NBPP "In 3's" by Bro. Zayid Muhammad

[nattyreb]

THE NEW BLACK PANTHER PARTY
THE NATIONAL MINISTRY OF CULTURE
P.O. BOX 25332
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY 07101
201-602-0780
March 22, 2006

In 3s, the Minister of Culture Speaks

The elders say that death comes in 3s…

Well in the last two weeks, our people have lost three treasured sons. Gordon Parks, Professor George Simmons and Lumumba Carson, better known to those my age and down as Professor X, the anchor and point man of the edge-cutting hip hop group X Clan.

I pen these words because I feel these men all deserve them. Professor Simmons and Lumumba more so here because they did not get their props the way Mr. Parks did.

Gordon Parks was a world famous figure and long distance runner in the arts and the most has clearly been said about him for obvious reasons. To be sure, Mr. Parks lived long enough to see the high contributions he brought to art and community to get his props while he was in the land of the living. The most instructive things about this elegant man’s legacy that our people need to know is that Parks was an extremely confident man who knew himself as a Black man and as a man. He was self-taught in everything he did, and he did everything well. He did not wait on anyone to do anything for him, or to discover him, least of all the white man, and he possessed kind of high standards which naturally made the world turn to his presence with nothing but respect. It was not enough that he had genius in his eyes, fingers and head; He had the necessary clarity and supremecy of confidence to make it manifest in a most unshakably concrete way.

He is best known to the ‘grassroots’ for introducing the media to the worlds of ‘gangs’ in Harlem in the 1940s and, of course, to the incredible fierceness and independence of the Nation Of Islam by virtue of what ultimately would be a very close relationship with our revolutionary father Malcolm X. Malcolm told the world how fearless, mighty and independent the Nation was; Parks followed his lead, and showed the world at its most fearless and dignified height.

On the matter of elegance, perhaps his single most famous picture, again to the grassroots, was his ‘A Great Day In Harlem,’ which captured dozens of the greatest Black jazz musicians of the 1950s in one epic shot! It inspired several generations and lead to another epic shot just a few years ago when he also shot called a ‘A Great Day in Hip-Hop’ on the same premise just four generations latter and a very different music. He was especially sensitive with his photography to our people drowning in poverty, whether it was segregated Washington, DC or in Brazil.

He was as true to the grassroots in the countryside as he was to the grassroots in the ‘hood as well, as attested to by his epic films, The Learning Tree, and of course, Shaft.


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Professor George Simmons will be the one to get the least props and recognition in the media because he never one to be in the media. He was a true ol’ school professor in the truest sense. It didn’t matter that he was not at any of the lofty universities in the white sense of the word. What mattered to us was that he was one who would come to us wherever we were, not for money in lecture fees, but to ground us in study, to give us the tools and the weapons to think with in order to organize and fight our way out of this devil’s playground that, for us, is a killing ground. He rolled all up New York and New Jersey, to all of those places most of us in cities like New York and Newark, don’t even think about truly grounding with people who were not in the universities, so we could truly make a difference. He did it until his health would no longer allow it. This is something that bourgeoisie black scholars, no matter their expertise, still do not understand in terms of their role! He did. That’s why we honor him. We did. That’s why we listened and learned. He was a ‘fundi’ one who has experienced the institutionalized but was not touched or processed by it.

If the NY Times obituary of my brother comrade and friend, Lumumba Carson, or ‘Professor X,’ to heads my age and down, hadn’t pissed me off so much, these words probably wouldn’t even be necessary. But to the set the record and the negro who wrote it straight, Lumumba was not just the voice shouting “vainglorious� for X Clan. Lumumba Carson was the backbone, the anchor, the foundation, the glue who brought it all together.

Lumumba Carson was first and foremost a son of struggle! He was the son of the immortal Abubadika Sonny Carson, one of my favorite bumrushers of all time! He was a child of ‘The East,’ that still underappreciated cultural magnet for Black Brooklyn from the late 60’s until the early 80’s. He was the principal organizer for Blackwatch, the community organizing arm of X Clan in a way that paralleled in some respects the Zulu Nation. One of my proudest hellraizin moments in New York was when I and several other brothers from the December 12th Movement covered down on Blackwatch when they staged a sit-in at the African Burial Ground in the early days of that struggle to prevent the skullsnatchers from removing our ancestors remains while nobody was looking.

During hip hop’s ‘golden age,’ X Clan was not an oddity with a cultish like following as the Times negro puts it. X Clan was one of the most original, unique and yet bridgelinking groups of the period. While it is true that Public Enemy got most of the play out of those groups rep’n for our people’s consciousness back then, they certainly were not the only group rollin like that.
To be sure, no group was bolder in the rep’n for the Black nation and for the R, B & the G (the red black and the green), than X Clan. And they did it in an original way. They were best known
for steeping their joints, laying their music over P-Funk, one of the most unique voices of funk of the 1970’s. Being from Plainfield, NJ originally, the home of the P-Funk, I personally liked to lost my mind when Lumumba’s krew hit! I loved it supremely! In doing so, X Clan embodied the continuum of the traditions between funk and hip-hop in general and between and a most original approach to funk, the sci-fi black and strong P-Funk approach, and their own most original approach in hip-hop, hard core, africentric, revolutionary and funky.

‘Konscious Rap,’ and groups like X Clan, as the bloodsuckers in the industry now try and call it to keep it isolated, did not just “fall out of style� with the advent of gangsta rap as the same writer said. It was whited out by the industry afraid of its insurgent potential.

Let us remember that the ‘golden age of hip hop’ did not take place in any ‘golden age’ for our people. It emerged amazingly during one of the most difficult, decadent and destructive periods in our recent history! The cream riiiising to the top of hip hop was our generation’s incredibly
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unique way of making sense out of the genocidal nonsense of the saturation bombing of the ‘hood with crack and the epidemic bloodletting that followed. In New York City, it was the time of Operation Black Desk, the NYPDs monitoring of Black radio stations, both talk and music, to figure who to target for covert and not-so-covert counterinsurgency operations to prevent a real Black United Front from gelling, as real efforts were being made to make that happen. I mention December 12th again, and Sonny Carson, one of its principal leaders, because they were in the center of it all, and it was a proud thing to be apart of. So to appreciate Lumumba Carson, and the emergence of X Clan and Blackwatch in all of this, you have to appreciate the political education of Lumumba Carson! Something the Times and their negro are clueless about.


To go further though, when Black Desk was exposed, the bloodsuckers in the music industry took their cues and moved in. They stepped in and did what the ny of the pd couldn’t do. They swept down, like vultures with dollar green beaks, in a stealth national operation, and made the black owners of black radio stations all across the country offers they couldn’t refuse! Just as the slavemaster banned our ancestors access to their drums in north america’s plantations early on in slavery to keep them from using them to raize hell, so did these bloodsuckers do the same by buying up black owned radio stations and step by step knocking off programming that allowed us to do the same. They in turn replaced with it bullshit! Everybody remembers the noize made in our community when BET mogul Robert Johnson sold his station to Viacom. But what we missed big time was that by the time Johnson sold BET, the damage of surrendering Black ownership had been irreparably already done all throughout the country with the radio stations. That is the background of gangsta becoming the dominant and almost exclusive trend heard on commercial radio airplay now. So hip hop’s progressive voices including those like X Clan did not just “go out of style.� In a cold, well-oiled calculated plan, those voices were if anything ‘taken’ out of style in order to steal the soul, let the bloodletting flow and the profits accrue to those in control! It’s important to lay this out because many of our elders blame all of our problems on hip hop and the youth, not being aware that our youth are in control and are not benefiting from any of this. And against this genocidal and sinister background, it’s a miracle we even had a ‘golden age’ in hip hop at all! We can all be proud that Lumumba was apart of that in an original and meaningful way.

Finally, for the negro at the Times who wrote Lumumba’s obit that pissed me and I’m sure so many others off, let’s be very clear, ‘X’ never, ever goes out of style!…

Long live Lumumba Carson!
Long live Abubadika Sonny Carson!
May We Rize In Fire!
Black Power!
Bro. Zayid Muhammad
National Minister of Culture, New Black Panther Party