"Hollywood Mayor" Looks to Move Up — And Out of Newark

Newark mayor Cory Booker couldn't wait a week. NJ Governor Jon Corzine was just voted out in an widely-reported odd-year race that was more about suburban control of the state than about taxes, Wall Street, corruption, or any of the issues that Republican challenger "Krispy Kreme" Christy pushed.

The media-hungry mayor hastened to disassociate himself from the fellow Democrat that he had supposedly been supporting--and also to throw his own hat into the ring for the next gubernatorial race. This is pretty clear evidence that he's going to spend the next four years running instead of governing.

Cory "Hollywood" Booker has a lot of incentive to run for state-wide office. Not least is the fact that he's reduced nearly all his bridges in Newark to smoking wrecks. He lies--repeatedly and blatantly--at every public appearance.

At this year's Labor Day March in Newark, he represented himself as a "friend of labor" at the rally to the very unions he's attempted to bust (while trying to upstage US Congressman Donald Payne -an actual "friend of labor"-- who was the parade's Grand Marshal). His most repeated claim is to be pro-education as he destroys city public schools in favor of charter-schools owned by political contributors. He professes to support citizens against greedy and corrupt businesses, while turning off tenants' water because their landlords had unpaid water-bills and taxes (see The Community Fights "Hollywood" Booker Over Right to Water… Newark Wins!).

And all the while, Cory Booker maintains that, as mayor, he has reduced street-crime.

This is, perhaps, the biggest lie of them all. Anyone who actually lives in Newark has witnessed the ever-increasing levels of street-violence. Booker has allowed his Giuliani-esque police force to run amok in the neighborhoods. The sharpest single example of the anti-community policies carried out by Police Director Gary McCarthy, an NYC transplant, is the police murder this past May of Basire Farrell. Farrell was beaten to death by Newark police while in handcuffs.

Defenders of McCarthy's police policies insist that neighborhood residents who'd witnessed the beat-down "had to be lying" because they claimed that the cops used tasers. "Stun guns are not standard issue in Newark." As though they are not for sale to anyone with a badge at cop shops down on Williams Street or anywhere in the state.

Last Saturday saw a rain-soaked march to the 5th Precinct on Bigelow Street, called by Mr. Farrell's aunt, Sharonda Smalls. It was far broader than simply a demand for justice for her nephew. Ms. Smalls reached out to families of other victims of police brutality, as well as the People's Organization for Progress (of which she is a member) and other community-based groups.

"We're all family," Ms. Smalls said. "The moment you hear the horrifying news about a loved one, you become a member of my family." She went on to talk about the many neighborhood residents who've suffered at the hand of the local police. But Smalls also broadened the issue beyond the precinct and even Newark, when she expanded the battle by talking about Amar McLean who was handcuffed and then "shot in the back, execution-style" by deputies of the Essex County Sheriff's Department..

"The 5th Precinct has a reputation for arrested suspects never making it to the station house," Lawrence Hamm, POP's chairman said. "This has got to stop! This is Newark, 2009 -- not Montgomery in the 1950s."

"We need to hold elected officials accountable for what happens on their watch," New Black Panther Party spokesman Zayid Muhammad said. "And if Cory Booker can be reelected after this, the shame is on us!"

The broader lesson is very clear. Cory "Hollywood" Booker is interested in Newark as a stepping-stone to state-wide or even national office, and that's all. His "tough love" policies are designed to polish his image at the expense of Newark residents. Because he's young, photogenic and well-spoken, folks like Oprah Winfrey have taken to him and are promoting him as a kind of "America's Mayor," Rudy Giulani-style.

And we can't forget the other thing besides name recognition that campaign for high office in this country requires. Money. Lots of money. And Cory Booker has the closest thing you can get to a public money-laundering scheme without winding up in jail. Here's how it works: well-meaning out-of-towners, following Oprah's example, donate money to help provide better schools for Newark. Booker takes their money and directs it to privately-owned, for-profit charter schools owned by campaign contributors. These folks turn around and make fat contributions to Booker's electoral war-chest.

It is our responsibility in Newark to stop Cory "Hollywood" Booker's climb to power--on our backs--right here and now. We have to expose his money-laundering schemes and the policies he promotes because they look good to well-meaning NJ suburbanites. And we have to fight for our own needs and interests, because he sure won't be doing it.

Read more!

NJ's People's Organization for Progress Celebrates the 150 Anniversary of John Brown's Heroic Campaign at Harpers Ferry

Dr. William W. Sales, Associated Professor at Seton Hall University, speaks at the October 15th POP meeting

On Thursday, October 15, the day before the Sesquicentennial of the Raid on Harpers Ferry, the People's Organization for Progress acknowledged this important event in African American history with a presentation by Seton Hall Africana Studies professor, Dr. William Sales. Before discussing the Harpers Ferry Raid itself, or John Brown's participation, before explaining the history of the abolitionist movement that Brown came from and became one of the most significant representatives of, Professor Sales began outlining the history of slavery in the United States, and its unique role in creating the wealth that underwrites U.S. capitalism (click here to view a portion of Dr. Sales' speech).

Dr. Sales went on to explain what was unique about John Brown. While many abolitionists of the 1800s opposed slavery, viewing unpaid labor as unfair competition to small farmers because large plantations undercut the influence of homesteading by "free-soilers," John Brown opposed slavery because, in Dr. Sales words, he "loved Black people." He moved his family to settle among free Black families in the community known as Timbuctoo in North Elba, NY. This attitude made Capt. Brown unique among white abolitionists.

And while many 19th century abolitionists viewed battling slavery as a "moral calling," requiring prayer rather than action, Brown had learned in Kansas that the slavers had no qualms about employing violence and terror. Dr. Sales explained that Brown had gone to Kansas after hearing that his son's farm was under murderous attack by the border ruffians. These pro-slavery terrorists came across the border from the slave state of Missouri to try and insure that the Kansas also entered the Union as a slave state. (Later, during the Civil War, many of these same irregular troops joined the special "bushwhacker" units of Confederate Army that burned farms, terrorized civilians and after the war became backbone elements in the Ku Klux Klan.) Units like Quantrill's Raiders, carried out the shelling and burning of Lawrence during the Kansas border wars. Brown played a major role in building the free state resistance in Lawrence.

Dr. Sales explained that Brown became involved out of "a sense of family responsibility, yes, but …because John Brown went to Kansas and fought the bushwhacker terrorists… he slowed down a process by which Kansas was about to be engulfed by pro-slavery sentiment, and by slowing it down, when the Civil War broke out Kansas could come into the war as a free state, a very important intervention on his part."

One cannot understand Brown, Professor Sales added, without grasping why U.S. society needs to portray him as "crazy." Brown was feared because he represented a key thing that both the slaveowners and many whites in the abolitionist movement feared most, a white person who could identify and find true unity with African Americans.

Despite bad weather and limited advanced promotion in the media, this People's Organization for Progress celebration, The Sesquicentennial of the Harpers Ferry Raid and the Legacy of John Brown, drew a sizable crowd. Perhaps, some POP members speculated, word of mouth is more powerful than an "Upcoming Events" listing in the Star Ledger. Perhaps area academics assigning students to attend Dr. Sales' lecture or the use of so-called "new media" like blogs and Facebook by POP members made the difference. No matter the reason, the gathering left POP members and supporters demanding more. POP Chairman Lawrence Hamm has proposed that Dr. Sales return to another meeting simply to have the question-and-answer segment that, due to a lack of time, never occurred. (click here, to see additional photos from this event)

Professor Bill Sales with POP's chairman, Larry Hamm salute John Brown

Read more!

POP commemorates anniversary 0f 1967 Newark Rebellion

On Sunday, July 12, the People's Organization for Progress returned to the intersection of Springfield Avenue, 15th Avenue, & Irvine Turner Blvd. to commemorate the 42nd anniversary of the 1967 Newark Rebellion (see the Newark Star Ledger report here). POP has held this observance annually for the past 25 years, in recent years mainly at this junction where a monument to the fallen was erected on the 30th anniversary in 1997.

Unique to this year's gathering was the presence of former Mayor Kenneth Gibson, who defeated Hugh Addonizio in 1970 to become the first African-American mayor of Newark, as well as Clifford Minor, the reform candidate running against Corey Booker. The parallels are interesting. Addonizio's administration was a center of corruption and criminal enterprise, as well as the racist apartheid that led to the '67 Rebellion. While Booker is a darling of Hollywood, his administration has become a magnet for racist violence against the city's youth.

As we noted in a previous posting here covering police-violence in Newark, (see The People's Organization for Progress demands Justice for Basire Farrell) "The instances and incidences of police violence against the citizenry has increased since Mayor Booker took office.

"…not that long ago that Mayor Booker proudly proclaimed to TV-networks and print media alike that the kind of police "over-reaction" that led the street rebellion that he describes as the "1967 Riot" are behind us."

In fact, a careful examination of the legacy of 1967 Newark shows us that the rebellion was part of a series of urban uprisings at the time which led to the important Black Power conventions of the next years, particularly the one that took place in Newark itself. Former Mayor Ken Gibson's July 12, 2009 announcement that he was at the commemoration to pay his dues and join the People's Organization for Progress may be and indication that our next ten years will be as revolutionary as the decade that followed the '67 rebellion!

Read more!

POP and Allies Expose Murdoch's NY Post

When the People's Organization for Progress called its second demonstration targeting the NY Post at the intersection of Broad and Market Streets in Newark for March 14, some self-described allies said it was too late, "the issue is over," or suggested that continuing to protest the February 18 cartoon was "riding a dead issue."(Read about POP's earlier protest here.)
When less than ten POP stalwarts began picketing at about 11:30 AM this past Saturday, it may have looked like the naysayers knew something, but by the time the sound equipment arrived twenty-minutes later, the crowd of marchers showed everyone at the historic intersection another lesson entirely! On Saturdays, the street vendors show up early to set up their tables and vie for prime "real estate" close to the bus stop. But as more and more POP members arrived and the picket line had tripled or more, as more and more shoppers getting off the many buses whose lines stop there had set aside their downtown errands and joined the protest, the vendors shrugged and carried their tables away from the ever-expanding crowd.


Elected officials like Assemblyman Bill Payne, People's Organization for Progress members and supporters, allied organizations such as the New Black Panther Party as well as concerned community members were there and on-point to proclaim that: 

1. we will get our "Lotto" "Mega Millions" and "Pick 4" numbers from other papers… 
   
2. we will get our sports scores from other news sources… 
   
3. we will not read The Post or watch either of Murdock's TV-stations without a full and heart-felt acknowledgement and apology about the racist editorial policy embodied in the hateful February 18 cartoon!
   

FotM thanks People's Organization for Progress member Ingrid Hill for the photos in this story.

Read more!

Join in the Response to Racist Cartoon: Boycott the NY Post, Demonstrate in Newark on March 14

The People's Organization for Progress (POP), the northern NJ-based African-American community organization that built the massive urban-NJ antiwar coalition highlighted here (see Black NJ Organizes Against the War: 2008 Edition) as well as the fight to save Muhlenberg Hospital in Plainfield (see Save Our Hospitals, Part 3— Muhlenberg defense moves to Trenton) demonstrated at the intersection of Broad and Market Streets in the heart of Newark, NJ on February 18 against the racist "they'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill" cartoon, above (see "Shut it Down! Boycott the Racist Rag! No to the New York Post!!!" for FotM's report on that picket line).

POP, along with Newark City Councilwoman Mildred Crump as well as the New Black Panther Party and other organizations, plans a massive demonstration at noon on Saturday, March 14, 2009. Join us there!

Councilwoman Crump sponsored the following resolution:

Whereas, The main editorial cartoon that The New York Post published in its February 18, 2009 edition, portrayed two police officers shooting a chimpanzee, with the caption “they’ll have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill” is viewed by many as not only a veiled, racist reference to President Barack Obama, but also as an open invitation to any individual with a cause, to take the life of the first African-American ever elected to the Presidency of the United States; and

Whereas, the New York Post, which was established in 1801, is the 13th oldest newspaper in the United States and is considered the nation’s oldest daily, is keenly aware of America’s shameful history of slavery, the era of Jim Crow and segregation and the profound use of racial imagery to negatively stereotype, demean and dehumanize the African American as monkeys, gorillas and chimpanzees; and

Whereas, considering America’s violent history of lynchings, burnings and assassinations which have been directed towards African American leaders, the cartoon depicting the gunning down of a chimpanzee – a veiled reference to President Obama – is construed by many in the African American community as yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, and should be subject to prosecution; and

Whereas, the feeble, disingenuous apology offered by the ownership and management of the New York Post, stretches the boundaries of credulity and is seen by many as a ploy to stem mounting negative criticism, avert the clamor for a national boycott and to protect its financial well being, is without a doubt “too little, too late”, and

Whereas, Members of the Council along with the residents of Newark, who were highly offended and insulted by the New York Post’s cartoon and its despicable, veiled reference to kill President Obama, call upon the public to begin a national movement that asks United States Attorney General, Eric Holder, to launch a full investigation into this matter,, and to begin to treat the publication of images that even remotely simulate the assassination of our President as equal to a terrorist threat; and

Whereas, Nothing short of the prosecution of individuals responsible for this type of slander is acceptable, and as Mr. Holder himself recently said, “though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been, and we, I believe, continue to be, a nation of cowards.”

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE MUNICIPAL COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF NEWARK, NEW JERSEY THAT it strongly condemns the New York Post and its management for its highly insensitive, humorless and racially charged characterization of President Barack Obama, in its main editorial cartoon which was published February 18, 2009, and that the United States Attorney General investigate the newspaper for possible terrorist threats and prosecute the individuals responsible to the fullest extent of the law.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT the certified copies of this resolution be forwarded to Governor Jon Corzine, the Urban Mayors’ Association, The New Jersey State Senate President, the New Jersey State Assembly Speaker, Mayor Cory A. Booker and Newark’s legislative representatives.

With the support of City Council President (and Councilwoman-at-Large) Mildred C. Crump, as well as the massive outpouring of community anger, and many other community-based organizations, the People's Organization for Progress hopes that this picket-line of Saturday, March 14 will be truly massive.

See John Legend's letter to the editor (here), sent to the NY Post for more background on this vicious attack, and then Join Us on March 14, 2009!!!

Read more!

Shut it Down! Boycott the Racist Rag! No to the New York Post!!!

When the New York Post decided to combine its editorial opposition to the Obama Administration stimulus bill with an unrelated news story about a pet chimpanzee mauling its owner, no one laughed. When the Post's editorial staff followed up with more racism couched as an "apology" the NJ-based People's Organization for Progress decided enough was enough.

The suggestion that folks were either "too thin-skinned" or "too stupid" to get the joke was itself an extension of the earlier racism, POP decided at our weekly general membership meeting on February 19. On Saturday, February 21, a picket line at the intersection of Broad and Market Streets in Newark publicly called the Post out on their racism (see Star Ledger article, Newark group Boycotts N.Y. Post, by Chanta L. Jackson with photos by POP member Christian E. Gales for additional coverage).

 

"Shut it down! Boycott the Post!!! Boycott Racism!!!" People's Organization for Progress members and supporters chanted at the intersection that is the heart of Newark's downtown shopping district. As POP stalwarts distributed leaflets to shoppers getting off buses, the popular  sentiment was probably best represented by questions about how a major newspaper could get away with a cartoon advocating assassinating the president, as well as calls to defend Barack Obama.

POP's Saturday picket in Newark follows the Thursday demonstration at the New York Post's main offices on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, called by New York City Councilman Charles Barron, and endorsed by Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network, NYC, State Senator Bill Perkins, State Assemblywoman Inez Barron,  Viola Plummer of the Women for Obama, Monica Moorehead of the International Action Center, and representatives of the Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive To African People (CEMOTAP), the December 12th Movement, NAACP-Jamaica Queens, Harriet Tubman Collective, Black Men's Movement, and many others.

This struggle demands further attention as many radicals, revolutionary nationalists, and anti-racist agitators find ourselves in the unique position and novel situation of defending a U.S. president.

Read more!

James Brown, Revolutionary

Okay, don’t get your undies in a bunch—I’m not memorializing James as belonging in the same expressly political musical pantheon as, say, Bob Marley or D. Boon or Phil Ochs. I just want to highlight a few points which were shorted in many of the obits that have blanketed Teh Internets and the media.

James Brown was, beyond any doubt, a musical revolutionary who changed the face of African American music—two times, maybe three. Which means he changed the face of American music. Which means he changed the face of world music. And that’s revolutionary, small-r revolutionary anyhow, on a scale few have ever achieved.

The estimable Charles Keil, a crack musicologist of the partisan rather than the academic type and all-round smart guy, identifies two traditions in popular music. The more common is the one which highlights strings and the human voice—“pickin’ and singin’ ” for short. The other is based on horns and drums, a school which Charlie favors, as shown in the more intriguing shorthand he has devised for it—“beaten and blown.” If one accepts Charlie’s typology for a minute, the biggest difference, in my opinion, is that pickin‘ and signin’ tends to be head music, listening and toe-tapping music, where beaten and blown is body music, demanding, impelling, a more comprehensive physical response than the patting of a foot.

Well, James Brown was a beaten and blown guy all the way, in a country where, with the partial exception of the big band era and some earlier and subsequent small group jazz, one could argue that pickin’ and singin’ has dominated and shaped musical taste for the last century.

With early instrumentals like 1961’s “Night Train” pointing the way, he developed a band that transformed the vamp—the repeated unison instrumental riff in a long jazz performance, as in “vamp ‘til ready”—into the whole song. Goodbye to the conventions of popular songwriting—the intro, the verse, the chorus, the bridge, the changes, the resolution. What was left at the heart of the song was the vamp. Folks talk about the Live at the Apollo, Volume 1 album as the epistemological break, but I gotta go for “”Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” Dave Marsh says of it:

“No record ‘Before Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” sounded anything like it. No record since—certainly no dance record—has been unmarked by it.”

But “Brand New Bag” was only a turning point, not the end. By the time he got to “Cold Sweat” a couple years later James had virtually dispensed with chord changes, period. As the late Robert Palmer put it:

"The rhythmic elements became the song....Brown and his musicians began to treat every instrument and voice in the group as if it were a drum. The horns played single-note bursts that were often sprung against the downbeats. The bass lines were broken into choppy two- or three-note patterns....Brown's rhythm guitarist choked his guitar strings against the instrument's neck so hard that his playing began to sound like a jagged tin can being scraped with a pocket knife."

In these early years he had also transformed soul vocals. In jazz the voice was often treated (as in classical and art music) principally as another instrument—words were secondary. Scat singing as practiced by Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald made the point that the often–corny pop lyrics they recorded didn’t matter; the joy of the music and artistic mastery (mistressy?) were what counted.

James’s implied critique was different. Drawing from the traditions of the Black church, he tortured the lyrics, hollering them, whispering them, drawing them out, chanting them, moaning them, and in doing so transcended the lyrics by showing that these words, that any words, were too weak, too pallid to fully express what was inside him—and us.

The second revolution Brown pioneered was the further evolution of what was by now called Funk. In the late “60s. early ‘70s, he was putting complex polyrhythms into cuts like “Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine,” codifying and deepening Funk and setting the stage for the early ’70s disco era. Like ‘60s soul, with its Motown vs. Stax/Volt dichotomy, classic disco had its smooth and its rough—and James was in the vanguard of the rough.

Of course Brown didn’t make the revolution alone. He had help, in the form of his band, and motivation , in the form of innovative funk competitors like the Isley Brothers, the Brothers Johnson, New Orleans’ Meters, and loads of others. The main one of course was George Clinton and the whole P-Funk combine. Some followed James’s polyrhythms back to Africa, like Osibisa and Mandrill. Folks who turned to Africa to find the roots of this remarkable music found themselves tripping over James himself more than once, in the form of artists like Nigeria’s Fela Anikulapo-Kuti who got turned on to him during a US sojourn in the late ‘60s. The creator of Afro-Beat, Fela returned the favor, influencing James Brown cuts like 1973’s “Time Is Running Out.”

Which bring us to the “maybe three” revolutions in the introduction. Plenty of people will argue that without James Brown, there would be no hip-hop. Certainly his shit got sampled by more early MCs and producers than anyone else’s—by at least an order of magnitude. It kind of peaked with NYC MC Fresh Gordon’s “Feelin’ James” tribute in, what was it, '85? (And someday somebody’s gonna write a book about James’s influence on house music. Despite what would appear to be an insistence worthy of the Adversary, the AntiJames, on a synthesized four/four beat, a lot of ‘80s house and garage cuts used piano flava recorded or inspired by James.)

To close, a brief word about James Brown’s politics. A lot of people have parsed his interesting love-hate relationship with America and his contradictory views on racism and capitalism and poverty. Hey, go to the music. Two tunes tell the story, and the rest is commentary.

In 1968, James Brown cut the raucous, defiant anthem of the Black Liberation Movement, “Say It Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud.” This was well before the more mainstream outfits like Motown and Stax/Volt let their artists record even mildly nationalist or political music—or, to be more exact, were forced by them to allow it. It announces that the long centuries of white values, white history and white aesthetics being imposed on Black folk and used as a yardstick to judge them are at an end. When Sam Cooke cut the achingly beautiful “A Change Is Gonna Come” less than five years earlier, neither he nor anyone else could have predicted that it would come this fast or that it would take this amazing form.

Another five years on, in 1973, Richard Nixon was going down in flames. James’s background band, the JBs, led by legendary trombonist Fred Wesley, recorded a little ditty called “You Can Have Watergate, Just Gimme Some Bucks and I’ll Get Straight.” It’s absolutely a James Brown cut of the era, complete with grunts, a goofy riff on Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddy’s Dead” and a repeated chorus of “I need some money!” (Which reminds me—there’s precious little in Go-Go that doesn’t come from James Brown, too.) And the message is just as simple as “I’m Black And I’m Proud”: Black folks can’t afford to care about politics, we got to focus on the wallet. Wrong, but a view that is stronger now than it was then and hence one that revolutionary socialists need be on top of and ready to engage with.

But I can't leave that as the last word. The personal is after all political. James Brown was an abuser of women, a serial abuser. He may have meant every syllable of agonized self-abasement in "It's A Man's, Man's, Man's World," but it didn't stop him from clocking wives and girlfriends anymore than "I Get Along Without You Very Well," stopped Frank Sinatra. I'm gonna go back and reread Pearl Cleage's influential "Mad At Miles," to cut my sadness, and my wonkery, with anger.

UPDATE;

Be sure to check out Ajamu Dillahunt's thoughts on James's death over at Sankofa Meets the Future.

Read more!