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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Judas and the Black Messiah Ending Shows Horrific Legacy of COINTELPRO

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This article contains detailed Judas and the Black Messiah spoilers. Read our spoiler-free review here.

We don’t even see it happen. Like Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback) and the other seven Black Panther Party members fortunate enough to survive an all-out assault on a Chicago apartment, we only experience the sound of it. Off-screen and out of focus, police officers glibly taunt Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), who is still incapacitated in his bed despite all hell having just broken loose in his home. Then there’s that sickening noise: two shots are fired into Hampton’s head. We only bear witness to the anguish on Johnson’s face. She tells it plainly enough to us: Fred Hampton was just executed.

This is the heart-wrenching climax of Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah, a striking piece of filmmaking that recounts how the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party was shot to death in his bed after being betrayed by FBI informant William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield). It’s a sordid tale, made possible—and largely engineered—by the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO operation, which infiltrated and illegally subverted any group they deemed radical.

Simply by existing, Judas and the Black Messiah is already doing so much. For the first time, Hollywood’s blinding hot spotlight is being pointed at the carnage wrecked by an extralegal effort which for years was denied, obscured, and outright lied about. For the first time, the mainstream is being asked to reckon with the full legacy of COINTELPRO.

Hiding an Atrocity in Plain Sight

“The Black Panther Party says there is a national conspiracy to wipe out their leadership and destroy their organization.” This is how the The New York Times began a story that scoffed at what turned out to be the actual facts of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s covert and illegal war against the BPP. The article was published on Dec. 7, 1969, three days after Hampton’s death, and heavily implied these were the ravings of an organization damned for having 28 members who’d been killed by “run-ins with the police.”

But then most of the media institutions of 1969 took law enforcement’s word for it. The day after the raid, Chicago Police Sgt. Daniel Groth held a news conference where he said, “There must have been six or seven of them firing. The firing must have gone on 10 or 12 minutes.” Groth, along with police officers who were assigned by Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan to allegedly serve a warrant for illegal firearm possession at Hampton’s apartment, circled the wagons. The official story was a woman opened fire with a shotgun on law enforcement before officers even got to the door. What followed was a “ferocious gun battle” with bullets exchanged by both sides.

Hanrahan even gave an exclusive to The Chicago Tribune, saying publications running statements from the actual BPP members who survived the raid were contributing to an “orgy of sensationalism.” Hanrahan, by contrast, built a full-scale replica of Hampton’s bullet-riddled apartment for a local TV broadcast, wherein the police officers who killed Hampton and fellow Black Panther Party member Mark Clark, reenacted the events as an act of heroism where they survived incoming fire.

This was a lie.

The truth came out when all seven surviving BPP members of the raid, including Johnson who was nine months pregnant with Hampton’s child, were charged with the attempted murder of police officers. The case was dismissed within months after the federal grand jury found the police fired between 83 and 90 rounds, and the Panthers fired a maximum of one shot.

In fact, that single shot was discharged by the slaughtered Clark when the police opened fire through the apartment’s front door. Clark had been sitting across from it with a shotgun on his lap as the group’s security detail. Accounts differ whether he was asleep when he was repeatedly shot or if he had risen from his chair to answer the knocking on the door (as depicted in Judas and the Black Messiah). Either way, the only gun fired by a Panther was the result of Clark clutching the trigger while holding the gun toward the ceiling in his death throes.

There were other signs of a cover-up too, such as Johnson and other Panthers insisting Hampton had been drugged before the 4 a.m. raid. Johnson reported Hampton passed out mid-sentence while talking to his mother on the phone. After the raid, the Cook County coroner, as well as a post mortem conducted by the FBI, failed to find any presence of “barbiturates” (sedatives that induce sleep) in Hampton’s body. Yet when the Hampton family commissioned an independent autopsy from Dr. Victor Levine, former chief pathologist for the Cook County coroner’s office, and Dr. Eleanor Berman, a toxicologist and acting director of the Department of Biochemistry at Cook County Hospital, they found a potentially lethal quantity of drugs in Hampton’s bloodstream—enough that Berman speculated it could certainly induce a coma.

The truth is it probably happened exactly how Johnson remembered it, with Hampton asleep and one officer saying in his bedroom, “He’s good and dead now,” after bullets were discharged point blank into Hampton’s head.

What Johnson couldn’t know at the time, because it was so hidden, is how the FBI helped orchestrate the entire event. She didn’t know fellow party member William O’Neal had been a paid informant for the FBI ever since joining the organization, or that one of O’Neal’s associates would later testify that O’Neal said “the raid on the Panthers was unnecessary because he had drugged Hampton the night of the assault.” Nor did anyone know for years that O’Neal and his handler in the FBI, Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons in Judas and the Black Messiah), received bonuses after the raid led to Hampton’s death.

How could they? The state’s attorney’s official story was they didn’t even know Hampton was in that apartment. Yet as the FBI’s own contemporaneous memorandum detailed, “[Prior to the raid], a detailed inventory of the weapons and also a detailed floor plan of the apartment was furnished to local authorities. In addition, the identities of BPP members utilizing the apartment at the above address was furnished.”

The FBI’s memo concluded that O’Neal’s sketched map and layout of the apartment, including the bed where Hampton slept, turned out to be of “tremendous value.” Apparently, it worked exactly how agents running COINTELPRO’s “Black Nationalist Hate Group” operation might have hoped. And the kicker was that in 1969, no one outside the government knew COINTELPRO existed.

The Origins of the FBI’s Covert Operations

The term COINTELPRO is an acronym for “counterintelligence program.” However, as the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations noted in its damning 1976 report on COINTELPRO, “covert action” is a more apt term since this was not simple intelligence gathering. Rather COINTELPRO was “a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association” for anyone who was deemed “radical.”

COINTELPRO was discreetly launched in 1956 in order to implement the same tools used against Soviet spies in the Cold War on alleged members of the Communist Party (and fellow travelers) in the U.S. In other words, it was initially another product of the Red Scare, particularly after recent Supreme Court rulings made it harder to prosecute alleged communists.

“This is a rough, tough, dirty business, and dangerous,” William C. Sullivan, former assistant to the FBI director, told the Senate select committee. “It was dangerous at times. No holds were barred… we have used [these techniques] against Soviet agents… [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate.”

According to the Senate report, wartime techniques were adopted “wholesale” to disrupt and neutralize targets the FBI deemed subversive. Such techniques included “poison pen” letters intended to break up marriages, utilizing informants and falsified correspondence to encourage “gang warfare” among rival fringe political movements, and falsely labeling members of a group deemed undesirable as police informants. The latter scenario was dubbed as fitting a target with a “snitch jacket.”

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COINTELPRO programs also worked closely with other government agencies, such as when they had the IRS audit a professor, and of course when they collaborated with local law enforcement, including the police whose raid ended Fred Hampton and Mark Clark’s lives.

Ostensibly the program was intended to curb the threat of violence inflicted on American citizens, but FBI leadership, spearheaded by Hoover, also viewed the programs’ mission statement to be about preserving “the existing social and political order,” which among other things meant protecting the established bigotries of the day.

So between 1956 and 1971, hundreds of clandestine actions were implemented against five primary targets, divided among the “Communist Party USA” program, the “Socialist Workers Party” program, the “White Hate Group” program, the “New Left” program, and the “Black Nationalist Hate Group” program. The last one was launched in 1967; the operation’s main point of interest by ’68 was undermining the Black Panthers.

COINTELPRO Mission: Destroy The Black Panthers

The term “Black Nationalist Hate Group” conjures a specific (and still quite racist) image in one’s head. However, the words “Nationalist” and “Hate” seemed to be confused simply with “Black” when the program began in 1967. Similar to how FBI agents defined the New Left as “more or less an attitude” (hence why they heavily targeted college kids protesting the Vietnam War), “Black Nationalist” was seemingly any Black person who challenged the social order of the day by demanding civil rights.

Technically speaking, COINTELPRO also had a “White Hate Group” program, but as detailed in the 1976 U.S. Senate report, this program, which targeted far right hate groups, “used comparatively few techniques which carried a risk of serious physical, emotional, or economic damage to the targets, while the Black Nationalist [program] used such techniques extensively.”

It’s why even before the program was launched in 1967, the FBI had already been extensively targeting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and members of the nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference for years. They also cultivated some of their defining clandestine “poison pen” power plays when they mailed King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, an alleged recording of her husband’s extramarital affairs while in hotel rooms. The tape came with a note probably written by J. Edgar Hoover himself, which threatened to release the audio to the press unless King committed suicide. That was at least how King and his advisors interpreted the letter.

Until King’s death in 1968, the FBI, including through COINTELPRO operations, stalked the civil rights leader. And in the first year of the “Black Nationalist” program’s inception, they also heavily targeted the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), and the Nation of Islam.

As per the language of the program’s mission statement, the goal was to “prevent a coalition of militant black nationalist groups… prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant nationalist movement… prevent violence on the part of black nationalist groups… prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability and discrediting them… prevent the long-range growth of militant black nationalist organizations, especially among youth.”

Hoover’s specific obsession with the idea of a Black Messiah who could “unify” (read: mobilize) Black communities out of poverty led him to initially obsess over King, as well as Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammad.

The “Black Nationalist” program’s supervisor said in a 1970s deposition that they targeted “a great number of organizations that you might not today characterize as black nationalist, but which were in fact primarily black.” By 1968 though, the organization feared most by Hoover was the Black Panthers.

Describing the Panthers as the greatest threat to internal security in the U.S., Hoover wrote, “Leaders and representatives of the Black Panther Party travel extensively all over the United States preaching the gospel of hate and violence not only to ghetto residents, but to students in colleges, universities and high schools as well.” The apparent menace of upward mobility for Black faces out of “the ghetto” was implicitly on the FBI Director’s mind.

In the end, the Black Panthers became the target of 233 of the 295 COINTELPRO sanctioned actions committed by the “Black Nationalist” program. And despite Bureau language claiming the program was intended to prevent violence, even the U.S. Senate concluded it “clearly intended to foster violence” and “many others could reasonably have been expected to cause violence.”

For example, Fred Hampton was the target of COINTELPRO manipulation long before his death. As fictionalized in Judas and the Black Messiah with the militant political advocacy group “the Crowns,” which is an amalgamation of several organizations, the FBI targeted Chicago street gangs with misinformation, attempting to set them against the Panthers.

In a letter to Jeff Fort, the leader of the militant Blackstone Rangers, an anonymous FBI agent claimed to be a Black man who knew that Hampton had put “a hit” out on Fort’s life.

“From what I can see these Panthers are out for themselves and not black people,” read the letter. “I think you ought to know what they’re up to. I know what I’d do if I was you.”

In a contemporaneous memo, the FBI Chicago office wrote they did not send a similar letter to the Black Panther Party because “the BPP at present is not believed as violence prone as the Rangers to whom violent activity—shooting and the like—is second nature.” This specific operation was personally authorized by Hoover.

Throughout the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, COINTELPRO agents pressured landlords to force Black Panther members out of their homes and office space, and they sent letters to male Panthers’ wives claiming their husbands were stepping out with teenage girls. In May 1970, the FBI even began coordinating with offices throughout the country to take proposals on how best to destroy the party’s newspaper, The Black Panther, which they deemed “effective propaganda,” all while still trying to protect the finances of the white businesses that made money off distributing the publication across the country.

Of course the proudest moment for COINTELPRO was solidified in the FBI memo which praised the operation that saw William O’Neal draw out a floor plan of Hampton’s apartment.

Legacy

Technically, COINTELPRO and all its programs were shut down in 1971. However, this was not due to some sort of moral clarity, but because these efforts suffered from public exposure after an FBI office in Pennsylvania had been robbed and documents proving COINTELPRO’s existence got out.

In April 1976, the Department of Justice created a special committee which would notify COINTELPRO victims that they were the subjects of “FBI activities.” But even that was only in the instances where “specific COINTELPRO activity was [considered] improper, actual harm may have occurred, and the subjects are not already aware that they were targets.”

In other words, many folks were never told they may have been sent misleading information in the mail. And for those who lost marriages or friendships—or even their lives—it’s of little comfort. Even today, the FBI can still implement counterintelligence operations in “exceptional circumstances,” with recommendations considered on a case by case basis.

COINTELPRO is gone, its legacy as depicted in Judas and the Black Messiah is not.

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litpoliticsinterview · 6 years ago

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Interviews with Farrukh Dhondy

The following transcriptions are of two conversations I had with Farrukh Dhondy, writer, left wing activist and former commissioning editor of Channel 4.

We spoke about the origins of the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, the fraught nature of the British Black Power movement in the late 1970′s and early 80′s.

These interviews were held on the 12th and 18th of November 2019.

- Emily Blundell Owers

Tuesday 12th November 2019

Farrukh Dhondy [FD]: (looking at printout of Voices of the Living and the Dead / VOTL&TD) I knew him in this phase, when he was formulating this. Well, you ask me the questions, I’ll tell you.

Emily [EB]: they’re not questions like ‘when did this happen’…I though that the first thing would be to tell you what the assignment is. ‘Take your text, and explain the relationship between what we have seen Raymond Williams call its social location and its aesthetic ideology. Each of these works is coming out of and speaking to a radical social movement at some moment in the twentieth century. I am asking you to research and reconstruct this context and to critically evaluate which elements of your work’s production and/or performance and/or publication/circulation history cast the best light on its actual or desired intervention in the world. Find out what you can about the decisions – personal, political – that inform the writing of your chosen work: its acts of aesthetic refusal and allegiance, its ways of thinking/doing community, uplift, justice, change. If appropriate, attend to any unintended effects or unconscious logics at play. Aim to address, in more or less equal measure, questions of literary form and of social world and to analyse both in relation to each other.’ Yes, it’s quite a long question.

FD: Good. Well it’s reassuring that you’re quoting Raymond Williams, who has gone out of fashion. But was very much in fashion when I was a student…before the postmodernists replaced him, who talk nonsense.

EB: So the first kind of questions that I was thinking were about the climate at the time…the 60s through to the 80s- this being first performed in 73 and published in 74. But my question is kind of…I get the impression that this was a time of social upheaval and what was it like in terms of one’s everyday experience?

FD: Let’s start there. I joined the Black Panther Movement (BPM/BP) in 1969. The reason was that I was a student from India and the entire movement consisted of immigrant workers, some immigrant students- Asians as well as West Indians- the movement was made of West Indian workers. And some people turned up in the youth branch of the BPM and they of course worked selling the newspaper, coming to meetings, coming to demonstrations that we organised, doing such things. Amongst them were the 6th formers of Tulse Hill school, one of which was Linton Kwesi Johnson. At the time he was not Kwesi, just LJ. But the BPM took its name through inspiration from the BPP of the United States. The BPP of the US departed from the civil rights movement of MLK, saying non-violence will NOT redeem the black population, or its social and political rights. We’ve got to take up arms, just as the American constitution guarantees that any citizen can carry arms and so on. And they were doing it as a piece of bravado- they weren’t actually going to shoot anybody- but they said we’ll carry guns and wear uniforms and this that and the other. But that was the inspiration, and the people who started the BPM here thought they’d take the name but it wasn’t the same struggle. We were immigrants from the ex-colonies, not descendants of slaves. Well yes, the West-Indians would come here, to work, who were- Indians weren’t. I was not- I came from a middle class family, on a scholarship to study at Cambridge, but I felt the same kind of tensions that Indian workers or west-Indian workers felt. Because there was a kind of race divide in Britain. So I joined that movement and the name of the movement was there to inspire black youngsters to join a movement which was dedicated to social and political rights in Britain. Get rid of racism. Get rid of police attacks on people. Get rid of pay differentials. Get rid of educational discrimination. Get rid of the fact that you couldn’t go into some places- a pub wouldn’t serve you, you couldn’t get housing- they’d say no blacks here. That had to be dealt with, it had to be dispensed with. One didn’t have to sit in different compartments, or at the back of the bus or some such, but there was a lot of discrimination going on in the 50s and 60s with the first wave of immigration, that’s the political background through which the BPM started, and which made people like Linton Johnson and others join up.

Now, there were radical teachers in Tulse Hill school. They were all white, but they were dedicated unionists, Trotskyists of sorts…they were the English department of THS. They were very active in the NUT, the national union of teachers, and of course they wanted an association with any other radical group. One got to know them. I was a teacher at the time.

EB: I heard that the Panthers spoke at the school, and that’s why Linton went along to the first meeting that he did…that it was through the school.

FD: Yes- they invited us to speak. I don’t know who spoke.

EB: I think it was Althea…

FD: Althea Jones. Yes. She was a postgraduate student in chemistry and biology, in London University. And she was very inspirational in as far as she was a good speaker. And these people invited her to speak there, and that’s how he got to know it and joined the BPM youth group, where we used to give history lessons in the Oval house, and we’d talk about ‘The Making of the English Working Classes’, Thompson, and other historical developments in America, in the West Indies, we wanted to know British history also. How it wasn’t exclusive- how the labour movement came about…it was all A.P Thompson’s book- it was very instrumental in those lessons. I had to give lectures on it, and young people were there. That was the political atmosphere in which that group began. And of course, in membership, you kind of devoted your life to it. Every day at some meeting, every weekend selling newspapers, during the week you were writing or having to publish it- Freedom News. And they’d call a movement (meeting?) on a Tuesday afternoon, and say ‘You’ve got to go somebody’s been arrested we are fighting for their release, outside the court or Brixton Police Station’. Constantly. So, we were doing all that. Agitational pamphleteering-

EB: Yes! Agit-prop.

FD: Exactly. And the group told itself that it aught to have its own educational internal systems. So, there were history groups, and some people wanted to start a literary movement. At that time, we had about 6 or 7 people who wanted to meet in a literature collective of the BPM, inside south London. And I was an aspirant writer myself- not aspirant, I was a published writer; I hadn’t written any books, but I’d written a lot of articles, lots of journalism and short stories- so they looked upon me as a kind of writer. And Linton wanted to be a kind of writer. And Linton turned up, we used to read things- if you sit in a collective of 8 or 10 people, in 33 Shakespeare road, in Brixton- you find out what other people are thinking, what they’re writing about. They’d bring their work and we’d criticise it, like a book club- a readers and writers association. At the time Linton was writing verse in imitation of what he had heard in 6th form English classes. He was writing not what he wrote later, but stuff that sounded to me like imitation T.S Eliot. Which he carried on into VOTL&TD. This book is not Jamaican patois.

EB: Yes. That’s a big thing, and its maybe more helpful to this question-

FD: Yes, this is (reads from text) ‘they came with fire blazing, death deep within our midst, desiring our destruction, we were water extinguishing their fire…’. Now this has a political bias. At the time, he was writing much more in the imitation of Eliot. Stuff he’d read and been inspired by his teachers to read. There was no notion in that literature group…that reggae was literature. There wasn’t. I think it was I who claimed that people are writing in the language that they grew up with- the language that they spoke at home, in the streets. And why…of course that was not something I invented. It was something I observed. There were poets in Jamaica and the West Indies who were trying to break out into dialect. There were other poets who wrote very purely in the English tradition. They were carrying on from Auden, Wordsworth, Keats, Eliot, Hughes. They were carrying on in that tradition even though they were black. But in the West Indies there was a movement to move towards the way that West Indians used English. Patois. Some call think that’s an insulting term.

EB: Yes, I’ve thought about this too- whether it’s creole or patois.

FD: Creole means ‘home language’.

EB: And then, coming off of that idea of the literary group, I’ve read Linton talking about reading in the Panthers, Fanon and Du Bois.

FD: Yes, in the history lessons…and CLR James of course. Whose biography I wrote. And he lived in our house, CLR James, when the kids were young. Yes, because his wife kicked him out. He stayed for a few months- he was supposed to stay 3 days! Anyway, so Johnson then went on with the inspiration of reggae and that debate which had been raging from the 30s in the west indies, over whether one should write in the British tradition, or apply bits of language and how people speak. And of course, he was influenced by that, and massively influenced by the reggae movement. And he began then- later on- VOTL&TD is kind of a construction in the British tradition, using the consciousness of hindsight. So, he has then put in the political content about tyranny, slavery…but the first branch out was when we told him, people told him, he became aware; ‘write in the language that your parents speak, how you speak on the streets, how Jamaicans speak’. And we got ‘Sonny’s Lettah’- I think that was probably the first branch out for him.

EB: I do find interesting, that 5NOB in this volume is also in DB&B. I was reading earlier, Brathwaite’s ‘History of the Voice’. And he analyses it, and writes it out in creole- in dialect. Because he’s analysing it from the EP, not how it was written down. And I thought that was interesting, because part of the question I’m asking myself is, because this is the reprint- rather than the original- why if this is in 83 that it was reprinted, so after DB&B has come out, after he started he publishing stuff in creole- I wonder why nothing was added to the volume that was this new type of poetry that he was writing.

FD: Braithwaite was at Pembroke college, Cambridge. Not at the same time as me, before. But I used to edit at Cambridge a magazine called Garconette (sp?), and I sought him out in London- said Mr Brathwaite, you were at my college. He probably thought ‘who’s this punk’- but I asked him to contribute a poem and he did. But it was not- he didn’t write- at the time in patois, he wrote in pure English.

EB: So, at the time he (Linton) was writing this (VOTL&TD), you don’t think he was experimenting with creole writing? Yet. Or maybe he was?

FD: Linton? I don’t know, but, as soon as Sonny’s Letter hit the decks, people though this was it, this is fantastic. And he never looked back. Except that when this was republished in 83- he went back to-he wasn’t ashamed of what he had written before. Did he revise it? Have you compared it?

EB: I can’t find 74 anywhere, but I’ve inferred from the introduction- which says ‘this volume’ was published in 74, and yes, I think it’s the same thing.

FD: You see, what would happen is that his teachers would have told him, and through Althea, write about the historical difficulties of what you think; Sonny’s Lettah is personal, he creates a character who is there. VOTL&TD is abstraction. He’s imagining that he’s the soul of black history, and that’s an abstraction. Putting himself in the place of the redemption of black history – ‘the tyrants came for us, they did this to us…’- they didn’t enslave him. He was walking around Brixton, having a drink. Smoking ganja. But he’s taking on the voice of the race.

EB: And calling for an uprising.

FD: Yes.

EB: I was going to ask about what Brixton was like in particular, and the relationships between minority youth, police-

FD: Brixton was very black- 100% black. There were no fashionable pubs, the Atlantic was a run down place, on the border of Coldharbour lane and Railton road- I lived at 74 Railton road. It was known as ‘the front line’.

EB: Yes, I’ve heard that Railton Road was a hotbed of different groups.

FD: What happened was, the BPM had a base in Shakespeare road- 38 SP road. That was given to us by somebody. Its first base was in Barnsbury, Islington. Very fashionable Islington. Because a rich white lady knew Althea and people, and said you can use my house to live in. You wouldn’t have known that it was the beginning of the BPM- it was in a very gentrified, even at that time- ‘Islingtonia’. And she handed over the house, so people would live in different rooms of the house. And the hall would be the meeting place for the Mangrove trials and so on. I would be up there every evening to write up what had gone on with the trial.

EB: I was reading about the Mangrove 9. And it was Franco Rosso, who did the film about the Mangrove 9…was it right that Race Today was based on Railton Road as well?

FD: What happened was, the Black Panthers then acquired property in Tollington Park. We had 3 branches in London. Shakespeare road, we used to call it the South London collective, then there was the West London collective, along the Mangrove- that gang, then there was the North London collective because they needed spaces across London, because there were members who used to come all the way South, as Althea said why don’t we base ourselves there. And as luck would have it, this writer, John Berger, gave us £2500, because he won the Booker Prize. And we, Darcus and I, with the BP, turned up- I was the only one with a fucking bank account. So we turned up to collect the money, with all these reporters trailing us and so on, and we took the money and put it into 37 Tollington Park, up near Finsbury park. And Althea and Eddie and everyone else moved in there. the entire story is told in a book I’ve written called ‘London Company’. Darcus was not a member of the central corps, because Althea didn’t like him.

EB: Of the Panthers? Why didn’t she like him?

FD: She said was a demagogue, a rabble rouser. And he was very attractive to the general membership. And he was a rival, so she kept him out of the central corps- saying he was a loose cannon, and he knew that. But one day they held a kangaroo trial…a chap called Brian, brought some white girl and the girls who lived there said we don’t want any white girls having sex in here. A household squabble. And they turned it into a kangaroo trial and called the central corps for an emergency meeting, saying ‘this man has disgraced the community’, and I said ‘What the fuck are you talking about? He’s a citizen he can fuck who he likes. It’s none of our business, we’re a political movement. He hasn’t broken any laws.’ And I said I’m not staying here for a kangaroo trial; I’m not doing this. And out of the 8 members of the central corps I walked out. And the first thing I did was phone Darcus, and said this is what’s happened. And he said ‘fuck, the whole place has deteriorated.’ So, we got a gang together, including Linton, and broke up the BPM, said fuck it. We want to do something else. So, we drifted for a while, didn’t go to the meetings, I signed over the house to Anthea and Eddie, her husband…but Linton came with us, he didn’t stay with the BPM, came with Darcus and me, and about 20 of us who quit the BPM started Race Today.

EB: That’s a really good story.

FD: So that’s how Race Today started and Linton joined it. And he continued his career as a poet, by this time of course he’d established himself by reading here and there. And the mood in Britain was towards celebrating Bob Marley, celebrating reggae, realising its rebellious- I wouldn’t say revolutionary- potential. And Linton tuned into that. It was very much attractive, to the establishment even. BBC 2 would do documentaries on him. That’s when Franco Rosso, everyone who thought they were on the radical left of the media, would join in to promote, celebrate, accentuate and bring to the public the ideas and voices they thought they were contributing to that rebellion or act of justice or revolution. All sorts of grades of ambition.

EB: So, at Race Today, were there specific roles?

FD: There weren’t specific roles. Darcus was certainly editor, he’d say what went into the magazine. The rest of us were writers, one of the first things I did for them was on the black explosion in British schools- a big article in the second edition.

EB: So, was Darcus Howe the editor from the start of the magazine?

FD: No, Darcus took over from a priest. Who used to run Race Today, when it was a magazine that belonged to the Institute of Race Relations in Kings Cross. And so, what happened was, Leila, who later on married Darcus, she and 2 or 3 others in the Race Today IRR said Alec was fine as editor, but we need a black editor. They were quite academic in their approach, the previous Race Today, just reporting this and that. They invited Darcus, who had just left the BPM, when we were floating about not belonging to anything, saying we’d make another movement and we’d have a black workers movement…they called him to be editor of Race Today, the collective of young black people who were working for IRR. And Darcus’ whole aim was, we’re not just going to be a magazine, we’re going to turn into an active collective.

EB: So the magazine was the start, and then it came out of that?

FD: Yes, and then he called me to write Black Explosion in British Schools, in February 73. The article is all about how the West Indian children of that generation that I was teaching are completely restless- by your generation they’d settled into the meritocracy, but in that generation they hadn’t.

EB: Are these second-generation kids, born here?

FD: Yes. Linton’s generation.

EB: This is something that I think is going to be the basis of my argument- the shift, the lack of complacency. So, I’m kind of wondering, for my own interest, your personal relationship with Linton. Because from what you’ve said it seems to be a kind of mentor relationship in the BPM.

FD: Hardly. He would never acknowledge anyone as his mentor. Of course, when he went his way and became a reggae poet, with groups giving him background to recordings and so on, there was no connection between me and him at all. We used to meet because we were part of the same collective, but otherwise there was no relationship with me whatsoever. I’ve never known whether he’s read my books- though I’ve followed his career.

EB: This was something I found interesting that I read today- in an interview he did with John La Rose, in I think around 97- he says, and I don’t think this will be a touchy subject from the conversation we’ve just had, but he said after he started touring the world with the successful albums, ‘I think there was a view within RT that I was too much of a high flier and my wings needed to be clipped’, in about 85. He said because of that he retired from music for 3 years, because he was needed for the Brixton organizational stuff.

FD: By 85 I had left Race Today, in the end of 83 I was appointed commissioning editor of channel 4, and I pulled in Darcus to do stuff. So, Linton was left with the collective and became one of its editors.

EB: I thought it was interesting.

FD: Yes, and maybe true. Its not that peoples wings…they probably said ‘what the hell are you doing? Do some political activity instead of cruising around!’

EB: I got the impression that it was more out of guilt than conscience, and I thought that was really interesting.

FD: You’re right I think, you’re right about that. And race today continued, Darcus left it because I gave him the money to fund Bandung files on Channel 4, where he started working full time. And Linton then began to run Race Today, and he must have felt responsible to do that. And if it was out of guilt rather than political conscience- well yeah, maybe. What he did do though, was bring in a lot of Jamaican poets- went to Jamaica, picked up Mikey Smith and others. And they all came and did a circuit of universities, and BBC2 came to the Race Today office and said they wanted to interview the poets.

[recording cuts out here]

Monday 18th November

EB: So, I went through the things we’d spoken about before, to see what hadn’t been lost in the recording. I think the first question that cut off was regarding what it was like to be creative at a time when what was at stake was something more material…if the battles that you’re waging are more to do with police brutality and discrimination- threats which meant government at local and national level needed to be targeted, how can poetry get to that, or try to meet the requirements of an aim like that. I think we spoke about political consciousness raising?

FD: One can look at in several ways. A Caribbean population established itself here. It has its culture, its culture is religion, food- they may not be aware that all these things are known by the name of culture- what you wear, what you believe in, how you conduct the traditions within your life- all that becomes your culture. Now, art is a branch of culture. What you produce to be beautiful or instructive- not useful- a frying pan could be useful but that’s not art- but if you make a sculpture, a painting, if you write poetry or sing a song- those are creative things that come within culture, but they come within the subcategory of art. The workers who came here from the Caribbean had a culture for the Caribbean- the Trinidadians would sing calypso- there were black singers who had made it from the Caribbean- Harry Bellefonte. The people who came here didn’t quite discover what they were going to be writing about. They could do imitation calypso, they could imitate reggae and so forth, and some of them did try. But a particular culture began to evolve within British blacks, and Linton was certainly part of that. He knew that art went with particular forms, particular forms, particular moods and emotions. He had read English poetry, and American poetry, and knew that these were the things that poetry did. But, he had not discovered his subject, until he began to thing 2 things- 1) let me write in the language of the people that I live with, and am part of- actually youths. And the second thing was what should I write about. And it was always said, because we were in political turmoil, political action and struggle, combat and activation- it became clear to him that we always said write about what you are and what you do. It needn’t always be combative. It could be descriptive. When the philosopher C.L.R James said to us in a big meeting of the BPM ‘write about what you’re doing, and that will inspire other people rather than theories’. I was a schoolteacher at the time- I used to write 500 word articles for the paper about accusations of a black child stealing, or the 5th form disco, where fights went on, love rivalries- I wrote about that. James was telling us, write about what you know, about where you are. It will move other people to think in a similar way. Bus drivers wrote about how their union treated them, what happened at the garage, conductors about their interactions with the public- someone was racist to them, stuff like that. Linton would turn the experience that he saw around him into poetry, and that’s how he began writing Dread Beat & Blood, and then he took to writing actual propagandist poems- ‘Darcus Howe to Jail, Race Today cannot fail’, ‘free George Lindo’, stuff like that. So those were activist poems in support of a particular movement rather than descriptions of something that he had observed as an artist and poet. Those distinctions exist even within his work.

EB: Yeah, I think there’s even a further distinction in that this [VOTL&TD] comes before the absolute personal, there’s hints of it. He seems to be writing in the western tradition, of Eliot as you said. I found bits of ‘Voices’ very similar to ‘The Hollow Men’-

FD: Yes, that’s what he was doing.

EB: But he’s imparting upon that style-

FD: Yes- he discovered these two things. The language as his people speaks and the subject matter which he should now begin to represent. So, he did. And he was one of the first. Other people have followed, other writers. Now a whole spate of rap artists of your generation. Like Stormzy, someone who is a household name, who I know.

EB: Yes, my parents would know Stormzy, I doubt they’d know anyone else of that ilk. I suppose it’s similar to Linton, when we think about the documentaries- these people that want to be involved and push this figure.

FD: Sure, and of course what happens in our time is that art, even if it has propagandist and activist motive, becomes something to frame and look at. So even if you sing a song of love to woo a girl, it gets recorded and then its value doesn’t become the relationship, but how much the record will sell for. The function of art in our times has become that. Picasso paints ‘Guernica’, because he hates the Spanish civil war. What happens to the piece? Sells for millions. That’s the destiny of art in our times.

[break]

EB: Thinking about the performance of VOTL&TD at the Keskidee- I wish it were recorded somewhere but it’s not from what I can see. In some interviews he says there were dancers, in others dancers aren’t mentioned. And because obviously there’s different speaking voices- parts- I would really like to know if the audience were told before who each of them were, or if they were meant to infer it. Because if one voice is ‘the dead’ and one voice ‘the living’, I wonder how easy that is to recognise.

FD: Ask the George Padmore institute.

EB: Yes, I’ve looked at their archive website. But I’ll email. And I’ve got your book- I’m going to read the article on the black explosion in British schools, which from what I’ve glanced at is about the way black children were treated as inferior. Which I think is relevant, because I’ve read interviews with Linton that say in Jamaica he was top of the class, and when he came here they tried to put him in basically remedial lessons.

FD: That’s what happened in the first school I taught at. It’s not like that anymore- that’s gone. There’s still a lot of desperation amongst black boys though, gang crime.

EB: This question I think we spoke on, about the musicality of Linton’s work. About him being inspired by reggae artists- and I’ve also read him speaking about how he doesn’t consider himself to be a dub lyricist, because for him the words and the music were together as he wrote, rather than him needing a backing track for the poem to exist. Like reggae artists riffing on the track as it plays. I thought that was interesting because obviously 5NOB is the last in this collection, and I’ve seen it performed with music, but I thought it was interesting that it exists sans music, and I wonder if he wrote it for music, or if the music came after.

FD: What it is, when you look at his work- it’s extremely rhythmic. And it’s rhythmic in a drumbeat way. It has no complex rhythms which then come out, which some melodic songs do have- if you listen to Andrew Lloyd Webber, there’s different beats that progress within the songs. Linton’s poems don’t, they have the same – bum, pa dum, pa dum bu bu dum- and that actually accords well with the sort of instrumental music he did later. Because he recites, he doesn’t sing. Its not melodic, but it’s very rhythmic, and the rhythm is particular. And that’s just his style, the peculiarity of it. Lots of reggae songs, they use melodies found in popular music too- but his compositions as well are purely rhythmic too, the reggae beats.

EB: We spoke about Race Today, how the magazine was owned by IRR, and then when Darcus was appointed editor, he said he wanted it to be about activation, not just recording things. And I’d love for you to retell me that story about the post van-

FD: Yes. Darcus did a couple of months editing the magazine in the IRR at Kings Cross, and we determined in private talks that the magazine should not be – and so had they, those who worked there- had determined what they wanted to do. Because some of them were activists you see, in other groups like the Black Unity and Freedom party- who were doing things. They said to themselves, we don’t want the magazine to reflect the society, it’s not an academic magazine; we want to report the actions which we undertake, and we want it to stimulate the actions of people. If we wanted it to be like Lenin’s magazine in Russia, we needed to move it out of the academic atmosphere of the IRR. So one night a few of us, of course Darcus and I- with me driving my little old green post office van went to the IRR in Kings Cross, loaded up all the machines, the electric typewriters, pens, this that and the other – I don’t know if we took any desks, we may have done. The whole lot, we cleaned up the place. When they came in the next day they found everything gone.

EB: Was there bad blood?

FD: Yes. I think Darcus must’ve told Siavanandan, who thought he was the great leader of immigrants in Britain, who was a purely academic idiot. And not too academic- he didn’t know much. But he got himself into this position. He was a race peddler, not very bright- he’s dead now though, so its not libel. So we ran away, we established ourselves at 132 Railton Road, my second squat. 74 was my first squat, out of which I got burnt.

EB: How do you mean?

FD: I got burnt out. I was living on the second floor, 74 Railton Road, and at 4 o’clock in the morning someone through a bomb into the house. The house was ablaze, I woke up to the smoke. I thought someone was choking me, a pillow or something. I struggled, there was no pillow just burning smoke. I thought shit I’ve left the fire on, it’s caught fire. It wasn’t on.

EB: Was it people trying to get rid of the squatters or?

FD: No. It was the National Front. Because they hit 6 houses that night, all Asian and west-indian houses and shops. They fire-bombed. The fire engine police told me I was fire bombed. The police never caught them. It was on the 15th of march.

EB: Beware the ides of march.

FD: Exactly. That’s when it happened. The 15th of March 1973. Burnt out of our house.

EB: It’s crazy to me that whenever I read about the New Cross house fire that it was never confirmed that it was the National Front. Who else would’ve done it?

FD: Electrical fault, somebody else, someone set fire to the basement because of a love rivalry. There’s all sorts of stories floating. Nobody knows I suppose.

EB: I can’t remember if I asked this last time- I wondered, not necessarily with this text as I don’t know how involved you were, but about the process of getting a text printed, getting somebody like Errol Lloyd to illustrate it. Do you think something like that would spring out of then already knowing each other, or-

FD: Well, the artistic world of blacks at that time was quite small, so they would have got to know each other, and they would have met at cultural occasions, where they were both speaking. And certainly the connection with Race Today could’ve helped- someone calling up and saying ‘I’m with Race Today, a poet, do you want to do my book?’

EB: I see, so it being a known thing people wanted to get involved. Also, not necessarily to do with Voices, but what do you think about capturing something in print which was made to be performed? Because on the first page of the poem, before it even starts, it says ‘with drums, bass guitar and flute’- and I suppose I’m asking for your opinion. Do you think illustrations in print are there in place of performance?

FD: No, they’re an additional form of art, apart from the performance. The performance is one thing, the illustrations their own form of art.

EB: Yes, this is why I’d love to see it. To see if there were costumes or-

FD: There wont have been costumes. I can tell you that. Youths of hope, for Darcus Howe…-

EB: Yes, that’s actually something I want to talk about, Darcus Howe. The fact it’s called ‘youths of hope’. I remember you saying to me before that Darcus was the driving force, was straight to the point.

FD: Yes, of Race Today. Yes.

EB: Everything I read about him, the mangrove 9, the black people’s day of action- every significant incident that is in the books I’ve read about any of this, Darcus is mentioned. So I guess the ‘youth of hope’ moniker is for him. It’s where I got a lot of my idea, my argument, about it being the younger generation who will be able to make a difference- rather than the complacency of the Windrush generation, it will be the younger people. I think 5NOB is my favourite one.

FD: It makes sense you see. Some of the others don’t- ‘terror tearing us up into pieces of smoke’- smoke doesn’t go have pieces!

EB: Well, I think YOH is helpful, when looking at VOTL&TD, to work out some things. Pinning down the tyrants, things like that. We spoke a little before on this- on whether at the time of writing this- because obviously all of this- even 5NOB which obviously made its way onto DB&B, is not written in the creole, the patois, any of the language that made him famous. Do you know if he was experimenting with it at that time- or do you think it was after? I remember you saying ‘sonny’s letter’ was the beginning, and after that he didn’t look back.

FD: I think so, I can’t be certain. 5NOB was refashioned- before he wasn’t doing anything in patois-

EB: Yes, it was actually really interesting to me that 5NOB, in his ‘History of the Voice’, Brathwaite analyses it, written out in patois- I think he did it from listening to the EP and writing it phonetically, because I’ve got DB&B, and it’s printed exactly the same as here. And that speaks to the fact that even though at this time Linton’s writing in standard English, if you were to hear him saying it, it becomes a completely different thing: his accent changes the whole thing. And it makes me think, how can a text that so needs to be heard in the voice of the person who made it- not what’s the point of printing it, because it’s obviously so more people can read it, but I find the tensions of that interesting.

FD: Yes. We all read Eliot for instance- and I’ve heard recordings of him reading Four Quartets, and it doesn’t give you a sense of a new dimension to the poem.

EB: So we don’t know for sure about the experimentations with creole, but I think I mentioned that this text we’ve been set is the republished, 2nd edition- so 9 years after the first in 1983. I wonder if you think there’s a particular reason for not expanding the volume, to include some of the work he was writing then. Because by then he’s published Sonny’s letter, and DB&B, released the albums which made him famous. He obviously wasn’t embarrassed of this stuff he’s done before.

FD: Well, even the publishers say ‘we don’t want collected works yet’, we’ll do them when you’re near to death.

EB: I’ve had to read a collected works of Linton!

FD: Well he’s getting old…

EB: My last question was- do you think Linton’s shift in writing style after this marked a shift in his intentions as poet. Maybe from politicisation to new means of expression for black creativity. VOTL&TD is riling up revolution of some kind and-

FD: Yeah, I think that the animus, the particularity of the activation has gone. There’s no Darcus in Jail or George Lindo- those were for particular publications of a monthly magazine- written for that. You couldn’t sell a poem in America or Jamaica, because nobody knows who that is, it’s a petty affair. Those poems were written for a particular audience, of a particular magazine, in a particular month. And they were just protest into rhyme. Of course he discovered that protest into rhyme works as journalism, but not as art. So I’m sure he’s shifted his focus to the attempt at permanence. The other thing, post-this, was that Linton befriended other poets from the Caribbean such as John La Rose. I don’t think La Rose is a good poet- or made an impact- but Linton befriended them, because Race Today deteriorated, got slower and went its way. Because frankly both Darcus and I left it.

EB: Do you think it was also kind of, not that the struggles had been won, but there was less-

FD: Times were changing certainly. And Linton then drifted off to the North to meet people like La Rose regularly, who of course he’d met in the Creation for Liberation times, World Book Fair and so forth.

EB: The way I’ve been thinking about it is like ’74, when this was written- there’s calls for uprising, calls for dying for what we believe in, even if that’s a lot of posturing. But I think even by the time this has been republished, there’s been the Brixton Riots, there’s been the battle of Lewisham. This stuff has happened.

FD: Yes.

EB: I think that you can attribute the change, that VOTL&TD is an attempt at politicisation, of whoever’s reading it, whoever’s watching; aimed at youth, the ‘youth’s of hope’, to stop ‘in-fighting’, start the righteous war- violence is justified if against police.

FD: Yes, he is saying that.

EB: And after this, it’s more like, ‘I’m speaking in my language…I’ve found my voice now’, like from the teaching in the BPM literary classes.

FD: Yes, adding the creole language to the literary tradition, maybe that’s what Linton will achieve.

EB: I think he knows that young people, 2nd generation children of immigrants, have got their own voice and that’s the protest and the riots and all this, is coming out of a lack of complacency. And the change, saying ‘I’m going to speak with this voice instead’, is a reflection of that.

FD: Yes.

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