Yup. Saw Malcolm X give a fiery speech when I was in graduate school. Wasn't politicized or political yet in those days. Maybe he helped.
arthur -----Original Message----- From: Ray Evans Harrell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2003 7:05 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Brian McAndrews; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Futurework] FWD: The King They Still Won't Talk About No take at all. Wilkie was half Cherokee from his mother and we used to talk a lot after lessons but Malcolm never came up. The Christian side of the black experience didn't cotton to a competing proselytizing ministry. Too much singing about Jesus to give him up for so different a culture I guess. Wilkie was an interesting mixture of spiritual traditions that included the spiritualism of Kahlil Gibran. He also didn't have much sympathy for traditions that would basically ignore the tradition of singing that grew up from the experiences of this place. He was connected to the greatest black singers of the day including Robeson and Price, but he was also thoroughly familiar with the "Beat Generation" of Frank O'Hara and the painter Paul England as well as the great black poets of the day. It was an amazing thing to attend the funeral after he had been murdered in NYCity. The greatest black artists of the last half of the 20th century came to read poetry, sing and talk about this amazing man who most of America has never heard of. I tend to believe that the black community was shaped by minds like his, and Elizabeth Loquen who was his teacher as well as Lawrence Tibbets. There are the people who were out in front, like Reagan in the Cold War and then there were the real people who worked tirelessly at teaching the children, creating the great artists and planning the future with their heads, hands and feet. Martin Luther King was the leader of the marches but everyone knew that it was the time and the seizing of it that made the difference. What we found out later was that they also had an assist from the CIA because the Russians were using American Apartheid (Segregation) and the lack of opportunity for world class minds and talents as an opening into prosecelytizing Africa for Communism. Remember Lamumba University in Moscow? I've come to believe that the "Create your own God" textbooks that came out at about the same time had to do with an attack on that Southern base trying to bring the children into the 20 century Scientific realm but that was a crude attack that showed poor breeding on the part of the people who made it no matter how well intentioned it might have been. I believe it was no accident that so much science was put in the South. The belief was that eventually the sheer reality of space travel and the necessity for scientific thinking would overtake the fundamentalist reticence. They missed the opportunism of Nixon and the Republicans and the fanatacism of the fundamentalists as will as their capacity for denial when it came to spiritual things. John and Bobby Kennedy had a good reason for resisting Orvil Faubus at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. If they didn't plug the hole in the propaganda dike, they could lose the world. They took Khrushchev's boast about burying America very seriously. These Democrats from Harvard and the Northeast, made the decision that they had to lose the South, as did Lyndon Johnson, in order to "win" the world. It was these small victories that made it possible for Reagan in the 1980s to give the final push to the Soviet Empire with his grandiose schemes that he didn't have the science to achieve. Got to go to work, This is just from one Indian Opera Singer who lived through this. I can't imagine that the rest of you my age didn't have some experience with this yourselves as well. Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director The Magic Circle American Masters Arts Festival Biennial [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lawrence DeBivort" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Brian McAndrews" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2003 5:41 PM Subject: RE: [Futurework] FWD: The King They Still Won't Talk About > Good question, I admit he didn't even occur to me as I was writing my take > on the early civil rights movement, or who had played what roles. In > Mississippi, in the early '60s, his name didn't come up, as far as I > remember. Perhaps the 'Nation of Islam' (when was it founded, and when did > Malcolm X come to prominence within it?) was viewed as a tangent? > > Malcolm X eventually went to Egypt and Mecca, and became a 'real' Muslim, > abandoning a lot of the 'white devil' thinking. Many years later, I had a > very interesting and productive meeting with the American Muslim leader (a > black minister from NJ) who mentored him through these changes. It was quite > a story, not adequately covered in the movie MALCOLM X. > > What's your take, Ray? > > Cheers, > Lawry > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Brian McAndrews [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > > Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2003 5:04 PM > > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Subject: RE: [Futurework] FWD: The King They Still Won't Talk About > > > > > > Hi Ray and Lawry, > > And what about Malcolm X? > > > > _______________________________________________ > Futurework mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
