BAM 9.8-11.2016
Knowing that the
Black Arts Movement was a logical moment in the ongoing evolving of
African-generated arts is a matter of common sense rather than one of academic
acrobatics.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
This knowledge of
what it means to be Black in America is an inner introspection that is never
the same for any two people.
Kim McMillon, organizer of the Dillard University-Harvard
Hutchins Center Black Arts Movement International
Conference, New Orleans, September 9-11, 2016
After more than two years of work, it came to fruition. It was simply Dr. Kim McMillon's vision of
the necessity to celebrate, contemplate, define and redefine, tell tales and
speak truth about the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic Movement to whomever would
listen. It occurred in a city that Tom
Dent famously declared with his uncanny wit and wisdom to be a weird place. Like other twenty-first century conferences,
it was characterized by plenitude
-- the too much to be said in
three days. Its special flavor was one
of Southern influences. It was one of
those endless conversations citizens of the United States of America need to
delay the inevitable tragedy of ritual murder and ritual suicide and ritual
terrorism. The conversation is about how
the past occupies the space where the future has always been.
Personal Notes
September 8
---Kim McMillon, Quo Vadis Gex Breaux, and I are special guests on a WBOK-AM
community notebook program. We talk
about the origin and purpose of the conference.
We extend an invitation to the people of New Orleans, especially the
young citizens, to participate in a moment of learning and teaching, a moment
of genuine public education.
September 9, 6:00 p.m.
---In the atrium of the Professional Schools Building at Dillard University, Big
Chief Clarence A. Dalcour of the Creole Osceolas, opens the conference with the
chanting of "Indian Red."
Haki Madhubuti, founder of Third World Press, opens one
conceptual space with his keynote address "A focus on people from the Midwest
who have been left out of the Black Arts Movement: Gwendolyn Brooks, Dudley
Randall, Margaret Burroughs and Hoyt W. Fuller." Burroughs was born in St. Rose, Louisiana,
and Fuller was born in Atlanta, Georgia.
They were Southern influences on the evolution of BAM thought and
activity in Chicago. For Burroughs, the
importance of legacy was to be remembered for positive contributions to one's
community, and her legacy is DuSable Museum.
Fuller, who died in the city of his birth (the eternal return of
things), left the legacy of his editing Negro Digest/Black World and founding
First World, his thinking about the concept of the Black Aesthetic, and his
nurturing of OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture). Note other Southern
influences. Sterling D. Plumpp was born
in Clinton, Mississippi and Angela Jackson was born in Greenville, Mississippi,
and both of them were Madhubuti's comrades in OBAC. Many people know Chicago as the UpSouth home
of the Mississippi Delta blues. Under
the banner of BAM, Chicago can be reconsidered as the place where the Southern
writers Richard Wright and Margaret Walker had some influence on a so-called
Chicago Renaissance. We must challenge
the accuracy of naming any cultural expressions by people of African ancestry a
"renaissance." Madhubuti's
keynote reminds me that the Southern historian Julius Eric Thompson wrote Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the
Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995 (McFarland 1999) and was himself
a BAM poet. When Madhubuti made
references to John Oliver Killens (born
in Georgia), the famed Fisk University conference of 1967 that had some impact
on the thinking of Gwendolyn Brooks, and the work that he did with Killens at
Howard University, I am reminded that Stephen Henderson (born in Key West,
Florida) founded the Institute for the Arts and the Humanities at Howard after
making noteworthy contributions to the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta. Killens did his major work in New York, but
he never forgot the crucial importance of the Black South voice. The South is everywhere in the unfinished
history of BAM. It is an open secret
that Washington, D.C., the scene of IAH's noteworthy BAM-related conferences,
is a very Southern city in America's democratic experimenting. Madhubuti opened floodgates.
September 10, 9:00
a.m. PSB 115 ----I shared the stage with Askia M. Toure (born in Raleigh,
North Carolina) to give a joint keynote address. Toure spoke eloquently about Umbra, the
importance of BAM journals, and the importance of reading the pamphlet "Freedom Manifesto: A Draft
Manifesto to Rebuild the Black Liberation Movement "(August 2016),
"the work of veterans of five decades of struggle and young activists in
the current struggles." Toure
directed thought to the continuity and cultural, political, and social
necessity of the Black Arts Movement rather than to the academic delusion that BAM dissolved
either in 1974 or 1975. I tried to make
these points in my keynote remarks:
- If we admit that
"history" is at once a process and a narrative of process, we
recognize that (a) the cultural expressions of enslaved African peoples in
the USA culminated in a burst of energy now called the Harlem Renaissance;
(b) the Harlem Renaissance with all its achievements and flaws (see Harold
Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual) focused on one site of development (there were many
sites of activity beyond New York) and served as prelude/preface for BAM
(c. 1960-1975), the special assertion of what W. E. B. DuBois outlined in The Gift of Black Folk (1924); (c)
BAM was a forecast of NOW (acronym for "no single name or
single wholeness), the
dispersed and decentered sense of freedom, the belief in an abstraction
that does not exist.
- BAM is a logical
configuration, a matter of time and space, of change and continuity, of
caste, class and commerce in human capital.
- This conference is one and
only one effort to use common sense to recognize the necessity of
conversations about the ACTUAL and the REAL, the perpetual motions of
history, the dao of being.
- At the center of this
particular conversation, at the core of this conference, is the spirit/memory of Tom Dent
(1932-1998) and what he said about the imperatives of history.
- In his magnum opus Southern Journey (1997), Dent noted
that in his youth dream roads were "fueled by books, movies, and
legends" which "led to a nonracial world" of solace. Dent came to believe that this dream
world does not exist.
- Smashing the icons of
dream worlds, as Dent did in his play Ritual Murder, was and is the work
of BAM, the work of exposing what is obscene in the American Nightmare and
figuring out how to defeat those icons.
With all its contradictions, BAM had to do with cognition, with a
consciousness of aesthetic gestures in life (not inside the abstract limits of
philosophy of art and its limits of good, beauty, truth.
- As editor of the Maroon Tiger at Morehouse College,
Dent criticized his generation for apathy and nonchalance, for not fighting
to get out of confusion (November 15, 1951). As Dent told me in a 1986 interview, our
job is working toward "critical and widening vision." Yes, that is the work of this 2016
conference.
September 10, 10:00
a.m. PSB 115----Black Studies
Roundtable, moderated by Jerry Varnado
Panelists: James Smethurst, Jimmy Garrett, Ishmael Reed,
Eugene B. Redmond, Quincy Troupe,
Kalamu ya Salaam, Askia Toure, Jerry Ward
My opinion about where Black Studies should be located is
sufficiently "incorrect" to anger colleagues who, truth be told, have
done remarkable work on the plantations of American higher education. Given all the uncertainty about progress in
local communities, our surplus of tragedies small and large, we need robust
PRACTICE outside the Academy and inside community sites regarding culture (i.e., values and lifestyles,
especially as they are affected and infected by commerce in the USA). We need to give dedicated, constant attention
to social institutions (i.e., roles and collective forms of social
interaction), namely
- the police and criminal
injustice
- legal systems and persons
who say they are responsible for order and law
- the prisons in the USA
- educational institutions
at all levels
- hospitals and health care
delivery; Medicare, Medicaid, and HMOs
- sports and popular
entertainment, film
- Mass media, publications,
the news as deliberate infotainment and misinformation
- social networks as emerging
technologies of mind-control
- labor
I ask for Black Studies to be efforts of local discovery by
trial and error of pragmatic local solutions.
I am Vietnam veteran pissed-off when the roundtable minimizes the long
history of forms of black study in HBCUs, and I stand and say as much loudly.
September 10, 11:30
a.m. PSB 200 ---Paper Panel 4 "Icons of the Black Arts Movement"
Presenters --Lasana Kazembe, John Zheng, Eshe Mercer-James,
Reginald Martin
I am humbled by Martin's paper "Takin' It to the
Bridge: The Legacies of Ishmael Reed and Jerry Ward," but energized to
continue my version of bridge-building between the USA and the Peoples Republic
of China.
LUNCH --1:00 p.m. with Eugene B. Redmond and discussion of program
planning for October 2016 in East St. Louis
September 10, 3:00
p.m. , Cook 204---Southern Writers Roundtable
Moderator: Jerry Ward
Panelists: Quo Vadis Gex Breaux, Chakula Cha Jua, Mona Lisa
Saloy, Kalamu ya Salaam; C. Liegh McInnis added late during the session
To begin --three quotations, all from Black Southern Voices, to which I request that panelists respond
1. "The black Southern literary voice is a most
important voice. As the South goes, so
goes the nation, with all due respect to the rock-bound coast of Maine and all
the Hampshires. It is the voice of hard
truth and reality." ---John Oliver Killens, "Introduction," page 3
2. "When murder occurs for no apparent reason, but
happens all the time, as in our race on a Saturday night, it is ritual murder."
---Tom Dent, Ritual Murder, page 324
3. yes, i see hard
times
a ' coming
and i see blk
folks
rediscovering
we are still
our own best
resources
and i rejoice
Nayo (Barbara Watkins), "Hard Times A' Coming,"
page 283
Comment ( my paraphrase) by Avotcja, a poet, playwright,
multi-percussionist, photographer and teacher: The writer's job is to know many
stories from all people.
September 11, 11:00
a.m. ---Videotape interview on the conference; Arnold Bourgeois,
interviewer
September 11, 11:00
a.m., PSB 115 ---"Young People's Town Hall Meeting"
I arrive late but catch the drift of the discussion led by
four young people. I am dismayed that
elders not young people constitute the bulk of the audience, because I had hope
we might have ended with a significant exercise in intergenerational listening
to the young, to hearing their voices.
What the four young people did say, however, was amazingly sobering:
Young people may be reluctant to reach out to elders, because young people
resent being disrespected. When the
discussion turned to a lack of interest in African American literature and
culture among many students at Dillard University, I went into Jerry Ward the
teacher mode. As a person who retired
from teaching at Dillard, I noted that what was obviously absent from the
conversation was a primal question: WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION IN THE
USA? That question has not been
adequately addressed, particularly in light of our endless evolving of
African-derived cultural expressions. It
has not been addressed in terms of what global capitalism is designed to do
with human beings.
I returned home from the conference with gratitude to Kim
McMillon and Mona Lisa Saloy and all the people who made the event happen. I
returned home to consider where I entered on September 8 with a renewed sense
that Southern influences prevail:
Knowing that the
Black Arts Movement was a logical moment in the ongoing evolving of
African-generated arts is a matter of common sense rather than one of academic
acrobatics.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. September 12, 2016
