The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (75 page)

Gibson had spoken in Atlanta, and his appearance, even though he wasn't much of a speaker, had been electric. The national black community of political activists honored him, honored CFUN and me for the job we had done in the election victory. It was this victory that raised CFUN's stature among the organizations. We had done some practical work and won it.

At home, Gibson's drifting continued. Our meetings were now at his office. Gradually, they became less and less regular. A couple times we had to speak to him and get reassurances from him that he wasn't trying anything. But the whole thing seemed more and more like it was getting fucked up. We were supposed to plan this shit together, the people who had put out the muscle and vision to get his ass in. But he was pulling a disappearing act right before our eyes.

One thing went down before the first year was out to make me clear on what was happening. I had put together a comprehensive cultural program for the city. What it called for, generally, was a consolidation of the cultural resources of the city, to expand the city's education capacity and transform the city into a cultural center. We did not have a lot of money but we could transform the city, I reasoned, by intensive cultural activity, even bring in some revenue and give the grim-visaged town a new image.

Gibson appeared to like the program. He formed a cultural committee to deal with the plan's implementation. The committee was designed to bring the different interests together in the city who were interested in culture and the arts or education. Prudential had a representative at that first meeting, Al DeRogatis, the old New York Giants football player, now community affairs specialist for the Prudential Life Insurance Company, the largest life insurance company in the world, whose main headquarters was in Newark. Prudential, hooked up with the Rockefeller interests through the Prudential-Manufacturers Hanover Trust group, of course, owns New
Jersey, legislature and all. DeRogatis, who was one of the Giants' game announcers at one point, was the kind of community affairs specialist who sat with the president of Prudential in his top-floor offices near the huge boardroom with raisable stained-glass windows and a view of their own communities way up in the mountains overlooking our grimy black town. On the outside of the boardroom were large paintings of the board members. It seemed as if there had been some major breakthroughs, as there were at least one Italian and one Jew on the wall among the smiling Anglos. DeRogatis was security as well as community affairs.

Before our first meeting of the cultural committee was over, DeRogatis had said to all in the room that he could not be in a meeting in which I was a participant. This was Prudential's position. But it was not even a real confrontation. It was a fait accompli. Gibson and the Prus had obviously talked about this before. But I thought it was a simple confrontation—that it was even good that it had come out so soon and could be gotten out of the way. Prudential was obviously one of our enemies and we would have to fight them. But that was the last cultural committee meeting Gibson was to call. Because of Prudential's displeasure with me, Gibson scrapped the committee. At first, when such things happened, I thought Gibson was simply ball-less, but as it went on, the pattern was clear he had been “purchased,” as Baba had suggested.

Each week, after a while, there was some new affront, some new confrontation between the old team and Gibson. The city tax on out-of-city workers, who had most of the jobs in the city, since Newark is an insurance and commercial and banking center and most blacks are not brought into these businesses in any number approaching their actual existence in the society, Gibson gave some lip service to, but quickly got silent when Prudential let it be known that they were opposed to the tax. All the promises and issues to come out of the Black and Puerto Rican Convention Gibson slid away from. And before the second year of his term was up he had attacked us openly, though in a slightly indirect way.

CFUN had managed to get some influence over the local antipoverty agency, the United Community Corporation. Even before the election, we were swarming all over their public meetings, attacking UCC's administration along with Addonizio. After the election we moved quickly to grab some real control over key sectors of the agency. This allowed us to put people in positions of power in the agency, including the president, David Barrett (Mtetezi), the trustees, and, finally, even the assistant director of the agency.

An open confrontation came when Gibson secretly backed a coalition of our enemies, who had been his enemies, too, before the election. His henchman, Clarence Coggins, put the attack together, trying to mobilize people to join the UCC so they could vote for Coalition Six to replace our people on the board of trustees, thereby limiting or totally eliminating our influence. But we outmobilized, outorganized, and beat them cold. George Richardson again figured in this traitorous business, and again he got his ass beat!

Now word was running around the city that Gibson was trying to cut himself loose from our baleful influence completely. Gibson thought, and he said this again and again, through the years, that he was the mayor. To him, this meant that he had to do everything himself, answerable only to his own mind and conscience (and the Prugeoisie). What limitations to impose upon a person. Even if Ken Gibson were intelligent, he could not do this. Not being intelligent made it difficult for him even to conceive of certain possibilities. For instance, not long after he got elected, Gibson painted the gold dome on the City Hall yellow. I guess he couldn't wallpaper it; for one sector of the lower middle class, cheap gloss paint is the answer to all problems.

It was his civil servant's mentality, that heaven is a place where GS-1000s go, that ultimately restricted him to mediocrity. He could not really conceive of black people having to make their own way, of self-determination and self-sufficiency. A government check is the only way we'll make it. So he gradually moved from being some kind of spokesperson for an independent black community to being a messenger to black people for the federal government's shenanigans.

We clashed now repeatedly and more and more openly. Our Sunday meetings became a thing of the past. But meanwhile we tried to work with him. We knew we could still benefit in some ways by the association, so we still tried to relate to him as we could.

CAP grew steadily, with new cities coming in nationally, where we had developed cadres—Chicago (through Don Lee, the poet, who was now Haki Madhubuti), Delaware, Philadelphia, Boston, Albany. Even the San Diego chapter of US had broken away from Karenga and become a chapter of the Congress of Afrikan Peoples.

Our main work nationally, aside from building the cadre organizations of Pan-Afrikan Nationals heavily influenced by Kawaida, was to put together the convention called for by the Atlanta mandate. I traveled around the country meeting with different organizations. There was much political
activity, and not just in the Black Liberation movement; now, as the 1972 presidential elections drew closer, a wide spectrum of people were busy getting ready to take part in those elections.

We had now gained a good entree with black electoral figures, because of the Gibson election. Electoral politics had become an obvious arena for the struggle for Black Power. We met with the black congressmen and congresswomen, who had now put together the concept of the Congressional Black Caucus. One meeting we had in D.C. with representatives of the caucus—Owusu Sadaukai, a national NAACP rep, a rep from the Urban League and the Urban Coalition, plus some of the old Black Power Conference Continuations Committee people—put the conceptualization of the National Black Political Convention squarely on the agenda. The caucus itself had a gathering a few months later, at which Shirley Chisholm declared her “presidential aspirations.” She attacked the male caucus members for not supporting her. I raised the Black Convention as the only viable way to proceed. If the black masses at a national convention wanted her, then let the convention declare that and then let black people come out and not only vote for Shirley Chisholm for president of the U.S. but convince others to do so as well! I later discovered that Ms. Chisholm's candidacy was just an attempt to get a front position at Mr. McGovern's pay window, that it was not serious at all. (In fact, the whole motion of black politicians toward the 1972 elections and the relationship of their real aspirations to the needs of the black masses I put in an article first published by
Black World
, the old
Negro Digest
, called “Miami Before and After.” Hoyt Fuller, the editor, changed the title to “Toward the Creation of Institutions for All African People.” See
Jesse Jackson and Black People
[Chicago: Third World Press, 1995].)

In the end there was no clear place the politicians could turn but the Black Convention and seem as relevant to the movement as they wanted to seem in 1971. The endorsement by the Congressional Black Caucus of the National Black Political Convention brought it together as the most forceful demonstration of mass motion toward the realization of Black Power of that period. Gary, Indiana, was selected because it had a black mayor (one who was more progressive than our own K.G.) and because Gary was in the middle of the country, just outside Chicago.

Some nine thousand people came to Gary, and since it was all black, the convention represented a far larger concentration of the black masses than even the Panther Constitutional Conference, which also gathered many whites and other oppressed nationalities besides African Americans.

In this period CAP had become a relatively powerful, well-disciplined national organization, with chapters in some eighteen cities. I was its political empowerment chairman as well as program chairman. The strong, well-organized base in Newark gave me a great deal to say in CAP affairs, and the Newark cadre was generally considered the most advanced group of cadres in the national organization.

A triumvirate was elected to pull the convention together. We wanted to draw all sectors of the black nation together. So that Mayor Hatcher, Congressman Charles Diggs of Detroit, and I were chosen as the three coconvenors. The sight of some nine-thousand-plus black people together in and outside the huge arena in Gary was deeply stirring. We had put up signs alphabetically throughout the hall so that the different state delegates would be seated just as in the Democratic and Republican conventions. We had also worked out a formula for how many delegates could be represented from each state according to the number of blacks in that state. Gibson thought that he should be chairman of the Jersey delegation, but the delegates elected me, which burned him up. But more and more people were beginning to find out just how jive Newark's first black mayor was becoming.

A very fine film was made of the entire convention by black filmmaker William Greaves. It is narrated by Sidney Poitier and shows Harry Belafonte, Isaac Hayes, Bobby Seale, who spoke one evening, Jesse Jackson, hosts of black politicians, Richard Roundtree of
Shaft
fame, and the thousands of black people intensely participating in a sincere effort to transform their lives and the society.

The NAACP issued a statement, from the national office, telling white folks it wanted no part of this all-black proceeding, even before the convention started. But the masses were there, bodily and in spirit. When it was over, we put together a fairly progressive document known as the Black Agenda. This was composed of resolutions voted by the convention, and this document was supposed to be used on a national or local level to present to candidates so that they would know black people's concerns. I was even appointed to go down to Miami to the Democratic convention to make sure that any of the politicians who wanted the black vote had to agree to the issues presented in the National Black Agenda. But once in Miami, the majority of the black politicians who were talking much militant shit in Gary reverted to character and were simply scrambling to get on some candidate's payroll. Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Ken Gibson, most of the Congressional Black Caucus were whoring like nobody's business.
I wrote about this in the
Black World
article, which in turn made many of those folks very angry. Charles Evers was such a bold-faced “ho” it was embarrassing, switching from candidate to candidate, with his hand out and his butt cocked for ready access. In a few minutes he switched from Humphrey to Chisholm to McGovern. Whenever I raised the question of the Black Agenda, such an idea was openly scoffed at. Hey, that was just for show. Shirley Chisholm refused to come to the Black Convention, where she could easily have won the black nomination and mobilized the black masses, if that's what she had really wanted to do. And then there was the charade about which black was closer to the biggest white. Ken Gibson came out into a conference of well-known black political types telling us that McGovern's choice of a running mate was the mayor of Boston, only to have McGovern, almost immediately after Gibson's statement, on a television playing in the same room announce that it was Congressman Eagleton. Ken did get the privilege of nominating Eagleton, which was considered hot stuff by the Washington black politicos, but lo and behold it's shown that Eagleton is a mental case so Gibson's great nomination came to naught.

But the Black Convention was a high moment in my life. Several times I had to chair the huge meeting, keeping a balance and the procedure flowing at the same time. It was the kind of challenge that made the adrenaline rush through your head and your whole body tingle. There was even a bomb scare while I was presiding (probably by the FBI) and I had to evacuate the huge building without causing too much alarm.

Coleman Young, later the mayor of Detroit, got some kind of note at the National Black Convention when he led a walkout of Michigan delegates. I was dumbfounded and demanded to know what was going on. It turned out that one group of blacks was going to push a resolution calling for separate black trade unions. Young was a UAW political cadre, so he was trying to avoid blowing his own gig.