In Memorium: Michael Cetewayo Tabor, Dec 13 1946 - Oct 17, 2010
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Deoliver47
I got a phone call from Kathleen Cleaver early Sunday morning to let me know that Michael Cetewayo Tabor had died in Lusaka, Zambia, after a long illness.
"Cet" as he was called by those of us who knew him, was a leader of the New York Black Panther Party in the late 1960's and early 70's, and one of the members of the New York Panther 21. He was best known as the author of a widely distributed pamphlet, Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide, which he wrote while being held prisoner on trumped up charges of conspiracy in one of the ongoing moves by police and government forces to silence and destroy the Black Panther Party and much of the left in the United States under the aegis of a program called COINTELPRO.
Many of you are too young to actually remember much about the Black Panther Party, other than having seen images of Panther's in history books or in documentaries of the 60's and early 70's. Each year, the numbers of former Panther's slims as those who were there as active members die, and become simply historical footnotes to a time of strife and protest. Some of you confuse the current bogus group using our name illegally with real Panthers.
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense played an important role in pushing those in leadership in the mainstream civil rights movement to more progressive positions, and spoke out as a voice for poor and everyday working people in our communities across America.
Cet was born in Harlem in 1946. Like many other young black men growing up during the 50's and 60's he hung out in the streets, sang do-wops in a local group, and fell prey to addiction to heroin, which he describes as "a plague".
He wrote:
Recently in the Black colony of Harlem a 12 year old Black boy was murdered by an overdose of heroin. Less than two weeks later a 15 year old Black girl met the same tragic fate. During the year 1969 in New York City alone there were over 900 deaths resulting from drug addiction. Of these 210 were youths ranging in age from 12 to 19. Of the over 900 dead, the overwhelming majority were Black and Puerto Rican. It is estimated that there are at least 25,000 youths addicted to narcotics in New York City - and that is a conservative estimate.
Drug addiction in the colonized ghettos of America has constituted a major problem for over 15 years. Its use is so widespread that it can - without fear of exaggeration - be termed a "plague". It has reached epidemic proportions, and it is still growing. But it has only been within the last few years that the racist US government has considered drug addiction "a matter of grave concern". It is interesting to note that this growing concern on the part of the government is proportionate to the spread of the plague into the inner sanctums of the White middle and upper-class communities. As long as the plague was confined to the ghetto, the government did not see fit to deem it a problem. But as soon as college professors, demagogic politicians, money-crazed finance capitalists and industrialists discovered that their own sons and daughters had fallen victim to the plague, a virtual "state of national emergency" was declared. This is significant, for it provides us with a clue to the understanding of the plague as it relates to Black people.
But unlike many others who died from that infestation in our neighborhoods Cet kicked his habit, and became a fighter for justice, rising swiftly in the ranks, to become a leading member of a newly formed Panther chapter in NY.
Cet was a brilliant and persuasive speaker, a good leader and beloved in the community. Tall, dark, with high cheekbones and an intense gaze, and deep baritone voice he was also gentle and compassionate. What I liked about Cet was his willingness to listen to the sisters in the Party, to involve them in leadership, and respect their perspectives.
In 1969 everything changed. Former Newsday columnist Murray Kempton describes the impact of that change in his book The Briar Patch
On April 2, 1969, New York City policemen rounded up members of the Black Panther party. Thirteen of 21 suspects were then charged and tried for attempted arson, attempted murder, and conspiracies to blow up various police stations, school buildings, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens.
Imagine that. Panthers were going to blowup flowers.
Originally published nearly 25 years ago, The Briar Patch is the account of the arrest of 18 members of the Black Panther Party in April 1969 and the subsequent trial of 13 of them. (Indictments were originally returned against 21 Panthers--hence the subtitle of the book--but not all went to court.) The Panthers were charged with conspiracy to kill several police officers and to destroy a number of buildings, including four police stations, five department stores, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens. All were held on $100,000 bail, even though several white radicals arrested later for bombings that had actually been committed were released on far less bail. The march through the justice system took about two years, but all of the defendants were finally acquitted. In prose both wry and magisterial, Murray Kempton, a columnist for Newsday before his death, shows the fallacies (and racism) inherent in the government's case. One sample: much of the case was based on the testimony of an informer who had been diagnosed by several psychiatrists as a pathological liar and a paranoid schizophrenic.
Members of the Panther 21 tell their own stories in Look for me in the Whirlwind
After hundreds of protests, and community efforts to raise the stupendous amounts of bail monies levied against the 21, several of the incarcerated Panthers were finally freed during the long trial.
Among them were Afeni Shakur (mother of Tupac), Jamal Joseph (academy award nominee) and Richard "Dhoruba" Moore, now Dhoruba Bin Wahad, whose story is documented in a documentary film "Passin' It On - The Black Panthers' Search for Justice" (clip below)
During the trial, several Panthers who were out on bail were forced to jump bail, flee and go underground, due to the assassination of a Panther, Robert Webb, shot down in Harlem by a COINTELPRO manipulated attack from West Coast Panthers.
Cet fled to Algeria, where the Black Panther Party International Section, headed by Eldridge Cleaver was located. Interestingly, the Panther headquarters in Algeria functioned as the US Embassy, since at the time, the United States government had no diplomatic relations with Algeria.
I was reunited with Cet in 1971 when I was sent to Algiers, to do work with the newly formed RPCN (Revolutionary People's Communications Network). Cet and I both were part of a delegation, headed by Eldridge, sent to The People's Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville) for an international conference and celebration of the victories of the MPLA. The photo below is of us in the diplomatic reviewing stand at the Mayday Celebration in the Congo:
(left to right Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Comrade Okabande; leader of the Congolese Socialist Youth Union, myself; Denise Oliver and Cetewayo, seated amongst European diplomats)
I returned to the States, and my only contact with Cet after that was by phone. After the fall of the BPP and the dissolution of the International Section, the core group of Panthers there went their separate ways. Ultimately Kathleen and Eldridge returned to the US. Cetewayo and his first wife, Connie Matthews (daughter of a member of the Jamaican Parliament and diplomat) went to Zambia. They divorced and Cet remarried a Zambian woman. Their son is currently attending school here in the US.
Other Panther's from the International Section also remained in Africa. Pete O'neil and his wife Charlotte settled in Tanzania. He was later the subject of an award winning documentary produced for POV, "A Panther in Africa" (see clip below)
Cetewayo became seriously ill several years ago with a liver condition. He would never return to the US. But he lives in the memories of a few of us who were touched by his time with us. He recruited many young brothers and sisters into the party, rescued many from the coils of addiction, and their children continue the struggle. There will be a memorial for him at the upcoming Black Panther Film Festival to be held in NYC Dec. 8th - Dec. 14th.
Though couched in revolutionary rhetoric of the movement, I often re-read Cet's pamphlet, for it holds so many truths about the plague of drugs in our communities. Though he addressed heroin, and did not foresee crack - the end results are the same. And heroin use is once again on the rise.
I think often of his final words "We are the only ones capable of eradicating the plague from our communities. It will not be an easy task. It will require tremendous effort. It will have to be a revolutionary program, a people's program."
In his memory and in the memory of all of our brothers and sisters who have passed on, the struggle continues.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Present at the White House were 20 African Americans working on the Web, including representatives of theRoot.com, Black Entertainment Television, Essence, Jack & Jill Politics, City Limits, Concrete Loop, AOL Black Voices, Black America Web and even the gossipy MediaTakeOut. Maynard Institute: Obama Courts Black Journalists, Bloggers. Democrats Budget $3 Million to Reach African Americans.
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President Obama stopped by a "black online summit" at the White House Monday as part of an outreach to African American journalists and bloggers before the midterm elections, an effort that includes the Democratic National Committee spending what it calls an unprecedented $3 million to reach the most loyal part of Obama's base, African American voters.
"I thought the meeting was great in that it showed that President Obama and his administration are taking black new media and our growing influence seriously," David A. Wilson, managing editor of theGrio.com, told Journal-isms via e-mail.
"They outlined how the administration's policies have had a positive effect on the African-American community and they invited us to make suggestions on how they could work better with us and provide us with more access to the White House.
The Democratic National Committee says the $3 million it will spend in advertising to reach African Americans could make the difference in such states as Pennsylvania, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio and Florida."I also thought the summit provided a great opportunity for all of us leading the charge in [the] black new media movement to get together in a way that I haven't seen since we started theGrio last year."
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But then of course conservatives have to attack it.. Obama should have said blacks don't get invited to Meet the Press. The Root: White House Stands by Black Bloggers.
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Except for the posting of a smart-phone video of President Obama greeting black bloggers and journalists — a video that found its way to the Drudge Report — the White House does not believe that ground rules for the Monday session were broken, according to the White House liaison for African American media.
Controversy over the meeting, which had gone virtually unreported in the mainstream media, increased late in the week after a Wednesday blog posting about the session by Jeremy W. Peters of the New York Times. It began, "The White House is usually quite good at keeping a muzzle on the mediaafter one of its off-the-record sessions with President Obama and senior members of his administration.
"But not this week."
Providing the meeting further notoriety, the Drudge Report and RealClearPolitics.com posted the blogger's smart-phone video under an identical headline: "Obama: Blacks Probably Don't Watch 'Meet the Press'."
What Obama actually said during his surprise visit to the online "summit" was, "The media is changing so rapidly. It allows us to reach audiences that may not be watching ‘Meet the Press’ — not that there’s anything wrong with ‘Meet the Press.’ I’m just saying that, you know, it might be a different demographic," prompting laughs from the group.
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With shows at Cannes and other stops and the documentary 'Benda Bilili!' due out, the Kinshasa band of mostly disabled musicians is riding a life-changing wave of popularity. LA TIMES: Staff Benda Bilili's Congolese rhythms hit global scale.
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In the long history of music, there have been improbable success stories. But even in such company, as a drunk man in the French documentary "Benda Bilili!" argues, there has never been anything like the Congolese "street-orchestra" Staff Benda Bilili.
Or as the band's 55-year-old leader Leon "Papa Ricky" Likabu explained during the group's recent stop in Paris to support the film's opening: "Since God created the world, no one has seen five or six disabled guys play music like this."
Formed by paraplegic and sometimes homeless middle-aged men in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo — and one of the most dysfunctional cities on Earth — Staff Benda Bilili now numbers five musicians in wheelchairs and three physically able younger men, including a teen prodigy named Roger Landu who has learned to play rock, funk and rumba with an instrument that he invented by attaching a piece of wire to a large jam jar. He presses or pulls the wire with one hand to alter the pressure and change notes with the astounding dexterity of a guitar hero — albeit one playing a strange, shrunken one-string guitar that he calls a "satonge."
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When it comes to African art, the French have always veered toward old-school, artisanal fare. Now, in the largest auction of art from the Diaspora, French art collectors will get a chance to see (and buy) the very best in contemporary African art. The Root: Art of the African Diaspora Comes to Paris.
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The French like their African art to be traditional. Nobody uses that outmoded word "primitive" anymore. The term of choice these days is arts premiers: the first arts. Bowls, masks, finely carved statuettes. Ageless objects made by anonymous artisans, appreciated as much as anthropological artifacts as they are works of art.
"It's Europe's colonial heritage," explains Florence Alexis, a prominent curator and veteran arts administrator. Paris-born with Haitian origins, Alexis points out that ever since Picasso modeled two faces in his Demoiselles d'Avignon after African masks in 1907, European modern artists have embraced what she prefers to call "classic African art." But when modern artists of the African Diaspora studied at elite schools like Paris' Ecole des Beaux Arts and London's Slade School of Fine Arts or employed Western techniques in their work, they were considered inauthentic by much of the European art establishment. Generations of modern black artists have been overlooked. "There are big gaps," Florence Alexis says, "in Europe's official art history."
Alexis is aiming to fill those gaps, orchestrating a major corrective to that official history in the form of Africa Scene 1, the largest auction of art by members of the Diaspora ever to be held in Paris. Some 100 works will be on sale at Artcurial, France's leading auctioneer. The event will take place on Oct. 23, during FIAC (Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain), a massive annual fair that attracts artists and dealers, collectors and curators from all over the world. The auction also coincides with commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the blossoming of African independence. In 1960, 17 African nations became independent states, freeing themselves from the domination of their colonial masters.
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The LRA (Lord's Resistance Army) is one of THE most evil groups on planet earth. Four African nations have agreed to form a joint military force to fight Lord's Resistance Army rebels, the African Union says. BBC: Four African nations crack down on LRA
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It says the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Uganda will form a brigade to pursue the militants. The LRA, which originated in Uganda 20 years ago, has recently mounted deadly attacks in all four countries.
It now targets towns some 1,000km (600 miles) away from Uganda, the UN says.
The latest LRA attack was in the Central African Republic's northern town of Birao last Sunday, said Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR).
The spokesman said the rebels reportedly abducted young girls, looted property and set shops on fire.
The LRA is led by Joseph Kony, who is accused of crimes against humanity
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Nine months after a devastating earthquake, only now are ruins starting to be removed so rebuilding can begin. New York Times: Weary of Debris, Haiti Finally Sees Some Vanish.
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Wearing a Nike visor, sunglasses, a crisp linen shirt and pressed jeans, Randal Perkins of Pompano Beach, Fla., watched with satisfaction as his $400,000 hydraulic excavator clawed into a towering pile of concrete chunks in the shattered heart of this city.
"This is what the people have been waiting for," Mr. Perkins declared in his booming voice, sweeping his arm to take in a crowd of bystanders mesmerized for hours by the demolition and removal of a collapsed funeral home.
Mr. Perkins had been waiting, too, with increasing impatience, for the cleanup of Haiti to begin. Chief executive of a Florida-based disaster recovery firm, he had made a $25 million gamble that he could capitalize on the Jan. 12 earthquake. He had partnered with a Haitian conglomerate, imported a dozen shiploads of heavy equipment and set up a state-of-the-art base camp here — but then, nothing.
It has been obvious since January that clearing the wreckage is the necessary prelude to this country’s reconstruction, physically and psychologically. But the problem was so dauntingly big and complex that the government and donors got stuck in visionary mode, planning the future while the present remained mired in rubble.
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Nearly 300,000 have fled war-torn Somalia, leaving behind livelihoods and lost loved ones for the grim, overcrowded refugee camps of Kenya. And still more are coming all the time. LA Times: For Somali refugees, the road leads from one misery to another.
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He buried his children and fled west across the border to a new country.
Young soldiers with rifles pass as Mohamed Abdul walks in the clothes of a refugee, a man who once owned several houses and a kiosk in that whitewashed and bloodied city by the sea: Mogadishu, Somalia.
Things taken, life whittled, and suddenly he is in Kenya, angry and lost amid tents and huts. Girls in candy-colored dresses run along barbed wire, and a tanker truck called the Sewage Buster rumbles beneath the blue flags of the United Nations. Dadaab glows in a web of thinning lights until dawn, when tribesmen stir and refugees gather documents and wait for stamps of approval that will move them closer to something, although they don't know what.
"Before the war, life was so nice," says Abdul, "but it was lost in a single day."
The whistle of a rocket, the rain of wood and mortar, limp children pulled from splinters and two graves dug. And then, as if all of you that existed before had been erased, there comes the weeklong walk into a wilderness of warlords and militants and thousands just like you.
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So it turns out that one after another of the Tea Party candidates is in one way or another mooching off the government. Rolling Stones: More Tea Party Hilarity
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You see, when a nice white lawyer with a GI Joe beard (Joe Miller) uses state aid to help him through tough times and get over the hump – so that he can go from having three little future Medicare-collecting Republican children to eight little future Medicare-collecting Republican children – that’s a good solid use of government aid, because what we’re doing is helping someone "transition" from dependency to economic independence.
This of course is different from the way other, less GI-Joe-looking people use government aid, i.e. as a permanent crutch that helps genetically lazy and ambitionless parasites mooch off of rich white taxpayers instead of getting real jobs.
I can’t even tell you how many people I interviewed at Tea Party events who came up with one version or another of the Joe Miller defense. Yes, I’m on Medicare, but... I needed it! It’s those other people who don’t need it who are the problem!
Or: Yes, it’s true, I retired from the police/military/DPW at 54 and am on a fat government pension that you and your kids are going to be paying for for the next forty years, while I sit in my plywood-paneled living room in Florida watching Fox News, gobbling Medicare-funded prescription medications, and railing against welfare queens. But I worked hard for those bennies! Not like those other people!
This whole concept of "good welfare" and "bad welfare" is at the heart of the Tea Party ideology, and it’s something that is believed implicitly across the line. It’s why so many of their political champions, like Miller, and sniveling Kentucky rich kid Rand Paul (a doctor whose patient base is 50% state insured), and Nevada "crazy juice" Senate candidate Sharron Angle (who’s covered by husband Ted’s Federal Employee Health Plan insurance), are so completely unapologetic about taking state aid with one hand and jacking off angry pseudo-libertarian mobs with the other.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor
A late summer on the west coast, the occasional rain squall that cleans the air. A temperate mid-70's as the sun casts moving shadows of moving clouds pushed by a confluence of sea and desert winds. Ntozake Shange evokes this landscape of concrete, glass and chaparral, of date palms and ice plant, the freeway and the back yard; as she pays homage to the...
People of Watts
where we come from, sometimes, beauty
floats around us like clouds
the way leaves rustle in the breeze
and cornbread and barbecue swing out the backdoor
and tease all our senses as the sun goes down.
dreams and memories rest by fences
Texas accents rev up like our engines
customized sparkling powerful as the arms
that hold us tightly black n fragrant
reminding us that once we slept and loved
to the scents of magnolia and frangipani
once when we looked toward the skies
we could see something as lovely as our children's
smiles white n glistenin' clear of fear or shame
young girls in braids as precious as gold
find out that sex is not just bein' touched
but in the swing of their hips the light fallin cross
a softbrown cheek or the movement of a mere finger
to a lip many lips inviting kisses southern
and hip as any one lanky brother in the heat
of a laid back sunday rich as a big mama still
in love with the idea of love how we play at lovin'
even riskin' all common sense cause we are as fantastical
as any chimera or magical flowers where breasts entice
and disguise the racing pounding of our hearts
as the music that we are
hard core blues low bass voices crooning
straight outta Compton melodies so pretty
they nasty cruising the Harbor Freeway
blowin' kisses to strangers who won't be for long
singing ourselves to ourselves Mamie Khalid Sharita
Bessie Jock Tookie MaiMai Cosmic Man Mr. Man
Keemah and all the rest seriously courtin'
rappin' a English we make up as we go along
turnin' nouns into verbs braids into crowns
and always fetchin' dreams from a horizon
strewn with bones and flesh of those of us
who didn't make it whose smiles and deep
dark eyes help us to continue to see
there's so much life here.
-- Ntozake Shange
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The Front Porch is now open. Pull up a chair, put your feet up,
relax, stay and chat with us for a while.
Pecan pie cooling on the ledge. Grab a slice.