Refugees welcome here - Stand Up to Racism national demonstration

Refugees welcome here now! UN Anti-Racism Day national demonstration - Saturday 19 March - London, Glasgow, Cardiff

Remembering Malcolm X - Black Power, Anti-Capitalism and Revolution

Rosa Parks with a poster of Malcolm X


Malcolm X paying tribute to Claudia Jones

'Anytime you live in a society supposedly based upon law and it doesn’t enforce its own laws because the color of a man’s skin happens to be wrong, then I say those people are justified to resort to any means necessary to bring about justice when the government can’t give them justice.’
Malcolm X at the Oxford Union

Malcolm X’s legacy on the 50th anniversary of his assassination is to recognise that the fight against racism must be a fight against the system that produces it. 
Anthony Hamilton on Malcolm's X's Road to Revolution 

See also Mike Davis on America's black shining prince, Lee Sustar on Malcolm's revolutionary politics, Brian Richardson on Manning Marable's biography of Malcolm X, Saladin Ambar on Malcolm X at the Oxford Union and Ken Olende and Avtar Singh Jouhl of the Indian Workers Association on when Malcolm X came to Smethwick just nine days before his assassination in February 1965.  For more on Malcolm X in Britain, see Marika Sherwood's study Malcolm X: Visits Abroad.

The Greatest Movie Never Made?

Though it was sadly not mentioned in a recent book, The fifty greatest movies you will never see, one film project that has a very good claim to be included in that category was the planned project to make a film about the Haitian Revolution starring Paul Robeson by the great Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein during the interwar period (another would be Eisenstein's plans to make a film of Marx's Capital).  The latest issue of History Workshop Journal has an interesting article entitled Sergei Eisenstein and the Haitian Revolution about this thwarted project, which might be of interest to readers of Histomat...

New Book: C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain

Out now as part of the C.L.R. James Archives series with Duke University Press:

C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain by Christian Høgsbjerg

C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain chronicles the life and work of the Trinidadian intellectual and writer C. L. R. James during his first extended stay in Britain, from 1932 to 1938. It reveals the radicalizing effect of this critical period on James's intellectual and political trajectory. During this time, James turned from liberal humanism to revolutionary socialism. Rejecting the "imperial Britishness" he had absorbed growing up in a crown colony in the British West Indies, he became a leading anticolonial activist and Pan-Africanist thinker. Christian Høgsbjerg reconstructs the circumstances and milieus in which James wrote works including his magisterial study The Black Jacobins. First published in 1938, James's examination of the dynamics of anticolonial revolution in Haiti continues to influence scholarship on Atlantic slavery and abolition. Høgsbjerg contends that during the Depression C. L. R. James advanced public understanding of the African diaspora and emerged as one of the most significant and creative revolutionary Marxists in Britain.

Read the introduction here

Endorsements

"Christian Høgsbjerg's book is going to make a very significant impact on the community of C. L. R. James scholars and beyond. Høgsbjerg has thoroughly combed the key archival sources to generate a comprehensive, lively, and insightful portrait of James's intellectual and political life during his first sojourn in Britain. In doing so, he has filled in many key details and fleshed out many important events in James's life in Britain."
—Paget Henry, co-editor of C. L. R. James's Caribbean and editor of the C.L.R. James Journal

"When C. L. R. James left Trinidad for England in 1932, it was a kind of homecoming: A connoisseur of cricket, immersed in the works of Shakespeare and Thackeray almost from birth, James was the consummate Afro-Saxon intellectual long before setting foot in London. In C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain, Christian Høgsbjerg follows him into the meeting halls and radical bookstores, the cricket grounds and bohemian haunts, where this displaced 'Victorian with the rebel seed' emerged as a leading figure in the Trotskyist and Pan-Africanist movements. The fusion of insight with command of factual detail sets the new standard by which serious work on C. L. R. James must be judged."
—Scott McLemee, editor of C. L. R. James on the "Negro Question" and the forthcoming The Dialectics of State Capitalism: Writings on Marxist Theory by C.L.R. James

Reviews

''C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain opens up the issue of the Third World struggle in an elegant and memorable way''
'C.L.R. James: Back in Style, Black in Style' by Paul Buhle, authorised biographer of C.L.R. James, author of C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary

"The excellence of this book by Christian Høgsbjerg on CLR James's first sojourn in Britain between 1932 and 1938 is signalled by the drama of its cover photograph.  Wearing a very English raincoat, the Trinidadian writer and militant is pictured addressing a mid-1930s meeting in Trafalgar Square.
    By 1938 Special Branch had judged James to be a fluent speaker, very well versed in the doctrines of Karl Marx and other revolutionary writers.
    Shortly after arriving in England he moved in with his old friend and compatriot, the cricketer Learie Constantine, and was a powerful advocate of West Indian self-government.  But his elite colonial schooling at Trinidad's Queen's Royal College and a literary apprenticeship in Port of Spain had certainly not made him a Marxist.
    Steeped in English literature - he told me in a 1982 interview that he had read Thackeray's Vanity Fair ten times before he was nine years old -  Høgsbjerg explains that in his early Trinidad days James had been a devotee of English Victorian cultural prophets like Matthew Arnold, with all his sweetness and light.
   Yet within a few months of staying with Constantine in the insurgent Lancashire cotton-weaving town of Nelson, where his host was a Lancashire League professional cricketer, he had become so involved in and influenced by the struggles of the "Red Nelson" working class - which he allied with black struggles all over the imperialist world - that, as he declared, "literature was vanishing from my consciousness and politics was substituting itself."   Høgsbjerg tells of this process of transformation with a compelling narrative vibrancy.
  In subsequent chapters he tells the story of James's involvement both in the apparently contradictory worlds - yet not so if you were James - of cricket reporting for the Manchester Guardian and Glasgow Herald and active solidarity with world anti-imperialist and Pan-Africanist processes.
   This was provoked by a reunion with his old Trinidadian school friend George Padmore who had written the pathfinding Life and Struggles of the Negro Toilers in 1931.  In 1937, as part of his solidarity work for the Ethiopian people after Mussolini's fascist invasion, he helped set up the African Bureau for the Defence of African and People of African Descent in London.
     Another engrossing chapter is that which tells of James's Paris-based research for, and the writing of The Black Jacobins, his history of the Haitian Revolution of 1791.  Its forerunner, the play about its leader Toussaint l'Ouverture with Paul Robeson as the protagonist, was performed in London's West End in 1936.
     Høgsbjerg has produced an invaluable addition to both British and Caribbean labour scholarship and has written it in such an accessible way that its stirring and provocative narrative ought to inspire thought and action.''
Chris Searle, 'A scion of black consciousness', Morning Star, 26 May 2014.

"Høgsbjerg discusses [James's] publications in various ways but it is the intellectual and social movement context the author brings to these works, which continue to animate critical minds today, that makes the reader pause and delight''
Matthew Quest, Insurgent Notes

''This impressively researched, well-written and accessible book demonstrates that James's time in Britain was a period of fertile intellectual growth for this inspirational writer and activist''
Brian Richardson, Socialist Review, June 2014.

''Just out from Duke University Press's C.L.R. JAMES ARCHIVES series is this important new book from Christian Hogsbjerg. Christian's first volume in this series was an edition of the original script of James's play Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History. This new book is the first to offer a full examination of James's years in England following his departure from Trinidad in 1932. In the few short years between his arrival in England and his departure for the United States, James published Minty Alley, The Case for West Indian Self-Government, World Revolution, A History of Negro Revolt and  Black Jacobins, all while keeping up work as a cricket writer and participating in the work of the African Service Bureau, International Friends of Abyssinia, and others. These years are vital for understanding James's evolution as a thinker and revolutionary, indispensable for understanding the work that he would do in the United States.''
Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author of C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction

''One of the most impressively researched biographies of a prominent radical to appear in recent memory ... Anyone with an interest in black protest, literary London, and/or left politics in the 1930s will enjoy this smart, factually grounded yet thematically rich biographical study''.
Kent Worcester, 'Renegades and Castaways', New Politics (Summer 2014)

''Høgsbjerg has made a major contribution through his reconstruction of James’s life and times in imperial Britain. Recovering James’s ventures into radical bookshops such as Lahr’s, his time spent in Nelson and Bloomsbury, his touring Britain as a cricket reporter, and much more, Høgsbjerg does a supreme job of reconstructing the historical geography of a distinct, and distinctly radical, life. In this sense, his book is an example to geographers, historians or other radical intellectuals pursuing the study of previously neglected biographies.''
Daniel Whittall, Antipode (August 2014)

"One of the book’s greatest assets is the way it manages a remarkable density of information. Refusing to succumb to the temptation of showing a single, linear narrative of James, Høgsbjerg uses the most diverse sources to illuminate the man’s different facets. His James is a witty thinker, spectacular orator, gifted organizer, cricket lover, and a politics addict. Indeed, these different traits exist side by side, develop over time, and contribute to shaping James’s trajectory....  He illuminates James as an actor who participated in and influenced contemporaneous debates about how Marxism and Trotskyism could provide answers to fighting colonial rule and the rise of Fascism.... CLR James in Imperial Britain is a valuable contribution to the field of James studies. It illuminates the early phases of Afro-Caribbean anticolonial activism in Britain and the development of anticolonial Marxism. Simultaneously, it tells the story of a remarkable beginning and shaping of much of C.L.R. James’s thought".
Itay Lotem, Twentieth Century British History (November 2014). 


Book Launches
Thursday 27 March, 7.30pm, Nelson Library, Lancashire.
Supported by North East Lancs TUC and Preston Black History Group.

Friday 11 July at Marxism 2014, central London 

Edited to add: Check out this film about CLR James's life in 1930s Britain

Stuart Hall

The passing of Stuart Hall is very sad news indeed.  Hall was one of the most remarkable, distinctive and principled voices on the New Left in post-war Britain - a very cultured anti-Stalinist Marxist intellectual whose heroes were figures such as Antonio Gramsci and C.L.R. James, and whose writing was always thoughtful and thought provoking, even if one did not agree with it in its entirety.   Duncan Hallas once said of Ralph Miliband that he 'hovers, hesitates, floats, between the best of the academic left and revolutionary left', and this was true of Hall and his contribution as well.  Given we are approaching the 30th anniversary of the start of the Great Miners' Strike in Britain,  there will no doubt be some discussion of Hall's analysis of Thatcherism as 'authoritarian populism' and the problematic positions associated with his support for the Marxism Today project.  Yet we should also remember Hall's contribution as a youthful activist in the first New Left - around CND and as the first editor of New Left Review - which are brought out quite well in the film 'The Stuart Hall Project'.  Those wanting to critically engage with Hall's work around 'Cultural Studies' would be well recommended to read Colin Sparks's contribution to the volume edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), which shows the essential continuities in thought which ran throughout his life from the 1950s until the 1980s in thinking about such questions as class consciousness and identity.  Overall, Hall made a creative, original and impressive contribution to the British and international Left, both as a black radical public intellectual and a generous partisan academic - and I count myself very privileged to have been able to have met him in person.  My sincere condolences go out to those who were close to him, particularly his friends, family and comrades - RIP Stuart. 

Edited to add: a link to some videos of Stuart Hall speaking: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9F57C5B178A98750. 

Edited to also add: Tributes / obits / commentary from Robin Blackburn (with useful links), Tariq Ali Evan Smith , Keith Flett , Gary Younge, Suzanne Moore, Stuart Jeffries

and Stephen Philip.

League of Revolutionary Black Workers online

Material on the League of Revolutionary Black Workers at the Marxist Internet Archive - well worth checking out.

Nelson Mandela's words remain weapons

“How many times has the liberation movement worked together with workers and then at the moment of victory betrayed the workers? There are many examples of that in the world. It is only if the workers strengthen their organisation before and after liberation that you can win. If you relax your vigilance you will find that your sacrifices have been in vain. You just support the African National Congress only so far as it delivers the goods. If the ANC government does not deliver the goods, you must do to it what you have done to the apartheid regime.”
Nelson Mandela to South African trade unionists, September 1993. RIP Nelson Mandela.

Quick Xmas quiz question: Who was David Lammy, a black Labour MP, talking about in 2007 when he said this: 'I feel very strongly that he follows in the tradition of Nelson Mandela who talked about peace and reconciliation'. For a reminder of the shocking truth read here.

What would Paul Robeson make of contemporary theatre?

A nice little article by Tayo Aluko, organiser of the excellent Paul Robeson Art as a Weapon Festival, on throughout Black History Month in London. 

Homage to Manning Marable

'At Tuskegee [in 1976], I began to study the major works of Marxism. I gradually became convinced that racism by itself could not account for the oppressed conditions of black people in America and, for that matter, across the globe. Capitalism as an economic system was based on an unequal exchange between the owners of capital and those who worked for a wage. Capitalism as a social system fostered class stratification, extreme concentrations of wealth, and poverty and promoted race hatred as a means to divide workers. This basic analysis seemed to make sense, based on my own experiences growing up inside the United States, in the context of racial discrimination and social inequality. I came to Marxism not out of some abstract love for the white American working class, or out of faith in the power of the international proletariat, or out of respect for the models of Soviet and Chinese Communism, both of which I found equally problematic. I became a socialist because I believed in the struggles of black people, in their history and destiny, and because I believed that to eliminate racism and inequality decisively, a new democratic society would have to be constructed.'
Manning Marable, 'Introduction: Towards an Autobiography of the Politics of Race and Class', Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Resistance and Radicalism (1996)

Tragically, and at the age of only 60, the great black American Marxist intellectual Manning Marable (1950-2011), author of such pioneering works of black history such as How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America and W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, has died. This is a very sad loss - one gets a sense of the importance of his prolific writing and commentary on race and class in the US from his staff page at Columbia University, which lists his multiple works of scholarship and other accomplishments, and which culminated in his recent works Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics and a new biographical study of Malcolm X and The Malcolm X Project that he constructed online. To lose such a powerfully acute mind well before his time, and in a period when there are hopeful signs that the American working class is beginning to stir again, remains a terrible blow - my condolences to his friends and comrades. I will endeavour to add tributes and obituaries to this great thinker and activist whose many works will remain a tremendous resource of hope for the many struggles ahead.

Russell Rickford, A Eulogy for Manning Marable
Yuri Prasad on Manning Marable
Marable interviewed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 by Kevin Ovenden
Manning Marable on Barack Obama
Marable interviewed in 2009 about Malcolm X

A Black Radical's Notebook

Interview with the editor of Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader

New book on Malcolm X

Malcolm X: Visits Abroad April 1964-February 1965
By Marika Sherwood

Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) after a troubled childhood and imprisonment, became a Muslim on his release in 1952. A gifted speaker he became the major preacher and national spokesman for the Nation of Islam, indicting white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against African Americans. But tension between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam, led to Malcolm X's resignation in March 1964. He now made the pilgrimage to Mecca, became a Sunni Muslim and disavowed racism. While he had crisscrossed the USA many times for the NOI, Malcolm now travlled widely in the Middle East and throughout Africa, and also paid a number of visits to England and France, addressing Muslim, student and political organizations.
An erudite man of great charisma and intelligence, he was a national and international figure when he was assassinated in New York on 21 February 1965.
This book is an introduction to Malcolm's travels in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, taken from his travel Notebooks, autobiography, FBI papers and local newspapers.

ISBN: 978-0-9519720
Special sale price £5
Email Savannah Press: savannah@phonecoop.coop.

Marika Sherwood will be launching her fascinating book - which among other things has details of Malcolm's visits to not just the London School of Economics and Oxford University but also Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester - at a Black and Asian Studies Association seminar on Tuesday, September 14 (room G37) at 6pm, Senate House, University of London, Russell Square, London WC1. Everyone is welcome - for more info see here.

Grace Lee Boggs on 'Requiem for Detroit'

I while back on this blog I noted catching some of the excellent documentary 'Requiem for Detroit’, and so it is nice to note that the veteran thinker and activist Grace Lee Boggs, who was interviewed by the show has written about her take on it as well:

Requiem for Detroit aired March 13 on BBC2. But I didn’t view it until last week when I received the DVD (with a thank you note) from Julien Temple, the director, and George Hencken, the Films of Record producer.

In 1960 Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame was a turning point in American consciousness because it forced us to recognize that the food we enjoy is picked by migrant agricultural workers living and working under unspeakable conditions.

Requiem for Detroit can play a similar role in this period of transition from an increasingly destructive industrial culture. The documentary makes very clear that Detroit’s notorious devastation is not a natural disaster but a man-made Katrina, the inevitable result of illusions and contradictions in our insane 20th century pursuit of unlimited economic growth. We witness auto workers reduced to robots to produce Henry Ford’s Model Ts, and then struggling to reclaim their humanity by sitdown strikes and battling Ford’s goons at the overpass.

We meet southern Blacks who relish the “freedom” of Northern cities but also experience the racial tensions that exploded in 1943 and 1967.

Cars that grow the profits of the auto industry speed by on freeways which destroy neighborhoods to provide escape routes to the suburbs.

Neighborhoods are turned into war zones as the drug trade replaces jobs that have been exported overseas.

This documentary is the Odyssey of how a mode of production and transportation, once celebrated as the height of human creativity, morphed into a dehumanizing consumerism at the expense of human beings and other living things.

A number of Detroiters, Black and white, comment throughout. But the only named cast members are white-bearded John Sinclair, poet, former MC5 manager and White Panther Party leader; Martha Reeves, Motown’s earthy, gospel-infused singing star; Heidelberg Project community artist Tyree Guyton; and me.

John Sinclair recalls the glories of the last century as he drives through disintegrating neighborhoods. An exuberant Martha Reeves helps us understand how the distinctive Motown sound emerged from the “this is my country” euphoria of Blacks who had left behind them the sharecropping and lynching culture of the South. Tyree Guyton explains that he created the Heidelberg Project to depict the destruction of his neighborhood. He also describes today’s rising hope as neither a white or Black thing but “I” becoming “We.”

My closing comments make clear that the new American Dream emerging in Detroit is a deeply-rooted spiritual and practical response to the devastation and dehumanization created by the old dream. We yearn to live more simply so that all of us and the Earth can simply live. This more human dream began with African American elders, calling themselves the Gardening Angels. Detroit’s vacant lots, they decided, were not blight but heaven-sent spaces to plant community gardens, both to grow our own food and to give urban youth the sense of process, self-reliance and evolution that everyone needs to be human.

That’s why growing numbers of artists and young people are coming to Detroit. They want to be part of building a Detroit-City of Hope that grows our souls rather than our cars.

I hope Requiem for Detroit will be shown at the 2nd USSF meeting in Detroit June 22-26 . It is the story behind the USSF mantra:

Another World is Necessary. Another World is Possible. Another World is happening in Detroit!

Viewing it can help Detroit’s mainstream media become less shallow.

It can deepen the imagination of the new generation of media makers attending the annual Allied Media Conference which precedes the USSF.

These young people need this deepened imagination to do justice to the present escalating struggle between the Bings and Bobbs, scheming to gentrify Detroit by closing down neighborhood schools, and grassroots Detroiters who are organizing not only to save our schools but to bring the neighbor back into the ‘hood by inventing new forms of education that motivate schoolchildren to learn through community-building activities.

For more about "Requiem for Detroit"

www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/10/detroit-motor-city-urban-decline

www.filmsofrecord.com/content.php?id=138

www.imdb.com/title/tt1572190/

Requiem for Detroit?

Those with 75 minutes to spare who missed this programme detailing the history of the city of Detroit (which among other things has contributors including the legendary veteran activist Grace Lee Boggs can catch up with it here.

More on W.E.B. Du Bois

This blog has always had a soft spot for W.E.B. Du Bois, so Lenin's Tomb's long review of The End of Empires: African Americans and India by Gerald Horne was most welcome. Some issues of The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP that Du Bois founded and edited for a long period, seem to be available online - which is also nice.

A change is coming...

War, budget cuts and austerity we can believe in

Edited to add: 'But it is a leap forward in class consciousness'. And it does feel damn good. Two final words to George W Bush, who I know reads this blog avidly: Black. Power.

The Russian Revolution and the Harlem Renaissance

Whenever I take the time to 'surf the left blogosphere', or whatever the phrase is, which is sadly quite a rare event these days, I am invariably struck by the quantity and quality of decent socialist blogging that it is possible to find out there. But one has to go searching for such stuff - and too often it remains hidden away under all the social-imperialist scum and sectarian-reformist idiocy that invariably rises to the top in the 'left political blogosphere'.

Take for example the author of General, Your Tank is a Powerful Vehicle an American blogger who has put their MA dissertation on 'The Russian Revolution and the Harlem Renaissance' online - a remarkably brave (and worthy) thing to do in my opinion. It looks fascinating...

Introduction
1. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen and The Messenger
2.Marcus Garvey, the UNIA, and the Negro World
3.Cyril Briggs and The Crusader
Conclusion

The Good, the Bad and the Queen

[Yesterday I was browsing through 'Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)' by Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, as you do, and I came across the following story. Trinidad-born Stokely Carmichael - one of the key figures associated with 'Black Power' in 1960s America - was invited over to London in May 1967 to speak at the 'Dialectics of Liberation' conference. His presence in Britain was not tolerated by the Labour Government of the day, and he was soon deported, but at the conference he met a fellow Trinidadian 'Michael X', who seems to have thought of himself as a kind of British version of Malcolm X, and was incidently the first person prosecuted under the Race Relations Act (typical British law - introduce a piece of legislation to tackle racism and then prosecute a black guy). Anyway to get to the point, I'll let Stokely tell the story of his encounter with 'Brother Michael.']

'I was there, talking with some students, when I noticed this short, muscular, redbone-looking brother coming toward us. You couldn't help noticing him. Something about him set him apart from the students. Something a bit too flashy in his clothes or his style? Or his walk, not exactly a swagger or a strut, but vaguely and unmistakeably "street".
"Oh, oh, there's that Michael X", a Jamaican sister said, not entirely approvingly, adding with a grimace, "The press calls him the British Malcolm X." I'd heard about the brother. I began to really check him out. By some accounts he was of "unsavoury charcter" and something of a player. And, as I quickly learned, a performer. When our eyes met, he broke out this beaming, wide smile and threw his arms wide.
"Oh, God, Brother Carmichael, is you? You the very man I come to see, boy. The very man, oh God, boy, oh God, boy."
There was nothing British - much less Oxford - in the brother's accent. It was pure San Fernando, back o'bridge. I felt like it might have been deliberately exaggerated to mark not only our common Trinidad origins, but his own class distance from the "bourgeois" students standing around.
"Yeah, boy, I does need your advice for true. I believe I jus' mess up bad bad, man. Oh, God, boy, listen this." By which time he had, as intended, commanded the attention of everybody and launched into a story about a meeting he'd just attended with "some decent, very respectable people, boy" on solutions to "the growing racial problem in Britain."
These "respectable people" included an Anglican bishop, assorted vicars, an Oxford don, some retired colonial civil servants, and a sprinkling of highly respectable and accomplished coloured folk, even a black baronet...Sir Learie Constantine, a great West Indian cricketer who'd been knighted.
These good people, deeply distressed by the increasing racism being directed at the growing immigrant community by the British public, had been meeting over tea to explore initiatives to try to counter this.
"So now they come up with this plan which they think is good. But see they don't want to go forward with it before, and unless, checking it with the masses, we common folk, eh? So they invite me to tea. I guess the street militant, yes. The bishop's wife, she ask the name of my organization. I say, 'RAAS.' She look shock. 'That's the name of the organization, ma'am. RAAS [The Racial Adjustment Action Society]. 'Oh,' she say.
"They all now looking at me right strange. So I say, 'Well, yes. I certainly agree that this racism is deplorable. Quite unworthy of the British people, yes. But I glad such distinguished people taking an interest, eh. Gives one hope, eh, what? I real honoured to be there.' I cock my little finger, sip my tea, and try to look serious an' respectful.
"Well, they say. After much thought and discussion they arrive at a proposal which had possibility. They had concluded that the situation was sufficiently grave, that the sovereign herself should intervene. Oh, God, I thinking, the queen? What that ol' bat goin' do? You ever hear she talk, boy? Give a speech, eh? But I jest sip my tea and look interested.
"Yes, we believe it is incumbent on Her Majesty to set the tone. An example to the nation. A gesture simple yet direct. Dramatic and unmistakeable yet appropriate. But what form should this take?
"'Well, yes', I say. 'Is a brilliant idea for true.' But in truth, boy, I now wondering the same thing. What form? They all smile and nod agreement.
"'Well', the bishop wife say. 'As you know, Mr. X, the very best ideas are sometimes the simplest.' They pretty sure they have such an idea, but they want to run it by me, so, as it were, to benefit from my unique and valuable perspective.
"'Okay,' I say. 'Be happy to help if I can.'
"'What we were thinking, are thinking,' say the bishop, 'is that perhaps, we here acting as a body, might, privately of course, prevail on Her Majesty to adopt a black child. Would that not be salutary? A splendid example, what?'
"They all looking at me now. I now look pensive, boy. I sip my tea, screw up my face, and grunt, 'Yeah.' I mutter. 'A black child, uh-huh.' Finally they say, "Well, Mr, ah, X, what do you think?'
"'Oh, is brilliant,' I say. 'Absolutely inspired.' They begin to beam and smile.
"'Only one thing,' I say. 'It might could be better.' They all stop smiling and look puzzled. 'How so?' they ask.
"'Well...I thinking now. The queen, she still quite a young woman, yes?'
"'Yes, relatively speaking. Perhaps, but why...?'
"'Well, instead of advising Her Majesty to adopt a black child...why don' we...why ain' we just go ahead and ask her to go on and have a black baby, eh?'
"Talk about a long silence, boy. Then...
"'Good heavens, man. You can't...you can't mean actually...actually...um...giving birth?'
"I say yes, tha's exactly what I saying. Ain' you looking a striking example of racial tolerance? This'll be an example not just to the nation, but to the world.
"Boy, the meeting break up just so. I doubt they go ask me back. But tell me, Bro Stokely, you think I wrong?"
Then he cracked up, enjoying himself shamelessly. That was our first meeting. I'd figured the story was a tall tale in the Sterling Brown tradition, but later other people would assure me that such a meeting had indeed taken place.'