Announcing the Pecan Grove Press first annual national short story competition. The deadline for the competition is May 30, 2012, and the winning collection will be published in summer, 2012. All PGP books will be perfect bound and professionally printed with full color covers.
Requirements:
Short story manuscripts should be between 125 and 150 pages.
The collection should work together as if they were paintings in an exhibition.
Individual stories within the manucript may have been published in literary magazines, but may not have been published together as a book.
A non-refundable entry fee of $15 must be included. If the manuscript is simultaneously submitted and subsequently wins another book competition or is accepted for publication by another press, the entry fee will not be refunded. An entry fee paypal button is provided on the left side for your convenience.
The writer must own the copyright to the short stories in the work or be able to secure permission to reprint any copyrighted work included.
The winning writer must be able to submit a copy of the manuscript in Word format as an attachment via our on line submission manager.
Note: Email submissions are not accepted. Please submit all submissions via our on line submission manager.
All our books, from Pecan Grove Press, are professionally printed with index stock covers. All our books are perfect bound. The writer with the winning book submission will receive $1000.00 plus 25 copies of the book. Additional copies may be purchased at 50% off list price.
While we recommend reading (and purchasing) a PGP chapbook and other short story collections, that is not a requirement. You can see a list of all our books by visiting our authors' page.
The Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS) calls for proposals for it 13th International Conference, which will take place on May 8-12, 2012, in Paramaribo, Suriname. The conference theme this year is “The Caribbean: Women’s Efforts, Women’s Lives.” The deadline for submissions is still January 31, 2012 (membership in ACWWS is a requirement for participation in the conference).
Description: The theme of the conference—Women’s Efforts, Women’s Lives—links the title to issues of gender, which is an utmost concern of the association. It also indicates the role of women as a fruitful one in building Caribbean communities. We can even take the theme literally as we think of the many women who worked (and still work) the Caribbean soil to grow food and other agricultural products to make a living. With all the active players on the field of literature in Suriname and the huge cultural variety, this conference aims to look at the new challenges in the writing and studying of creative writing in a kaleidoscopic way. The theme covers a broad range of subtopics on which participants can elaborate in their papers.
The organizers suggest the following subtopics: Tributes to women living in the Caribbean; literature and politics: the female voice; female struggle for freedom of speech / against oppression; history: the female indentured laborer; women in slavery; indigenous women during colonial times; future: visionary women; ethnic background: problem or opportunity; cross-cultural fertilization; female sexuality; mothers (in relation to son); daughters (and the absent father figure); female mythical characters in Caribbean literature; female economics (career building, survival strategies); publishing strategies in the Caribbean; critics’ review of Caribbean literature; modernizing oral tradition (techniques, genres, contents); geography (e.g. rainforest/island) as literary space; Caribbean writers in education; and mother tongues, the language of Empire as a barrier against creativity.
For papers/panels, please submit title, a 200-word abstract, and a short bio by January 31, 1012. All papers must represent new, previously unpublished work. Please include your full name, institutional affiliation, title, phone number and email address with your proposal. Performance artists are also encouraged to submit proposals for music, film and/or theatre presentations.
The organizers strongly encourage panel proposals. A panel proposal should include a detailed abstract for each paper, a designated chair, and a short statement as to why the submissions should be considered as a panel rather than as individual presentations.
Panelists discuss a recent report from Indiana University on how poverty is changing in America. Participants include Princeton professor Cornel West, TV host Suze Orman, filmmaker Michael Moore, and author Barbara Ehrenreich. Tavis Smiley moderates the discussion.
Mr. Smiley also hosts “The Tavis Smiley Show” on PBS and co-hosts “Smiley & West” on Public Radio International.
Yesterday evening i went to Foto8 in London again for the screening of How to Start a Revolution, a documentary tracing the global influence exercised by the work of Gene Sharp, the world leading expert in nonviolent struggle. Investigative journalist Ruaridh Arrow who directed the movie was there to introduce the film and later on to answer our questions. He was accompanied in the Q&A by Jamila Raqib. She's Sharp's close collaborator and the executive director at the Albert Einstein Institution, a non-profit organisation Sharp founded in 1983 to study strategic non-violent resistance.
Sharp believes that non-violent struggle has a greater chance of success than violent resistance, because violence is typically the most powerful weapon used tyrannical regimes and they will always have the upper hand. His booklet From Dictatorship to Democracy (which you can download as a PDF) provide a list of 198 "non-violent weapons", including mock awards, alternative communication system, wearing of symbols, pray-in, boycott of elections, withdrawal of bank deposits, consumers' boycott, renouncing honours, etc.
The book was first published in 1993 to support the opposition movement in Burma and was circulated among dissidents. Anyone seen carrying the book around was sentenced to seven-year prison terms by the regime. This kind of manual for toppling dictators has since inspired opponents of oppression in places as far apart as Thailand, Ukraine, Serbia, Estonia, Iran, China, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, and more recently in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Sharp's work which is committed to the defense of freedom, democracy, and the reduction of political violence doesn't always receive the praise one would think they deserve. Some regimes have accused him of being a CIA agent and the Albert Einstein Institution he founded struggles to find funding.
The film How to Start a Revolution uses extended interviews with Gene Sharp. Now in his mid-eighties, Sharp hardly ever leaves Boston where he runs the non-profit Albert Einstein Institution and dedicates his free time to orchids. There are also long contributions from his assistant Jamila Raqib, and from Robert Helvey, a retired US army colonel with whom Sharp worked in Burma and who has remained his ally since, training activists in various parts of the world to practice peaceful resistance. The film also includes testimony from key players in the Serbian revolution and activists involved in non-violent unrest in the Middle East.
How to Start a Revolution has been described as the unofficial film of the Occupy movement and was shown in Occupy camps in cities all over the world. In an Q&A with Aljazeera, Gene Sharp's reaction to the question What advice would you give to the Occupy movement? was the following:
I think they need to study how they can actually change the things they don't like, because simply sitting or staying in a certain place will not change or improve the economic or political system.
This is Ruaridh Arrow's first documentary and it has already received numerous awards. It's easy to understand why: we are in critical need to hear more about Sharp's thinking and the film traces the impact of his work with clarity. It's an energizing movie, it gives hope in a time when newspapers deride any attempt at optimism. However, the film isn't flawless. The music was a bit too emphatic, with trumpets and pathos to highlight the moments when tyranny hits the dirt. The images didn't need added drama. Neither did i need to witness anyone's parking skills at length. It would have been helpful to be able to read on the screen for more than 2 seconds the names of the interviewees. But these are minor grudges. I wish How to Start a Revolution was available online. Like Sharp's booklet, it should be distributed widely.
How to Start a Revolution film will be shown in the UK Houses of Parliament on 1 February. Check out the facebook page to read about upcoming screenings.
KSW reminds us of a struggle Nigerians have largely ignored or at best dismissed. The Nigerian media [pre social media] has to take major responsibility for the lack of information and analysis no doubt bullied as usual by military and pseudo military governments including Goodluck Jonathan’s. He reminds us of our right to stand up to oppressive leaders. He reminds of the misery oil has brought to people’s lives and how this has been ignored by multinationals and western governments. He reminds us of the existence of a ‘political cabal’ and an ‘oil cabal’. He reminds of our right to the fruits of our land and our resources and that we as people are part of an ecology system not outside of it.
We know that nothing has changed since this interview in 1995 except today we the people have the media in our hands. We can, if we choose and are prepared to make the effort and the sacrifice, do things differently so people do not have to feel they have no stake in this geospace called Nigeria and therefore have to chip a bit off and create their own space. The Niger Delta IS an Occupy Nigeria issue so far as it is part of Nigeria and so far as it is the source of all Nigeria’s income for the past 55 years. Oil is and has always been central to the Nigerian political economy and one cannot act and speak as if the source of that oil is not central to the oil equation.
There is no such thing as a “Niger Delta” issue that is not a Nigerian issue – to say so is to imply that the region is not part of the country and the people are not Nigerians. To do so is to disconnect the misery oil production has brought to millions of Nigerians from those who have benefited at their expense; from the benefit of free flowing oil including fuel subsidies; from political corruption, government waste, the terrible poverty in the north, south east and west and all the other social and economic ills we have faced as a nation.
This could be an opportunity for Nigerians to finally stand up and support the struggle of all Nigerians not just their own little corner and this works all ways. I hope people will have the imagination and vision to really move beyond the status quo. Because if petrol returns to N65 and political salaries are halved, fraudulent oil marketers are prosecuted but gas flaring and oil spills continue to destroy peoples lives, then we havent moved very far!
On Monday 9 January, the first day of the Nigerian nationwide indefinite strike, my fellow blogger, Emmanuel Iduma, wrote a post ‘See, The Nigerian Revolution Has Begun’. Emmanuel is a young man, a writer, modest and maybe a little shy. Sometimes there is hesitancy about his writing, as if he is not quite sure whether the stone he steps on will bear his weight or if his foot slips he will maintain his balance. But the important thing is, he never fails to take that step. ‘See, The Nigerian Revolution Has Began’ is an eloquent, assured statement of a young Nigerian at the point of a new beginning. Behind him lies years of scorn, thievery, greed, opportunism, political thuggery, untold violence, scammers, the occasional great football team and some of the world’s most innovative and accomplished musicians.
‘The revolution has begun. I am part of it. Do not be fooled that it begins and ends with placards, strikes, Twitter hashtags. I am certainly wiser than that. Yes, I will keep hashtagging, placarding, striking, until I am convinced that I have been de-stereotyped. Until I am convinced that I am not a matterless blur in the narrative of my country.’Yes, we can play football and we can make music and dance! But now we can also make revolutions, or can we? For me, well I am older, though not necessarily wiser, and most definitely less optimistic. It’s day nine of Nigeria’s uprising and the sheer energy, rapidness and velocity of hundreds of voices seconds apart on Twitter is exhausting. So reading anything that is at least one paragraph or more is sheer relief. I have noted two types of writing on the uprising. Those that stick to the superficial and easy summations repeated from similar commentary on Tunisia and Egypt and those that try to look deeper and raise questions relevant to the geopolitical entity called Nigeria. I am not a historian of revolutions, but since when were revolutions not predominantly acted by young people with a few elders thrown in for good measure? Hardly an original observation. My intention here is to attempt to provide a summary of what has taken place to date and to raise questions by bringing together some of the facts and analysis.The fuel subsidy is the spark that lit the fire but this was never simply about the fuel subsidy. The fuel subsidy is a vicious tax on Nigerians, the majority who are neither materially nor emotionally able to cope with this burden. The facts are Nigeria earns millions of dollars from the sale of crude oil. The oil is exported and then, because our refineries are in a constant state of disrepair, it is necessary for us to import refined petrol. A cabal of independent marketers has been given licenses to import this petrol. They lie, they cheat, they steal and for this they are subsidized and now we all have to pay the price of their actions. Added to this are the billions of dollars wasted and stolen by government officials and politicians leading a country for 50 years incapable of refining it’s own oil. Included in this wastage is the obscene personal expenditure of politicians who we learn do not even have to buy their own food! For a breakdown on the cost of maintaining political officers in 2010, $8.3 billion [against $7.4 billion allocated for capital projects of which only half was spent] see Sahara Reporters.Going into the fourth day, the strike remains steadfast and so far to everyone’s relief and possibly surprise, the labour movement has not capitulated despite rumours of the offer of huge bribes. In what I consider to be one of the most encouraging and significant acts of the uprising, the oil workers union PENGASSAN has declared their support for the indefinite strike and ordered all production platforms to be on alert for a complete shutdown, adding that:‘All Nigerians should please note that the fuel subsidy issue is only a tip of the iceberg amidst a plethora of issues needing urgent redress. ‘We hereby call on all Nigerians not to be weary, but keep faith in the collective will of the people to liberate us from this miss-rule.’One of the main narratives around the protest is ‘unity’. Nigerians of all religions and ethnicities coming together. We have been repeatedly shown a photo [favoured by the international media] of a group of Muslims praying protected in the rear by their Christian comrades. Although Abuja and Lagos have been the epicenters, protests have taken place, throughout the South West and in some of the major northern states - Kano, Kaduna, Bauchi and Niger State and to a much lesser extent in isolated parts of the Niger Delta. Nigeria is a militarised state and has been for most of its existence. Militarisation creates a culture of violence as a solution whether by the state or by citizens. With the government employing it's typical militarist response of ‘shoot on sight’ and some states declaring curfews, there is a real possibility of sustained violence. The next step will be for the government to declare a state of emergency across the country and use this as an excuse to deploy the army against Nigerian people. To date some 25 people have been killed by the police with hundreds injured, including in violent attacks by the police in Kano where Muslims and Christians had come together to protest. In Minna, Niger State protestors went on a rampage burning offices of the state governor and other buildings and one police officer has been killed. Stories are emerging of protestors being paid to support the government's position, others being paid by anti-government elites and or ex-politicians to protest against the government. Against the backdrop of the protests and unity in ethnicity and religion are a series of more sinister and potentially destructive events taking place. The increasingly bold presence of Boko Haram, who after the despicable bombing of churches on Christmas day continue to kill and injure with impunity. Following a New Year ultimatum for all Christians to leave the north within three days, at least 12 people have been killed by the group. Two other significant Boko Haram related events have taken place in the past week. The first was a statement by President Goodluck Jonathan that his government and security forces had been infiltrated by Boko Haram. The second, a video broadcast on the 10th January by the leader of the sect, Imam Abubakar Shekau, dressed in the usual terrorist gear, fatigues, and surrounded by weaponry. He proceeded with a rant against the President and Christians blaming them for all the ills befallen to Muslims - a strange thing to say as they have probably killed as many Muslims as Christians. According to an AP report, Shekau was said to ‘hint at having far more support than the authorities believe’.There has always been questions as to who Boko Haram really are and a belief that they do have support from some northern elite. If Jonathan’s statement is to be believed then it is within the realms of possibility to consider that the end game is to bring down his presidency. In short, a coup by any other name. Not necessarily a military coup but a coup nonetheless. However we cannot dismiss the fact that Jonathan chose the moment of an uprising to reveal this information. Is he trying to win sympathy or to warn us of more sinister possibilities? We know that northerners are leaving the southeast and southerners leaving the north. One cannot help but note the similarities to 1966/67 and the events which led to the civil war. Three esteemed Nigerian writers, Professor Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and J P Clarkissued a joint statement in which they warned Nigerians of the possibility of another civil war. In a BBC interview, Soyinka reiterated that scenario including a commentwhich supports Jonathan’s statement on Boko Haram infiltrators....‘There are people in power in certain parts of the country, leaders, who quite genuinely and authoritatively hate and cannot tolerate any religion outside their own.‘When you combine that with the ambitions of a number of people who believe they are divinely endowed to rule the country and who… believe that their religion is above whatever else binds the entire nation together, and somehow the power appears to slip from their hands, then they resort to the most extreme measures.’Another question that has yet to be answered satisfactorily is why there have been relatively few protests and strike actions, apart from in Warri and Sapele, in the Niger Delta and Igbo states. Although Jonathan is from Baylesa State, it’s not as if the Niger Deltans are any more supportive of the fuel subsidy removal than the rest of the country. As of Wednesday, Port Harcourt was still on strike although there had been no rallies since day one. In other parts of Rivers State, namely Ogoniland, there have been rallies in support of the strike. In Yenagoa, the Baylesa state capital, workers had tried to march on the first day but police managed to disrupt and eventually prevent any meaningful presence. In other parts of the East there has been relatively little protest or strike action. One explanation given for the lack of participation was provided by environmental activist, Fidelis Allen. Quoting a fellow Ogoni activist, he writes:‘Labour has been bought. They have compromised. As civil society in Rivers State we thought we could work with labour, but they have compromised in Rivers State. How can you be having a protest and you just sluggishly walk in? There is lack of seriousness. It is so glaring’. Cracks between the civil society and the Nigerian Labour Congress and the Trade Union Congress over strategies in current struggles against fuel price increase arising from the removal of oil subsidy are already being noticed. Lagos, Kaduna, Abuja and so on had huge a turn-out of protesters, but the same story cannot be told of Port Harcourt, Rivers State, where presently, the NLC and TUC are being accused of compromising.’To summarise, the feeling is that at least in Bayelsa and Rivers State, the NLC and TUC had been bought off by the state and federal governments. Allen also makes the point that removal of fuel subsidy is not the same as a rise in prices and that if handled differently (as I mentioned earlier) then maybe these actions would not have been necessary. Complicating the situation in the Niger Delta, the powerful and long established Ijaw Youth Council whose stronghold is in Bayelsa State has yet to make a formal statement on the removal of the fuel subsidy or the national strike. The IYC was formed in the town of Kaiama [Kaiama Delcaration] 1998 during Olusegun Obasanjo’s presidency in the post-Abacha period. It was a period of intense militarisation of the core Delta states which saw the destruction of Odi Town by the Nigerian Army, the ransacking of Kaiama and other attacks against civilians in Yenagoa, Warri, Isoko to name a few. The IYC action, however, conflicts with statements from other Delta youths such as The Niger Delta Youth Coalition who not only supported on strikes but threatened to disrupt oil production. ‘What we are saying is no to fuel subsidy removal. The reason why we are saying no to fuel subsidy is that Nigerians were not part of this decision. The economy is bad. We were paying N1,000.00 for transportation from Warri to our villages in the creek but now we are paying N10,000.00. You cannot say removal of fuel subsidy is to help the poor and it is the poor people that are suffering it...........We are giving President Jonathan a 24 hours ultimatum to reverse the pump price to N65 and failure to do so, we will go back to our communities and when we go back to our communities, we will ensure that all the oil installations in the creek are made not to work.’ Interestingly, one of the founding IYC members and director of Social Action Nigeria,Issac Osukoa expressed what he believed to be the disappointment and disgust Niger Deltans have for Jonathan. However, other activists I have spoken to recently have not been willing to be this critical.‘Many Nigerians believed that Goodluck Jonathan was a different breed from the backward cabal that has held Nigeria hostage for the better part of the last 51 years. They thought that because he is a native of the Niger Delta with very minimal historical ties to what was referred to as the Hausa-Fulani oligarchy, he represents a refreshing change from the past. They saw a meek-looking and educated man and felt that maybe he is the change that Nigeria needs. Well, Goodluck Jonathan has proven to Nigeria that he is not the change the country needs. In fact, Jonathan is the worst President that the ruling class has ever foisted on Nigeria.‘Exactly! The man has shown that he is clueless. He has shown that he lacks the capacity to address the very serious challenges confronting the country. And what is even worse is that he does not care. He does not care for the people of Nigeria. He does not care for the progress of Nigeria. He has the mentality of a Local Government caretaker committee chairman.’Another group which has so far failed to enter the equation are the ex-militants from the various branches of MEND and the NVF many of whom are closely aligned to President Jonathan, the state governors and influential oil marketers. The hierarchy within the militants is itself at odds with the rank and file, many of who feel abandoned and betrayed. Unable to return to their homes where they are either feared or seen as outcasts and unable to find jobs despite the training they have been given, they remain disillusioned young men and women. To summarise, what is becoming clear is that the Occupy Movement as it stands lacks any real socioeconomic or gender analysis (not surprising in what are essentially male spaces). There has been no discussion on the impact of massive rise in prices on women and children; the protests themselves in as much as what happens beyond gatherings and placards, there are issues such as sexism, homophobia and witch hunting of women and girls. It is not clear whether any women’s organisations are formally taking part in the protests or have representatives within the unions though a few prominent women have joined the protests and/or spoken out in support, but hardly a movement of women! Lesley Agams raised a number of these points on Twitter including the question as to whether women ‘involved are merely supporting a male agenda’.It is worth remembering that Nigeria has a rich history of protests. Much of that history has come from women and there is much to learn in terms of bringing together protest and education. Interestingly, it has been in the east where large groups of women are visibly protesting. Women in Enugu and Edo took separate but very different actions. The former by gathering to pray in a church and the latter, elderly Edo women bearing their breasts as a sign of protest.Nor has there been any discussion on the massive disparities between the rich and the poor. The new young aspiring upper class entrepreneurs, NGOs executives, celebrities and artistes have been at the forefront of organisng the Occupy Movement and the working and unemployed masses have joined together. In Lagos tensions are already beginning to appear between on the one hand local ‘area boys’, Lagosians and ‘their’ musicians and on the other, ‘Occupy’ protestors many from more affluent parts of the city. Will the elites of the movement be able to maintain control? What happens if the fuel subsidy decision is reversed, will they be able to move towards a more coherent debate around issues such as corruption, governance, social and economic justice and will social media activism be sufficient to make this happen?The question of unity is complex. I believe the majority of the country is behind not just the strikes but the Occupy Nigeria movement which seeks to seriously challenge the status quo and once and for all end the rule by kleptocracy. However there are other small but extremely powerful interest groups working for and against the government: Boko Haram and whoever is behind them; Jonathan and possibly some of the ex-Niger Delta militants; Senators and Governors who fear loss of their power and wealth; the trade union movement particularly the oil workers - how trustworthy are they? – the independent oil marketers or cabal. And of course there is the religious factor, the cozy relationship between an all-powerful state and a powerful highly influential set of religious institutions. Nigeria is about oil and nothing but oil. Let us not forget the multinational oil companies already facing huge losses and a complete shutdown of the sector has yet to happen. Finally at the end of this oil trajectory, the US and other importers of Nigerian crude? BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS.* Sokari Ekine blogs at Black Looks. * Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online atPambazuka News
Today marks the 25th annual Martin Luther King Day, commemorating the visionary whose work and legacy transcended borders of nationality, ethnicity and ideology to make one of the most important contributions to human rights in history. In 2004, PBS produced Citizen King — an extraordinary documentary that skirts the all-too-familiar stories of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and instead offers a rare glimpse of the last five years of MLK’s life through personal recollections and eyewitness accounts of friends, journalists, policemen, historians and cultural luminaries.
The series is now available on YouTube in 13 parts — or, for those keen on quality, on DVD.
My dear fellow Clergymen: I came across your recent statement calling our present activities ‘unwise and untimely.’ I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” ~ Letter from the Birmingham Jail, MLK, 1963
Catch the remaining parts here: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.
Finally, no celebration of MLK’s legacy is complete without his iconic I Have a Dream speech — catch it here in its full hair-raising glory:
The effigy of a black man, a son of Southern soil and descendant of slaves, now stands over the nation’s Mall among its founding fathers, notorious slave owner in front and the so-called Great Emancipator to his back. Looking out over the placid Tidal Basin with a steely-eyed reserve and chiseled determination, the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial, the first monument on the Mall dedicated to a man of color, has whipped up yet another tempest of protest. Besides the same types who did not and still do not commemorate the life of this influential Civil Rights leader on the third Monday of every January, other dissenters have noted that the veined, confrontational depictionof the Brother Preacher by the Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin does not evoke the round docility associated with the open-armed love of nonviolence. For them, the image goes against what they see as King’s true legacy, while others see the statute as an appropriate stance of well-grounded, stony defiance and pride.
Perhaps the best way to understand Martin is through his foil, the other Brother Minister, Malcolm X. As the chronicler of the black experience Manning Marable wrote in last year’s authoritative biography of Malcolm, “the leader most closely linked to Malcolm in life and death was, of course, King.” However, these two men were linked more by their perceived differences than they were known for their similarities. Malcolm was “widely admired as a man of uncompromising action, the polar opposite of the nonviolent, middle-class-oriented Negro leadership that had dominated the civil rights movement before him.” But if Malcolm was known for his action, Martin has been remembered for his results.
Despite their perceived divergence, Malcolm and Martin’s convergence is the essential condition for understanding the Black Freedom Movement and socio-political struggle in general, just as it was in the turbulent times when these two leaders were slain.
Though their constituencies were different – Martin’s southern, largely rural base standing in contrast to Malcolm’s Northern and Western urban industrial community – their desire to develop black dignity insured an ongoing dialogue, even if Martin used a language of Christian integration-based citizen rights and Malcolm championed an Islam-inflected black cultural nationalism. In 1954, at the time that Martin was finishing his PhD at Boston University, Malcolm was preaching for the Nation of Islam, and according to Marable they walked the streets of the same neighborhood. Yet they would not meet in person until March 26, 1964, walking the Senate Gallery after a conference King had with Senator Hubert Humphrey and Jacob Javits. That these two figures, who embodied two different currents of the Black Freedom movement, met only once is remarkable. In the ten years between these dates much had changed with both men. But their streams of black consciousness and political action continued to both diverge and converge.
Though Malcolm often decried the Uncle Tom Negro leadership of which Martin was conceivably a member, he would rarely call Martin out directly, sparing the young energetic leader his typically pointed barbs. He spoke highly of the Montgomery bus boycotts and the courage of people like Rosa Parks. King, on the other hand, often used Malcolm to make his ideological platform and political practice more palatable for whites. In response to a June 1962 comment Malcolm made about God answering his prayers to kill 121 whites in a Paris-Atlanta flight, King assured the white press “that the hatred expressed toward whites by Malcolm X [was not] shared by the vast majority of Negroes in the United States. While there is a great deal of legitimate discontent and righteous indignation in the Negro community, it has never developed into large-scale hatred of whites.”
In spite of Martin’s attempts at distancing, it is no simple task to place these men as opposing forces. Both were what we might call institutional men. Granted, the natures of the institutions were very different. King came up in the black church, Atlanta’s black bourgeoisie, defined by the Black intellectual network of the Atlanta University Center and organizations such as the NAACP, ultimately arriving at the elite institutions of Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University. Malcolm, on the other hand, came up against the backdrop of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, foster homes, the assembly line, and prison. Martin’s class position and Christian ideology positioned him in a conciliatory stance, whereas Malcolm, who shifted constantly between the working class and the lumpenproletariat, was prepared to separate from the entire system. Any discussion of these two men must start from this basic understanding. Martin had the material means and the social support to develop an entire intellectual program that he could start to execute at the age of 26, during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. To be sure, King’s leadership and theory continued to develop through his career, but he remained a traditional intellectual, built into the structure of the clergy. Malcolm was an organic intellectual. He had to forge an independent philosophy from a patchwork of street smarts, prison libraries, and undying curiosity. His theory was forged by the fires of practice.
Even with their differing points of departure, observers have often noted that the two leaders seemed to converge near the ends of their short lives. The post-Nation of Islam Malcolm made a path from separatism towards internationalism. Marable argues that the 1964 meeting “marked a transition for Malcolm, crystallizing as it did a movement away from the revolutionary rhetoric that defined ‘Message to the Grassroots’ toward something akin to what King had worked his entire adult life to achieve.” Shortly after the meeting, Malcolm’s “Ballot or the Bullet” speech stressed voting rights and black political solidarity, implicitly diminishing the potential role of violence.
Martin’s militant opposition to the triple evils of racism, militarism, and exploitation, as manifested in the Vietnam War, recalled Malcolm’s anti-colonial solidarity with Asia and Africa, a rejection of the Western paradigm:
I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.
What’s more, Martin, just as Malcolm, experienced extensive government surveillance. Documented in his FBI file, this surveillance reminds us that no matter how much the man is celebrated today, he was treated as a dangerous threat to national security during his life.
The obvious distinction between Martin and Malcolm almost does not need to be made. However, the nonviolence/violence dichotomy does not accurately depict the actual schools of thought in the struggle to achieve black subjectivity, nor does it allow for the type of evolution that we have already seen among the two thinker-activists. First, nonviolence does not imply that demonstrators are non-confrontational, or even the absence of violence. On the contrary, nonviolence is an aggressive passivity intended to incite a disproportionately violent response, exposing the morally bankrupt structure. This tactic – and many, including Martin, referred to it as a tactic – required an aggressive, courageous resistance. This method did not exclude the possibility of violence. As King himself wrote in 1958, “nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist…This is why Gandhi often said that if cowardice is the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight.”
Moreover, King’s early interventions did not exclude the protection of armed self-defense. In his recent Colored Cosmopolitianism, Nico Slate narrates a visit by a veteran civil rights activist: “when Bayard Rustin visited King’s home during the early days of the Montgomery boycott, he found armed guards on the porch and weapons scattered throughout the house.” It was not until much later in his career that nonviolence become an all-embracing philosophy for King. Even then, he admitted that for most black people, nonviolence would remain a tactic, at most.
Meanwhile, throughout the south, armed self-defense became a promising approach to combat ruthless and murderous racists, the kind that left Medger Evers assassinated and four little girls dead. Few figures were as influential as Robert F. Williams in advocating armed self-defense to achieve safety and dignity for Blacks in America. Having labored in Northern industry and served in the Army during World War II, Williams returned to his North Carolina home – trained, disciplined, and radicalized. He rose to a leadership role with the Union County chapter of the NAACP, a position from which started to insist on the need “to meet violence with violence.” In 1957, Williams started the Black Armed Guard, with a charter from the National Rifle Association. The group probably saved many lives when on October 5, James “Catfish” Cole led a Klan rally that ended with a raid on the black part of town. The war veterans fought off the motorcade from fortified positions in trenches and foxholes with small arms. The next day, Klan motorcades, which had sometimes been escorted by police, were banned by the City of Monroe. The 1961 Freedom Riders foray into Monroe was intended to show the advantage of nonviolence. But when thousands of rioting Klansmen showed no respect for philosophy, Williams and his Black Armed Guard were called on to protect the demonstrators. Here nonviolence and armed self-defense worked together in a dynamic dialectic. At his funeral, Rosa Parks said that she and others who marched with Martin in Montgomery admired Williams’ contribution to the struggle. As Slate puts it, “the ability of nonviolent activists to mobilize Black communities depended largely on the capacity of local Blacks to physically defend activists…Nonviolent tactics and armed self-defense worked together to channel white violence into less deadly and more politically useful situations.” Williams’ bookNegroes with Gunswould come to be influential for younger black political actors, such as Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton.
Robert and Mabel Williams target practicing in Cuba.
A few months after their only meeting, Malcolm sent a telegram to Martin, extending an offer to help protect the nonviolent protesters in Saint Augustine, Florida who had been attacked.“We have been witnessing with great concern the vicious attacks of the white races against our poor defenseless people there in St. Augustine,” Malcolm wrote. “If the Federal Government will not send troops to your aid, just say the word and we will immediately dispatch some of our brothers there to organize self defense units among our people and the Ku Klux Klan will then receive a taste of its own medicine. The day of turning the other cheek to those brute beasts is over.”
Defensive violence, however, was not the only type of violence that militants in the Black Freedom Movement considered. Contemporary developments in China, Cuba, and Algeria seemed to make a convincing argument for an offensive armed revolutionary struggle. Even after his disillusionment with the Communist Party, Harold Cruse was forced to contemplate “the relevance of force and violence to successful revolutions” after visiting Cuba in June of 1960. “The ideology of a new revolutionary wave in the world at large,” he recalled, “had lifted us out of anonymity of lonely struggle in the United States to the glorified rank of visiting dignitaries.” Cruse asked, “what did it all mean and how did it relate to the Negro in America?” Marable’s biography of Malcolm shows that near the end of his life, with his connection to people like Max Stanford and the Revolutionary Action Movement, he anticipated the development of a revolutionary underground that would emerge later in the decade and in the 1970s.
If Martin and Malcolm’s divergence can be explored through their evolving stances on the use of violence, their convergence may be best assessed by stances along the axis of transgression. The Italian workerist Ferruccio Gambino‘s 1993 essay, which recasts Malcolm’s life and legacy as a transgression of the logic of the state, captures this relationship:
Malcolm X – the laborer, the convict, and the minister of the Nation of Islam – had seen too many and too well the least-lit corridors of the state to avoid a collision with it. In this respect, his path was similar to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s. The young desegregationist minister of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had seen so many black people suffer indignities during his early campaign in the South that he could only relate these to the cheapness of living labor there. Indeed, as early as 1957 he had said, “I realize that the law cannot make an employer love me or have compassion for me.” As King too began to walk away from the role the state had expected of him, he headed toward assassination while supporting a strike by black laborers in Memphis, Tennessee.
The transgressions of the entire Black Freedom Movement, though they have since been validated and subsumed into the narrative of liberal democracy’s ability to accommodate, encompass nonviolent conformist activities just as much as militant direct action, each equally criminal. The most potent transgression is the rejection of the state’s “gods,” its symbolic embodiments of power. Islam forced Malcolm “to occupy the double political space of ‘the immigrant,’” as Gambino argues, a “self-location” which “violated the written and unwritten codes of legitimate political behavior.”
Malcolm’s Islam was a symbolic and spiritual orientation to an Afro-Asiatic anti-colonial internationalism that struck a claim on politics outside the state’s monopoly of legitimate power. His transgressions, mental, criminal, and spiritual, are widely understood. But against Martin’s easy incorporation, we should remember that he, too, transgressed. It is true that the familiar and domestic language of Christianity of Martin made him acceptable to many Americans. However, couched in that language was the vernacular of a long tradition manifested in black liberation theology that signified on the master’s religion, developing a sometimes dormant, sometimes active opposition to white power. It is a lineage emerging from people like Richard Allen, who started the African Methodist Episcopalian Church in 1816 to create autonomy for black congregations. There are the likes of Henry McNeal Turner, an early “back to Africa” advocate and missionary who once said that “Hell is an improvement upon the United States where the Negro is concerned.” Turner’s own theology understood the symbolic power of the state’s gods:
Every race of people who have attempted to describe their God by words, or by paintings, or by carvings, or any other form or figure, have conveyed the idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves, and why should not the Negro believe that he resembles God as much as other people?
More direct influences on King can be found in the likes of Howard Thurman and Benjamin Mays. The two had visited Gandhi in India and worked towards establishing functional solidarities with South Asians during their struggle against the British Empire in the 1930s. Importantly, Thurman and Mays contributed to a theology that sought to isolate the religion of Jesus from its imperial uses.
Thurman, a classmate of Martin’s father and a mentor while Martin was at Boston University, and Mays, Martin’s mentor at Morehouse College, helped Martin to develop a transgressive philosophy. As Nico Slate writes, Martin was almost immediately hailed as the Montgomery Mahatma after beginning the boycott: “King’s connection to Gandhi strengthened his appeal to both blacks and whites. Gandhi represented courage, civil disobedience, and the rising colored world to many blacks while symbolizing non-threatening nonviolence to whites.” Slate argues that this double space of meaning did not prevent Martin from identifying race as only one variable in the equation of oppression. As King wrote of his visit “to the land of Gandhi” in Ebony magazine, “the bourgeoisie – white, black or brown – behaves about the same the world over.”
Today the legacies of both Martin and Malcolm benefit from an official acknowledgement of their contributions to the Black Freedom movement. This is largely because, as Gambino writes, “the attitudes of ethnic leadership towards the state are shaped over a long period of time, often being the result of continuous readjustments over many generations.” That there is such a grand official salute to Martin reflects that the state “often believes it can redress past wrongs with reforms that are supposed to have the effect of ‘cooling off’ both ethnic leadership and the people as a whole,” and that “the state’s late discovery of a collective symbolic reality one shade removed from its official gods has often ended in a redefinition of the state and its pantheon, or in the demise of both.” That Martin’s legacy today appears to tower over so many others indicates just how well he occupied the double space of meaning while acting for dignity and freedom. Now our task is to refuse the state’s gods and reach into our past, to recover the possibilities for future transgression.
Wendell Hassan Marsh is a graduate student at Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. He has written for Reuters, The Root, AllAfrica.com, and The Harvard Journal of African American Policy.
Big thanks to our friends over at Funk It who just posted a pro-shot video of The Roots’ entire performance from last year’s Lowlands Festival. The show took place in August on a brief European tour right after bassist Owen Biddle left the group. Mark Kelley hadn’t become a member of The Roots yet, but Tuba Gooding Jr. stepped up the low nicely, filling in with his sousaphone. Full video from the European TV broadcast can be streamed below, and you can download the audio as well.
Intro > How I Got Over > Here I Come > Mellow My Man:
Mellow My Man (continued) > Drums > Mellow My Man > Jusufckwithis > Fantastic > You Got Me Intro:
You Got Me > Sweet Child O’ Mine > Bad To The Bone > You Got Me > Immigrant Song / Monster:
Immigrant Song / Monster (continued) > Get Busy > Jungle Boogie > The Next Movement > The Seed:
To this day, I still attest that the jam sessions The Roots held for 32 weeks at Highline Ballroom in NYC were the best string of concerts the band has done in their entire career. For further proof, here’s our exclusive audio recording of The Roots jammin and tearing through incredible renditions of Table of Contents and 75 Bars, with some help from Vernon Reid (from Living Colour), Truck North and Yoshi Takemasa (from Antibalas). We’ve also embedded some great footage below of the performance courtest of Okayplayer and Noisemaker Media.
Tiny Lights invites entries that feature a distinctive voice, discernible conflict and an eventual shift in the narrator's perspective. We are looking for writers who weave the struggle to understand into the fabric of their essays.
This year, we offer 5 prizes in the "Standard" category and 3 "Flashpoint" prizes.
We can only consider unpublished work, or previously published material for which the author holds rights. Rights revert to author after publication in the hard copy edition of Tiny Lights.
Each essay must be accompanied by an entry fee: $15 for first essay, $10 each additional essay. Make checks payable to:
Tiny Lights Publications. Mail to: P.O. Box 928, Petaluma, CA 94953.
SASE (self-addressed, stamped envelope) recommended for feedback/contest notification. One envelope for multiple submissions OK.
Essays may be submitted in one of two categories:
STANDARD (no longer than 2,000 words) or
FLASHPOINT (no more than 1,000 words)
Please indicate preferred category on ms.
Entries should be typed and double-spaced.
Cover letters are optional, but ideally the title page of the manuscript should include author's name, complete address, e-mail, phone number, and essay word count. Essay title and page number in header or footer OK. Author name should not appear there.
Personal essay requires writers to communicate the truth of their experiences to the best of their abilities. While no theme restrictions apply to this contest, we will not consider essays that celebrate brutality or gratuitous violence. Tiny Lights does not accept poetry, short stories, or material written for children. Entry fees for inappropriate submissions may not be returned.
Entries must be postmarked by February 17, 2012.
Prizes will be awarded as follows:
First Place: $350
Second Place: $250
Third Place: $150
Two Honorable Mention Prizes: $100 each.
Three FLASHPOINT prizes of $100 are also offered. Awards will be determined by a panel of judges. Final authority rests with the Editor-in-Chief, Susan Bono.
Winning essays are subject to editing before publication. Final copy must be approved by writer. No essays will be published in hard copy or online publications without author's permission.
All contestants will receive a hard copy of Tiny Lights' contest publication featuring the winning entries.
A few words about hard copy submissions: I know it's old-fashioned, cumbersome and expensive for you to send us your entries via snail mail. Someday, I'm going to have to invest in the software that allows us to manage electronic submissions. But until we learn to enjoy scrolling through hundreds of essays on computer screens, you'll just have to put up with us sprawling on couches and beds, sitting at the kitchen table or in a sunny window or a rocking chair or a dentist's waiting room, reading every single word you send us. We're old-fashioned enough to believe that's important.
One way to save $$ on postage is to submit your entries in a 6" x 9" envelope, which allows it to be sent at letter rates. A 2,000 word essay folded in half with entry fee and SASE should not exceed the U.S. Postal Service's ¼" thickness limit, and costs about half of what the same material sent in a larger envelope does. (Do NOT expect a 6 ½" x 9 ½" envelope to get the same treatment!) Tiny Lights can live with the fold down the middle at those rates! While we're on the subject, please avoid business letter-sized envelopes for entries. Thrice-folded manuscripts are bad news. (Just imagine more than 4 of them open in a pile and you'll start to see what I mean.)
Here's why we recommend a SASE with a single "Forever" stamp (or letter stamp of your choice): By the time the winners are decided, the judges have formed some impressions of your work, even if it didn't place. It only takes a moment to jot these thoughts down, and if we have a SASE, we will send them to you, along with a nice rejection letter. Oftentimes, we will use the first page or two of your essay for this feedback, which can actually help remind you months later where your essay has been. (Of course, you keep meticulous records of where you submit, don't you?) There's no need to include postage for the entire manuscript's return, since you have other copies in your computer.
Speaking of returns, I have a weird confession. Crazy as it sounds, if you have entered our contests before and haven't gotten your SASE back, I probably liked your essay too much. At the end of every contest there are losing entries that are so good, I want to write the authors personally. But whenever I think about doing it, I feel guilty, because I have no real explanation for not choosing them, except someone has to lose, and then I get busy, and 8 months or a year later, I'm ashamed to see these manuscripts still in my office, so I hide them until they are so old I figure everyone's moved on and I can throw them away. Don't think for a minute I'm proud of this behavior. I'm telling you because it's just more proof that you never know what an editor really thinks about your work. So don't be unduly influenced by anything they do.
