We Remember Kwame Ture

Eight years ago today, our brother Kwame Ture passed. He was, as some would say, prematurely transitioned, due to prostate cancer though some of us would say that there are two days we cannot avoid: birth and death and that it was simply his time. I can't say that I knew brother Ture personally. I met him exactly one time at Cornel University where he spoke to a small gathering of us. Anyone familiar with Ture knows his signature line..after "ready for revolution": History is made by the masses, this is clear.

I must at this point thank brother KRS One for putting Ture on his seminal album "Edutainment". Were it not for that album I would have not known of Ture at the time I did and I have no clue who I would be now. On that album Ture is heard saying:

History can never be made by one man and we smash this one quickly. History is only made by the masses of the people this is clear. Even a cursory glance at the fallacious presentation of history by the American capitalist system would demonstrate just this.

Take George Washington as bad as he is. Put him in the middle of Valley Forge by himself surrounded by the British, he could do nothing.

Take Martin Luther King as righteous as he is; put him in the middle of Birmingham by himself speaking out against racism; he would be lynched.

but you take this same King, you take this same Washington; put them in Valley Forge put them in Alabama surround them with thousands of people who have the same ideas they do willing to make those ideas reality and the situation changes drastically.

Yes, that was my introduction to Ture. Oddly enough I wouldn't get around to reading Black Power a part of my reading list.

What made me respect Ture more than many people of his era was that I he took liberation seriously. I'm not going to put Ture on a pedestal but one has to respect a man who turns his back on material wealth that he most assuredly would have had had he compromised his principles. When the Portuguese attempted to invade Guinea Ture shows what he was about:

What I really wanted was to go join my unity, retrieve my weapon, get in the trenches, and defend the revolution.

Brother went from organizing in the American south and enduring police brutality to looking to fight for African independence. Not too many black folk from the diaspora can claim such a commitment. Ture prior to his work in the All African Peoples Revolution and cabinet member to Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Ture was a member of SNCC. It was during his tenure there that the issue of Black Power came up. In the recently released book Ready for Revolution Ture recounts what Black Power meant when the term was coined. I think this is instructive for those people who think they know what Black Power is about:

Our experience with the national press has been that where they have managed to escape a meretricious special interest in "Git Whitey" sensationalism and race-war-mongering, individual reporters and commentators have been conditioned by the enveloping racism of the society to the point where they are incapable even of objective observation and reporting of racial incidents, much less the analysis of ideas. But this limitation of vision and perceptions is an inevitable consequence of the dictatorship of definition, interpretation, and consciousness, along with the censorship of history that the society has inflicted upon the Negro--and upon himself.

Our concern for black power addresses itself directly to this problem, the necessity to reclaim our history and our identity from the cultural terrorism and depredation of self-justifying white guilt.

To do this we shall have to struggle for the right to create out own terms through which to define ourselves and our relationship to the society, and to have these terms recognized. This is the first necessity of a free people, and the first right that any oppressor must suspend. The white fathers of American racism knew this-instinctively it seems--as is indicated by the continuous record of the distortion and omission in their dealings with red and black men.

There have been traditionally two communities in America. The white community, which controlled and defined the forms that all institutions within the society would take, and the Negro community, which has been excluded from participation in the power decisions that shaped the society, and has traditionally been dependent upon, and subservient to, the white community.

This has not been accidental. The history of every institution of this society indicates that a major concern in the ordering and structuring of the society has been the maintaining of the Negro community in its condition of dependence and oppression, This has not been on the level of individual acts of discrimination between individual whites against individual Negroes, but as total acts by the white community against the Negro community. Institutional racism

For example, when unknown racists bomb a church and kill four children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city, Birmingham, Alabama, not five but five hundred Negro babies die each year because of a lack of proper food, shelter, and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally, and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and deprivation in the ghetto, that is a function of institutionalized racism. But the society either pretends it doesn't know of this situation, or is incapable of doing anything meaningful about it. And this resistance to doing anything meaningful about conditions in that ghetto comes from the fact that the ghetto is itself a product of a combination of forces and special interests in the white community.

It is more than a figure of speech to say that the Negro community in America is the victim of white imperialism and colonial exploitation. This s in practical economic and political terms true. There are over twenty million black people comprising ten percent of this nation. They for the most part live in well defined areas of the South, and increasingly in the slums of northern and western industrial cities, If one goes into any Negro community, whether it be Jackson, Mississippi, Cambridge, Maryland, or Harlem, New York, one will find that the same combination of political, economic, and social forces at work. The people in the Negro community do not control the resources of that community, its political decisions, its law enforcement, its housing standards; and even the physical ownership of the land, houses, and stores lie outside that community.

It is white power that makes the laws, and it is violent white power in the form of armed white cops that enforce those laws with guns and nightsticks. The vast majority of Negroes in this country live in these captive communities and must endure these conditions of oppression because, and only because, they are black and powerless.

...

According to the advocates of integration, social justice will be accomplished by "integrating the Negro in to the mainstream of the society from which he has been traditionally excluded." It is very significant that each time I have heard this formulation, it has been in terms of "the Negro," the individual Negro, rather than in terms of the community.

This concept of integration had to be based on the assumption that there was nothing of value in the Negro community and that little of value could be created among Negroes into the surrounding middle-class white community. Thus the goal of the movement for integration was simply to loosen up the restrictions barring the entry of certain Negroes into the white community..only a small select group of Negroes. Its goal was to make the white community accessible to "qualified" Negroes, and presumably each year a few more Negroes armed with their passports--a couple of university degrees--would escape into the middle class America and adopt the attitudes and lifestyles of that group; and one day the Harlems and the Wattses would stand empty, a tribute to the success of integration.

[Note: We would like to note that the concept outlined above has been proven to be prophetic as indeed that is exactly what has happened.]

This is simply neither realistic [note: well actually with the current gentrification of Harlem this is very realistic] nor particularly desirable. You can integrate communities but you assimilate individuals. Even if such a program were possible, its result would be, not to develop the black community as a functional and honorable segment of the total society, with its own cultural identity, life patterns, and institutions, but to abolish it--the final solution to the Negro problem. Marx said that the working class is the first class in history that ever wanted to abolish itself. If one listens to some of our "moderate" Negro leaders, it appears that the American Negro is the first race that ever wished to abolish itself. The fact is that what must be abolished is not the black community, but the dependent colonial status that has been inflicted upon it.

The single aspect of the black power program that has encountered most criticism is this concept of independent organization. This is presented as third-partyism, which has never worked, or a "withdrawal" into "black nationalism and isolationism." If such a program is developed it will not have the effect of isolating the Negro community but the reverse. When the Negro community is able to control local office and negotiate with other groups from a position of organized strength, the possibility of meaningful political alliances on specific issues will be increased.

Let me take the reader to the book Black Power by Ture and Hamilton where Ture addresses black politicians something Mr. Steele Mr Blackwell, and Mr. Swann ought to consider. While I'm at it I'll add that Mr. Charlie (Hugo Chavez has more balls than I) Rangel and John Conyers to the list since the latter will now find themselves in positions where they can exercise a little "black power":

it does not mean merely putting black faces into office. Black visibility is not Black Power. Most of the black politicians around the country today are not examples of Black Power. The power must be that of a community and emanate from there. The black politicians must stop being representatives of downtown machines (ahem! Mr. Conyers), whatever the cost might be in terms of lost patronage and holiday handouts...While we endorse the procedure of group solidarity and identity for the purpose of attaining certain goals in the body politic, this does not mean that black people should strive for the same kinds of rewards (i.e., end results) obtained by the white society. The ultimate values and goals are not domination or exploitation of other groups, but rather an effective share in the total power of the society.

...Racism is not merely the exclusion on the basis of race [note: Garvey's Ghost's position on racism is clear. I suggest the substitution of the term 'White supremacy" wherever one sees the term racism.] but exclusion for the purpose of subjugating or maintaining subjugation. The goal of the racists is to keep black people at the bottom, arbitrarily and dictatorially, as they have done in this country for over three hundred years. The goal of black self-determination and black self-identity--Black Power-- is full participation in the decision making processes affecting the lives of black people, and recognition of the virtues of themselves as Black people. The black people of this country have not lynched whites, bombed their churches, murdered their children and manipulated laws and institutions to maintain oppression....The goal of Black Power is positive and functional to a free and viable society. No white racist can make this claim.

So today we remember Kwame Ture and remember (or learn) about the incredible dedication this man had to all African people and the extensive personal sacrifices he made on our behalf.

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