Kojo Nnamdi: From Black Power Radical to D.C. Power Player SOURCE: WAMU
In 1973, 28-year-old Kojo Nnamdi was a member of the Black Panther Party in Washington, D.C. At the time, he appeared at mass public events filled with impassioned speeches about uniting the 54 nations of Africa into a single politically powerful entity. Nnamdi was driven by the ideology of figures like Carter G. Woodson, the author of The Mis-Education of the Negro, a book that argues African-American children have been indoctrinated rather than taught in the American education system. Nnamdi also drew inspiration from then-President Julius Nyerere of newly free Tanzania, who was wildly popular due to his calls for Pan-Africanism. Now at 55, Nnamdi hosts his self-titled local radio program for WAMU 88.5, the NPR-affiliate for the Washington, D.C., area. He has become a staple of local media, hosting guests reasonably far up on the celebrity totem pole, including James Beard Award winning Chef (and fellow DC celebrity) Jose Andres, author Nick Hornby, supermodel Iman, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Born Rex Orville Montague Paul, Nnamdi has become a source of insight as a cool, levelheaded voice of reason amid the noise. “You can’t be involved in D.C. journalism and not know of Kojo," says The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor for the Atlantic whose family has a long connection to Nnamdi since the days when Coates’ father and Nnamdi fought along side each other in DC’s black power movement. Nnamdi strives for balance and objectivity, something that might be surprising when you consider his radical past. Nnamdi sees his role as a journalist “to make sure that the competition of ideas is a fair one.” For Nnamdi, political consciousness started early To hear Nnamdi tell it, his “journey to political consciousness started in high school” in what is now the Co-operative Republic of Guyana. But when Nnamdi was a child, Guyana was a colony under British rule and stayed that way until 1966. It was in that context that he developed what Nnamdi calls “the normal rebelliousness of youth.” Throughout his high school years he refused to wear a British-style uniform to school. For students in Guyana, refusing to abide by the sartorial standards of British propriety took on a larger political meaning. “More and more, my friends and I considered ourselves ‘radicals,’” Nnamdi says. Nnamdi is quick to point out that in the early 1960s the starkly anti-imperialist stance often put him and his friends at odds with their parents. “We rebelled against all the mores of our parents’ generation,” Nnamdi says, which they saw as too heavily influenced by imperialism. As a teenager, Nnamdi sold insurance to seasonal day laborers. Nnamdi recalls taking great pride in having “a terrific motor bike” and more important, “a lot of friends at a time in Guyana when the young progressive types and young petty bourgeois party types came together.” For Nnamdi, who at the time happened to be both, this created a perfect combination positioning him within the social scene. Nnamdi's time as a carefree biker was short lived. His mother, Gladys, sensed he was “having too much fun.” She secretly saved the money he earned and sent in his application to McGill University in Montreal without his knowledge. “She put a ticket in my hand and said I would be leaving for Montreal in one week” in the fall of 1967, Nnamdi says. Picking up—and dropping—Black Power By the time he arrived at McGill, the Black Power movement was gaining membership and attention across North America. Huey P. Newton, a co-founder of the Black Panther Party of Self-Defense, was released from jail the previous year, and Nnamdi couldn’t avoid the growing movement. His roommate, Keith Byrne, started a newsletter called Maroon, named for a group of Jamaican slave resistors. Though Nnamdi considered himself a radical as a high school student in Guyana, it was not until he began studying at McGill that he joined an actual political movement. For the second time, Nnamdi found himself at the center of a large social circle; only this time Nnamdi’s popularity meant he was surrounded by fiery talk of the social ills of the day rather than just having a good time. The apartment Nnamdi and Byrne lived in became a gathering place for young Black student radicals. Nnamdi and his peers were fighting for “the development of a Black nation that would be lead by black people.” “It started me on a path of exploring exactly how Black people came to be in the position we were in Guyana and North America,” Nnamdi says. With a newly re-discovered political drive that led him to believe that blacks “needed to be making more aggressive demands of the white power structure,” Nnamdi dropped out of McGill University after only one year and headed to New York City in 1968 to join the Black Power Movement. “I was still wedded to the notion of Black Power. The Black Panther Party seemed to embody that in New York,” Nnamdi says. But after arriving in New York, things took a quick turn for Nnamdi. “It became apparent the Black Panther Party was adopting less of a black power posture and moving toward a more traditional Leftist Marxist ideal.” To Nnamdi at the time “the only way to “realize full black power was the establishment of a nation we lead ourselves,” and the Leninist ideals of a dictatorship of the proletariat did little to curb the problem of “putting too much power in the hands of very few people who begin to see themselves as replacements for the people.” Nnamdi recognized a disconnect between Marxism and Kojo’s pan-African visions at the time. “I wanted something that pointed me more in the direction of my cultural heritage,” he says. Nnamdi was beginning to believe that Marxist ideals did not fit with his goal of a unified Africa, so Nnamdi moved to Washington, D.C., in 1969. There his cousin, Claremeont Moore, told him about a Black Education Program at the then Federal City College’s Center for Black Education. The program aimed to re-educate black people by looking “at Liberal Arts and Science within the context of the black experience,” with a pan-African ideal as its guiding political principle. Between the fight to “strengthen and unite Africa,” Nnamdi got married, divorced, re-married, and fathered three children by 1973. “The responsibilities of parenthood began to weigh down on me. It became apparent I needed to stop being a youth and become a parent.” Pushing Marxism through an effective commercial model Nnamdi, who had been working at a bookstore and press run by the Center for Black Education, set out to “look for a real job.” Nnamdi landed a job as news editor at WHUR, Howard University’s radio station. “The news department began to attract a lot of attention. We had a very ambitious vision to produce a show patterned after All Things Considered but from the black experience.” The resulting radio show, The Daily Drum covered D.C. politics, Capitol Hill, labor relations, and a Daily Africa round-up with several correspondents reporting from throughout Africa. Nnamdi points out that though he was a journalist, “I was also as interested in changing the world as I was during my period as an activist.” This finally led him to embrace the Marxism/Leninism he once saw leading the Black Panther movement off its path: “Merely subscribing to the Pan-Africanist ideal made me and others internationalist. If we were going to be internationalists we would have to look at the world. Once we began to look at the world Marxism became crucial because when we looked at the oppressed people around the world we saw the working class.” “To convince people socialism was the right path we needed to be effective within a capitalist free-enterprise context. Otherwise we would be seen as disgruntled, unsuccessful activists who couldn’t succeed competing in the free-enterprise environment,” Nnamdi says. To do this, Nnamdi aggressively pursued the youth demographic by transforming “a Jazz-oriented Pacifica style station” into a “pump the funk station” in hopes of using popular music trends of the time to lure people into the news and information programming sandwiched between the funk. The plan to use capitalist commercial tactics to gain audiences for news and information programs broadcast by a group of Marxists worked. Audiences began to flood in. ‘The idea of the correctness of Marxism’ Through the transition from WHUR to the contemporary Kojo Nnamdi Show, Nnamdi gained important insight about the role of journalism in society: “Being in the news business forced me to actually do in public what a lot of my radical fellow travelers claimed was our objective to do in private—to weigh all perspectives and arguments equally—something we often really didn’t do in private.” As a reporter in Grenada in 1980, Nnamdi saw a majority elected government taken over by a Marxist cabal. To Nnamdi, this was one of the moments that awakened him “to the idea of correctness in Marxism. That there’s really only one correct line and you are the carrier of the correct line.” To Nnamdi, the fall of Eastern Europe served as greater proof of the corruption within communist countries and reinforced the concept of correctness running through Marxism. In his experience, journalism “offers the opportunity to have socialism, capitalism, or any other ideology compete in the arena of ideas,” Nnamdi says. This competition of ideologies “forced me even more to accommodate and review perspectives that I didn’t share and sometimes find value in that perspective,” says Nnamdi. Nnamdi may now be part of the system, but he has not abandoned his ideals; he still integrates his previous perspective as an activist into his work. “Given our history of racial oppression in America we cannot be insensitive to the needs for our leadership to try to reflect the way we look,” says Nnamdi with a forthrightness that has become increasingly rare in D.C. A racially divided city The racial divide in the city is particularly applicable to Nnamdi's work. According to census data, in the 1970s when Nnamdi was fighting for Black Nationalism, D.C’s population was 70 percent black. This ratio earned it the nickname “Chocolate City.” In 2009, that number fell to 54 percent and demographers predict that in the next 5 to 10 years blacks will become a minority population in a city they once dominated. This shift has only furthered the racial divides in a city where a black family now lives in the White House, but many other black families are displaced from the city due to gentrification and skyrocketing real estate prices. “It's important to have people in the media who can see it, analyze it and span the gulf it creates. I'm glad Kojo is here because that is what he does,” says NBC's Tom Sherwood, who often appears alongside Nnamdi on the Friday segments of The Politics Hour. Some may be tempted to criticize Nnamdi for so vehemently identifying with the far Left and only now working to balance the political discourse through journalism. But Nnamdi isn't bothered by such criticisms. “I think anybody who is involved in the process of changing the human condition has to be considered political,” he says. As someone who has come to love Washington, D.C., and be identified as a central part of the city by its residents, Nnamdi thinks that it is his forthrightness about his radical past that has, in part, led him to such a high place in D.C. society. “I don’t hide my past. I am willing to admit my ignorance … In listening to all points of view I am willing to admit that my own point of view might be wrong. But I am also willing if I do have a point of view to argue it and back it up.” Critics and skeptics may find the story of Nnamdi’s transformation to be too easy, leading them to question how a man can go from one ideology to another. But the advice Nnamdi offers to young people today proves that though he may no longer identify as a radical, he has not abandoned his ideals. “As you forge your own career, understand that merely by being here you have a responsibility to lookout for the welfare of your fellow human beings.” Nnamdi has matured from a rebellious rule-breaker to a man who has come to the realization that whether the outspoken radical, or the journalist “directly in the center,” he must find ways to apply his principles. Despite his many transformations, he has never lost them. In the summer of 2010 Ali served as a production intern for the Kojo Nnamdi Show where he produced four one-hour long segments, including one about young people and politics, which featured attendees and organizers of the 2010 Campus Progress National Conference. -- http://campusprogress.org/articles/kojo_nnamdi_from_black_power_radical_to_respected_member_of_washington/ Via InstaFetch -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
