Response to London Bridges Falling Down

RESPONSE TO MARVIN X'S LONDON BRIDGES FALLING DOWN
Date:
Sun, 10 Jul 2005 15:20:44 -0400


Jideofor, peace and blessings,
I quite understand your position. And I respect your choice and your reaction. Those who commited the acts in London may be all you say. I do not know the facts of the situation. I know there is a lot of dying going on in the world, everywhere. Oceans of tears have fallen, and there are rotting corpses a plenty, everywhere. I'd love for it all to come to an end so that we can all live in peace and comfort.
I must however disagree with you in how you characterize Marvin X. I think he is neither delusional nor a sadist. At least I cannot discern that from his writings and his public statements. What occurs in his private life is another matter, in those matters I little concern from a moral or ethical point of view.
From what I know of Marvin, he too loves humanity, and he loves the individual, regardless of color or nationality or gender or sexual persuasion. He is Love, and sacrifice everyday for the poor and the oppressed. I did not get the impression that he took cruel delight in the death of others. He is not monstrous. He was not operating on the gound level of sentimental feelings he may or may not possess.
I only know for certain what he wrote. That writing was done in the context in which there is a Great War or great wars between the operations of the Global North and the Global South. And there is a long, long history, of violence and oppression which incorporates biblical history. Israel's very existence is built up on a mythic foundation, in which is invoked scripture and scriptural prophecy. Why should such structures not be available to Marvin X as an artist and a citizen of the world.
The millenialism notion incorporated in Marvin's prophetic sermn is a mode of interpretation that did no begin with Marvin. It is rooted in our national history here in America, used by Abe Lincoln to justify the slaughter of our Civil War, and it has been used by George Bush to justify his War on Iraq.
The issues of divine justice and divine retirbutions is as much an important aspect of Christian theology as it is found in Islam. Did he have a right to say what he wanted to say in the manner in which he said it, you damn right he does. And the only reason that I would not post it on ChickenBones: A Journal would be out of fear.
I will not silence Marvin X.
As ever and always, Rudy
----Original Message Follows----From: "Editor" To: "rudolph lewis" Subject: Re: London Bridges Falling Down Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2005 19:37:43 +0100

I find Marvin X's article, prophetic or not, extremely in bad taste. To justify the recent London mayhem by a bunch of delusional psychopaths as retributive justice sits uncomfortably with my notion of justice - from humanist, religious, political and intellectual perspectives. It is akin to some non-blacks somewhere celebrating as a comeuppance the setting the torching and killing of all congregations in a black church because some black men raped some non-black women somewhere.Many of the people who lost their lives are ordinary individuals like you and I, who daily struggle to make ends meet. Some, I am sure, may have taken part in demonstrations against some of the decisions of the politicians, which the killers claim motivated their sick actions. There are single mothers who left their children at schools, hoping to be back before the end of the school that day to pick them up. With mum no more, the fate of such children could only be imagined. And yet, someone out there, in a delusional intellectual grand-standing, dared call it retribution.Even if the actions of the politicians had called for this, there is time for everything under the heaven. There is time for analysis of what happened and why, and time to show compassion. It is only a sadist who will want to engage in an ill-digested analysis at a time when what is called for is compassion.I am surprised that you chose to defend that ill-advised piece.

Jideofor ----- Original Message ----- From: rudolph lewis To: rudolphlewis@hotmail.com Sent: Sunday, July 10, 2005 6:51 PM

Subject: London Bridges Falling Down

My dear Friends, I come to you, today, with another piece of artful composition. This sermon, performed in the prophetic mode, has its special appeal to me, not because of the particular event it refers. I have not kept up with them. The last four years has just been too rich for my comfort. As some of you know, I'm ever in the religious mode, my grandparents who raised me had the Baible at the oppressive center of my universe. Virginia-bred, living in Nathaniel Turner Country, which has a proclivity toward preaching and prophecy. As you know I daily defend Nathaniel Turner, preacher and prophet of Southampton, who redefined for us black manhood, and black masculinity. For me, Marvin X plays that role in comtemporary times. He too is preacher and prophet. In this sermon, he is Jeremiah, I imagine, warning governments of Divine Justice, and retribution. Of course, preachers and prophets have always frightened me since I was a boy, by their talk of hellfire & brimstone, wars and rumors of wars. I realize too keenly, the discomfort that can ensue when one speaks for God. Here's Marvin X's London Bridges Falling Down -- Rudy

London Bridges Falling Down

London Bridges Falling Down

Marvin X



Not only has the sun set on the British empire but the sons of her colonial slaves are out to avenge their impoverished fathers and mothers. Yes, call them devils for their evil desires and actions to seek retribution for centuries of rape, mass murder, mutilation and simple genocide.

During the four centuries of European slavery, how many innocent men, women and children were crucified in the name of Jesus and capitalism? When they toiled in the sun of Africa, Asia and the Americas, were they not simple human beings whose only desire was to care for their families and loved ones--how often did they even bother to revolt against their enslavement for life?

But today the world appears utterly horrified that the descendants of colonialism have decided to seek vengeance in the name of their God and peoples, no matter what the moderates, the uncle toms and uncle abdullahs, think of their barbaric actions. Were not the Europeans barbaric in the Congo, South Africa, in Arabia and India, in the the Americas with their black codes and slave catchers, lynchings, raping of men, women and children?

Did the Europeans and their colonial collaborators ever think the day would come for justice to raise her hand and strike death blows into the hearts of the masters as they went about their daily round, eating, drinking, sporting, playing, working, praying?

The death angels don't care about any of these goings on. Throughout the centuries of your oppression in Africa, Arabia, India and the Americas, did you ever give the subject peoples a day of respite, a moment to wipe the sweat off their brow? You gave them nothing but more slavery, suffering and death. And as you have done, so shall it be done unto you.

Keep a stiff upper lip because you shall need it as your cities crumble for the death angels march with no mercy, a lesson they learned from you. The only difference is that you claim to value life but the death angels care nothing for life and there are no innocents in their world.

The moderates are mostly your puppets, your colonial administrators who have benefited from the enslavement of their people. What right to life do they deserve. Yes, those who worship the beast shall be destroyed with the beast. Your moderation is submission to continued enslavement and colonialism--even your feigned religiosity is reactionary poppycock. You are one billion Muslims, yet you cannot liberate Palestine. To hell with your prayers and your pilgrimage to Mecca. When you march to Jerusalem one billion strong, that is the day Islam shall be redeemed from the devil, yes, from you fake imams who preach mysticism while your people wallow in poverty, disease and ignorance.

You are glad to send your sons to Iraq as suicide bombers because it is better they fight the Crusaders than fight you and your reactionary regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Sudan, and places where you have delivered your oil fields to the global bandits in exchange for liquor and European women.

Review: Wish I Could Tell You The Truth, essays by Marvin X

NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, AS TOLD BY MARVIN X.

A review of the book, Wish I Could Tell you the Truth. Marvin X (El Muhajir), Cherokee, CA: Black Bird Press, 2005, 223 pp.

By Nathan Hare


What ever happened to the Black Movement? Where did our” black power” go? Where did we lose our vision? How did we lose out way after the Sixties – declining and degenerating from the days when black was beautiful before we gave up our valiant black fight, before we relinquished the revolutionary initiative to the white woman, turned away from combat with our own oppression to focus on real and imagined glories in the regal but bygone realms of Antiquity, searching out the faraway and the long ago, preoccupied and mesmerized by the unfathomed wonders of the Pyramids, safe and serene in our plush and sexy high-tech Africanized “pads” four blocks removed from the projects; two corporate paychecks and ten credit cards away from bankruptcy and the welfare lines, wrapped in speculation and pontification on the magical elements of melanin?

You can find the many answers to such questions as these lurking menacingly, as we speak, within the pages of a bomb of a book that recently slipped largely unnoticed into the middle of what the late sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier, liked to call “Negro society,” before black intellectuals and enlightened “people of color” wrapped themselves in elusive layers of ideological buzzwords such as ”Afrocentricity,” “Africana” and “Multiculturalism.”

The name of the book is Wish I Could Tell You the Truth, by Marvin X, deceptively titled if you ask me, because Marvin X has been going around telling the truth on everybody, including himself, for something like going on forty years. Marvin X will tell the truth on you and your momma, will put all of your business in the street -- and his. I mean the brother is an open book, the kind of dude who, if you started him to lying, would tell everything he knew.

So obviously on some level, the brother is not afraid to tell the truth, and I don’t really think he’s saying he couldn’t if he wanted to.

I also believe Bro. Marvin is the kind of guy you could probably call a lie (or argue that he could tell you the truth when he’s saying he can’t) and walk away unscathed; but I won’t lie to you, after reading his book clean through, I still wasn’t exactly prepared to call a brother a lie who is the ace boon coon of the likes of Amira Baraka and Sonia Sanchez and even introduced the pistol-packing cofounders of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton and his equally fearless firebrand and collaborator, Eldridge Cleaver.

But I still couldn’t figure out why a brother would write a book making like he wished he could tell the truth if he wasn’t lying (God knows the average black intellectual has been going around here lying for the past forty years, all up and down the streets, and in and out of the penitentiary and the professorial tenure track; and it doesn’t take Neitsche (who opined that “lying is a part of the human experience”), or a Native American or a feminazi to catch the white man in a lie; but Marvin X is a black man, with nothing in sight to lie for.

Maybe Marvin is saying he wants to spend a few tall tales. I once suggested to him, based on one of his earlier books, Somethin’ Proper: The Autobiography of a North American Poet, that he should write a novel and damn well could. But truth, as Marvin apparently knows, is often stranger than fiction – and a good deal harder to come by.

I know that somewhere in the ranks of the keepers of “Negrocracy” there are “tenured Negro intellectuals” – as Marvin calls them -- writing polkadot rainbow books out-fabricating Kingfish who would argue in their own defense that Marvin X’s very surname casts an element of mystery, and some might go so far as to say that the brother is a “relic of the Sixties” – as his name implies – but that would lead them to a grave misunderstanding.

No one can deny, who knows Marvin’s work, that he is a brother who is qualified to tell the truth, who has been around a long time and really paid some dues, as B.B. King likes to sing it – or, as my late friend and novelist John O. Killens would say, Bro. Marvin is a “long distance runner.”

I would have to confess, on the other hand, that he has had enough time and written enough books and poetry to pack in a fair amount of lies as well as a lot of truth. And I know you are asking what is the truth – which you righteously may wish to know – as told by Marvin X.

I’m afraid you’re going to have to read the book, because what I see as truth may well be lies to you. I can tell you what I knew even before I read the book – and the book confirms it -- Marvin’s literary work, if not his life, is considered by many to be a veritable monument to truth.

From the very first chapter, in any case, of Wish I Could Tell You the Truth (called “A Tale of an Angry Old Man”), it is clear that Marvin wishes to inform and hip the young, but Marvin also wishes to be understood by the young. And the young, like the old, would do well to read him and study him. If you don’t already know him by now you will learn that he is qualified, if not able, to tell the truth. You will learn, if you didn’t already know it, that Marvin’s fundamental mission in life is to jack people up and tell you the truth (to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” according to my wife, Dr. Julia Hare , who is also well acquainted with Marvin)..

Don’t care if you’re white, black, polka dot, or chartreuse; Afrocentric, Eurocentric, egocentric or just eccentric, send Marvin X an email if you dare, saying any secret thing, and the first thing you know he’ll have you all over the Internet.

But in truth the business of Marvin X, a playwright and a poet, is books – fulltime. I’ll let you judge for yourself if this book proves he’s getting better at his craft, but I can tell you at least a part of the truth, if not the whole truth: Marvin X loves books, reads books, writes books, sells books up and down the streets of San Francisco, Philadelphia, Atlanta, LA, Detroit, Chicago, or Bedford Stuyvessant; in and out of white bookstores, the rainbow section of black bookstores, at Negro caucssuses and “professional” conferences, book-signings of the black literati (what Zora Neale Hurston called ‘the niggerati), church confabs or coconut soirees. This brother sells books online, offline, in front of the church, in front of the bar, in front of the theater (he’s the founder of The Recovery Theatre, where he also sells his books), in front of the White House, your house, the Black House (which he founded with Eldridge Cleaver in the mid-1960s), or anywhere he finds a brother or a sister or a black intellectual who has never read a book in the past ten years, let alone bought one in their pompous lives, other than some textbook they couldn’t borrow from somebody else in their in-service classes.


Tell them, yes, Marvin is a relic, a remnant of another epoch, a better blacker time, an age when black intellectuals looked to the future and were not afraid to step out of line with the white man and whey-eyed concessions to white supremacy, before the “Negro cognoscente” retreated into escapism and a “world of make believe” and filled their lives with ceremony and myths, before they stood so deep in the residue of black family and social decay, crowing about “the strengths of the black family,” “the positives,” denouncing the “pathology” that the white man’s chattel slavery and oppression had made, while the black family crumbled more in a couple of decades than a century or more since slavery.

Tell them of the time we knew so briefly and brilliantly in the Sixties, before black intellectuals (including their warriors and their mathematicians) grew preoccupied with reading, talking and writing history instead of making history, before they fixated on recasting the bygone past instead of making the future, before they fell into their postmodern waltz with the status quo, where the white woman has a hold to the white man’s shirttail, the black woman has a hold to the white woman’s skirt tail, and the black man has a hold to the black woman’s skirt tail, with the white man leading them all around in a Conga dance.

Tell them the truth, as told by Marvin X,

Tell them the truth that is hidden in the chapters of Wish I Could Tell You the Truth, chapters such as: “In Search of my Soul Sister,” “Beyond the Ignorance Zone,” “Farrakhan’s Final Call,” “Live in Philly at Warm Daddies,” ”Life In Social Movements,” “What Is Life and Why Are We Living,” “Black Woman’s Tit Knocks Out America” (remember Jackie Jackson in the Superdome) “Gay Marriage and Black Liberation,” “Black Bourgeoisie Defend Their Own,” “ VIP Nigguhs and Rape,” “Meaning of Black Reconstruction,” and so many more.

Then them and they will understand how, once I had finished reading Wish I Could Tell You the Truth, I slammed it down then picked it up again and read it over a second time, the way you used to sit back through a grownup movie when you were young and had somebody to hold real tight or squeeze you in the dark.

Yes, I could go ahead and tell you the truth as Marvin tells it, but that would be like letting the cat out of the bag, and robbing you of the pleasure of panning for your own gold in a stormy sea of truth and maybe a sprinkling of multicolored lies, but I can’t. So if you don’t read the book you’ll never know.

And yet, I would never lie to you; this is one time I wish I could tell you the truth.

Review: Beyond Religion, toward Religion by Marvin X

Beyond Religion toward Spirituality, Essays on Consciousness.
Marvin X/El Muhajir
Black Bird Press, Paradise Ca, 2007, 281 pages, $19.95
Review by Ayodele Nzinga

In his introduction to, Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality, the X man says: “How you begin is how you will end.” He goes on to describe a new relationship with himself and joy. Full circle, the boy from Fresno is a man of the world, master of the small story, in possession of his joy and a child like wisdom, simple, honest, and fresh.

The world according to Marvin X is in beautiful place to visit but it is also in serious need of a more spiritually imbued story of itself.

El Muhajir has been teaching us through the medium of poetry, drama, lecture, and essay for four decades; this offering signals his attention to his continuing personal evolution. One of his greatest strengths as a storyteller is he is never afraid to share what he has learned. In the pages of Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality Marvin celebrates the spiritual nature of man and the world in a series of moving non-fiction essays.
He speaks in an authoritative voice in what he calls the fourth quarter of a remarkable run. X is clear, concise, and straight razor sharp. His lyrical use of North American African vernacular remains as clear and as musical as his poetry and his undiminished power of observation touches all the nooks and crannies of his life and our own.

As usual Marvin’s view is a wide one that takes in his subject from a variety of vantage points. This volume is simple, yet thorough in its scope. Flowing from a seemingly endless well, Marvin’s eye moves like water from the intricacies of love, to the nurturing of youth, into the spiritual aspects of music, as his pen makes the leap from the personal to the universal.
In Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality Marvin has compiled an “All you ever need to know” compendium for anyone with a mind, heart and soul living on earth. These are the musings of a well-seasoned life traveler with stories that instruct and inspire. In the tradition of “I wish I could tell you the Truth”, essays, 2005, and “Something Proper,” autobiography, 1998, Marvin blesses us with the gift of his scholarship embodied in our lived reality. Here philosophy is given flesh we understand, for here is a philosopher of and from us, bold enough to tell us the truth, continually serving us something proper, and ready to move us beyond religion to an enlivened spirituality.

“Let it be said that we tried to expand our consciousness, to get high with the Most High (Ali). And if we only touched the hem of His garment, it is better than not having touched Him at all.” Marvin X/ El Muhajir, Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality, Essays on Consciousness.

This collection of “small stories” is another well-written chapter in the ongoing grand narrative of Marvin X, available from Black Bird Press, POB 1317, Paradise CA 95967 , $19.95.

Poet/actress Ayodele Nzinga is doing her PhD thesis on Marvin X and the Black Arts Movement. His archives were recently acquired by the University of California , Bancroft Library

Marvin X's 2007 Book Tour Report
PHILADELPHIA

Marvin X's East coast book tour got off on anunfortunate note when Poet Sonia Sanchez had topostpone hosting her book party for Marvin because shesuffered a fall and was hospitalized a few days beforethe scheduled event. So the tour began with a reading(accompanied by Elliot Bey on piano) at the Universityof Penn's WEB DUBOIS center, sponsored by AfricanAmerican Studies, African American Resource Center andthe Women's Center. The event was a poetry reading bylocal spoken word artists, especially those connectedwith Maurice Henderson's National Black Poetry Tour. Marvin was asked to join the tour, and he agreed,especially after hearing the poets. "The poets whoread today have renewed my faith in the power ofpoetry to free our people. In the beginning was theword—if these poets and others like them can get theirmessage to the people, it will cause a paradigm shiftin the hood—things will never be the same, just as theBlack Arts Movement helped change consciousness in the60s. Conscious spoken word and poetry can refocus ourpeople on liberation, personal and political, asopposed to the bitch, ho, and motherfucker message ofmuch rap." Later than evening at Robbins Book Store, Marvin X wasgiven a proper introduction by poet Lamont Steptoe,winner of the Pew award. He quoted from an interviewby Lee Hubbard, Marvin X Unplugged, see AALBC orChickenBones He also quoted from the preface toMarvin's collection of essays, In the Crazy HouseCalled America, which called for a national generalstrike. The poet dialogued with hip hop journalist Justin SoulOne Bedford, a Philly native, who recently interviewedSpike Lee. But much of Marvin's comments were directedto the two young males traveling with him, aged 16 and25. "All that I am doing now is to save these youngmen and others like them. We must surround them withlove to save their lives. We have formed a dream teamto save them, composed of their mother, uncles andaunt." He suggested other parents, relatives, andcommunity members do the same with their young males. As per young females, Nisa Ra, Marvin's friend, formerwife and mother of his daughter, Muhammida, isconsulting with him to write a book on how she raisedtheir daughter, a Howard University graduate,entrepreneur and filmmaker, Hip Hop: The New WorldOrder, go to www.suninleo.com. Muhammida is filmingher father's tour for a documentary on the Black ArtsMovement and Hip Hop. On Thursday, she will dialogue with her father atthe Medgar Evers College film series, 7pm. It ispossible there will be a screening of Marvin's filmTHE KINGS AND QUEENS OF BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS, a videodocumentary he produced from the 2001 concert at SanFrancisco State University, featuring Amina and AmiriBaraka, Dr. Cornel West, Julia and Nathan Hare, Kalamuya Salaam, Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Church,Ishmael Reed, Askia Toure, Marvin X, and many others. Marvin was totally surprised to learn one audience member was his comrade from the 60s liberationstruggle, Muhammad Ahmad (Max Stanford, Jr.), leaderof Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM ). Marvin was totally humbled when Muhammad introduced himself andexchanged his recently published WE WILL RETURN IN THEWHIRLWIND, a history of Black Radical Organizations.* * * * *

Marvin X East Coast Tour

Ishmael Reed says "Forget about spending hundreds ofdollars for motivational and prosperity seminars. Justgo stand next to Marvin X and watch him sell hisbooks."

Little may be known in the mainstream of poet/writer Marvin X but within circles of radical and independentartists and thinkers, he remains an icon! "Marvin X is one of the founders and innovators of the Black Arts Movement." --Amiri Baraka

This month, the Bay area legend heads east for a booksigning/reading tour of his latest release, Beyond Religion-Toward Spirituality: Essays on Consciousness.Longtime friends/associates/ comradessuch as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Ed Bullins host Marvin X onthe road. He will also bridge the gap with dialoguefrom the new generation of young writers, journalistsand activists.

Philadelphia
Friday, April 6 : 7pmHosted by Sonia SanchezPrivate. Contact rsvp@suninleo. com for details
Saturday, April 7
WEB DuBois Center--University ofPenn,
3pmBridging the Gap- dialogue with writer Justin SoulOne Bedford Introduction by poet Lamont B. SteptoeRobin's Bookstore 108 S. 13th Street 7pmNewark,

New Jersey
Sunday, April 8 : 6pmHosted by Amiri & Amina Baraka
808 S. 10th Street, Newark

Brooklyn

Wednesday, April 11 : 7pm
Bridging the Gap- dialogue with Cuban Hip Hopactivist, Ariel FernandezHosted by Sun in Leo @ House of Van Buren 145 Van Buren Street, Bed-Stuy

April 12, 7pmMedgar Evers CollegeFilm Series
Marvin X dialogue with daughter,filmmaker Muhammida El Muhammida

Boston
Sunday, April 15 : 6pmHosted by Ed Bullins and Askia ToureAfrican American Gallery76 Atherton, Jamaica Plains, MAHartford,

Connecticut
April 20 Hosted by novelist Dana Rondel265 Oxford Street, Hartford

Brooklyn

April 27 : 6:30pmSista's Place -Nostrand & Jefferson

Washington DC
April 28Hosted by Baba LumumbaUmoja Gallery -2015 Bunker Hill Rd, NE

For more information, please contact events@suninleo.com 718-574-6331 www.marvinxwrites.blogspot

Brother Hasan on the State of the Race

Marvin,

I hope you are doing well. The other day a young brother (his father told he that he is an honor student) was robbed for two dollars several feet away from his parents' home by two young punks. I heard the punk in question screaming that he should shot him. The young brother kept asking him: "But what did I do?"

That a young brother could "almost" lose his life at Ground Zero Black America over two dollars is breathtaking in its scope. I mean, I would have given this punk two dollars had he asked me for it; but, he did not know that I was looking at him out my window. I called the police and the reason I called the police is this: There is no male backup in these communities any longer to set the tone for civility. The main character, for example, in True To The Game by Terri Woods is a drug dealer with a Muslim name. It seems that she is suggesting that even the Muslims, who provided some degree of hope in these communities, are no longer respected and, furthermore are lost in a maddening mayhem.

What we are facing, Brother Marvin, is far more complex than a "child left behind." We are dealing with the consequences of "generations being left behind" and, in the absence of some kind of new socially engineered race, these folks are not going to catch up. What is the implications of this as a matter of public and social policy?

Many of the books now "flooding" Ground Zero Black America are basically trashy Black romance novels. I ride the bus every morning in the 'hood and one is hard pressed to see most our people reading anything at all. In fact, I cannot find a copy of Ebony or Jet magazine in a predominantly black neighborhood and would have to travel a considerable distance to find a book by Ishmael Reed. It is really incredible.

The Africans, for example, in New York City are busy involved in commercial endeavors. They are not espousing (if so, they are skillfully keeping it to themselves) any idea of the-way-we-were Afrocentricity and, in fact, probably think those of us born in America are completely out of our minds.

This is a time when clear minds with a will towards something concrete must prevail. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, so they say, and I am trying to determine what was lost when one has no discernible frame of reference at all.

Reply to Dr. Asa Hillard on the Cultural Revolution

Dear Brother Asa:Thanks for your clarification but my real desire is see how can we help the "bootleggers" spread the truth, maybe even pay them if we could find sponsors so that our material could be given out freely--in the way Imam Khomeini launched his revolution with cassette tapes and in the way "self respecting" preachers give away free copies of their books and tapes. What about getting our material produced in China--I know the SFSU Black Studies Journal was printed in Taiwan. Basically I am saying we need to launch a true cultural revolution in the hood by flooding it with black consciousness material so that "no child is left behind" and all can make a great leap forward into the new millennium with educational material that will counteract the reactionary filth that rap is spreading along with public school disinformation that is killing the desire to learn in our children.The panelist talked about returning to some of the post-slavery educational models. Indeed, I read that during those years they had to beat the children out of the classroom to make them go home because of their burning desire to learn. Today we must beat them into the classroom. I spoke to students at Oakland's McClymonds High School recently. As I began my talk the students informed me the police was outside rounding up students. The Oakland School District went 100 million in debt because students failed to show up for class. We must take over our schools but with radical teachers and radical materials that will hold the attention of students even unto the midnight hour. Also, I especially liked what one panelist said about the intergenerational schools--this is what is really needed--many parents of today need to be in classrooms with their children because in their parental ignorance they undo all that is done for the child at school.Thank you for being one of the great minds of our time. You know I remember you when you were the Dean of Education at SFSU. No one is all wrong and no one is all right. Let's do the damn thing.

Peace,Marvin X

Asa Hilliard III wrote: Hello Brother Marvin, thank you for being present at Wade Nobles' celebration. I wanted to clarify my comment from the interview. I did not mean to say that the young people were involved in widespread distribution. I intended to refer to the bootlegging of audio and videotapes of many speakers, and that their products are easily available on the streets in New York, Atlanta etc. I also do not mean to approve that practice, just to say that in the absence of financial support and institutional vehicles for dissemination is a continuing problem for the messages. Thanks for covering our meeting. AsaAsa G. Hilliard III-Nana Baffour Amankwatia II>>> Marvin X 06/05/05 2:53 PM >>>