A poet and the Black Power movement

Rupert Murdoch, owner of the New York Post, should be jailed for the editorial cartoon depicting a chimp that many critics felt represented President Obama.

 

The blacks who served on the jury that convicted Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin – better known as 1960s Black Power advocate H. Rap Brown – of murdering a deputy sheriff in Atlanta in 2000 are all “Negroes” whose names are known.

 

No, those thoughts aren’t mine. They came from Amiri Baraka, poet, playwright, activist and full-time Marxist who was, at one time, the Poet Laureate of New Jersey.

 

It’s where Baraka made his comments that’s significant: at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, a publicly funded institution. Ah, your tax dollars at work!

 

Baraka was a panelist at an event co-sponsored by the art museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture called “1968 and Beyond: A Symposium on the Impact of the Black Power Movement on America.” During the 1960s, Baraka was a Black Power advocate and a member of the Black Nationalist US organization before he went commie in the 1970s.

 

These days he comes off as a babbling left-wing lunatic who calls senators neo-fascists, wants newspaper owners jailed and exposes “Negroes” – Baraka’s term for those blacks whose racial loyalty he feels isn’t quite up to snuff. Should taxpayer-funded institutions provide a forum for such views?

 

Well, yes, for this reason: Every time Baraka makes statements like the ones he made at the Smithsonian art museum, he proves that America is exactly the opposite of the country he thinks it is. He sure as heck couldn’t live in Cuba and make such disparaging remarks about Fidel or Raul Castro.

 

And Baraka’s comments about McCain and Murdoch weren’t nearly as disgusting as the ones he made about former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice at another public institution six years ago: Baltimore’s Coppin State University.

 

Back then, Baraka called Rice a “skeeza,” a slang term for a loose, sexually promiscuous woman. His audience of overwhelmingly black listeners went absolutely wild when Baraka called Rice a “skeeza,” cheering and applauding and whooping with glee.

 

Now you know virtually all of them, only a few years later, called for radio talk show host Don Imus’ head when he referred to the predominantly black Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed ‘hos.” The double standards of the left never cease to astound me.

 

I was incensed by what Baraka said about Rice, but also puzzled. I mean, don’t folks on the left regard sexual promiscuity as some kind of virtue? Since when did they regard it as a negative thing?

 

After I learned Coppin State had used taxpayer money to pay Baraka for his appearance, I called the school to ask if they’d consider inviting a black conservative writer to speak or do a reading. I mentioned Shelby Steele – who’s every bit the writer Baraka is and then some – specifically. An associate professor in the university’s department of humanities and media told me that yes, indeedy, plans to invite Steele were in the works.

 

Six years later I have heard of no Shelby Steele appearance on the Coppin State campus. He wasn’t at the Black Power symposium either, though his presence would have made for a much livelier discussion.

 

Steele was a Black Power advocate himself in his younger days, but his views today differ sharply from most of the panelists who appeared at the Smithsonian. He links it to the phenomenon he calls “white guilt.” I’m dead certain Baraka would disagree.

 

For what it’s worth, although Steele and I are both conservatives, my views on Black Power are probably closer to those of Baraka’s. Even Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that the ultimate goal of the civil rights movement was Black Power; King said he just wouldn’t have used that particular terminology.

 

I guess Steele’s invitation to the Smithsonian Black Power symposium got lost in the mail. Those who attended the two-day conference learned much about an underrated and little-appreciated movement. But they would have been better served if Steele had been on hand to present an opposing view.

 

Examiner columnist Gregory Kane is an award-winning journalist who lives in Baltimore.