B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (24 page)

The same book explained that this claim was part of Cooks’s effort of
convincing Negroes of their innate ability
to do big things now and in the future
. Cooks and his fellow orators at African Square
speak of great Negroes of long ago
, and tell of magnificent performances by dark souls in African states of antiquity
. Commenting on the excavation of pharaonic tombs in Egypt, Cooks noted the deaths of several scientists involved. They were not, he said, the result of the “Pharaoh’s Curse” or some word-magic effected by inscriptions on the tombs. According to Cooks, the reason was the presence of nuclear fission within the burial chambers.
When the explorers opened
and entered them, their bodies became radioactive and this brought about their death
.

Cooks’s ideas on ancient nuclear physics were a minor part of his presence and influence.
Born in the Dominican Republic
in 1913, Cooks immigrated to New York, where he founded the ANPM in 1941. He led the group until his death, in 1966. During his quarter century as a political personality, he seems to have enjoyed a level of local celebrity that, despite his penchant for the world-historical, never transcended the borders of Harlem. Indeed, most writing about Cooks by his acolytes emphasizes the lack of attention paid to his work while he lived and to his legacy in death. He is mourned as one who never got his due and described with a level of hyperbole intended to assert his place in history:
Carlos Cooks was to Black Nationalism
what John Coltrane was to the so-called avant-garde “jazz”, and what Aretha is to soul music; the prime progenitor among their respective peers
. But he was robbed of this recognition because
he was denied national coverage—by white and “Black” press—and was bound by an oath (the sacri) not to seek publicity for himself
.

Perhaps Cooks would not have tolerated that coverage—that publicity—if it had been granted him, and certainly he would not have trusted it. His own newsletters,
Street Speaker
and
The Black
Challenge,
would have been publicity enough, providing an outlet for Cooks and his cohort to write on various topics both contemporary (
one issue reprinted a speech
of Sékou Touré to the United Nations on the subject of the sovereignty of African nations) and historical (
Zimbabwe was in its noonday
of culture and refinement two thousand years before the Germanic Tribes abolished the gruesome practice of feasting on the flesh of their conquered dead
).

The latter-day African Nationalist Pioneers strive to keep the memory of Carlos A. Cooks alive.
The Contributions of Carlos Cooks
include, apart from founding the ANPM and its newsletter: a merchant organization known as the African Pioneering Syndicate, Inc.; a resettlement organization, the African Colonization Society; the Universal African Relief, a charity arm; an African Communities League; the African Nationalist Legion, which was
the military arm of the race;
the School of African Culture and Fundamentalism; the Nationalist Social Club; and the production of Orthodox African Nationalist Literature. Cooks also presided over annual celebrations of Marcus Garvey’s birthday; an African Freedom Day held in January to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation and the anniversaries of various African independence declarations also celebrated in that month; and the Miss Natural Standard of Beauty Contest, held in conjunction with the Marcus Garvey Day celebrations,
a unique and rare contest designed to help restore pride and self-confidence in the heavily inferior-minded Black woman who falsely believes that the white woman (and all other women) is more beautiful than the Black woman.

Some of these accomplishments were achieved only in theory. Their fate as part of Cooks’s legacy is sealed in another of his contributions: the Marcus Garvey Memorial Building. Planned as a headquarters for the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement, the building was to serve as
a stone monument
that will spiritually testify to the admiration and respect that the Black people of Harlem
and throughout the world have for the life, efforts, deeds, doctrine and memory
of Garvey.
The date, day, and time
of a 1962 groundbreaking ceremony is recorded, along with its position
on a site located on the south side of 141st Street, approximately 100 feet east of Eighth Avenue, Harlem, New York.

After breaking ground, Cooks postponed the official launch of all ANPM programming until the building’s completion. But by the time of Cooks’s death, it was only two-thirds constructed. The building, a ruin before its time, was demolished by the city in the 1970s.
Consequently, the programs of the ANPM
were never launched and remain unfinished business for the African Nationalists. The erection of the Marcus Garvey Memorial Building or its equivalent is also unfinished business for the African Nationalist.

Lacking a physical home, Cooks’s movement found shelter under the still-erect pillar of his most frequently articulated aim:

Buy Black was the enduring cause of the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement, and in Harlem, the Chief was its main booster. He could be found most Saturdays at the same spot beneath the Powell monument, passing out flyers and holding court before a posse of supporters and protégés.

When we met, the Chief explained that the campaign was only the first action of an extensive movement for self-determination.
He asked me which movement I was a part of. I told him I was not a part of any movement. He asked what my platform was. I fumbled for an answer, saying something about liberation, and then confessed that I had none, but that I was a writer and that I was from Texas. One or both of these facts caused him to pursue his initial line of questioning with greater fervor—the Chief was even more convinced that I should have an urgent and articulate platform. I was, after all, from a place where a black man had recently been
tied to the back of a truck and dragged
along a country road until his limbs were torn from his body. I was from a state where
a small-town drug bust
had resulted in the arrest of 15 percent of the town’s black population on suspicion of involvement in a drug ring. These more spectacular and egregious acts, the Chief informed me, could be joined by other more mundane atrocities. But since my place of birth and my chosen vocation had not inspired in me a form of political engagement that could be expressed as a slogan, the Chief gave up and began to give me a history quiz.

He asked me what I knew about Juneteenth. I told him it was the day, celebrated in Texas, when slaves finally learned the news of the Emancipation Proclamation, more than two years after it had been ratified. I told him how, as a child, I’d been taught (or had been half-listening and misheard what I was taught) that it had taken two years for the news to reach Texas. I did not tell him that this was a holiday about which I’d always felt ambivalent. Two extra years of slavery had always seemed a dismal cause for celebration.

That last bit would not have impressed him any more than the first part of my answer did. He told me I was wrong. He told me I had absorbed a rather benign if not fraudulent version of the events of June 19, 1865. The belated emancipation in Texas could not be blamed on the poor service of the Pony Express. Confederate slaveholders in Texas had refused to recognize Lincoln’s
proclamation, so
Juneteenth celebrated the date
when a general of the Union Army landed at Galveston with a phalanx of 1,800 soldiers to take possession of the state and enforce the order. The Chief lingered on this last detail, emphasizing the necessity of military force to assert the liberty of my ancestors in Texas.

I thanked him for the corrective history and said I’d read up on it. He told me that when we next met, he expected me to have a platform.

A person in search of a platform could hardly find a better spot than the setting of my encounter with the Chief. The Adam Clayton Powell statue faces southwest, across from the Hotel Theresa.
The hotel is famous for hosting Fidel Castro
during his postrevolutionary visit to New York, after Castro was unsatisfied with his reception by a downtown hotel. The Theresa was briefly the
headquarters of the Organization of Afro-American Unity
, founded by Malcolm X about a year before his assassination, after he broke with Elijah Muhammad and returned from Mecca. Its mission was modeled after the Pan-African platform of the Organization of African Unity, connecting the U.S. struggle to the circumstances of blacks across the diaspora.

Before Nelson Rockefeller’s office tower was built, the corner had been a congregation point for soapbox orators. The confluence of those speakers and Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore had earned it the name Harlem Square or African Square. Aside from a regular cast of street speakers, the intersection was also the setting for mass rallies featuring speeches by Powell, Malcolm X, and Kwame Nkrumah, among others.

Currently, African Square is also the place where the Brooklyn-based Pan-Africanist group the December 12th Movement and the Malcolm X Millennium Committee each year convene a “Black
Power March” on the leader’s birthday, May 19, enforcing
a three-hour shutdown
of all businesses on 125th Street (and boycotting those establishments that refuse to close). On the same day, the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee organizes a caravan of buses that leave from African Square on an annual pilgrimage from Harlem to Woodlawn Cemetery in Queens, where a graveside ceremony is held to honor the man, who, after pilgrimage to Mecca, took on the formal designation of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.

Just a few blocks away, on 129th Street, is the former Elks Lodge where, in 1925, A. Philip Randolph held a meeting of five hundred railway workers, organizing them in defiance of the Pullman Company. The men became
the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
, the first African American labor union, under the motto Fight or Be Slaves.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr. launched one of his most famous crusades a few blocks from the spot. The “
Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work
” campaign was a boycott that forced white merchants on 125th Street to hire blacks as shop attendants. And in the 1940s, Powell led a
“black-out” boycott against Consolidated Edison
Electric and Gas, successfully forcing them to hire blacks by organizing Harlem residents to abandon the use of electricity once a week. Participants in the campaign lit their dwellings with candles. Later, the effort culminated by converging on the Con Ed premises on 125th Street in a “Bill-Payers’ Parade,” where marchers appeared at the office en masse to pay bills with pennies.

But that was all in the past. In the present, I could find a platform on posters covering store windows, and from flyers pressed into my hands or picked up from the pavement. All of these beckoned toward protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, but most of all, they announced meetings. They offered urgent information bulletins:

They put forward fiery exhortations:

They suggested boycotts and mass actions that never took root: