Sunday, March 22, 2015
Saturday, March 21, 2015
The Black Students Union at San Francisco State University started it all!
The Black Student Union at San Francisco State University was the first at any school anywhere. Its official history has not yet been written, but the oral history is being kept alive by two men in their mid-60s talking about the mid-'60s.
They are Jimmy Garrett and Jerry Varnado, who cooked up the concept - a college advocacy group that would work toward civil rights everywhere - and barnstormed it around to other colleges and high schools. The pair met as undergraduate activists in early 1966 and met most recently at Garrett's house a few doors off Martin Luther King Jr. Way in North Oakland.
"We did manage to play a role in a broader movement," says Varnado, a retired attorney who lives in the Oakland hills. "There are Black Student Unions all over the world. I went to the London School of Economics to visit the Black Student Union."
"The group at San Francisco State is the first that we know to use that term," says Akinyele Umoja, associate professor of African American studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta and a leader at the National Council for Black Studies. "Later on, there was a conference in California where black students at other campuses all adopted that name."
It was more than a name, and the lasting acronym BSU. "That activity that they were leaders in didn't just shift San Francisco State. It shifted the access and the academic context of every university in the country," says Kenneth Monteiro, dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State.
The first and still the only academic department of its kind in the country, the College of Ethnic Studies is celebrating its 40th anniversary this school year. The College of Ethnic Studies came out of the black studies department, which came out of the famed student strike of 1968-69, which came out of the BSU, which came out of a wager that Garrett made in Los Angeles shortly after the Watts Riots of 1965.
A winning bet
"The bet was that you could build a black student movement on a predominately white campus," says Garrett, 67, also a lawyer and the retired dean of instruction at Vista Community College (now Berkeley City College). "That was a bet that a couple of people in SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) made. I bet that it could happen."In his early 20s, Garrett was already a veteran Freedom Rider and youth activist. He came to San Francisco because he had family here, and he came to S.F. State specifically to organize. Being enrolled in classes was mainly a way to avoid Vietnam.
"When I got to San Francisco State, I did an analysis," says Garrett, who broke the black student population into three categories: the Negro Student Association (NSA), an organized club inclusive of all black students; the fraternities and sororities; and the radical Black Nationalists.
"Then there were people like me who didn't know what they were," Garrett says. "Whatever I was, it wasn't one of those."
Strategy sessions
Varnado was one of those. A 21-year-old freshman from segregated Mississippi, by way of the Air Force, he was chapter president of Alpha Phi Alpha, a black fraternity, and active in the NSA. He may have met Garrett at a party at the frat house on Capitol Avenue in the Ingleside district, but he isn't sure. They started having strategy sessions in a corner of the campus library. Two became three. Three grew to five, then to eight.Whatever it was they were on to, it needed its own name, and that took two or three weeks of meetings to settle. Otherwise, there were no membership rules or bylaws or articles of incorporation filed in the student activities office.
"We didn't plan all this stuff," Varnado says. "It just started happening and it grew."
According to "Blow It Up!" Dikran Karagueuzian's account of the 1968 campus revolt, the name Black Student Union was attributed to a student named Tricia Navara. The book suggests that it was just a matter of renaming the NSA, which is the way Varnado and Garrett tell it.
"For all practical purposes, the BSU and the NSA were the same," says Varnado. But Dean Monteiro says that the BSU formed as a wholly separate entity.
"That was a tough moment," says Monteiro, who was too young to be there but has studied the chronology. "The Negro Student Association was not moving along as if it needed to be defunct."
But it couldn't keep up with the BSU under Garrett, who "soon moved into politics and made the BSU the most powerful pressure group on campus," according to "Blow It Up!"
"Our thing was not simply to understand the world. Our duty was to change it," Garrett says. "Everybody on the campus who identified themselves as a black person, whether they were a student, faculty, worked in the yards, you were a member of the Black Student Union by definition."
Garrett was the first chair, and Varnado was the on-campus coordinator. Word got around, and soon their expertise was being sought at other campuses.
"We had a student who called us from Stanford and he said, 'There's only six or seven of us, can we set up a Black Student Union?' " Garrett says. "We worked at every institution that would open space for us: community college, high school, elementary school."
College outreach
Within a year, the BSU was at every state college in California. There were BSU sweatshirts, BSU dances, but the most important aspect was the BSU outreach into high schools with tutorials and college prep programs."Having the name Black Student Union, we were not afraid to go to the ghetto. We were not afraid to go to Hunters Point," says Varnado. "We tried to recruit students to come to college. We wanted them to join the BSU also, but the primary reason was for them to get an education."
The BSU pressed campus administrators for a more liberal admissions policy. A year after its launch, the black population at San Francisco State had doubled, Garrett says, and a year after that, it doubled again.
"Enrollment was increased and many lives were changed because of the outreach they did," says Umoja of the National Council of Black Studies. "BSUs in the late '60s and early '70s provided a key role for tens of thousands of black kids in the United States."
Much of that was the result of the student strike to institutionalize minority curriculums. The walkout started Nov. 6, 1968, and ended March, 21, 1969, making it the longest campus strike in U.S. history. By then, Garrett had moved on toward graduate school in the East, but Varnado wasn't going anywhere. He liked S.F. State so much that he changed his major to prolong his undergraduate career.
During the strike, he was arrested many times and ended up spending a year in County Jail. But it ended well. He proceeded directly from jail to law school at Hastings, though he doesn't recall ever filling out an application. That was the power of the BSU at S.F. State.
A new plaque
If you go out to the Outer Sunset campus looking for the history of the BSU, you won't find much. There is the BSU headquarters in Cesar Chavez Student Center, and there is a commemorative rock hidden in the Quad with a plaque that vaguely honors the strike but doesn't mention the BSU.Next month, a historic plaque that speaks specifically to the BSU and its sister in arms, the Third World Liberation Front, will be mounted in the front lobby of the ethnic studies building.
Garrett and Varnado will be proud to see it, but they're more proud of what stands behind it.
"I'm just happy that the ethnic studies department is still in existence at San Francisco State," Varnado says. "It's beyond anything that I could have imagined."
Garrett breaks it down to numbers: "Six thousand students take those courses every semester."
Prayers for the Black Arts Movement Success of BAM 27 City Tour
Members of the BAM Poet's Choir and Arkestra informed producer Marvin X they are in prayer for the success in acquiring the funding needed for the 27 City Tour prescribed by Ancestor Amiri Baraka. It is estimated the tour will cost $2.7 million dollars @ $100,000.00 per city. Cost of the BAM 50th Anniversary Celebration/Conference at the University of California, Merced, Feb/Mar 2014, was approximately $60,000.00. The Oakland Laney College BAM Celebration, Feb. 7, 2015, was approximately $30,000.00. Marvin X says, "One hundred thousand dollars will allow us to do a first class production, including professional fees for all artists and participants. It will allow us to promote the event in Prime Time.
The Black Arts Movement Poet's Choir and Arkestra at the Malcolm X Jazz/Art Festival, Oakland, May 27, 2014
Adam Turner photo collage
Syrian poet/professor, Dr. Mohja Kahf and Marvin X. She invited Marvin X to speak and read at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Dr. Kahf proclaims that the Black Arts Movement poets are the foundation of the genre Muslim American literature. "Marvin X, well, along with Malcolm X, is the father of Muslim American literature, as well as other BAM poets, including Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez (Laila Mannan), Askia Muhammad Toure', Yusef Rahman, et al.
Ancestor Ossie Davis, Dr. Nathan Hare, Bobby Seale, Dr. Carlton Goodlet (The street in front of San Francisco City Hall is named after Dr. Carlton Goodlett, publisher of the Sun Reporter Newspaper).
Marvin X in Seattle, Washington at rally protesting genocide in Gaza, occupied Palestine.
Oakland Post Newspaper Publisher Paul Cobb and Marvin X. They are childhood friends who grew up in West Oakland. "Marvin X, is this BAM thing a new Movement?" Paul is a supporter of the BAM District and the BAM 27 City Tour. He has promoted BAM in his Post News Group papers, including the Oakland Post, San Francisco Post, Richmond, Berkeley Post.
Paul Cobb suggests one hundred people in each city donate $100.00 each to BAM 27 City Tour. This will acknowledge that we are serious about doing for self, although we will seek funding from corporations, organizations and governments. We will not compromise our mission as artistic freedom fighters, lovers of truth and beauty. See the following essay by ancestor Langston Hughes:
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926)
Earlier that year, Freda Kirchwey, editor of the Nation, mailed Hughes a proof of “The Negro-Art Hokum,” an essay George Schuyler had written for the magazine, requesting a counterstatement. Schuyler, editor of the African-American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, questioned in his essay the need for a separate African-American artistic and literary tradition.
Understanding a fellow African American poet’s stated desire to be “a poet—not a Negro poet,” as that poet’s wish to look away from his African American heritage and instead absorb white culture, Hughes’ essay spoke to the concerns of the Harlem Renaissance as it celebrated African American creative innovations such as blues, spirituals, jazz, and literary work that engaged African American life. Notes Hughes, “this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.”
His attention to working-class African-American lives, coupled with his refusal to paint these lives as either saintly or stereotypical, brought criticism from several directions. Articulating the unspoken directives he struggled to ignore, Hughes observes, “‘Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,’ say the Negroes. ‘Be stereotyped, don't go too far, don't shatter our illusions about you, don't amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,’ say the whites.”
Hughes’ early poetry often explored domestic and musical themes—particularly jazz—in African American life, and his work grew increasingly political as the Great Depression wore on and his interest in Marxism deepened.
Adam Turner photo collage
Marvin X supports a democratic, non-sectarian Syria, but it is for the Syrian masses to decide their form of government, no matter what form, whether a Sharia or Democratic form of government. It should not be a decision of the imams but the suffering masses.
Syrian poet/professor, Dr. Mohja Kahf and Marvin X. She invited Marvin X to speak and read at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Dr. Kahf proclaims that the Black Arts Movement poets are the foundation of the genre Muslim American literature. "Marvin X, well, along with Malcolm X, is the father of Muslim American literature, as well as other BAM poets, including Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez (Laila Mannan), Askia Muhammad Toure', Yusef Rahman, et al.
Dr. Cornel West is a longtime supporter of Marvin X and the Black Arts Movement. Dr. West participated in the Marvin X production The Kings and Queens of Black Consciousness, San Francisco State University, April 1, 2001.
The Black Arts Movement Poet's Choir and Arkestra, University of California, Merced, 2014
Marvin X, David Murray and Earle Davis, Malcolm X Jazz/Art Fest, Oakland CA 2014
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926)
Ancestor Paul Robeson, Artistic Freedom Fighter Supreme
Alprentice Bunchy Carter, BAM/Black Power Freedom Fighter, Poet/Chairman of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Black Panther Party.
Kathleen Cleaver, Black Panther Party member, Black Power Revolutionary
Only known picture of Eldridge Cleaver and Marvin X. Marvin X introduced Eldridge Cleaver to Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. Eldridge and Marvin co-founded the San Francisco Black House, 1967, on Broderick Street.
A Day in the life: Marvin X at his Academy of da Corner, renamed the Black Arts Movement District.
Sufi Master, His Holiness Guru Muhaiyadin Bawa, one of Marvin X's main teachers. Many BAM members are influenced by the Sufi Teachers, especially Bamba of Senegal and Sufi Master Hazrat Inayat Khan. Marvin X and the BAM artists are the founders of the genre known as Muslim American literature, according to Dr. Mohja Kahf, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
Jah Amiel, grandson of Marvin X. At three years old, he told his grandfather, "Grandfather, you can't save the world, but I can!"
BAM co-founder Amiri Baraka
BAM founding General, Askia Toure'
BAM founding General Sonia Sanchez
BAM founding General Marvin X, West Coast
BAM Generals, Amiri Baraka and Marvin X. They enjoyed a 47 year friendship as Artistic Freedom Fighters.
Mrs. Amina Baraka and Mr. Amiri Baraka, friends of Marvin X for 47 years. I partyed with the Barakas for 47 years, from the time I met them both at the Black House, San Francisco, 1967, founded by Eldridge Cleaver, Ed Bullins, Ethna X. Wyatt (Hurriyah Asar) and myself. I miss my drinking buddy!
Marvin X at memorial for Amiri Baraka
Danny Glover at AB memorial
Amiri Baraka, "Marvin, why didn't you do it--yeah, the 27 City Tour?"
Marvin X at memorial for Amiri Baraka Danny Glover at AB memorial
When AB transitioned, it was the coldest winter ever. --MX
The good times: AB, Amina, Mariam Makeba, Kwame Toure
Marvin X and Nuyorican poet Nancy Mercado at Harlem NY reception for Marvin X.
Bam Poets honor Jayne Cortez and Amiri Baraka at New York University: left to right: Ted Wilson, Rashidah Ismaili, Sandra Esteves. Black Row: , Haki Madhubuti, Askia Toure, Marvin X, bassist Henry Grimes who accompanied Marvin X.
Bam Poets honor Jayne Cortez and Amiri Baraka at New York University: left to right: Ted Wilson, Rashidah Ismaili, Sandra Esteves. Black Row: , Haki Madhubuti, Askia Toure, Marvin X, bassist Henry Grimes who accompanied Marvin X.Introduction
Langston Hughes was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. He was educated at Columbia University and Lincoln University. While a student at Lincoln, he published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926), as well as his landmark essay, seen by many as a cornerstone document articulation of the Harlem renaissance, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”Earlier that year, Freda Kirchwey, editor of the Nation, mailed Hughes a proof of “The Negro-Art Hokum,” an essay George Schuyler had written for the magazine, requesting a counterstatement. Schuyler, editor of the African-American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, questioned in his essay the need for a separate African-American artistic and literary tradition.
Understanding a fellow African American poet’s stated desire to be “a poet—not a Negro poet,” as that poet’s wish to look away from his African American heritage and instead absorb white culture, Hughes’ essay spoke to the concerns of the Harlem Renaissance as it celebrated African American creative innovations such as blues, spirituals, jazz, and literary work that engaged African American life. Notes Hughes, “this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.”
His attention to working-class African-American lives, coupled with his refusal to paint these lives as either saintly or stereotypical, brought criticism from several directions. Articulating the unspoken directives he struggled to ignore, Hughes observes, “‘Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,’ say the Negroes. ‘Be stereotyped, don't go too far, don't shatter our illusions about you, don't amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,’ say the whites.”
Hughes’ early poetry often explored domestic and musical themes—particularly jazz—in African American life, and his work grew increasingly political as the Great Depression wore on and his interest in Marxism deepened.
One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me
once, “I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet,” meaning, I believe, “I
want to write like a white poet”; meaning subconsciously, “I would like
to be a white poet”; meaning behind that, “I would like to be white.”(1)
And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever
been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire
to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great
poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art
in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to
pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and
to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.
But let us look at the immediate background of this young poet. His family is of what I suppose one would call the Negro middle class: people who are by no means rich yet never uncomfortable nor hungry—smug, contented, respectable folk, members of the Baptist church. The father goes to work every morning.
He is a chief steward at a large white club. The mother sometimes does fancy sewing or supervises parties for the rich families of the town. The children go to a mixed school. In the home they read white papers and magazines. And the mother often says “Don’t be like niggers” when the children are bad.
A frequent phrase from the father is, “Look how well a white man does things.” And so the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all virtues. It holds for the children beauty, morality, and money. The whisper of “I want to be white” runs silently through their minds. This young poet’s home is, I believe, a fairly typical home of the colored middle class. One sees immediately how difficult it would be for an artist born in such a home to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people. He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian patterns.
For racial culture the home of a self-styled “high-class” Negro has nothing better to offer. Instead there will perhaps be more aping of things white than in a less cultured or less wealthy home. The father is perhaps a doctor, lawyer, landowner, or politician. The mother may be a social worker, or a teacher, or she may do nothing and have a maid. Father is often dark but he has usually married the lightest woman he could find. The family attend a fashionable church where few really colored faces are to be found. And they themselves draw a color line.
In the North they go to white theaters and white movies. And in the South they have at least two cars and house “like white folks.” Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven. A very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist to climb in order to discover himself and his people.
But then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority—may the Lord be praised! The people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. They live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let’s dance!
These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself. Whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear. And they are not ashamed of him—if they know he exists at all. And they accept what beauty is their own without question.
Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art. Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their “white” culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work. And when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country, with their innumerable overtones and undertones, surely, and especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand. To these the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears. But let us look again at the mountain.
A prominent Negro clubwoman in Philadelphia paid eleven dollars to hear Raquel Meller sing Andalusian popular songs. But she told me a few weeks before she would not think of going to hear “that woman,” Clara Smith, a great black artist, sing Negro folksongs.(2) And many an upper-class Negro church, even now, would not dream of employing a spiritual in its services. The drab melodies in white folks’ hymnbooks are much to be preferred. “We want to worship the Lord correctly and quietly. We don’t believe in ‘shouting.’ Let’s be dull like the Nordics,” they say, in effect.
But let us look at the immediate background of this young poet. His family is of what I suppose one would call the Negro middle class: people who are by no means rich yet never uncomfortable nor hungry—smug, contented, respectable folk, members of the Baptist church. The father goes to work every morning.
He is a chief steward at a large white club. The mother sometimes does fancy sewing or supervises parties for the rich families of the town. The children go to a mixed school. In the home they read white papers and magazines. And the mother often says “Don’t be like niggers” when the children are bad.
A frequent phrase from the father is, “Look how well a white man does things.” And so the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all virtues. It holds for the children beauty, morality, and money. The whisper of “I want to be white” runs silently through their minds. This young poet’s home is, I believe, a fairly typical home of the colored middle class. One sees immediately how difficult it would be for an artist born in such a home to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people. He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian patterns.
For racial culture the home of a self-styled “high-class” Negro has nothing better to offer. Instead there will perhaps be more aping of things white than in a less cultured or less wealthy home. The father is perhaps a doctor, lawyer, landowner, or politician. The mother may be a social worker, or a teacher, or she may do nothing and have a maid. Father is often dark but he has usually married the lightest woman he could find. The family attend a fashionable church where few really colored faces are to be found. And they themselves draw a color line.
In the North they go to white theaters and white movies. And in the South they have at least two cars and house “like white folks.” Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven. A very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist to climb in order to discover himself and his people.
But then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority—may the Lord be praised! The people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. They live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let’s dance!
These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself. Whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear. And they are not ashamed of him—if they know he exists at all. And they accept what beauty is their own without question.
Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art. Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their “white” culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work. And when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country, with their innumerable overtones and undertones, surely, and especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand. To these the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears. But let us look again at the mountain.
A prominent Negro clubwoman in Philadelphia paid eleven dollars to hear Raquel Meller sing Andalusian popular songs. But she told me a few weeks before she would not think of going to hear “that woman,” Clara Smith, a great black artist, sing Negro folksongs.(2) And many an upper-class Negro church, even now, would not dream of employing a spiritual in its services. The drab melodies in white folks’ hymnbooks are much to be preferred. “We want to worship the Lord correctly and quietly. We don’t believe in ‘shouting.’ Let’s be dull like the Nordics,” they say, in effect.
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes,
published by University of Missouri Press. Copyright © 2002 by The
Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted with the permission of Harold Ober
Associates Incorporated.
Marvin X returns to his academy of da Corner on 14th and Broadway, renamed the Black Arts Movement District.
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After an absence of many months, Marvin was mobbed by street people who sincerely missed him. When it was time to depart, a student begged him, "Oh, Master Teacher, please do not leave me here with these ignut nigguhs, please don't go, please. Don't leave me in darkness!" Another brother had missed him so much he bowed before the Master Teacher and got down on his knees in respect and honor. photo Adam Turner
The writings of Marvin X appear in the BAM Reader: SOS
Dr. Cornel West and Marvin X
Cornel will participate in the BAM 27 City Tour
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photo South Park Kenny Johnson
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Laney College BAM celebration, panel on BAM/Black Power Babies: Kujichagulia and daughter Taiwo
Marvin X and daughter Nefertiti on BAM/Black Power Babies panel at Laney College
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