Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America

3. Message from the Grassroots: The Black Power Experiment in Newark, New Jersey

Chapter 3 Message from the Grassroots The Black Power Experiment in Newark, New Jersey Komozi Woodard You and I want to create an organization that will give us so much power we can sit down and do as we please. Once we can sit down and think as we please, speak as we please, and do as we please, we will show people what pleases us. And what pleases us won’t always please them. So you’ve got to get some power before you can be yourself. Do you understand that? You’ve got to get some power before you can be yourself. Once you get power and you be yourself, why, you’re gone, you’ve got it and gone. You create a new society and make some heaven right here on this earth. —Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary,  In late , in the midst of the struggles of the Black Power movement three twenty–year-old college students went to the headquarters of the controversial grassroots organization, the Committee for a Unified NewArk (CFUN), in the heart of Newark, New Jersey’s Central Ward ghetto to inquire about the nature of its political program. Each of them had been in black student unions; one had been involved in Newark’s Black Youth Organization; and each one knew of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party—but they were searching for a serious grassroots organization that addressed the tremendous problems in their own communities. One student was Eric Dillard who grew up in the Hayes Homes public housing projects in  Newark’s Central Ward and was a basketball star at South Side High School as well as a martial arts expert. He had attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the same college that the militant Black Power leader H. Rap Brown had attended. Leon Herron was raised in a cold-water flat on Whiton Street in the Lafayette working-class section in nearby Jersey City; he attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the same college that Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah had attended and where Herron met his classmate Gil Scott Heron. Tim “Doc” Holiday was also from one of Jersey City’s working-class neighborhoods in the BergenLafayette section. Doc Holiday had attended Rutgers University in New Brunswick and the “totally bourgeois” intellectual, social, and cultural environment had turned him off. When they were sixteen years of age both Holiday and Herron had studied at Princeton University as part of the Princeton Cooperative Schools Program (PCSP), a forerunner to the Upward Bound program. At Princeton, Holiday had listened to Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grassroots” speech for the first time, and it had been a life-changing experience. Since then he had been searching for answers to burning issues of identity, purpose, and direction. At the front desk of the militant headquarters they met the leader of one of the youth divisions of CFUN, the Young Lions. At fifteen years of age the handsome Sultani Tarik was already one of the proudest symbols of the Black Cultural Revolution. Not only did Tarik boast a bold and beautiful Afro, but he also wore the uniform of the Young Lions: immaculately clean green and black military boots, black slacks, a green African shirt, and, around his neck, an elaborately hand-carved wooden “talisimu ”1 representing his cultural and spiritual connection to the mythical first African ancestor, Nkula Nkula.2 Tarik explained to the students that the red-, black-, and green-colored bans on his talisimu, as well as those colors on the black nationalist flag, articulated red for the blood of their people (that was not shed in vain), black for their faces, and green for their youth and new ideas.3 Telling the students his background, Tarik said that he had joined the Black Revolution at age twelve when the Spirit House Theater (once a Muslim Mosque) and community center opened down the block from his tenement apartment on Stirling Street in the heart of the Central Ward. The writers and actors of the Spirit House and the Black Arts movement became a second family to him. The Spirit House established not only a theater and cultural center but also the African Free School where children learned reading, history, math, and science.  k o m o z i w o o d a r d Tarik had been groomed for leadership. In...