Angela DAVIS: Actually we've had a black bourgeoisie or the makings of a
black bourgeoisie for many more decades if we look at one of our great
leaders, W.E.B. Du Bois, he was associated with a very minuscule black
bourgeoisie in the 19th century so this is not something that is
substantively new although the numbers of black people who now count
themselves among the black bourgeoisie certainly does make an enormous
difference.
In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the US has
always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent
that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable. What I think is
different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle
class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished
than ever before.
*
WL: To Angela Davis, my tender experience . . . These words are forever
carved in my memory as they were written by George Jackson, the most famous of
the Soledad Brothers and were written as part of his book, Prison Letters of
George Jackson.
I remember the night George was murdered, what I was doing and who I was
with. I remember the incredible sorry.
If I leave here alive, I'll leave nothing behind. They'll never count me
among the broken men ... but I can't say I'm normal either.
George words linger in my mind . . . Nay, are pressed into the interior of
brain convolutions. Angela was his tender experience and meaningful connection
with the outside world. Angela was on her way to becoming an authentic
iconoclast. She remains to this day my wife hero and symbol of all that is
truly
human, woman and revolutionary.
My mind drifts . . . It was 1971, when we sent Ken Crockrel to the West Coast
to made a bid to and for Angela Davis to entrust her defense to an all
African American United Front, under our political leadership and with our
attorney's, headed by Ken. Ken had about the most impressive credentials of an
attorney
in America and our concerted assault on the legal system in Michigan and
Detroit reverberated throughout America. We had redefined the meaning of a
jury
of ones peers to not simply included blacks but class as a material attribute.
Who but us demanded that juries be taken to the actual factories and
industrial prison-production combines where the industrial slaves of capital
rendered
their daily toil?
Angela refused our services and there was no hard feelings. Towards Angela .
. . with her pretty ass. Everyone already understood she was amongst the most
serious of revolutionaries, having a European slant towards Marxism, but she
was the kind of women I would have most certainly joined the CPUSA to be
close to or associated with. Her European slants means she studied in Europe,
rather than a racial concept of the abstraction called white.
We were the extreme class polarity within the African American People's
Movement and everyone understood that. The League of Revolutionary Black
Workers
meant exactly that. We were a federation rather than a Leninist form of
organization with an uneasy alignment of the most diverse forces possible in
American
society, riveted to a Marxist-communist core. While one sector of the League
screamed bloody murder against white journalism and declared Marx a honkie
advocating pro-let-Aryan dreams alongside those studying Marx, Engels, Lenin,
Stalin of course and Leon Trotsky, another sector advocating Marxism wanted to
convert the League into a parliamentary organization to fuel a political
projection to win the upcoming mayoral race.
Those of us in the League and around the league held the Black Panther Party
in political contempt and basically considered Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P.
Newton political fools, whose antics would lead to the need less death of young
militants. Our attitude was recorded in the book Detroit I Do Mind Dying -
written at the time the events above were actually occurring.
My narratives are not a revision of history and can be independently verified
and authenticated. In Detroit we actually formed the local chapter of the
Black Panther Party, placing John Williams and Cassandra Smith in the key
leadership positions. Given the publicity and attraction of the Panthers
promoted by
the media, we placed two panthers at the top of the South End newspaper once
we took control of it and then proceeded to impart a form of Marxism - as we
understood it, to our coverage of events in the community and throughout the
world. We also demanded no Black jackets and talk about a lumpen proletariat
being the vanguard of revolution in America.
Nor did we have any intentions of creating one massive solidarity
organization. Even back then we were not anti-Stalin and clearly different from
everyone
on the left. We were not hostile towards the CPUSA or the SWP but considered
the former to be a mirror of a previous period of the working class movement
and
