Remembering Geronimo
by Bakari Kitw, sfbayview.com
June 9th 2011
Political activists around the country are still absorbing the news of
Geronimo ji Jaga’s death. For those of us who came of age in the ‘80s and ‘90s,
the struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s were in many ways a gateway for
our examination of the history of Black political resistance in the U.S.
Geronimo ji Jaga (formerly Geronimo Pratt) and his personal struggle as well as
his contributions to the fight for social justice were impossible to ignore.
His commitment, humility, clear thinking as well as his sense of both the
longevity and continuity of the Black Freedom Movement in the U.S. all stood
out to those who knew him.
I interviewed him for The Source magazine in early September 1997 about three
months after he was released from prison, having served 27 years of a life
sentence for a murder he didn’t commit. Three things stood out from the
interview, all of which have been missed by recent commentary celebrating his
life and impact.
First that famed attorney Johnnie Cochran was not only his lawyer when ji Jaga
gained his freedom, but also represented him in his original trial. They were
from the same hometown and, according to ji Jaga, Cochran’s conscience over the
years was dogged by the injustice of the U.S. criminal system that resulted in
the 1970 sentence.
Second, according to ji Jaga, he never formally joined the Black Panther Party.
As he remembered it, he worked with several Black activist organizations and
was captured by the police while working with the Black Panther Party for
Self-Defense.
And finally, his analysis of the UCLA 1969 shoot-out between Black Panthers and
US Organization members that led to the death of his best friend Bunchy Carter
and John Huggins is not a simple tale of Black in-fighting. Now is a good time
to revisit all three.
Misinformation is so much part of our current political moment, particularly as
the 24-hour news cycle converges with the ascendance of Fox News. In this
climate, the conservative analysis of race has been normalized in mainstream
discourse.
This understanding of racial politics, along with the election of Barack Obama
and a first term marked by little for Blacks to celebrate, makes it a
particularly challenging time to be politically Black in the United States. Ask
Jeremiah Wright, Shirley Sherrod and Van Jones – all three serious advocates
for the rights and humanity of everyday people whose critiques of politics and
race made them far too easily demonized as anti-American.
If we have entered the era where the range of Black political thought beyond
the mainstream liberal-conservative purview is delegitimized, Geronimo ji
Jaga’s life and death is a reminder of our need to resist it.
Excerpts from the 1997 interview
Q: How did you get involved with the Black Panther Party?
A: Technically, I never joined the Black Panther Party. After Martin Luther
King’s death, an elder of mine who was related to Bunchy Carter’s elder and
Johnnie Cochran’s elder requested that those of us in the South that had
military training render some sort of discipline to brothers in urban areas who
were running amuck getting shot right and left, running down the street
shooting guns with bullets half filled which they were buying at the local
hardware store.
When I arrived at UCLA, Bunchy was just getting out of prison and needed
college to help with his parole. We stayed together in the dorm room on campus.
But we were mainly working to build the infrastructure of the party.
Q:You ended up as the deputy minister of defense. How did that come about?
A: They did not have a ministry of defense when I came on the scene. There was
one office in Oakland and a half an office in San Francisco. I helped build the
San Francisco branch and all of the chapters throughout the South – New
Orleans, Dallas, Atlanta, Memphis, Winston-Salem, North Carolina and other
places. We did it under the banner of the Panthers because that’s what was
feasible at the time.
Because of shoot-outs and all that stuff, the work I did with the Panthers
overshadowed the stuff that I did with the Republic of New Afrika, the Mau Mau,
the Black Liberation Army, the Brown Berets, the Black Berets, even the Fruit
of Islam, but I saw my work with the Panthers as temporary. When Bunchy was
killed, the Panthers wanted me to fill his position [as leader of the Southern
California chapter]. I didn’t want to do it because I was already overloaded
with other stuff.
But it was just so hard to find someone who could handle LA given the problems
with the police. So I ended up doing it, reluctantly. And this is how I ended
up on the central committee of the Black Panther Party. I never took an oath
and never joined the party.
Q: What was your role as deputy minister of defense?
A: The ministry of defense was largely based on infrastructure: cell systems in
the cities, creating an underground for situations when you need to get
individuals out of the city or country. When you get shot by the police, you
can’t be taken to no hospital. You gotta have medical underground as well.
That’s where the preachers, bible school teachers and a lot of others behind
the scenes got involved. When Huey got out of prison in 1970, this stuff blew
his mind.
Q: What were the strengths and weaknesses of the party?
A: The main strength was the discipline which allowed for a brother or sister
to feed children early in the morning, go to school and P.E. (political
education) classes during the day, go to work and selling papers in the
afternoon, and patrol the police at night. The weak points were our naiveté,
our youth and the lack of experience. But even at that I really salute the
resistance of the generation!
I have a problem saying it was just the Panthers ‘cause that’s not right. When
you do that, you x out so much. There was more collective work going on than
the popular written history of the period suggests. And when you talk about
SNCC, you are talking about a whole broader light than the Panther struggle. So
you have to talk about that separate; that’s a bigger thing. They gave rise to
the intelligence of a whole bunch of Panthers.
Q: What was Bunchy Carter like?
A: He was a giant, a shining prince. He had been the head of the Slausons gang.
He was transforming the gangbangers in Los Angeles into that revolutionary arm.
He was my mentor. Such a warm and lovable brainy brother.
At the same time he was such a fierce brother. He was very dynamic, was an
ex-boxer, and he was even on The Little Rascals probably back in the ‘50s. His
main claim to fame was what he did with the gangs in the city. And that was a
monumental thing. All that was before Bunchy became a Panther.
Q: Because of the death of Bunchy Carter as a result of the Panthers’ clash
with Maulana Karenga’s US organization, even today rumors persists that Dr.
Karenga was an informant.
A: Not true. Definitely not true.
Q: What was the Panther clash with US all about?
A: We considered Karenga’s US organization to be a cultural-nationalist
organization. We were considered revolutionary nationalists. So we have a
common denominator. We both are nationalists. We never had antagonistic
contradictions, just ideological contradictions. The pig manipulated those
contradictions to the extent that warfare jumped off.
Truth is the first casualty in war. It began to be said that Karenga was rat,
but that wasn’t true. The death of Bunchy and John Huggins on UCLA campus was
caused by an agent creating a disturbance, which caused a Panther to pull out a
gun and which subsequently caused US members to pull out their guns to defend
themselves. In the ensuing gun battle Bunchy Carter and John Huggins lay dead.
Q: What’s your worst memory of the 27 years you spent in prison?
A: I accepted the fact that when I joined the movement, I was gonna be killed.
When we were sent off to these urban areas, we were actually told, “Look,
you’re either gonna get killed, put in prison or if you’re lucky we can get you
out the country before they do that. Those are the three options. To survive is
only a dream.” So when I was captured, I began to disconnect. So it’s hard to
say good or bad moments because this is a whole different reality that had a
life of its own.
Q: Many people would say that during those 27 years that you lost something.
How would you describe it?
A: I considered myself chopped off the game plan when I was arrested. But it
was incumbent upon me to free myself and continue to struggle again. You can’t
look back 27 years and say it was a loss. I’m still living. I run about five
miles every morning, and I can still bench press 300 pounds 10 times. I can
give you 10 reps (laughter). Also I hope I’m a little more intelligent and I’m
not crazy. It’s a hell of a gain that I survived.
Q: What music most influenced you during that time?
A: In 1975 I heard some music on a prison radio. I hadn’t seen a television in
six years until about 1976, and it was at the end of the tier. I couldn’t see
it unless I stood up sideways against the bars. When I really got to see a
television again was in 1977. So I was basically without music and television
for the first eight years when I was in the hole.
When I was able to get on the main line and listen to music and see TV, of
course the things I wanted to hear were the things I heard when I was on the
street. But by then those songs had to be at least nine years old. So I would
listen to oldies.
And the new music it was hard to get into, but I slowly began to get into that.
But when hip-hop began to come around, it caught on like wildfire. It reminds
me how the Panthers and other groups started to catch on like wildfire. It
reminded me of Gil Scott-Heron. He would spit that knowledge so clearly and
that was the first thing that came to mind when I heard Grandmaster Flash,
KRS-One, Paris, Public Enemy and Sista Soulja – the militancy.
Q: What type of books were you reading?
A: We maintained study groups throughout when I was on main line. Much of the
focus was on Cheikh Anta Diop. He was considered by us to be the last pharaoh.
We also read the works compiled by Ivan Van Sertima. Of course, there were
others.
Q: In terms of a spiritual center, what helped you to get through?
A: Well the ancestors guided me back to the oldest religion known to man: Maat.
We also studied those meditations that were developed by all of our ancestors –
the Natives, the Hispanics, the Irish – not just the ones that were strictly
African.
The youngest of seven children, Ji Jaga was born Elmer Pratt in Morgan City, a
port city in southwestern Louisiana, two hours south of New Orleans, on Sept.
13, 1947. One hundred twenty years earlier marked the death of Jean Lafitte,
the so-called “gentleman’s pirate” of French ancestry who settled in Haiti in
the early 1800s until he was run out with most other Europeans during the
Haitian revolution. Lafitte’s claim to fame was smuggling enslaved Africans
from the Caribbean to Louisiana during the Spanish embargo of the late 17th and
early 18th centuries, often taking refuge in the same bayous that were Pratt’s
childhood home.
Pratt was dubbed Geronimo by Bunchy Carter and assumed the name ji Jaga in
1968. The Jaga were a West African clan of Angolan warriors who Geronimo says
he descends from. Many of the Jaga came to Brazil with the Portuguese as free
men and women and some were later found among maroon societies in Brazil. How
Jaga descendants could have ended up in Louisiana is open to historical
interpretation, as most Angolans who ended up in Louisiana and Mississippi and
neighboring states entered the U.S. via South Carolina. Some Jaga were possibly
among the maroon communities in the Louisiana swamplands as well. According to
Pratt, the Jaga refused to accept slavery; hence his strong identification with
the name.
Q: What were some of your earliest early childhood memories?
A: Well, joyous times mostly. Morgan City was a very rural setting and very
nationalistic, self-reliant and self-determining. It was a very close-knit
community. Until I was a ripe old age, I thought that I belonged to a nation
that was run by Blacks. And across the street was another nation, a white
nation. Segregation across the tracks.
We had our own national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” our own police,
and everything. We didn’t call on the man across the street for nothing and it
was very good that I grew up that way.
The worst memories were those of when the Klan would ride. During one of those
rides, I lost a close friend at an early age named Clayborne Brown who was hit
in the head by the Klan and drowned. They found his body three days later in
the Chaparral River. And, we all went to the river and saw them pull him in.
Clayborne was real dark-skinned and when they pulled him out of the river, his
body was like translucent blue. Then a few years later, one Halloween night,
the Klan jumped on my brother. So there are bad memories like that.
Q: Does your mother still live there?
A: She’s gone off into senility, but she’s still living – 94 years old this
year. [She died in 2003 at 98 years old.] And every time I’ve left home, when I
come back, the first person I go to see is my mama. So, that’s what I did when
I got out of prison. Mama has always stood by me. And I understood why. She was
a very brainy person. Our foreparents, her mother, was the first to bring
education into that part of the swampland and set up the first school.
When I was growing up, Mama used to rock us in her chair on the front porch. We
grew up in a shack and we were all born in that house, about what you would
call a block from the Chaparral River. She would recite Shakespeare and
Longfellow to us. All kind of stuff like that at an early age we were hearing
from Mama – this Gumbo Creole woman (laughs). And she was very beautiful. Kept
us in church, instilled all kinds of interests in us, morals and respect for
the elders, respect for the young.
Q: What about your father?
A: My father was very hard working. He wouldn’t work for no white man so he was
what you could call a junk man. On the way home from school in Daddy’s old
pickup truck we would have to go to the dump and get all the metal that we
could find as well as rope, rags, anything. When we got home, we unloaded the
truck and separated the brass, copper, the aluminum, so we could sell it
separate. That’s how he raised an entire family of seven and he did a damn good
job. But he worked himself to death. He died from a stroke in 1956.
Q: With an upbringing so nationalistic, what made you join the U.S. military?
A: I considered myself a hell of an athlete. We had just started a Black
football league. A few years earlier, Grambling came through and checked one of
the guys out. So initially my ambition was to go to Grambling or Southern
University and play ball. Because of the way the community was organized, the
elders called the shots over a lot of the youngsters.
They had a network that went all the way back to Marcus Garvey and the days
when the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was organizing throughout
the South in the 1920s. My uncle was a member of the legionnaires, the military
arm of the UNIA. Of the 17 people in my graduating class, six of us were
selected by the elders to go into the armed forces, the United States Air
Force. The older generation was getting older and was concerned about who would
protect the community.
Q: Many of the brothers that went to Vietnam have never gotten past it. You
seemed to have made a progressive transition. How have you done that?
A: I’ve never suffered the illusion that I was aligned to anything other than
my elders. And my going to Vietnam was out on a sense of duty to them. When I
learned how to deal with explosives, I’m listening at that training in terms of
defending my community. Most of the brothers that I ran into in the service
really bought into being Americans, and “pow” – when they were hit with the
reality of all the racism and disrespect, they just couldn’t handle it.
Q: What was it like to be a Black soldier in the U.S. military in 1965?
A: This was my first experience with integration. But I was never was a victim
of any racial attack or anything. During the whole first time I was in Vietnam
– throughout 1966 – I never heard the “N” word. And all of my officers were
white.
When I went back in 1968 that’s when you would see more manifestations of
racial hatred, especially racial skirmishes between the soldiers. But first off
there were so many battles and we were getting ambushed so much. Partners were
dying. We were getting overrun. I mean it was just madness. If you were
shooting in the same direction, cool.
Q: You were very successful in the military. Why did you get out?
A: On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. I was due to terminate
my service a month later. I wasn’t gonna do it. I was gonna re-up ‘cause I had
made sergeant at a very early age, in two tours of combat, so I could have been
sitting pretty for the rest of my life in the military.
I was loyal and patriotic to the African nation I grew up in who sent me into
the service. And after Martin Luther King was killed, my elders ordered me to
come on out of the service.
King was the elders’ Messiah. Malcolm was our generation’s Messiah. And now
that their King was dead, it was like there’s no hope. So they actually
unleashed us to do what we did.
This is why when Newsweek took their survey in 1969: It was over 92 percent of
the Black people in this country supported the Black Panther Party as their
legitimate political arm. It blew the United States’ mind.
Bakari Kitwana is a journalist, activist and political analyst whose commentary
on politics and youth culture have been seen on the CNN, FOX News (the O’Reilly
Factor), C-Span, PBS (The Tavis Smiley Show) and heard on NPR. He’s currently
senior media fellow at the Harvard Law-based think tank, The Jamestown Project,
and the CEO of Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop. Email him at
[email protected] and visit his website, www.bakarikitwana.com. This
story first appeared on NewsOne.
See Video: http://www.vimeo.com/24674744
Geronimo Ji-Jagga Pratt Community Vigil from Jasmyne Cannick on Vimeo.
See Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XP2rmv5qqM
See Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBWSaS8X3v0
See Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzzSnFRtau8
See Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0S38WQoijQ
Original Page: http://sfbayview.com/2011/remembering-geronimo/
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