular audiences’ pure epistemology [a theory of history … put other way, what makes up the ways we produce knowledge] or the function of categories of cognition. For James, one can think correctly without knowing dialectics (James, 1971a, 27). His Notes on Dialectics are instead grounded in political concerns. James asserted that we must be careful not to be stuck in our principles. Politics, or "the organic life of thought forms," must come "out" of contradictions or one's thought is "no good" (1971a, 20, 40). James tried to use his study of dialectics to figure out the relationship between the spontaneity of ordinary people's self-organization and the tasks of a political party or revolutionary organization whose intention was to "propagate” the destruction of bureaucracy" (1971a, 243). Opposed to further inculcating it or expanding it. we present Pt. II of the three-part series where we are unpacking CLR James’s thought, paying specific attention to his articulation of notions of direct democracy, worker’s self-emancipation/management, and meditations on autonomy with Matthew Quest. Matthew Quest has taught African, African American and Caribbean History at universities including Georgia State University in Atlanta, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is known as a scholar of the legacies of CLR James. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.

In an article for Insurgent Notes, Matthew Quest asks, What Type of Historian Was CLR James? CLR James, native of Trinidad, was a historian with a speculative philosophy of history. He brought these methods to his narrative of Haiti in The Black Jacobins (1938), and later in his Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977). James was influenced by historians of the French Revolution, while his approach was shaped by Leon Trotsky’s A History of the Russian Revolution, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, and the Edwardian radicals GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, both literary men who wrote polemical histories sympathetic to the social motion of commoners. James’s Notes on Dialectics explored the intersection of Hegel and Lenin as applied to the history of the international labor movement. But his original view of dialectics was just as much informed by how he understood the craft of writing history. For James, dialectic did not mean simply history moved by contradiction. Rather history was a series of ruptures with hierarchy and domination. At his best, he did not read history in a manner that placed the development of the nation-state as the primary unit of study. For James, the working classes, be their wages high or low, and the unemployed possessed a hidden depth, a latent understanding, and a creative genius. Ordinary people, not professional leaders of official society, were the chief actors of history. Humans faced institutionalized oppression, but also partial hindrances they placed in their own path as part of pursuing freedom. History did not move simply by materialist laws, but by romantic elemental drives where the dispossessed pushed from behind those who aspired to lead or rule. Highlighting another important contribution of CLR James to Black radicalism, Matthew Quest unpacks his political economic analysis. Quest writes that CLR James is recalled as a Pan-African and independent socialist. A colleague and critic of anti-colonial politicians and activists (Trinidad’s George Padmore, Eric Williams, and Stokely Carmichael, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, and Guyana’s Walter Rodney) James’s political economy was fundamentally different than his associates. While there are apparent moments of unity, especially around how the empire of capital underdeveloped Africa and the Caribbean through slavery and colonialism, or how federation might help enhance peripheral nation’s sovereignty, James was distinctive. He saw the state, party politics, democracy, and the working class in contrast to Pan-African and Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Today, we will explore CLR James’s thought, paying specific attention to his articulation of notions of direct democracy, worker’s self-emancipation, and meditations on autonomy with Matthew Quest. This conversation will be presented as a three-part series where we specifically explore CLR James as a frame of reference in the context of current labor struggles, the opportunities and potential limitations of demands within labor movements [where we think through the limitations of labor demands being divorced from direct critique of imperialism and colonialisms]; and how does CLR James’ conceptualization of autonomy and direct democracy have an important part to play in conceptualization of labor movements today. To understand the depth and range of impact of CLR James’s work, I would describe him as your ‘rappers’ favorite rapper’. Your favorite theorist, revolutionary, radical, Pan Africanist had to or at some point must come to terms with CLR James’s work. His influences are both undeniable and misunderstood. Matthew Quest has taught African, African American and Caribbean History at universities including Georgia State University in Atlanta, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is known as a scholar of the legacies of CLR James.

Image: Fran Beal Thank you for tapping into Reflections on Malcolm X through the … 1990 Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and a Legacy of Struggle conference … this is the final installment, Pt. III – Applying Malcolm In this series, Africa World Now Project is sharing some of the sessions from this conference in an effort to engender serious engagement, in this very moment, a moment where it is essential to be intentional with one’s political practice with Malcolm. Not in the narrow confines of him as an individual or pigeonhole him to moments and soundbites, but to identify the tradition that produced Malcolm as a nexus, a point of entry for many into the seriously trying to figure out: what is to be done? More than this, we encourage you to visit Abdul Alkalimat’s website to explore, read, and hear more of the conference. Link to archive: https://www.alkalimat.org/brothermalcolm/1990_conf_contents.htm We will hear, in the following order, is: Barbara Ransby, Fran Beal, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu & William Sales. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Thank you for tapping into Reflections on Malcolm X through the … 1990 Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and a Legacy of Struggle conference … this is Pt. II - Black Workers & Malcolm X In this series, Africa World Now Project is sharing some of the sessions from this conference in an effort to engender serious engagement, in this very moment, a moment where it is essential to be intentional with one’s political practice with Malcolm. Not in the narrow confines of him as an individual or pigeonhole him to moments and soundbites, but to identify the tradition that produced Malcolm as a nexus, a point of entry for many into the seriously trying to figure out: what is to be done? More than this, we encourage you to visit Abdul Alkalimat’s website to explore, read, and hear more of the conference. Tap in here: https://www.alkalimat.org/brothermalcolm/1990_conf_contents.htm What we will hear next, in the following order is: Ashaki Binta [Black Workers for Justice], General Baker [Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW)], and Saladin Muhammad [Black Workers for Justice] Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

In November 1990 [1-4], more than 3,000 people from 25 countries attended the Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and a Legacy of Struggle conference held in New York City. More than 100 speakers led 24 sessions that deeply explored, contextualized, and situated El Hajj Malik El Shabazz in the genealogy of Black radical internationalism as a Pan Africanist. There is an argument that can be made that El Haj Mailk El Shabazz is an archetype of what I have argued elsewhere as a critical Africana human rights consciousness. This praxis [the intellectual production and the Black radical and revolutionary practice that it produces, is in fact a critique of and expansion on dominant human rights theory and practice. When we turn attention to his evolution as an internationalist activist-theoretician, we can begin to truly grasp the breadth, depth and the rhythms of the various manifestations of Africana peoples struggle for freedom. Africa World Now Project will share some of this conference in an effort to engender serious engagement, in this very moment, a moment where it is essential to be intentional with one’s political practice with Malcolm. Not in the narrow confines of him as an individual or pigeonhole him to moments and soundbites, but to identify the tradition that produced Malcolm as a nexus, a point of entry for many into the seriously trying to figure out: what is to be done? More than this, we encourage you to visit Abdul Alkalimat’s website to explore, read, and hear more of the conference. Link to archive is available here: [https://www.alkalimat.org/brothermalcolm/1990_conf_contents.htm]. The archive is rich, we did not include sessions with important revolutionary organizer-intellectuals as well as academics such as: Dhoruba bin Wahad, bell hooks, James cone, Chokwe Lumumba, Linda Burham, Molefi Asnate, john Woodford, Timonthy Johnson, Estella Vazquez, Sylvia Hill, Clarence Lusane, Akinyele Umoja, etc What you will hear next is Pt I – Contextualizing El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, which will be part of a series on this conference. Pt II and III will be available via our podcast and on all podcast platforms. What you will hear next is Amiria Baraka opening the conference with a series of meditations on 10 why we need this conference and then a poem titled Today for Malcolm. We then will here next, in the following order is: Abdul Alkalimat, Lou Turner, Vikki Garvin, and Yuri Kochiyama contextualize El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly …!

Form the archives [2017]! Enjoy.

Pt. III - Poetics of Revolution: Autonomy, Land, Visions of Freedom & the Kurdish Freedom struggle [a discussion of 1979 struggle] Thank you for listening to Terrains of Struggle: continuities in freedom dreams [a mini radio documentary] that was designed to explore possibilities; radical possibilities and how they become material. How they become alive [brought to life] through resistance – rooted in the assertion of a people’s collective humanity. And how this process is transmitted in time [history] and across space [geographies]. More importantly, we were interested in what can they tell us about ourselves, each other and our relationship with land as a fundamental component of freedom; what are the continuities in conceptualizations of autonomy; and the role of culture in struggle. We hope something was shared that will inspire you to think critically. And act accordingly. To build a global commons of struggle, where we move beyond symbolic solidarity, to material exchange! Until we meet again … In struggle!

Pt. II - A luta continua, vitória é certa: Conceptions of Autonomy, the Black Panthers & Zapatista Check out Pt. III. Thank you for listening to Terrains of Struggle: continuities in freedom dreams [a mini radio documentary] that was designed to explore possibilities; radical possibilities and how they become material. How they become alive [brought to life] through resistance – rooted in the assertion of a people’s collective humanity. And how this process is transmitted in time [history] and across space [geographies]. More importantly, we were interested in what can they tell us about ourselves, each other and our relationship with land as a fundamental component of freedom; what are the continuities in conceptualizations of autonomy; and the role of culture in struggle. We hope something was shared that will inspire you to think critically. And act accordingly. To build a global commons of struggle, where we move beyond symbolic solidarity, to material exchange! Until we meet again … In struggle!

Part I - Radical Considerations & Revolutionary Possibilities: Towards a Black University in the 21st century Check out Pt. II. Thank you for listening to Terrains of Struggle: continuities in freedom dreams [a mini radio documentary] that was designed to explore possibilities; radical possibilities and how they become material. How they become alive [brought to life] through resistance – rooted in the assertion of a people’s collective humanity. And how this process is transmitted in time [history] and across space [geographies]. More importantly, we were interested in what can they tell us about ourselves, each other and our relationship with land as a fundamental component of freedom; what are the continuities in conceptualizations of autonomy; and the role of culture in struggle. We hope something was shared that will inspire you to think critically. And act accordingly. To build a global commons of struggle, where we move beyond symbolic solidarity, to material exchange! Until we meet again … In struggle!

Kamau Rashid writing in Jacob H. Carruthers and the African-Centered Discourse on Knowledge, Worldview, and Power posits that “whether we are interrogating the conceptual imperatives of the state or capital, the mandates of school curriculum, or even the policy directives of white supremacy and the worldview orientations that it seeks to impose, we are still speaking of knowledge, its social construction, and the broader social milieu in which it occurs.” Accordingly, “when considered from the state's perspective education must inevitably entail notions of legitimate knowledge. However, what is hidden within the language of legitimacy is the political-economy of hegemony. The notion of "legitimate knowledge" is merely a ruse. It is a means of controlling the conversation about the process of formal socialization-which is schooling. Schooling in the United States is a process that does not typically privilege critical thought and action, but instead encourages conformity to hegemony, rewards apathy to the status quo, and punishes agency with regards to radical social change.” “When the state concerns itself with "legitimate knowledge" it is not a departure from the historical processes that have established the supremacy of the West or the dominance of capital. This knowledge is of necessity a discourse interested in maintenance of the existing power relations. It seeks, as Blyden has asserted, to establish a most pernicious system of domination. It is the “slavery of the mind” which “is far more destructive than that of the body” (Carruthers 1999, 253).” The structures of knowledge, that is dominant notions of knowledge birthed in the catacombs of imperial logic, are the foundational networks that weave together categories of thought that are derived from narrow expressions of power. Narrow in that most of the dominant frames that are forced upon those intent to understand the realities that make up their material conditions are consistently trapped within contradictions. Next, we listen to Josh Myers in conversation with a study collective at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he expands and explores a few of the ideas offered in his recent work: Of Black Study. Also, in the discussion are: Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa, Research Student, Department of Sociology, convenor of the Of Black Study Reading Group, London School of Economics and Political Science; and Dr. Mahvish Ahmad, Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics, London School of Economics and Political Science who is the moderator/chair of the discussion. In addition to being a member of the Africa World Now Project collective, Josh Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He is the author of Black Study [2022]; We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 (NYU Press, 2019); Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition (Polity, 2021) and the soon to be released Holy Ghost Key (Broadside Lotus Press, due February 2024, as well as the editor of A Gathering Together Literary Journal. His research interests include Africana intellectual histories and traditions, Africana philosophy, musics, and foodways as well as critical university studies, and disciplinarity. As always, our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Image: LSE Of Black Study Reading Group Music: Sango & Lakim Edit) - Lady The Supplicants - Peace & Strength J Dilla - Spacey

We are in conversation with Frank Chapman, organizer & movement architect. The anchoring poles in this conversation revolve around the formation of National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression, movement intellectuals and their development and the importance of struggle. What you will hear over the next hour are the words, ideas, reflections, and meditations by one of our important freedom fighters! Frank Chapman is a former political prisoner, long-time organizer, radical movement architect and former member of the Communist Party. He is the educational director and field secretary at the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR) and a leader in the campaign for an elected Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) and member of the Freedom Road Socialist Party. The range and scope, the breadth and depth of this conversation provides enough context that my normal introduction is not needed [at least at the moment]. Be sure to tap into the work of the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression and their upcoming conference details available at: https://conference.naarpr.org/ **Note the upcoming conference: https://conference.naarpr.org/** Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly …! Music: Skipp Coon - Miles Garvey - 02 blacker Jay Electronica - Exhibit B [Ft. Yasiin Bey] Dilla - Spacey Image: Brad Sigal

Clip from recent conversation .... full conversation coming soon!

In, The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the U.S., James posit that it is Black workers and the Black working-class that was central and unique in the fight against capitalism. Specifically, James outlined the following: We say, number 1, that the Negro struggle, the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own; that it has deep historic roots in the past of America and in present struggles; it has an organic political perspective, along which it is traveling, to one degree or another, and everything shows that at the present time it is traveling with great speed and vigor. We say, number 2, that this independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights. We say, number 3, and this is the most important, that it is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States. James also argued for independent Black movements against capitalism because Black workers would be subject to special prejudices generated by the bourgeoisie against them. Here, James tackled in depth one of the most important challenges for building an interracial working-class movement, namely the role of white workers. In his 1945 essay “White Workers’ Prejudices,” written three years before “Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem,” James explained that white workers would always be vulnerable to absorbing racial prejudices against Black workers because capitalism was built out of slavery, segregation of the races and racial hierarchy which shaped the society as a whole, especially the workplace. W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction, offers a supporting contribution as he presents the racial “bribe” of white privilege as the “wages of whiteness.” He argued that after the Civil War, southern plantation owners sought to implant racism in the minds of white workers to prevent them from unifying. What we will hear next, in contribution to the tradition partially laid out above, is a critical intervention in the dominant conversation on the current strike. Organized by Communiversity South, this intervention is focusing on Black Workers and the UAW strike: centering the long genealogy of the work of Black worker organizing in auto industry. The conversation included: Nsea Brenda Stokely, longtime activist, Former President, AFSCME DC 1707; N.E. Regional Coordinator, Million Worker March Movement. Clarence Thomas (a.k.a. The Real Clarence Thomas) is a 3rd generation retired member of International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 in San Francisco and a leading radical African American trade unionist. Past-secretary-treasurer and executive board member of his local. He is author of, Mobilizing in Our Own Name: Million Worker March. Willie Brown, City of Durham public works; worker and member of UE150. Robin DG Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA, active-intellectual; and Board member, Communiversity South. The conversation was moderated by Menelik Van Der Meer, longtime activist, Chair of the Board of Communiversity South, Senior Lecturer in Africana Studies at UMass- Boston. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly …!

Support Now ...: ****https://www.historymatters.online/save-mres-campaign**** Walter Rodney once wrote in African History in the Service of the Black Liberation, that “African history must be seen as very intimately linked to the contemporary struggle of black people. One must not set up any false distinctions between reflection and action. We are just another facet of the ongoing revolution. This is not theory. It is a fact that black people everywhere, in Africa and in the Western world, are already on the march. So nobody who wants to be relevant to that situation can afford to withdraw and decide that he is engaging in what is essentially an intellectual exercise. The African historian, to me, is essentially involved in a process of mobilization, just like any other individual within the society who says, "I'm for black power. I'm going to talk about the way the blacks live down in the South," etc. That's a facet of mobilization. The African historian is also involved in that mobilization …” It is in this tradition that Professor Hakim Adi has dedicated his praxis. It is also because of this principled position to dedicate his efforts to this tradition that he, along with his students, the Masters by Research (MRes), History of Africa and the African Diaspora has been suspended as well as he has been sacked by the University of Chichester. Of the various claims by the university, one standard, even in the U.S. is a claim of redundancy. Nevertheless, it must be noted that no comparable course is offered by this or any other university in the UK. Let’s be clear. These tactics are transnational. The conditions on the ground differ, but the objective is the same … to intentionally stop any opportunity to help develop another cadre of radical intellectual-workers, to stop the development of Amilcar Cabrals, Anna Julia Cooper, Steve Bikos, Claudia Jones … the various attempts at intellectual colonialism we are witnessing are neither new, nor are they relegated or confined to borders. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro-Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly. Enjoy the program!

Dr. Hendricks writes in The Life of Madie Hall Xuma: Black Women’s Global Activism During Jim Crow & Apartheid that “when the Society for the Study of Afro-American History in Winston Salem, Forsyth County, North Carolina, issued a call in June 1994 for community assistance with research and memorabilia for a 1995 historical calendar on Black women “who made distinctive contributions to the community between the early 1900s through 1959.” Madie Beatrice Hall Xuma made the list of an impressive group of women. Nearly a decade later, her name also appeared in the Wilson (NC) Daily Times as an educational tool for kindergarten through eighth grade students in a section called “Mind Designs.” Professor Hendricks goes on to contextualize Mrs. Madie, writing that “Hall Xuma had been propelled onto a global stage in South Africa in 1940 and by 1954 had made such an impact in the country that a representative of the Department of Bantu Education referred to her as “the mother of Africa.” Her presence in South Africa, “he insisted, “has meant a new day for our dark-skinned fellow-men of Africa,” and he declared, “Her name will not be forgotten in the annals of our day.” Indeed, more than sixty years later, South Africans still revered her. The Cape Town, South Africa, Weekend Argus contended in 2017, “If South Africa owes its constitutional democracy to the [African National Congress] and its heroic struggles, then the ANC owes its progressive outlook and gender sensibilities to a legion of its women cadres who, over the years, have weaved formidable foundational threads upon whose pivot this progressive culture is hinged.” These women were amongst the best minds that the country has ever nestled,” and “none of them suffered fools as they formidably held their own in a patriarchal and racist society.” Ultimately, they “could put any man to intellectual shame and in fact stand head and shoulders above most men.” Hall Xuma was the only Black American on the list that included an impressive array of South African women like Charlotte Maxeke, Sophie Mpama, Ruth First, Ruth Mompati, Bertha Gxowa, Ellen Kuzwayo, Lucy Mvubelo, Gertrude Shope, and Winnie Mandela. Hall Xuma, however, is virtually unknown to the general public, in part because she has been ignored in much of the historical literature, particularly by American scholars. South African scholars fare far better, but they have compartmentalized nearly every aspect of her life to such a degree that they have not been able to craft a broad conceptual framework that adequately demonstrates how centered she was in the historic issues facing the world during and after World War II and the pivotal role she played in the dynamic interplay between women’s groups globally after the war. Today, we present Professor Hendricks very important contribution to expanding our historical consciousness as we explore the Life of Madie Hall Xuma. Wanda A. Hendricks is a distinguished professor emerita of history at the University of South Carolina. Professor Hendricks has served as the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians, and senior editor of the three-volume Black Women In America: Second Edition, published by Oxford University Press. She currently is an editor for the UIP’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History series, and her other books include Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois and the first biography of Black activist and intellectual Fannie Barrier Williams titled, Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race. Image: Part of the temporary exhibition, AMERICA’S VOICES AGAINST APARTHEID: Confronting Injustice at Home and Abroad via Apartheid Museum

The IWW was born in 1905. On January 2, 1905, several dozen people identifying as “industrial unionists” met in Chicago and issued a call to form a new labor union. That June several hundred people belonging to more than 40 unions and radical organizations returned to Chicago, where they founded the Industrial Workers of the World [Wobblies of the World: A Global History, 3]. On July 8, attendees adopted the now-legendary Preamble to the IWW’s Constitution, which boldly and famously declared: The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. Clearly, the IWW believed in class struggle and the need for a proletarian revolution to bring socialism to the world. However, unlike most socialists, the IWW did not privilege political means for achieving socialist ends. Rather, the IWW and other syndicalist organizations saw industrial unions, direct action on the job, and the climactic general strike as the logical and best ways to enact revolutionary change. Already in 1905, and even more so after 1908, this ideological distinction mattered a great deal [Wobblies of the World: A Global History, 3-4]. The question that comes to the fore today begs us to ask: is it time for this ideological difference to be reassessed for its efficacy? What are the categories of thought, assessed through practice over time and space, up until this point relevant to be included in our analysis that is necessary to redirect/realign current labor efforts to emancipate our labor power? The IWW, from its inception, committed itself to organizing all workers regardless of their ethnic, national, racial, or gender identities. The other major IWW effort to organize African Americans occurred on the Philadelphia waterfront where, for almost a decade, the IWW’s Marine Transport Workers Local 8 dominated one of the nation’s largest ports. Born out of a successful strike in 1913, Local 8 represented upwards of 5,000 dockworkers, among them the Wobblies’ most well-known African American, Ben Fletcher. A brilliant speaker and organizer, Fletcher, together with other Wobbly organizers—black and white, native-born and immigrant—forced employers to hire Local 8 members exclusively for nearly a decade. [Wobblies of the World: A Global History, 6-7]. Today, I speak with Peter Cole, where we contextualize and expand on the work of the IWW and the influence of Ben Fletcher. We weave together a tapestry of places, experiences, and movements that culminate into a lens through which we use to understand the life and influences of Ben Fletcher and the IWW. Peter Cole is a Professor of History at Western Illinois University and Research Associate in the Society, Work and Development Program at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive Era Philadelphia; the award-winning Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area; [an editor of] Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW; and the recently re-released: Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly. Peter Cole is also the founder and co-director of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (CRR19). And publishes widely on internationalism, labor, and race. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly … Enjoy the program! Here is a collection of some of his writing: https://africasacountry.com/author/peter-cole https://www.newframe.com/writer/peter-cole/ https://inthesetimes.com/authors/peter-cole https://jacobin.com/author/peter-cole @ProfPeterCole

"“We are surrounded. We who are in the academy, looking for community, like June Jordan and her students in 1969, are still surrounded. We have also made it inside the gate, but we are now cornered. This place, the university, is the destination, they said. We were told that we had to be inside or else. And now that we are here, they lie to us. Just as they lied to Jordan’s students. Just as they lied to the Black professors they hired when they demanded teachers less likely to lie. Just as they lied to the Black teachers who went to college in order to teach those Black professors long before 1969. They lied about us. About why we are here, how we got here, and what it means to be here. Although they would eventually again shut the gates, some of us made it through and have been here for a long time now. Which means we have listened to these lies for a long time now. The lies have changed. But they are still lies. Every now and then, there is a slip, an exposure, a seam opens. We seize on those moments because the lie that sustains what Jordan called this system’s “exploitation of human life, for material gain” cannot exist forever." What you will hear next is a critical exploration of Chapter 1 – Of Hesitance: WEB Du Bois with Nathalie Frédéric Pierre. For Du Bois, Myers suggests, was a desire to reveal the inadequacy of the prevailing norms of scientific inquiry, both on their own terms as well as their ability to reveal the Truth of the Black experience. His work continued a process of thinking beyond discipline, beyond even interdisciplines, in order to access that, Truth. In that conception, Du Bois would have heirs who would take this further. His example was foundational to how they regarded the world. And just as Of Black Study grapples with Du Bois’s legacy in ways that are different from those texts that seek to exalt him as the founding father of several disciplines, it connects his confrontation with those disciplines to a genealogy of Black thinkers who extended his example in the early days of Black Studies” [9]. Expanding and stretching this premise, you will hear a conversation we had with Nathalie Pierre. Nathalie Frédéric Pierre is an Assistant Professor of History at Howard University. She earned her PhD in the history of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America from New York University. In the classroom and within her research agenda, Professor Pierre highlights the plans and processes people of African descent set into motion in order to sustain sites of autonomy across the Americas. She is currently writing her first book, ‘The Vessel of Independence... Must Save Itself’: Haitian State Formation, 1757 - 1815 which articulates the political thought of Haitian statesmen, who were bound to preserve antislavery and create a government suitable for emancipated citizens of African origin in a revolutionary Atlantic world still reliant on enslaved labor. Her work has been published in The Journal of Haitian Studies, Cultural Dynamics, Remembrance: Loss, Hope, Recovery after the Earthquake in Haiti, and other forums. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of the City University of New York in the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC), a Black Studies Dissertation Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Ronald E. McNair Scholar at Howard University. Public engagement is a critical part of her work; and, after surviving the 2010 Haitian earthquake, she became board chair (2011 - 2017) of the Flanbwayan Haitian Literacy Project, an immigrant education advocacy group serving migrant Haitian teens and their families. She has given lectures in Haitian Creole and English to community organizations; while also participating in the Digital Library of the Caribbean’s online exhibit “Haiti: An Island Luminous.” She is on the board of the Haitian Studies Association. Image: Lisa Larson-Walker

Today we will hear from Sudanese diasporan activists who are maintaining vital attention on the conflict which has been taking place in Sudan since April 15. The human cost of this current iteration of conflict is immeasurable from those observing from a far, but very measurable to those impacted directly, whether in Sudan or in the Diaspora. It is vital we direct our empathy into action. Our compassion into measured and intentional activities that are led by those impacted, in country as well as in the Sudanese diaspora. The interconnectedness of this conflict impacts the entire African world, not just segments. The current conflict is between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary group the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by Lt. General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo also known as “Hemetti”. The conflict continues to take a devastating toll on people across the country. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has recently estimated that an additional 2.5 million are expected to slip into hunger in the coming months. WFP has provided food aid to nearly one million people in 14 of the country’s 18 states since resuming operations on 3 May; the UN agency plans to expand support to 5.9 million people by the end of the year. Today, we will hear a recent conversation between Africa World Now Project’s Mwiza Munthali and Dimah Mahmoud. Dr. Dimah Mahmoud is a humanist, Pan-Africanist, and Actionist. Her extensive interdisciplinary expertise in research, cross cultural communication, political analysis and project management are reflected in the diverse public programs and conferences she organizes as well as the initiatives and collaborations she spearheads through her strategic research consultancy established in 2014. Her work contributes to advancing sustainable socio-economic and political development in Africa and the Middle East. She has consulted for a number of international organizations and is co-founder of: The Nubia Initiative (TNI), a transboundary organization aimed at leveraging art, academia and technology to protect, preserve and promote Nubia’s endangered heritage and languages. Dr. Mahmoud completed her MA and PhD at the University of Exeter, UK on Middle East Policy Studies and Sudanese Foreign Policy and International Legitimacy respectively. She obtained her BA in Political Science from Towson University. We will also hear voices from the demonstration, which was graciously provided to us by Sudanese American journalist Isma’il Kushkush. After Dimah, we will hear, in the following order, from recent Harvard graduate, Reem Ali, in both a poem she delivered at the 2023 program honoring Black graduates from Harvard and then her reflections at the June 3rd demonstration. And Emi Mahmoud. Emi Mahmoud is a Sudanese American slam poet. Emi Mahmoud has supported the work of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency since 2016 and was appointed as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador in June 2018 after giving the opening performance at TEDxKakumaCamp, the first ever TEDx event held in a refugee camp. Born in Khartoum, Sudan, before later moving to the United States, Emi has used her talents to raise awareness around refugee causes. 1] https://www.worldhistory.org/user/dimah/ 2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biTJD9FLNf0 3] https://emi-mahmoud.com/ 4] Image: Tate, "Ibrahim El-Salahi, The Inevitable," in Smarthistory, September 10, 2021, accessed June 21, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/ibrahim-el-salahi-the-inevitable/

Delegates at the First Conference of Independent African States, hosted by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in Accra, in 1958, called for an “African Freedom Day” to be held on April 15 to honor those who had contributed to the anti-colonial struggle. Later in 1963, with the founding of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa, African Freedom Day became African Liberation Day. At the founding of the OAU, Kwame Nkrumah stood before 31 heads of African states and declared: “[T]he struggle against colonialism does not end with the attainment of national independence. Independence is only the prelude to a new and more involved struggle for the right to conduct our own economic and social affairs…unhampered by crushing and humiliating neo-colonialist controls and interference.” The clarity of Nkrumah’s thought is further articulated as he was very clear to point out that while African peoples were throwing off “the yoke of colonialism” it must not be lost that “these successes were equally matched by an intense effort on the part of imperialism to continue the exploitation of our resources by creating divisions among us.” As a result, for Nkrumah, the imperative was clear: “We must unite or perish”. While the Organization of African Unity eventually became the African Union (AU) and African Liberation Day became Africa Day, May 25th still serves as a crucial platform for progressive forces to connect and strategize against inequitable and dehumanizing conditions. Moreover, while it is argued that the ideas and principles of liberation that propelled the formation of the Organization of African Unity has since been “removed in letter, and even in spirit, from official commemorations of the day” (Tanupriya Singh, “Unity is an imperative: reclaiming African Liberation Day, 60 years on”). However, the current global conditions, products of historical inequities inherent in racial capitalist relationships, have produced a more intentional focus on radical study that informs the work to address the false narrative of the ‘post’ colonial which is rising across the African world (see Kenyan Organic Intellectuals). Today, we explore the continuities of African Liberation Day w/ Obi Egbuna Jr. Born in London and raised in Washington, DC, Obi is a journalist, African/a history teacher and playwright. Currently, Obi is correspondent to The Herald, Zimbabwe’s national newspaper as well as US correspondent to the Southern African Times. Obi is also External Relations Officer to the Zimbabwe Cuba Friendship Association and founder of the Get Out of Cuba Way coalition. Obi is a Founding Member and Executive Director of Mass Emphasis Children’s History and Theater Company (2012). Working directly with Kwame Ture, Obi is the son of Obi Egbuna Sr, who was a Nigerian-born novelist, playwright and political activist, leading member of the Universal Coloured People's Association (UCPA) and the British Black Power and Black Panther Movement. Obi’s father’s book, Destroy this Temple: The Voice of Black Power in Britain, has been [re]released and is currently available from Black Classic Press. Shirley Graham Du Bois (1972) in her review of Destroy this Temple: The Voice of Black Power in Britain, wrote that: “Here is a book all of us will find extremely valuable. By “all” I mean every African, everyone of African descent, wherever he or she may be and everyone who is aware that something is basically wrong with the relations of human beings on this earth. (People not aware of this fact are either too stupid or too arrogantly complacent to matter)” (Black Scholar, 3(5): 58-61). Image: Members of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party march outside the White House for African Liberation Day, May 28, 1977. (Star Collection/D.C. Public Library)