This is a poem that I read years ago in an anthology edited by Langston Hughes titled “New Negro Poets, U.S.A.” published in 1964. I think that it applies to this historical moment. It’s also a reminder that black people have ALWAYS borne the brunt of government surveillance in America.

Award by Ray Durem (1915-1963)

A Gold Watch to the FBI Man who has followed me for 25 years.

Well, old spy
looks like I
led you down some pretty blind alleys,
took you on several trips to Mexico,
fishing in the high Sierras,
jazz at the Philharmonic.
You’ve watched me all your life,
I’ve clothed your wife,
put your two sons through college.
what good has it done?
the sun keeps rising every morning.
ever see me buy an Assistant President?
or close a school?
or lend money to Trujillo?
ever catch me rigging airplane prices?
I bought some after-hours whiskey in L.A.
but the Chief got his pay.
I ain’t killed no Koreans
or fourteen-year-old boys in Mississippi.
neither did I bomb Guatemala,
or lend guns to shoot Algerians.
I admit I took a Negro child
to a white rest room in Texas,
but she was my daughter, only three,
who had to pee.

This weekend, I bought a first edition copy of a book titled “The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot” by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations. The book published in 1922 is a very comprehensive review of the events that led up to Chicago’s “Red Summer” riots.

In reading the chapter on crime and the Negro in Chicago, I came across this paragraph:

“In its inquiry the Commission met the following current beliefs among whites in regard to the Negro criminal:

That the Negro is more prone than the white to commit sex crimes, particularly rape; that he commits a disproportionate number of crimes involving felonious cuttings and slashings; that the recent migrant from the South is more likely to offend than the Negro who has resided longer in the North; and that Negroes willingly tolerate vice and vicious conditions in the midst of their residence districts.”

This was written in the early 1920s but one could hear similar sentiments being expressed in 2013…

This week, I spent an inordinate amount of my time giving talks that focused on violence in the lives of youth. I’ve adapted one of the talks I gave to publish here.

You might be forgiven if you thought that interpersonal violence (particularly homicides) among youth in Chicago was at an all time high rather than at one of its lowest levels in 20 years. The headlines blare that Chicago is a “war zone.” We are told that we are living in “Chiraq, Chiganistan, Terror city,” take your pick. Our frame is all war, all of the time.

In fact, a friend posted a photo of a poster that he saw in the South Loop (a fully gentrified community) just a few days ago advertising an art exhibition sponsored by Home Depot titled “Finding the Lost Childhoods of Chiraq” where the organizers label our children “child soldiers.”

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This week is the National Week of Action against School Pushout and my organization has been actively involved.

We co-organized, along with our comrades at the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance and the Chicago Freedom School, a wonderful event that took place on Monday evening. The event “Stand Up/Speak Out About School Pushout: A Youth Panel & Town Hall” drew an intergenerational packed house.

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I watched the excellent documentary “The Trials of Muhammad Ali” by director Bill Siegel a few weeks ago. When it comes to a theatre in your town or city, I highly recommend that you see it. Dave Zirin wrote a very good review of the film in the Nation Magazine. You should read it for a synopsis of the documentary.

I’d like to address some larger issues that were raised for me as I watched the film. The documentary is mostly about young Ali. He is beautiful. His sense of humor and genial personality come across very clearly. The film covers new ground as it delves into Ali’s relationship with the Nation of Islam (NOI) and his court trials for refusing to join the military when he was drafted.

It’s easy to understand the appeal of the NOI to someone like Ali. The overt expression of racial pride evident in Black Muslim ideology and teachings was surely a draw. At a time when Black was not yet beautiful to find a community that affirmed your humanity and worth would have been and still is enticing. The emphasis on self-discipline and self-determination might have been an attraction as well for Ali, the athlete. Most importantly perhaps was Malcolm X who was the embodiment of confident black manhood for so many. So often, marginalized people are expected to define ourselves through negation. In other words, we are NOT lazy, we are NOT criminal. It’s much more difficult to self-define through a positive affirmation of our qualities. We ARE loving, we ARE resilient, we ARE human. Malcolm was a master at self-definition through positive affirmation and for this he was loved & respected.

As a black person watching the film and hearing Ali call out the people who he saw as his oppressors, I could feel pride and satisfaction at his truth-telling. Yet, I have to admit to wondering what white people watching the film are appreciating about the man. How are they able to absorb and reconcile his confident, unapologetic blackness? In America, blackness is usually punished and contained. As someone on Twitter with the handle @freshestmhizha mentioned, “Black culture is popular, black people are not.” So it can’t be Ali’s embodied blackness that white people are celebrating. What is it then?

The Ali of today is feeble and ill with Parkinson’s disease. There have been several false reports of his impending or actual death. In other words, Ali is not a threat to white supremacy anymore. This no doubt makes it easier for white audiences to countenance and ultimately to forgive Ali’s blackness. After all, they are aware that they are watching history from a safe distance.

When Ali was in his prime, he was clearly considered as a threat by the U.S. government (his FBI file will likely confirm this posthumously). He came to public attention in the 60s during a time when there was real fear within the government of a domestic black insurgency. Ali had to be neutralized and the government found its mechanism when he refused to serve in Vietnam saying that it was against his religious beliefs to participate in a war. Ali’s thoughts on his conscientious objection to military service are encapsulated in the following words (some of which we get to see and hear him speak in archival footage in the film):

“I ain’t draft dodging. I ain’t burning no flag. I ain’t running to Canada. I’m staying right here. You want to send me to jail? Fine, you go right ahead. I’ve been in jail for 400 years. I could be there for 4 or 5 more, but I ain’t going no 10,000 miles to help murder and kill other poor people. If I want to die, I’ll die right here, right now, fightin’ you, if I want to die. You my enemy, not no Chinese, no Vietcong, no Japanese. You my opposer when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice. You my opposer when I want equality. Want me to go somewhere and fight for you? You won’t even stand up for me right here in America, for my rights and my religious beliefs. You won’t even stand up for my right here at home. “

Upon refusing to be drafted, Ali transforms from an admired athlete to a convicted felon. Like Jack Johnson decades earlier, he is “unforgivably black.” He is stripped of his heavyweight titles and ends up penniless. In order to support himself and his family, he has to embark on a series of speeches at colleges across the country. When he finally “wins” the right to return to boxing, it’s based on a legal technicality by the U.S. Supreme Court. He is never officially “vindicated” in his decision to refuse to fight in Vietnam. The film underscores the roles available to black men in the 60s. They could be athletes, soldiers, or felons.

When the documentary officially opens in Chicago, I will invite some young black men to see it with me. I am curious about who they will “see” when they watch a larger-than-life Ali filling the screen. Will they see themselves in his brashness or not? Will they be more likely to identify with Jackie Robinson who appears in the film to denounce Ali’s decision against serving in Vietnam? Will they too be struck by Ali’s unapologetic blackness or will they see something else?

I am curious.

Stay tuned…

I am very excited to say that today marks the official kickoff of the #31forMARISSA campaign.

The wonderful writer Darnell L Moore submitted a poignant letter that begins:

Dear Marissa,

It was a cold and dark Christmas Eve—sometime in the mid 80’s. My mom, my three sisters, and I lived in a small, but comfortable, house on Maryland Street in Camden, NJ. We smiled a lot. According to the pictures I recently stole from mom, my sisters and I donned big smiles and tight ass corduroys. What’s interesting to me some twenty-plus years later, however, is the hard fact that I cannot remember my smile, I cannot reach back and grasp the joy I possessed, because on many days—not unlike the particular Christmas Eve that I am recalling right now—I watched in horror and fear as my father used his heavy hands or feet or words to brutally attack my mother.What was he thinking or not thinking? What was he feeling or desiring to feel that would make him harm the woman who loved him?

A child should not have to help his mom wrap the many gifts that she purchased on her minimum wage income, write dad’s name on the gifts per her instruction, watch dad walk in the house with one of his peeps after he had been gone all day and week, bear witness to an argument that he started because she—according to him—purchased too many gifts, and then witness his dad beat the woman who cared enough to make him legible despite his absence. It was Christmas Eve, Marissa! There were no sounds of sleighs, jingle bells, carols, and laughter. None. Fist hitting mom’s face. Hair being pulled. Mom’s body being tossed…were dad’s gifts to us. And I cannot forget that evening even if I tried. I also cannot forget the brother that was with him, who watched and did nothing.

Read the rest of the letter here. We welcome more support from men everywhere.

I had initially thought to collect letters from black women to Marissa Alexander to post in October for Domestic Violence Awareness Month. I asked several amazing black women to contribute before the project eventually shifted focus to became #31forMARISSA, a campaign to engage men in addressing domestic violence and supporting Marissa.

In the meantime, the wonderful T.F. Charlton aka Grace was kind enough to write a letter to Marissa. I am really happy to share it with you today. It feels like the perfect kick off. You can read Grace’s work here among other places on the interwebs and in print.

Dear Marissa,

I read that you’ll be getting a new trial. That a court ruled that the jury that convicted you in 13 minutes received the wrong instructions. I was, like many, cautiously optimistic to hear this news. I can’t help but worry about the next jury, about whether they will really see you. About how they will weigh the letter of laws designed to erase you against your humanity.

I keep thinking about how perverse it is that the law that required you to be sentenced to two decades in prison was the doing of a white man who calls himself pro-life. How could a law that declares “use a gun and you’re done” – put away for 10 years, 20 years, the rest of a lifetime – be “pro-life?” Pro whose lives? Where were such defenders of life when your husband attacked you when you were five months pregnant? Where were they when you feared for your life days after giving birth?

The woman who prosecuted you and failed to successfully prosecute Trayvon’s murderer called the outcry about your incarceration a sign that “social media is going to be the destruction of the country.” As though your working to preserve your life – and the affirmation of so many people around the country that your life is worth preserving, you were worth defending – is destruction.

Far as I see it the only one who was pro-life for you, Marissa, for your children, was you. That you were incarcerated for defending your and your children’s right to life is heartbreaking, obscene evidence of the reality that mere survival as a Black woman and mother in this world is a radical act.

I am glad you are alive. You are worth defending. You are worth protecting. You deserve a whole and safe life. I fervently hope the jury sees this, sees you, and that you will be holding your babies again before too long.

In love and solidarity,
Grace

Below are actions that the Free Marissa Now! coalition has requested occur for the next 16 days. The goal is dissuade Angela Corey from retrying the case.

YOUR URGENT ACTION NEEDED — DEMAND THAT FLORIDA OFFICIALS DROP THE CASE AGAINST MARISSA ALEXANDER

We are asking that you call, write letters (snail mail), fax AND email State Attorney Angela Corey, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and Florida Governor Rick Scott to demand that they drop the case against Marissa Alexander now.

If each of us sends at least one letter & makes at least one phone call & sends one fax & sends one email, the outpouring will be significant. Do not allow Marissa, a domestic violence survivor and mother, to be subjected to another trial. She has already served three years.

Here is preliminary information about how to contact these officials. Please take action now and start spreading the word now!

Office of Attorney General Pam Bondi
State of Florida
The Capitol PL-01
Tallahassee, FL 32399-1050
Phone: 850-414-3300
Email here

Angela Corey, State Attorney
4th Judicial Circuit
Jacksonville Office
1300 Riverplace Blvd., Suite 405
Jacksonville, FL 32207
(904)348-2720
(904)630-2400
Fax (904)348-2783

Office of Governor Rick Scott
State of Florida
The Capitol
400 S. Monroe St.
Tallahassee, FL 32399-0001
(850) 717-9337
Email here

Drop the Charges – FREE MARISSA

They used to advertise…