Poet Returns Home, Apartheid in Oakland

Poet/Playwright Returns Home to West Oakland, Speaks at Black Dot Cafe

On Saturday, November 20, Marvin X. Jackmon, poet/playwright/essayist/producer/organizer/teacher, returned to his childhood neighborhood in West Oakland where he attended Prescott elementary and Lowell junior high school.

On Saturday afternoon he had a conversation with actors in the Lower Bottom Playaz who have been performing his first play Flowers for the Trashman, 1965, San Francisco State University Drama Department production while he was an undergrad.

He told the young actors he was flunking an English literature class taught by legendary Medievalist professor/author John Gardner. Gardner asked him what he wanted to do pass the class. The poet said write. The professor said write what. Write a play. Gardner said write it! Flowers for the Trashman was the product. The play became a classic of the Black Arts Movement and established Marvin X as one of founders of the most radical movement in American literature. BAM forced America to include ethnic and gender literature in the academic curriculum. See the Black Arts Movement by James Smithurst, University of North Carolina Press.

The poet described his childhood in West Oakland, Harlem of the West. While I was growing up, West Oakland was the Harlem of the West. I grew up on 7th and Campbell, in my parents florist shop. West Oakland was booming with a vital economic and cultural community on 7th Street, with shops, restaurants, cafes, clubs, associations. It was the end of the railroad line, home of the first black union, the Pullman Porters, led by C. L. Dellums, uncle of Oakland's Mayor Ronald Dellums.

My mother and father were Race people, the name accorded to those who had racial consciousness in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. They were activists in many social organizations, especially the NAACP. Before the family moved to Oakland, his parents edited the Fresno Voice, the first black newspaper in the Central Valley. His maternal great grandfather, E. Murrill, was mentioned in 1943 edition of the Fresno Bee Newspaper. He was so well known the newspaper noted that whites and blacks attended his funeral. His maternal relatives were pioneers to the West coast.

After the war, his parents left Fresno and came to Oakland. There my parents opened a florist shop while my mother worked at the Navy Supply Center as a clerk. The Army base at the end of 7th Street employed many blacks who migrated to the Bay Area during WWII. Seventh Street was bumper to bumper cars, especially on the weekends. The street was crowded with people enjoying Negro life and culture. See Marvin's autobiography Somethin' Proper, Black Bird Press, 1998.

The poet told of his introduction to drama at New Century Recreation Center on 5th Street at McFeely School where he attended elementary school. He recalled a dance teacher at New Century was Ruth Beckford, queen of African choreography in the Bay Area. She was one of the most beautiful women of my childhood with her short natural hair, African body and black velvet skin. I adored her whenever I could catch a glance of her. So fine, so fine.

While doing a play at children's play at Mosswood Park, the poet said he was in the sandbox when a little white girl called him a nigger for the first time and told him to get out of the sandbox. In those days, we didn't go to Mosswood Park often and definitely did go to Lake Merritt, only on holidays such as the 4th of July. A nigguh would get his ass kicked by white boys if caught at Lake Merritt.

Pine Street, where the Black Dot Cafe is located, was the ho stroll, from 7th to 16th by the Southern Pacific train station. There was a hotel near the train station where you could rent a room for a few minutes. Although the area where Black Dot is located is gentrified, someone in the audience informed the poet the hotel is still there.

As a child, the poet used to play up and down the streets in the vicinity of Black Dot Cafe, and later he used to sell black newspapers and magazines in the area, including Jet, Ebony, Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Currier, Detroit Black Dispatch, et al. As a child, he also wrote in the Children's Section of the Oakland Tribune.

As per the play, the setting is a jail cell with the lead character the poet as a young college student with his ghetto friend. They had an encounter with the police coming from a dance and end up in jail for failing the tone test with the police. In jail, the story evolves into a narrative of the father/son relationship, although most critics focus on the rage expressed by Joe, the militant college student who goes off on the white man in the cell. This rage made it a classic of the Black Arts Movement nationwide and worldwide. The play was produced in Europe as well. It appeared in Black Dialogue Magazine and the 60s classic anthology Black Fire, edited by Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka.

In conversation with the actors, they told the poet how the play affected them as fatherless young men, suffering the estrangement and abandonment by their fathers. For them, the play was/is a play within a play, thus giving a level of consciousness as they performed the ritual and were transformed by it. The poet told them this is the purpose of drama, to transform.

He said on one level, the drama reveals his failure as a father since when it was written he had fathered two sons by the age of twenty-one. The play ends with his lines "I want to talk with my sons. I want to talk with my sons." The poet noted that he had been able to talk with one of his two sons, but not with the other who is now almost 50 years old. This son still has feelings of abandonment and neglect. The poet told the young men and women we must break the cycle of such trauma. Otherwise it shall go on forever. Such is the purpose of Flowers for the Trashman, a man-hood training ritual drama to transform lives.

He spoke on the function of ritual drama to transform. This play Flowers for the Trashman is a manhood training ritual so that young men are changed by witnessing it. They will get over some of their hatred and trauma with fathers, for soon they shall be fathers and how shall they behave? Shall their sons hate them, shall they hate their sons, when shall it end?

Truth is, we were not brought over here to have healthy relationships, father/son, mother/daughter. We were brought here for our labor, to be slaves and later wage slaves, coming down to the present. In a 1968 interview with the poet, James Baldwin told him, "For a black father to raise a black son is a miracle. And I applaud the men who are able to do this. It's a wonder we all haven't gone stark raving mad!"

--Marvin X
11/20/10


Happy Thanksgiving: Apartheid in Oakland


It began long ago with Negro Removal or Urban Renewal, the destruction of the economic and cultural vitality of the North American African community. At least San Francisco's Mayor Joe Alioto apologized for destroying the Fillmore. But many blacks were involved because they were part of the Redevelopment Agencies, thus they made decisions detrimental to our cultural vitality. Call it apartheid in black face!

The Fillmore is a graveyard compared to its former designation as the Harlem of the West. West Oakland the same. Of course, before we get to today's apartheid or more precisely, ethnic cleansing, aka, gentrification, we must recall how the Crack epidemic or pandemic destroyed communities coast to coast and throughout Pan Africa, from Jamaica to the Motherland. The Crack germ/chemical warfare destroyed people as well as property after the Crack addicts stopped paying rent or mortgages , leading to lost of property, deterioration of mental and physical health, including those infected from STDs and HIV/AIDS.

In many cases property was sold for little or nothing to the dope man. Many children who inherited property sold it for Crack, although Crack was inter-generational, grandparents and parents succumbed to the US Government supplied drug. In some cases great grandparents were addicted. Of course violence aided the destruction of community when rival gangs fought for turf.

President Reagan allowed the Contras in Nicaragua to bring cocaine into America to aid them in the fight against the Sandinistas. With money from cocaine, the Contras bought weapons.

In Oakland during the reign of black mayors, beginning with Lionel Wilson, then Elihu Harris, the reconstruction or development of the hood was ignored for downtown development. And then came Gov. Moonbeam, Jerry Brown as mayor. He expanded downtown development at the expense of the hood, although West Oakland was the exception since he told the neo-colonial yuppies and buppies that West Oakland is closer to San Francisco than San Francisco. Yes, the West Oakland BART train ride to San Francisco's financial district is less than ten minutes. This created a rush for West Oakland property, and by hook or crook, the neighborhood was further destroyed, although new housing and reconstructed housing boomed. Most of the blacks had long gone from the area due to redlining, Crack and violence. As we see with Fillmore, West Oakland and elsewhere, buildings and houses do not give birth to culture, but rather people who have traditions and shared culture. Capitalism cares nothing about tradition or culture, except as it relates to global finance that we see is in its final stages.

The sub prime loan scam put the death nail in the West Oakland community, also East Oakland, as it has done nation wide and worldwide. But finally, blacks and poor are being excluded, ethnically cleansed, from Oakland entirely by rental costs that price them out of the market, even when they may have Section 8 or subsidized housing, for they are required to have income from employment that excludes them. We may say it is not racial but class since poor persons of any ethnic group will find rental housing almost impossible to obtain with the income restrictions.

Apartheid is thus in full swing. Not only are blacks and other poor being pushed out of San Francisco but Oakland as well, heading to Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto, Madera and Fresno.
We wonder what shall they do in these cities where there is high unemployment and massive forecloses.

Apartheid shall continue its run unless there is an emergency jobs and housing program that is focused on the poor, which seems very unlikely unless Oakland's new mayor Jean Quan has some revolutionary ideas, certainly our President seldom mentions jobs and housing for the poor, except for terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. Enjoy your turkey--don't be a turkey!

--Marvin X