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houstonvote · 3 years ago

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Juneteenth, 20 minutes prodcast on Radio France Internationale.

The link for the podcast: https://www.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/grand-reportage/20210618-m%C3%A9moire-et-r%C3%A9parations-de-l-esclavage-%C3%A9ternels-d%C3%A9fis-pour-le-texas

the Full Script, translated in english:

June 19th is now the 11th national holiday in the United States this date commemorates June 19th 1865, when 2000 Union soldiers arrived in the last Confederate city in the country.

General Gordon Granger announced the immediate liberation of the slaves, and the effective end of slavery in the United States. This city was Galveston, Texas.

This great port of the triangular trade is today a seaside resort, a touristic and historical attraction and a place of memory on the outskirts of one of the great black cities of the country, Houston...For 156 years, Galveston and Houston have commemorated the anniversary of the end of slavery, but also the long way to heal the wounds.

Memory and reparations of slaver: the eternal challenges for Texas,

Thomas HARMS, RFI

-----

"This building used to be here (showing a picture). This was General Gordon Granger's headquarters. We're standing in the exact spot where General Order Number 3 was issued. " (Tommie Boudreaux)

Tommie Boudreaux is the city historian for Galveston. The Emancipation Act signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 freed the slaves, but it took 2 1/2 years of fighting for the news to reach Texas. And that Union troops led by General Gordon Granger finally arrived in Galveston... where he had his general order number 3 read: " (…) all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves..."

"As far as we know he was standing around here when the announcement was made. Of course the merchants of the town came out in number to attend. He had 2,000 men with him, which was already unusual, and that made what he was going to say all the more important. He also had black soldiers with him.” (Tommie Boudreaux)

In his order, General Granger made it clear what the slave owners had to do, for example, that the slaves could stay and work for them for a wage. In Galveston, this order was not applied until much later...

"In order not to lose their heritage, they found legal loopholes and ways to keep the new free men in bondage. You had to work to pay off all the debts accumulated during the years of slavery. So a lot of them left Galveston. And because there was a lot of virgin land in Texas, they had that opportunity (..) When you think of slavery, you think of working in the fields from sunrise to sunset. Galveston was different, the soil didn't allow for farming so the slaves worked at the ports, on the docks, loading the ships, cleaning the holds... they were craftsmen, blacksmiths, the women were nannies, and did most of the domestic work..."(Tommie Boudreaux)

The place of the historic declaration of June 19, 1865, Juneteenth in English, is today a parking lot. But since March, artists have painted a Mural of more than 450m2 on the adjacent building.

"This is History that you see, when scrolling from left to right. We see the boats, and the Africans who are forcibly embarked. We see Harriet Tubman who helped many slaves to escape. In the middle you see Abraham Lincoln breaking the chains. Above him you see the Union soldiers, some of whom are African-American. Then you see General Granger signing General Order number 3. We also see the African Americans who left Galveston to settle further north. This wall is interactive, with your phone you can zoom in on a part of the drawing to see a video that tells the episode represented." (Tommie Boudreaux)

Sam Collins, co-chair of the juneteenth legacy committee, is at the origin of the mural project. The idea came to him a few days after George Floyd's death in May 2020. He contacted the owner of the building and the parking lot who was excited by the idea.

"This design, which has been called “absolute equality”, is part of the Junetenth legacy project. It was created by artist Reginald Adams and his team (the Creatives). Every year Juneteenth is an important event. There was a lot of talk about it last year (during the protests after George Floyd's death), but this History has always been important to the Galveston community, to Texas and to the United States. " (Sam Collins )

But Galveston past resurfaced in 2019, when a man, Donald Neely, walked through the city between two sheriffs on horseback. The hands tied behind his back and pulled by a rope, as were the slaves captured by the slave patrol. The video went viral around the world.

"I don't think the police intended to hurt, it was more a lack of sensitivity and cultural reference that lead them to make him walk like that in the street. But it is also because of a lack of historical knowledge. That's why it's so important to have art projects like this one, to teach history to citizens and law enforcement. I'm sure none of them had seen a slave militia or someone pulling a tied slave on the street before. Maybe if they had been taught this in school or high school, they would have thought twice about doing this to someone. You have to teach the full story and tell what happened here. We all live in this house America that was built on a cracked foundation. We need to repair that foundation. It is my job to tell that story, the artists to paint it. It's all part of the repair work to make America better. " (Sam Collins )

At 1 hour drive from Galveston we arrive in Houston. The Buffalo Soldier Museum is located In an old army building, It traces the history of black soldiers in the United States... including those who accompanied General Granger, as Captain Paul Matthews, the founder of the museum, tells us.

"When General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to read his declaration, he had 300 black troops with him to enforce the law. Many of these African American soldiers remained in Texas after the Civil War. So part of the maneuver was to free the slaves but also to enroll them in the army. Look at what the ardent defender of slavery Howell Cobb wrote in 1865: "The day you make soldiers of them, speaking of Negroes, is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong. " (Captain Matthews)

In 1865, many former slaves made the journey from Galveston to Houston, more than 2 days by foot or boat. They landed in Freedmen's Town, a town created by freed slaves some twenty years earlier. Catherine Roberts is a historian and co-founder of the Rutherford Yates Museum, which traces the history of the original inhabitants of Freedmen's Town.

"The 40 blocks of Freedmen's Town housing listed on the National Historic Register are the only evidence of urban settlement by former slaves in Texas. Because of Jim Crow laws, former slaves could only buy land in very few places. They were allowed to settle on a swamp, along the Buffalo Bayou River which is always flooded. Because they were the first inhabitants, archaeologists consider Freedmen's Town a treasure because everything found in the land was left by newly freed slaves, so we know how they lived and how they built this community on a swamp. " (Catherine Roberts)

When they were taken to Africa and made slaves, the most expensive were the ones with skills. Those who knew how to work metal, mastered basketry or pottery.

"When they were able to get their own land, they knew how to do just about everything, because they had built up their skills on the plantations. There were 13 blacksmiths living here, 34 brick makers, masons and carpenters of quality. There was also a fairly diverse population. Jewish families moved in right after slavery in the 1800s, as they were also subject to segregation laws (Jim Crow). They were limited in where they could go, where they could live and own land. That's why you have a Jewish cemetery at the end of the street. (…) The inhabitants had to protect their children from strangers coming into the neighborhood, so when you look at this model you see that they relied on an African tradition of a central courtyard in the heart of the block of houses. Each porch faced the street and between the houses was a central courtyard where livestock was stored, gardening was done, and children could play safely. "(Catherine Roberts)

Of these original wooden houses, painted white, few have been preserved. Since 1985, 500 of them have been torn down or burned to make way for expensive middle-class homes in this central Houston neighborhood.Charonda Johnson is a neighborhood activist who was nominated mayor of the community.

"This was my childhood home. My family has been in Freedmen's Town for five generations. I used to play in the Gregory School when it was abandoned. The Gregory School was the first school for black children. It opened in 1872. How did my grandmother get here? My mother told me, everybody knew to come here. It was a kind of Mecca. The word was passed around that people were free here. Some people walked from Galveston, but most came by boat on Buffalo Bayou. We are not upset that people are moving into our community today. We just want everyone to know that this is a historic place where our ancestors came from and it deserves respect. "(Charonda Johnson )

Charonda organizes tours of Freedmen's town and fights to keep the developers from destroying the history of these houses and cobblestone streets. She is supported by the city council, which has helped create the Freedmen's Town Conservation Center... an NGO headed by Zion Escobar, who has just gotten Freedmen's Town officially designated as a historic district, the first in Houston...

"When you look at a map of the area...You see Galveston, where the Juneteenth Emancipation Proclamation was read. All that green space there is plantations. So people went north from there by trade routes, and some by boat. You take a whole region, concentrate all its population looking for economic opportunities, take them to Freedmen's town and you get a black Wall street, which was bigger than Tulsa's. But nobody knows that. It's this chapter of American history: this is what happens in the aftermath of the end of slavery! That's why we're trying to get Freedmen's Town designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Because nowhere in the United States can you find so many houses that date back to the history before the Civil War (..)"Here you can see the big picture, and realize that there were thriving businesses. This gentleman owned a brick factory, a drug store, and he was a writer. This one was the first black lawyer in Houston... We need to stand up for ourselves, we need to stand up for this space, politically and legally, or else anyone would just set it on fire and think they can take it over. "( Zion Escobar)

Freedmen's Town was quickly enclosed, a highway was even built in the middle of it. The descendants of the former slaves therefore left for other parts of Houston, notably towards the 3rd Ward. Carl Davis presides over the " Houston Society for Change ", which is very active in this district.

"Emancipation Park is the site that 4 former slaves were able to purchase together in 1872, 7 years after 1865. They wanted a place where they could celebrate their Freedom as a family. The community leaders pooled their resources, $800 to buy these 10 acres of land. It was the first public park in Texas. The 1872 celebration was a huge success, everyone came as a family, they had been enslaved for so many years. When they were able to celebrate that they were free it was a feeling of fulfillment. They wanted a place where they could come together and be one. Today, if there is a tragedy in the country, Emancipation Park is the focal point, the place where you can share your feelings or express your protests because we consider this place holy ground. It is a sacred place for us African-Americans. " ( Carl Davis)

On the ground, a group of young women paint "Be the change". Emancipation park is not only the symbol of Juneteenth, but also the symbol of recent struggles against systemic racism and police violence. George Floyd, whose murder by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 generated a huge wave of protest in the United States is indeed from this neighborhood of 3rd Ward. His face is represented on several murals.

"We find these paintings on the walls of several buildings of Third Ward. There is one in front of Jack Yates High School, where George Floyd studied. I helped create it: it's a Black Lives Matter mural, which takes up the demand for social equity that has been going on around the country. But we added a coat of arms, with on one side the lion, mascot of the school, and on the other side George Floyd's soccer jersey...with his number, 88, his name, his birth and death dates. We want these children growing up in this African American high school to see, every morning, that "Black lives matter," that their lives matter. That's the message that should give them hope. " (Carl Davis)

A few steps from Emancipation Park, we come across 7 restored houses of the first descendants of slaves. Today they host artists for creations related to the current events of the neighborhood... Eureka Gilkey directs the Row House Project organization which promotes art and development of 3rd Ward.

"The 7 artists who created the Row House Project were inspired by Dr. John Biggers who founded the art studies department at Texas Southern University, Houston's Black University. He studied and worked on the architecture of these slave houses, which are called "shotgun houses". Most people think that the name comes from the shotgun, because an urban legend says that when a slave tries to escape, the owner can shoot the house and hit all the inhabitants. But in fact these houses are the result of the architectural ingenuity of the slaves. Inside, you find a central column, a bit like a chimney, with a hole inside. This allows air to circulate and keep the house cool in the summer and warm in the cooler months. The word comes from the Yoruba "Shogun", which means "the house of god", but it has been distorted by dialects and time...” Juneteenth will always be at the heart of the work we do here, especially because of the geographical proximity of the "Row houses" to Emancipation Park. But it's also important to know that the Row house project has been at the forefront of social justice issues for many years. One of our creations a few years ago was titled: "Breaking the Concrete: Artists, Activists and Instigators" and one of the installations highlighted police violence and the need for police reform. " (Eureka Gilkey)

Marked by slavery and its memory, the Houston area has become, since Emancipation, one of the spearheads of the struggle for perfect equality, "absolute equality" written as early as 1865. Max Krochmal is Professor of History and Chair of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University.

"There was a fierce struggle in Houston for civil rights. African-Americans fought for decades before the struggles of the 1960s, and they continue to do so today. African-Americans continue to come to Houston because it is recognized that it is an easier city for them to live in than other cities. It's not the slave plantation city it used to be..." (Max Krochmal)

It is not a coincidence then that it is thanks to the mobilization in Galveston and Houston, that since 1979, June 19th is a holiday in Texas...( and that Juneteenth is now a holiday everywhere in the United States.) It's no coincidence either that it's Houston's congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee in Washington who is trying to get a vote on the creation of a reparations commission for the descendants of slaves.. Because here in Houston, instead of the term African Americans, we prefer an acronym, ADOS, African Descendant of Slaves.

Descendant d’esclaves africains… (in French)

Thomas Harms, Houston, RFI

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silver-and-ivory · 7 years ago

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Would you like to provide some links or examples as to how police favor white supremacists over black rights activists? No pressure to respond, of course, but if you do choose to, I'm not asking for anything exhaustive. Maybe a keyword or event or two so I can research it myself. Thanks.

Ha, this is not the ask I was expecting to get about that post!

Hm.

It’s possible that this article from the Atlantic about gun control has some relevant information, but it’s not comprehensive.

So here’s a summary of what I was referencing instead. When slavery was common in the South, there were gangs of white men who would search for runaway slaves and in general police black behavior. According to some sources, modern police forces are a direct descendant of these gangs.

After the Civil War, former plantation owners and so on tried to reestablish their power. Part of the way they did this was through arresting lots of innocent black people; slavery was - and is - still legal as long as the slaves were criminals. The police didn’t function as protectors or as enforcers of the law, but instead as the implements of white supremacy.

All of this was accompanied by racist policies whereby insurance companies would devalue districts where black or other nonwhite people lived, resulting in white flight and creating ghettoes. Also, job discrimination created poverty; government welfare programs after wars and in the New Deal weren’t applied equally to whites and blacks, so that the form of welfare that blacks got ended up being more stigmatized. (For example, WWII veteran benefits included a Nice Picket Fence in Suburbia. Black people did not get that benefit.)

Skip ahead a few years the criminalization of blackness (and other minorities) continues to be a Major Problem. The police consistently act as enforcers of e.g. segregation laws. The criminal “justice” system consistently fucks over black people and forgives white supremacists, like the murderers of Emmett Till. (A little known fact is that Emmett Till had had polio, which left him with a consistent stutter. He was taught to whistle so that it was easier for him to speak. The incident that lead to his death was him whistling at a white woman. This is kind of far out there but it seems as though there’s a natural connection between these two facts.)

(Police also served as enforcers of gender normativity- there were laws that women had to be wearing three articles of men’s clothing at a time, and vice versa; also, gay sex was sometimes criminalized. The police would arrest and rape queer people routinely. This is depicted in Stone Butch Blues very disturbingly and it is also probably relevant to this Amnesty International article, “Brutality in Blue”. It’s part of what caused the Stonewall Riots.

In addition to this, the police would ignore crimes committed against queer people, turning a blind eye to queers being assaulted or raped. This is called selective enforcement and it is Very Bad.

This all means that black trans women are (likely) at a higher risk of having bad stuff happen to them; for an example, see the CeCe McDonald case.)

At some point the school-to-prison pipeline became a thing as well. The policing of black people was also extended to Latinos.

It only gets worse with the War on Drugs, wherein President Nixon deliberately and explicitly decided to criminalize crack in order to hurt black people (and marijuana in order to hurt the anti-Vietnam counterculture). A particularly notorious example of the criminalization of [stuff black people do] is the massive disparity in crack versus powder cocaine sentencing. Crack is something poor black people tended (tend?) to use more; powder is something rich white people tend(ed) to use. So of course…

…people faced longer sentences for offenses involving crack cocaine than for offenses involving the same amount of powder cocaine – two forms of the same drug. Most disturbingly, because the majority of people arrested for crack offenses are African American, the 100:1 ratio resulted in vast racial disparities in the average length of sentences for comparable offenses. On average, under the 100:1 regime, African Americans served virtually as much time in prison for non-violent drug offenses as whites did for violent offenses.

The disparity has since been reduced to a mere 18:1 ratio. Racial equality, eh?

This is a good time to mention that a good deal of Republican presidents, including Nixon and Our Good Friend Ronald Reagan, tried to pander to the South by being utter racists. They would deliberately say things like “welfare queens” or “thugs” or “law and order” or “states’ rights”, and the South would know that they really meant to say “fuck those uppity n-words, amirite?”. This was called the Southern Strategy. Internal records show that Nixon knew exactly what he was doing and that he was deliberately doing it; he summarizes his strategy in basically the same way I am.

At some point a narrative of black criminality started being common. Black people and black men especially were seen as threatening, thugs, brutes, less than human. They were threats to the beauty of the white women (as in Emmett Till’s case). This has also been applied to various other minorities (see: Donald Trump on Mexicans).

Unfortunately - somewhat similarly to their treatment of queers - , police are very bad at actually doing stuff about real crimes committed against black people- ie, the much vaunted black-on-black crime problem, which some people use to derail conversations about police brutality and abuses. The underpolicing of minority neighborhoods is actually an outgrowth of racism as well.

Partially due to a fear of blacks, and partially due to a neurotic fear of Communism, during the 70s or around that time, the FBI started keeping information on a lot of black activists, including the (radical! socialist!) Martin Luther King Jr. They assassinated or otherwise eliminated a lot of the black leadership. Here is a very emotional letter from James Baldwin to Angela Davis about her arrest, which is probably somewhat relevant. (Content warning for comparisons to the Holocaust.)

The media did not care about dead black people. The media did care when white college students, down in the South for Freedom Summer, started getting killed, by police forces. The involvement of white students, of course, was orchestrated by nonviolent black activists like King.

Another remarkable thing that King did was that he made going to prison a mark of prestige, rather than shame. This is really cool just on its own, but it’s even more clever when one considers the context.

Everyone knows about Martin Luther King Jr. Not everyone knows why he was so admirable, or so successful. Through nonviolence, he made clear what had been true for centuries- that the white supremacists were the initiators of violence and the breakers of peace. He actively worked against notions of black people as brutes or criminals.

Black Lives Matter and the Ferguson… thing… are reactions to hundreds of years of racist police enforcement and brutality. Conservative Republican reactions are, by and large, abysmal: whenever another black child gets murdered by the police people always try to justify it, claiming that the kid is Just A Thug. He stole cigarettes! He had his hand in his pocket. He was wearing a hoodie. He was so big and threatening. We had to tackle her to the ground because we were Just Scared. He was rude so we put him in a chokehold and ignored him saying he couldn’t breathe! They were just thugs.

As if these make someone less of a victim, or less worthy of care. As if this makes police officers less responsible for what they’ve done.

(Note that I’m not making specific claims about specific incidents- just, taken as a whole, it’s Very Very Damning.)

As a whole, the police force functions as an instrument of white supremacy. This is a disgusting perversion of the Lockean social contract and the rule of law.

And I don’t know how to solve it.

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litpoliticsinterview · 5 years ago

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Interviews with Farrukh Dhondy

The following transcriptions are of two conversations I had with Farrukh Dhondy, writer, left wing activist and former commissioning editor of Channel 4.

We spoke about the origins of the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, the fraught nature of the British Black Power movement in the late 1970′s and early 80′s.

These interviews were held on the 12th and 18th of November 2019.

- Emily Blundell Owers

Tuesday 12th November 2019

Farrukh Dhondy [FD]: (looking at printout of Voices of the Living and the Dead / VOTL&TD) I knew him in this phase, when he was formulating this. Well, you ask me the questions, I’ll tell you.

Emily [EB]: they’re not questions like ‘when did this happen’…I though that the first thing would be to tell you what the assignment is. ‘Take your text, and explain the relationship between what we have seen Raymond Williams call its social location and its aesthetic ideology. Each of these works is coming out of and speaking to a radical social movement at some moment in the twentieth century. I am asking you to research and reconstruct this context and to critically evaluate which elements of your work’s production and/or performance and/or publication/circulation history cast the best light on its actual or desired intervention in the world. Find out what you can about the decisions – personal, political – that inform the writing of your chosen work: its acts of aesthetic refusal and allegiance, its ways of thinking/doing community, uplift, justice, change. If appropriate, attend to any unintended effects or unconscious logics at play. Aim to address, in more or less equal measure, questions of literary form and of social world and to analyse both in relation to each other.’ Yes, it’s quite a long question.

FD: Good. Well it’s reassuring that you’re quoting Raymond Williams, who has gone out of fashion. But was very much in fashion when I was a student…before the postmodernists replaced him, who talk nonsense.

EB: So the first kind of questions that I was thinking were about the climate at the time…the 60s through to the 80s- this being first performed in 73 and published in 74. But my question is kind of…I get the impression that this was a time of social upheaval and what was it like in terms of one’s everyday experience?

FD: Let’s start there. I joined the Black Panther Movement (BPM/BP) in 1969. The reason was that I was a student from India and the entire movement consisted of immigrant workers, some immigrant students- Asians as well as West Indians- the movement was made of West Indian workers. And some people turned up in the youth branch of the BPM and they of course worked selling the newspaper, coming to meetings, coming to demonstrations that we organised, doing such things. Amongst them were the 6th formers of Tulse Hill school, one of which was Linton Kwesi Johnson. At the time he was not Kwesi, just LJ. But the BPM took its name through inspiration from the BPP of the United States. The BPP of the US departed from the civil rights movement of MLK, saying non-violence will NOT redeem the black population, or its social and political rights. We’ve got to take up arms, just as the American constitution guarantees that any citizen can carry arms and so on. And they were doing it as a piece of bravado- they weren’t actually going to shoot anybody- but they said we’ll carry guns and wear uniforms and this that and the other. But that was the inspiration, and the people who started the BPM here thought they’d take the name but it wasn’t the same struggle. We were immigrants from the ex-colonies, not descendants of slaves. Well yes, the West-Indians would come here, to work, who were- Indians weren’t. I was not- I came from a middle class family, on a scholarship to study at Cambridge, but I felt the same kind of tensions that Indian workers or west-Indian workers felt. Because there was a kind of race divide in Britain. So I joined that movement and the name of the movement was there to inspire black youngsters to join a movement which was dedicated to social and political rights in Britain. Get rid of racism. Get rid of police attacks on people. Get rid of pay differentials. Get rid of educational discrimination. Get rid of the fact that you couldn’t go into some places- a pub wouldn’t serve you, you couldn’t get housing- they’d say no blacks here. That had to be dealt with, it had to be dispensed with. One didn’t have to sit in different compartments, or at the back of the bus or some such, but there was a lot of discrimination going on in the 50s and 60s with the first wave of immigration, that’s the political background through which the BPM started, and which made people like Linton Johnson and others join up.

Now, there were radical teachers in Tulse Hill school. They were all white, but they were dedicated unionists, Trotskyists of sorts…they were the English department of THS. They were very active in the NUT, the national union of teachers, and of course they wanted an association with any other radical group. One got to know them. I was a teacher at the time.

EB: I heard that the Panthers spoke at the school, and that’s why Linton went along to the first meeting that he did…that it was through the school.

FD: Yes- they invited us to speak. I don’t know who spoke.

EB: I think it was Althea…

FD: Althea Jones. Yes. She was a postgraduate student in chemistry and biology, in London University. And she was very inspirational in as far as she was a good speaker. And these people invited her to speak there, and that’s how he got to know it and joined the BPM youth group, where we used to give history lessons in the Oval house, and we’d talk about ‘The Making of the English Working Classes’, Thompson, and other historical developments in America, in the West Indies, we wanted to know British history also. How it wasn’t exclusive- how the labour movement came about…it was all A.P Thompson’s book- it was very instrumental in those lessons. I had to give lectures on it, and young people were there. That was the political atmosphere in which that group began. And of course, in membership, you kind of devoted your life to it. Every day at some meeting, every weekend selling newspapers, during the week you were writing or having to publish it- Freedom News. And they’d call a movement (meeting?) on a Tuesday afternoon, and say ‘You’ve got to go somebody’s been arrested we are fighting for their release, outside the court or Brixton Police Station’. Constantly. So, we were doing all that. Agitational pamphleteering-

EB: Yes! Agit-prop.

FD: Exactly. And the group told itself that it aught to have its own educational internal systems. So, there were history groups, and some people wanted to start a literary movement. At that time, we had about 6 or 7 people who wanted to meet in a literature collective of the BPM, inside south London. And I was an aspirant writer myself- not aspirant, I was a published writer; I hadn’t written any books, but I’d written a lot of articles, lots of journalism and short stories- so they looked upon me as a kind of writer. And Linton wanted to be a kind of writer. And Linton turned up, we used to read things- if you sit in a collective of 8 or 10 people, in 33 Shakespeare road, in Brixton- you find out what other people are thinking, what they’re writing about. They’d bring their work and we’d criticise it, like a book club- a readers and writers association. At the time Linton was writing verse in imitation of what he had heard in 6th form English classes. He was writing not what he wrote later, but stuff that sounded to me like imitation T.S Eliot. Which he carried on into VOTL&TD. This book is not Jamaican patois.

EB: Yes. That’s a big thing, and its maybe more helpful to this question-

FD: Yes, this is (reads from text) ‘they came with fire blazing, death deep within our midst, desiring our destruction, we were water extinguishing their fire…’. Now this has a political bias. At the time, he was writing much more in the imitation of Eliot. Stuff he’d read and been inspired by his teachers to read. There was no notion in that literature group…that reggae was literature. There wasn’t. I think it was I who claimed that people are writing in the language that they grew up with- the language that they spoke at home, in the streets. And why…of course that was not something I invented. It was something I observed. There were poets in Jamaica and the West Indies who were trying to break out into dialect. There were other poets who wrote very purely in the English tradition. They were carrying on from Auden, Wordsworth, Keats, Eliot, Hughes. They were carrying on in that tradition even though they were black. But in the West Indies there was a movement to move towards the way that West Indians used English. Patois. Some call think that’s an insulting term.

EB: Yes, I’ve thought about this too- whether it’s creole or patois.

FD: Creole means ‘home language’.

EB: And then, coming off of that idea of the literary group, I’ve read Linton talking about reading in the Panthers, Fanon and Du Bois.

FD: Yes, in the history lessons…and CLR James of course. Whose biography I wrote. And he lived in our house, CLR James, when the kids were young. Yes, because his wife kicked him out. He stayed for a few months- he was supposed to stay 3 days! Anyway, so Johnson then went on with the inspiration of reggae and that debate which had been raging from the 30s in the west indies, over whether one should write in the British tradition, or apply bits of language and how people speak. And of course, he was influenced by that, and massively influenced by the reggae movement. And he began then- later on- VOTL&TD is kind of a construction in the British tradition, using the consciousness of hindsight. So, he has then put in the political content about tyranny, slavery…but the first branch out was when we told him, people told him, he became aware; ‘write in the language that your parents speak, how you speak on the streets, how Jamaicans speak’. And we got ‘Sonny’s Lettah’- I think that was probably the first branch out for him.

EB: I do find interesting, that 5NOB in this volume is also in DB&B. I was reading earlier, Brathwaite’s ‘History of the Voice’. And he analyses it, and writes it out in creole- in dialect. Because he’s analysing it from the EP, not how it was written down. And I thought that was interesting, because part of the question I’m asking myself is, because this is the reprint- rather than the original- why if this is in 83 that it was reprinted, so after DB&B has come out, after he started he publishing stuff in creole- I wonder why nothing was added to the volume that was this new type of poetry that he was writing.

FD: Braithwaite was at Pembroke college, Cambridge. Not at the same time as me, before. But I used to edit at Cambridge a magazine called Garconette (sp?), and I sought him out in London- said Mr Brathwaite, you were at my college. He probably thought ‘who’s this punk’- but I asked him to contribute a poem and he did. But it was not- he didn’t write- at the time in patois, he wrote in pure English.

EB: So, at the time he (Linton) was writing this (VOTL&TD), you don’t think he was experimenting with creole writing? Yet. Or maybe he was?

FD: Linton? I don’t know, but, as soon as Sonny’s Letter hit the decks, people though this was it, this is fantastic. And he never looked back. Except that when this was republished in 83- he went back to-he wasn’t ashamed of what he had written before. Did he revise it? Have you compared it?

EB: I can’t find 74 anywhere, but I’ve inferred from the introduction- which says ‘this volume’ was published in 74, and yes, I think it’s the same thing.

FD: You see, what would happen is that his teachers would have told him, and through Althea, write about the historical difficulties of what you think; Sonny’s Lettah is personal, he creates a character who is there. VOTL&TD is abstraction. He’s imagining that he’s the soul of black history, and that’s an abstraction. Putting himself in the place of the redemption of black history – ‘the tyrants came for us, they did this to us…’- they didn’t enslave him. He was walking around Brixton, having a drink. Smoking ganja. But he’s taking on the voice of the race.

EB: And calling for an uprising.

FD: Yes.

EB: I was going to ask about what Brixton was like in particular, and the relationships between minority youth, police-

FD: Brixton was very black- 100% black. There were no fashionable pubs, the Atlantic was a run down place, on the border of Coldharbour lane and Railton road- I lived at 74 Railton road. It was known as ‘the front line’.

EB: Yes, I’ve heard that Railton Road was a hotbed of different groups.

FD: What happened was, the BPM had a base in Shakespeare road- 38 SP road. That was given to us by somebody. Its first base was in Barnsbury, Islington. Very fashionable Islington. Because a rich white lady knew Althea and people, and said you can use my house to live in. You wouldn’t have known that it was the beginning of the BPM- it was in a very gentrified, even at that time- ‘Islingtonia’. And she handed over the house, so people would live in different rooms of the house. And the hall would be the meeting place for the Mangrove trials and so on. I would be up there every evening to write up what had gone on with the trial.

EB: I was reading about the Mangrove 9. And it was Franco Rosso, who did the film about the Mangrove 9…was it right that Race Today was based on Railton Road as well?

FD: What happened was, the Black Panthers then acquired property in Tollington Park. We had 3 branches in London. Shakespeare road, we used to call it the South London collective, then there was the West London collective, along the Mangrove- that gang, then there was the North London collective because they needed spaces across London, because there were members who used to come all the way South, as Althea said why don’t we base ourselves there. And as luck would have it, this writer, John Berger, gave us £2500, because he won the Booker Prize. And we, Darcus and I, with the BP, turned up- I was the only one with a fucking bank account. So we turned up to collect the money, with all these reporters trailing us and so on, and we took the money and put it into 37 Tollington Park, up near Finsbury park. And Althea and Eddie and everyone else moved in there. the entire story is told in a book I’ve written called ‘London Company’. Darcus was not a member of the central corps, because Althea didn’t like him.

EB: Of the Panthers? Why didn’t she like him?

FD: She said was a demagogue, a rabble rouser. And he was very attractive to the general membership. And he was a rival, so she kept him out of the central corps- saying he was a loose cannon, and he knew that. But one day they held a kangaroo trial…a chap called Brian, brought some white girl and the girls who lived there said we don’t want any white girls having sex in here. A household squabble. And they turned it into a kangaroo trial and called the central corps for an emergency meeting, saying ‘this man has disgraced the community’, and I said ‘What the fuck are you talking about? He’s a citizen he can fuck who he likes. It’s none of our business, we’re a political movement. He hasn’t broken any laws.’ And I said I’m not staying here for a kangaroo trial; I’m not doing this. And out of the 8 members of the central corps I walked out. And the first thing I did was phone Darcus, and said this is what’s happened. And he said ‘fuck, the whole place has deteriorated.’ So, we got a gang together, including Linton, and broke up the BPM, said fuck it. We want to do something else. So, we drifted for a while, didn’t go to the meetings, I signed over the house to Anthea and Eddie, her husband…but Linton came with us, he didn’t stay with the BPM, came with Darcus and me, and about 20 of us who quit the BPM started Race Today.

EB: That’s a really good story.

FD: So that’s how Race Today started and Linton joined it. And he continued his career as a poet, by this time of course he’d established himself by reading here and there. And the mood in Britain was towards celebrating Bob Marley, celebrating reggae, realising its rebellious- I wouldn’t say revolutionary- potential. And Linton tuned into that. It was very much attractive, to the establishment even. BBC 2 would do documentaries on him. That’s when Franco Rosso, everyone who thought they were on the radical left of the media, would join in to promote, celebrate, accentuate and bring to the public the ideas and voices they thought they were contributing to that rebellion or act of justice or revolution. All sorts of grades of ambition.

EB: So, at Race Today, were there specific roles?

FD: There weren’t specific roles. Darcus was certainly editor, he’d say what went into the magazine. The rest of us were writers, one of the first things I did for them was on the black explosion in British schools- a big article in the second edition.

EB: So, was Darcus Howe the editor from the start of the magazine?

FD: No, Darcus took over from a priest. Who used to run Race Today, when it was a magazine that belonged to the Institute of Race Relations in Kings Cross. And so, what happened was, Leila, who later on married Darcus, she and 2 or 3 others in the Race Today IRR said Alec was fine as editor, but we need a black editor. They were quite academic in their approach, the previous Race Today, just reporting this and that. They invited Darcus, who had just left the BPM, when we were floating about not belonging to anything, saying we’d make another movement and we’d have a black workers movement…they called him to be editor of Race Today, the collective of young black people who were working for IRR. And Darcus’ whole aim was, we’re not just going to be a magazine, we’re going to turn into an active collective.

EB: So the magazine was the start, and then it came out of that?

FD: Yes, and then he called me to write Black Explosion in British Schools, in February 73. The article is all about how the West Indian children of that generation that I was teaching are completely restless- by your generation they’d settled into the meritocracy, but in that generation they hadn’t.

EB: Are these second-generation kids, born here?

FD: Yes. Linton’s generation.

EB: This is something that I think is going to be the basis of my argument- the shift, the lack of complacency. So, I’m kind of wondering, for my own interest, your personal relationship with Linton. Because from what you’ve said it seems to be a kind of mentor relationship in the BPM.

FD: Hardly. He would never acknowledge anyone as his mentor. Of course, when he went his way and became a reggae poet, with groups giving him background to recordings and so on, there was no connection between me and him at all. We used to meet because we were part of the same collective, but otherwise there was no relationship with me whatsoever. I’ve never known whether he’s read my books- though I’ve followed his career.

EB: This was something I found interesting that I read today- in an interview he did with John La Rose, in I think around 97- he says, and I don’t think this will be a touchy subject from the conversation we’ve just had, but he said after he started touring the world with the successful albums, ‘I think there was a view within RT that I was too much of a high flier and my wings needed to be clipped’, in about 85. He said because of that he retired from music for 3 years, because he was needed for the Brixton organizational stuff.

FD: By 85 I had left Race Today, in the end of 83 I was appointed commissioning editor of channel 4, and I pulled in Darcus to do stuff. So, Linton was left with the collective and became one of its editors.

EB: I thought it was interesting.

FD: Yes, and maybe true. Its not that peoples wings…they probably said ‘what the hell are you doing? Do some political activity instead of cruising around!’

EB: I got the impression that it was more out of guilt than conscience, and I thought that was really interesting.

FD: You’re right I think, you’re right about that. And race today continued, Darcus left it because I gave him the money to fund Bandung files on Channel 4, where he started working full time. And Linton then began to run Race Today, and he must have felt responsible to do that. And if it was out of guilt rather than political conscience- well yeah, maybe. What he did do though, was bring in a lot of Jamaican poets- went to Jamaica, picked up Mikey Smith and others. And they all came and did a circuit of universities, and BBC2 came to the Race Today office and said they wanted to interview the poets.

[recording cuts out here]

Monday 18th November

EB: So, I went through the things we’d spoken about before, to see what hadn’t been lost in the recording. I think the first question that cut off was regarding what it was like to be creative at a time when what was at stake was something more material…if the battles that you’re waging are more to do with police brutality and discrimination- threats which meant government at local and national level needed to be targeted, how can poetry get to that, or try to meet the requirements of an aim like that. I think we spoke about political consciousness raising?

FD: One can look at in several ways. A Caribbean population established itself here. It has its culture, its culture is religion, food- they may not be aware that all these things are known by the name of culture- what you wear, what you believe in, how you conduct the traditions within your life- all that becomes your culture. Now, art is a branch of culture. What you produce to be beautiful or instructive- not useful- a frying pan could be useful but that’s not art- but if you make a sculpture, a painting, if you write poetry or sing a song- those are creative things that come within culture, but they come within the subcategory of art. The workers who came here from the Caribbean had a culture for the Caribbean- the Trinidadians would sing calypso- there were black singers who had made it from the Caribbean- Harry Bellefonte. The people who came here didn’t quite discover what they were going to be writing about. They could do imitation calypso, they could imitate reggae and so forth, and some of them did try. But a particular culture began to evolve within British blacks, and Linton was certainly part of that. He knew that art went with particular forms, particular forms, particular moods and emotions. He had read English poetry, and American poetry, and knew that these were the things that poetry did. But, he had not discovered his subject, until he began to thing 2 things- 1) let me write in the language of the people that I live with, and am part of- actually youths. And the second thing was what should I write about. And it was always said, because we were in political turmoil, political action and struggle, combat and activation- it became clear to him that we always said write about what you are and what you do. It needn’t always be combative. It could be descriptive. When the philosopher C.L.R James said to us in a big meeting of the BPM ‘write about what you’re doing, and that will inspire other people rather than theories’. I was a schoolteacher at the time- I used to write 500 word articles for the paper about accusations of a black child stealing, or the 5th form disco, where fights went on, love rivalries- I wrote about that. James was telling us, write about what you know, about where you are. It will move other people to think in a similar way. Bus drivers wrote about how their union treated them, what happened at the garage, conductors about their interactions with the public- someone was racist to them, stuff like that. Linton would turn the experience that he saw around him into poetry, and that’s how he began writing Dread Beat & Blood, and then he took to writing actual propagandist poems- ‘Darcus Howe to Jail, Race Today cannot fail’, ‘free George Lindo’, stuff like that. So those were activist poems in support of a particular movement rather than descriptions of something that he had observed as an artist and poet. Those distinctions exist even within his work.

EB: Yeah, I think there’s even a further distinction in that this [VOTL&TD] comes before the absolute personal, there’s hints of it. He seems to be writing in the western tradition, of Eliot as you said. I found bits of ‘Voices’ very similar to ‘The Hollow Men’-

FD: Yes, that’s what he was doing.

EB: But he’s imparting upon that style-

FD: Yes- he discovered these two things. The language as his people speaks and the subject matter which he should now begin to represent. So, he did. And he was one of the first. Other people have followed, other writers. Now a whole spate of rap artists of your generation. Like Stormzy, someone who is a household name, who I know.

EB: Yes, my parents would know Stormzy, I doubt they’d know anyone else of that ilk. I suppose it’s similar to Linton, when we think about the documentaries- these people that want to be involved and push this figure.

FD: Sure, and of course what happens in our time is that art, even if it has propagandist and activist motive, becomes something to frame and look at. So even if you sing a song of love to woo a girl, it gets recorded and then its value doesn’t become the relationship, but how much the record will sell for. The function of art in our times has become that. Picasso paints ‘Guernica’, because he hates the Spanish civil war. What happens to the piece? Sells for millions. That’s the destiny of art in our times.

[break]

EB: Thinking about the performance of VOTL&TD at the Keskidee- I wish it were recorded somewhere but it’s not from what I can see. In some interviews he says there were dancers, in others dancers aren’t mentioned. And because obviously there’s different speaking voices- parts- I would really like to know if the audience were told before who each of them were, or if they were meant to infer it. Because if one voice is ‘the dead’ and one voice ‘the living’, I wonder how easy that is to recognise.

FD: Ask the George Padmore institute.

EB: Yes, I’ve looked at their archive website. But I’ll email. And I’ve got your book- I’m going to read the article on the black explosion in British schools, which from what I’ve glanced at is about the way black children were treated as inferior. Which I think is relevant, because I’ve read interviews with Linton that say in Jamaica he was top of the class, and when he came here they tried to put him in basically remedial lessons.

FD: That’s what happened in the first school I taught at. It’s not like that anymore- that’s gone. There’s still a lot of desperation amongst black boys though, gang crime.

EB: This question I think we spoke on, about the musicality of Linton’s work. About him being inspired by reggae artists- and I’ve also read him speaking about how he doesn’t consider himself to be a dub lyricist, because for him the words and the music were together as he wrote, rather than him needing a backing track for the poem to exist. Like reggae artists riffing on the track as it plays. I thought that was interesting because obviously 5NOB is the last in this collection, and I’ve seen it performed with music, but I thought it was interesting that it exists sans music, and I wonder if he wrote it for music, or if the music came after.

FD: What it is, when you look at his work- it’s extremely rhythmic. And it’s rhythmic in a drumbeat way. It has no complex rhythms which then come out, which some melodic songs do have- if you listen to Andrew Lloyd Webber, there’s different beats that progress within the songs. Linton’s poems don’t, they have the same – bum, pa dum, pa dum bu bu dum- and that actually accords well with the sort of instrumental music he did later. Because he recites, he doesn’t sing. Its not melodic, but it’s very rhythmic, and the rhythm is particular. And that’s just his style, the peculiarity of it. Lots of reggae songs, they use melodies found in popular music too- but his compositions as well are purely rhythmic too, the reggae beats.

EB: We spoke about Race Today, how the magazine was owned by IRR, and then when Darcus was appointed editor, he said he wanted it to be about activation, not just recording things. And I’d love for you to retell me that story about the post van-

FD: Yes. Darcus did a couple of months editing the magazine in the IRR at Kings Cross, and we determined in private talks that the magazine should not be – and so had they, those who worked there- had determined what they wanted to do. Because some of them were activists you see, in other groups like the Black Unity and Freedom party- who were doing things. They said to themselves, we don’t want the magazine to reflect the society, it’s not an academic magazine; we want to report the actions which we undertake, and we want it to stimulate the actions of people. If we wanted it to be like Lenin’s magazine in Russia, we needed to move it out of the academic atmosphere of the IRR. So one night a few of us, of course Darcus and I- with me driving my little old green post office van went to the IRR in Kings Cross, loaded up all the machines, the electric typewriters, pens, this that and the other – I don’t know if we took any desks, we may have done. The whole lot, we cleaned up the place. When they came in the next day they found everything gone.

EB: Was there bad blood?

FD: Yes. I think Darcus must’ve told Siavanandan, who thought he was the great leader of immigrants in Britain, who was a purely academic idiot. And not too academic- he didn’t know much. But he got himself into this position. He was a race peddler, not very bright- he’s dead now though, so its not libel. So we ran away, we established ourselves at 132 Railton Road, my second squat. 74 was my first squat, out of which I got burnt.

EB: How do you mean?

FD: I got burnt out. I was living on the second floor, 74 Railton Road, and at 4 o’clock in the morning someone through a bomb into the house. The house was ablaze, I woke up to the smoke. I thought someone was choking me, a pillow or something. I struggled, there was no pillow just burning smoke. I thought shit I’ve left the fire on, it’s caught fire. It wasn’t on.

EB: Was it people trying to get rid of the squatters or?

FD: No. It was the National Front. Because they hit 6 houses that night, all Asian and west-indian houses and shops. They fire-bombed. The fire engine police told me I was fire bombed. The police never caught them. It was on the 15th of march.

EB: Beware the ides of march.

FD: Exactly. That’s when it happened. The 15th of March 1973. Burnt out of our house.

EB: It’s crazy to me that whenever I read about the New Cross house fire that it was never confirmed that it was the National Front. Who else would’ve done it?

FD: Electrical fault, somebody else, someone set fire to the basement because of a love rivalry. There’s all sorts of stories floating. Nobody knows I suppose.

EB: I can’t remember if I asked this last time- I wondered, not necessarily with this text as I don’t know how involved you were, but about the process of getting a text printed, getting somebody like Errol Lloyd to illustrate it. Do you think something like that would spring out of then already knowing each other, or-

FD: Well, the artistic world of blacks at that time was quite small, so they would have got to know each other, and they would have met at cultural occasions, where they were both speaking. And certainly the connection with Race Today could’ve helped- someone calling up and saying ‘I’m with Race Today, a poet, do you want to do my book?’

EB: I see, so it being a known thing people wanted to get involved. Also, not necessarily to do with Voices, but what do you think about capturing something in print which was made to be performed? Because on the first page of the poem, before it even starts, it says ‘with drums, bass guitar and flute’- and I suppose I’m asking for your opinion. Do you think illustrations in print are there in place of performance?

FD: No, they’re an additional form of art, apart from the performance. The performance is one thing, the illustrations their own form of art.

EB: Yes, this is why I’d love to see it. To see if there were costumes or-

FD: There wont have been costumes. I can tell you that. Youths of hope, for Darcus Howe…-

EB: Yes, that’s actually something I want to talk about, Darcus Howe. The fact it’s called ‘youths of hope’. I remember you saying to me before that Darcus was the driving force, was straight to the point.

FD: Yes, of Race Today. Yes.

EB: Everything I read about him, the mangrove 9, the black people’s day of action- every significant incident that is in the books I’ve read about any of this, Darcus is mentioned. So I guess the ‘youth of hope’ moniker is for him. It’s where I got a lot of my idea, my argument, about it being the younger generation who will be able to make a difference- rather than the complacency of the Windrush generation, it will be the younger people. I think 5NOB is my favourite one.

FD: It makes sense you see. Some of the others don’t- ‘terror tearing us up into pieces of smoke’- smoke doesn’t go have pieces!

EB: Well, I think YOH is helpful, when looking at VOTL&TD, to work out some things. Pinning down the tyrants, things like that. We spoke a little before on this- on whether at the time of writing this- because obviously all of this- even 5NOB which obviously made its way onto DB&B, is not written in the creole, the patois, any of the language that made him famous. Do you know if he was experimenting with it at that time- or do you think it was after? I remember you saying ‘sonny’s letter’ was the beginning, and after that he didn’t look back.

FD: I think so, I can’t be certain. 5NOB was refashioned- before he wasn’t doing anything in patois-

EB: Yes, it was actually really interesting to me that 5NOB, in his ‘History of the Voice’, Brathwaite analyses it, written out in patois- I think he did it from listening to the EP and writing it phonetically, because I’ve got DB&B, and it’s printed exactly the same as here. And that speaks to the fact that even though at this time Linton’s writing in standard English, if you were to hear him saying it, it becomes a completely different thing: his accent changes the whole thing. And it makes me think, how can a text that so needs to be heard in the voice of the person who made it- not what’s the point of printing it, because it’s obviously so more people can read it, but I find the tensions of that interesting.

FD: Yes. We all read Eliot for instance- and I’ve heard recordings of him reading Four Quartets, and it doesn’t give you a sense of a new dimension to the poem.

EB: So we don’t know for sure about the experimentations with creole, but I think I mentioned that this text we’ve been set is the republished, 2nd edition- so 9 years after the first in 1983. I wonder if you think there’s a particular reason for not expanding the volume, to include some of the work he was writing then. Because by then he’s published Sonny’s letter, and DB&B, released the albums which made him famous. He obviously wasn’t embarrassed of this stuff he’s done before.

FD: Well, even the publishers say ‘we don’t want collected works yet’, we’ll do them when you’re near to death.

EB: I’ve had to read a collected works of Linton!

FD: Well he’s getting old…

EB: My last question was- do you think Linton’s shift in writing style after this marked a shift in his intentions as poet. Maybe from politicisation to new means of expression for black creativity. VOTL&TD is riling up revolution of some kind and-

FD: Yeah, I think that the animus, the particularity of the activation has gone. There’s no Darcus in Jail or George Lindo- those were for particular publications of a monthly magazine- written for that. You couldn’t sell a poem in America or Jamaica, because nobody knows who that is, it’s a petty affair. Those poems were written for a particular audience, of a particular magazine, in a particular month. And they were just protest into rhyme. Of course he discovered that protest into rhyme works as journalism, but not as art. So I’m sure he’s shifted his focus to the attempt at permanence. The other thing, post-this, was that Linton befriended other poets from the Caribbean such as John La Rose. I don’t think La Rose is a good poet- or made an impact- but Linton befriended them, because Race Today deteriorated, got slower and went its way. Because frankly both Darcus and I left it.

EB: Do you think it was also kind of, not that the struggles had been won, but there was less-

FD: Times were changing certainly. And Linton then drifted off to the North to meet people like La Rose regularly, who of course he’d met in the Creation for Liberation times, World Book Fair and so forth.

EB: The way I’ve been thinking about it is like ’74, when this was written- there’s calls for uprising, calls for dying for what we believe in, even if that’s a lot of posturing. But I think even by the time this has been republished, there’s been the Brixton Riots, there’s been the battle of Lewisham. This stuff has happened.

FD: Yes.

EB: I think that you can attribute the change, that VOTL&TD is an attempt at politicisation, of whoever’s reading it, whoever’s watching; aimed at youth, the ‘youth’s of hope’, to stop ‘in-fighting’, start the righteous war- violence is justified if against police.

FD: Yes, he is saying that.

EB: And after this, it’s more like, ‘I’m speaking in my language…I’ve found my voice now’, like from the teaching in the BPM literary classes.

FD: Yes, adding the creole language to the literary tradition, maybe that’s what Linton will achieve.

EB: I think he knows that young people, 2nd generation children of immigrants, have got their own voice and that’s the protest and the riots and all this, is coming out of a lack of complacency. And the change, saying ‘I’m going to speak with this voice instead’, is a reflection of that.

FD: Yes.

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