Tag: Black History

Black History Month–Bobby Seale

When I was a much younger man I was a political activist, early to mid 70’s, during my travels I got to Oakland, California….I had heard about the work of the Black Panthers and wanted to see how they were pulling off their mini revolution…..about here some will be rolling their eyes but those are the people that have NO ideas what the Panthers were doing other than the propaganda crap that the government and the media was feeding the country.

When we got permission we were introduced to Bobby Seale and a quick hand shake with Huey Newton……we were told that we could walk around and talk to people freely…..I witnessed an amazing co-operative going on with food banks, clinics, pre-school, legal help…I witnessed many programs designed to help the community….I was impressed but the tour was far too short.

I think the people like Bobby Seale do not get the historic coverage they deserve simply because someone did not like their politics.  I will attempt to change that with every opportunity……that is why I am highlighting Bobby Seale here on IST…..

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense at a community center in North Oakland, California, in October 1966, and acknowledged it was a living testament to the Work of Malcolm X. The Black Panthers practiced militant self-defense of minority communities against the U.S. government, and fought to establish revolutionary socialism through mass organizing and community based programs. The party was one of the first organizations in U.S. history to militantly struggle for ethnic minority and working class emancipation. The Black Panther agenda was the revolutionary establishment of real economic, social, and political equality across gender and color lines. The FBI labeled Seale and his colleagues in the Black Panthers as “Public Enemy Number One”.

Robert George Seale was born on October 22, 1936, to a poor African American carpenter and his wife in Dallas, Texas. The Seale family moved to Port Arthur, Texas, and then to San Antonio, Texas, before finally settling in Oakland, California, during World War II. Attributing his failure to make the basketball and football teams to racial prejudice, Seale quit Oakland High School and joined the U.S. Air Force. After three years in the Air Force, Seale was court-martialed and given a bad conduct discharge for disobeying a colonel at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota.

Read more on this unique civil rights activist……

Source: Civil Rights Leaders- Bobby Seale

History does not teach many Americans about “Black Nationalism”……there is more to it than the negative headlines…….whether one agrees with the ideology is of no concern…it still should be taught and understood.

It is a political and social movement prominent in the 1960s and early ’70s in the United States among some African Americans. The movement, which can be traced back to Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association of the 1920s, sought to acquire economic power and to infuse among blacks a sense of community and group feeling. Many adherents to black nationalism assumed the eventual creation of a separate black nation by African Americans. As an alternative to being assimilated by the American nation, which is predominantly white, black nationalists sought to maintain and promote their separate identity as a people of black ancestry. With such slogans as “black power” and “black is beautiful,” they also sought to inculcate a sense of pride among blacks.

Time to learn more about the real work people were doing in their communities and Bobby Seale is a fine example.

Do not dismiss what you do not understand.

Black History Month–Malcolm X

Too many look upon Malcolm X as a “black nationalist”….and a member of the Nation of Islam…..someone who hated whites and worked against them until his death in 1965…….

Sorry but that is not completely accurate……after his visit to Mecca he embraced orthodox Islam and cooled his more radical views on race however he remained a proponent of “black power” until his death…..

Malcolm X was the passionate and controversial black activist who was assassinated in New York City in 1965.

Born in Nebraska and raised in a foster home, Malcolm Little had a troubled youth that included burglary and drug dealing. At age 20 he was sent to prison for a 10-year term. While in prison, he adopted the Black Muslim faith and upon his release in 1952 became a minister of the Nation of Islam. As Malcolm X, he was a charismatic advocate of black separatism who rejected Martin Luther King, Jr.’s policies of non-violence.

At first a follower of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam in 1964. That same year he made a pilgrimage to Mecca and shortly afterwards he embraced orthodox Islam and took the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. He recanted some of his earlier more strident viewpoints on race, though he remained a staunch advocate of “black power.”

Malcolm X was shot to death by a group of men while giving a speech in New York City in 1965; some of the men had connections to the Nation of Islam, though a formal tie between that group and the assassination was never proven.

If you would like more info on Malcolm X then I suggest that this site will be the best and most informative……

Source: Malcolm X |

Another leader of the people that needs more exposure than he gets….most know only of his early years and do not go past the rhetoric….time for that to change!

He was an activist that needs to be studied and appreciated.

Black History Month–W.E.B. DuBois

February is here and it is Black History Month….shame that we have to designate such for them to get recognition….I usually try to give my readers personalities that they may not be that all aware of in their everyday lives…..

Name one founder of the NAACP—-(pause here for the dash to the Google button)……

William Edward Burghardt DuBois

Scholar and political activist W.E.B. Du Bois helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). DuBois attended Harvard University and in 1895 became the first African-American to receive a doctorate from the school. He became a university professor, a prolific writer and a pioneering social scientist on the topic of black culture.

W.E.B. DuBois particularly disagreed with black leaders such as Booker T. Washington who urged integration into white society; Du Bois championed global African unity and (especially in later years) separatism. He distilled his views in his famous 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. In 1909 he was a founding member of the NAACP, an organization promoting progress and social equality for blacks. Du Bois continued for decades as a strong public voice on behalf of African-Americans.

In the 1950s, DuBois clashed with the federal government over his support for labor, his public appreciations of the Soviet Union, and his demands that nuclear weapons be outlawed. He emigrated to Ghana in 1961 and became a citizen of that country shortly before his death in 1963. The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois was published posthumously in 1968.

This man should be studied in our classrooms not just during Black History Month….

When America behaved like ISIS: Jesse Washington and the Bible Belt’s dark history of public lynchings – Salon.com

I live in the Deep South or the Bible Belt, if you like…..we have a dark and sick history when dealing with Blacks……

It is time that American especially Southerns face the music for their twisted sense of justice toward African-Americans………

 

When America behaved like ISIS: Jesse Washington and the Bible Belt’s dark history of public lynchings – Salon.com.

Who Was Haywood Hall, Jr.?

College of Political Knowlerdge

Subject:  Black History

In my years as an ultra radical I came upon works by many people within the early movements of the 20th century……I found a man that I could look up to for his work with the poor and minorities….

As per my tradition I try to find and profile an African-American leader especially someone that most Americans are unfamiliar with their contributions for various reasons……this time it is Haywood Hall, Jr….aka Harry Haywood………

I would like to thank blackpast.org for the following…….

A radical theoretician, anti-colonialist, labor organizer, and civil rights activist, Harry Haywood was one of the most prominent and influential African American Communists of the twentieth century.  Haywood, the son of former slaves, was born in South Omaha, Nebraska in 1898. He migrated to Chicago after serving in World War I and organized community defense during the 1919 Chicago race riot. In 1922 he joined the African Blood Brotherhood and in 1925 became an official member of the CPUSA. The following year Haywood traveled to Moscow where he studied at the International Lenin School. During this time he made his greatest intellectual contribution to the American Communist movement: the 1928 and 1930 Comintern “Resolutions on the Negro Question,” which theorized the right of self-determination for African Americans in the southern Black Belt through the creation of a sovereign black nation state. Although never pursued in practice, “self-determination” for African Americans was adopted as the official line of the Comintern and became the rhetorical touchstone for CP activism in African American communities throughout the 1930s.

After returning to the United States in 1930, Haywood helped found of the CP’s League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR). He was active in LSNR campaigns against lynching, tenant evictions, segregation, and legal frame-ups and served as the organization’s president from 1934 to 1936. From 1927 to 1938 he was a member of the CPUSA’s Central Committee and served on the Communist Party Politburo from 1931-1938. In 1937 Haywood joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and fought alongside Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War.

Haywood became increasingly estranged from the Party in the post World War II era. He spoke out against Earl Browder’s accommodationist line, as well as Nikita Khrushchev’s destalinization reforms in the mid 1950s. When the Party officially disavowed the theory of self-determination in the American Black Belt in 1957, Haywood denounced the decision and was expelled from the Party two years later. He spent the remainder of his life helping to build the Mao-aligned New Communist Movement and mentoring a new generation of black radicals in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Author of scores of essays, pamphlets, and treatises on a variety of topics, Haywood’s major works are Negro Liberation, published in 1949, and his 1978 autobiography, Black Bolshevik. Harry Haywood died on January 4, 1985.

Most people have never heard of this person simply because he was a….wait for it…..Communist.  I hate to tell people but most of the early labor organizers and activists were either Communist or Socialist……regardless of ideology they were instrumental in bring about equality and fairness in the labor sector….and Haywood was I true and important leader of that movement…..he needs to be remembered for the actions he took and the deeds he did to progress African-Americans forward in a society that would have preferred to keep them marginalized…….