New Panthers Host Power-Full National Black Power Weekend

New Panthers Host Power-Full
Natl Black Power Weekend

By ‘little Red

Under the leadership of Washington, DC based attorney Malik Zulu Shabazz, the New Black Panther Party hosted a very well rounded and full “national Black Power Conference” this past Memorial Day weekend.
Drawing people from as far north as Cleveland and Boston and asserting boldly that this was the first attempt to convene such a gathering since the early 1970s, this conference accomplished several things.

First, it brought together a wide range of the Black Nationalist community, and in some respects, it even went beyond that. On the first night of the conference, a town hall plenary featured what the conveners claimed would be new players in the new call for Black Power. Attorney Shabazz, who continues to emerge as very important force in the Black community, introduced some the key players in his national team to be considered among those players. He introduced new voices like his national chief of staff, Atlanta’s own Minister Hashim Nzingha, a driving force behind the coming together of this conference, his Boston-based national minister of information, Jamarhl Crawford, also known by his hip hop moniker Uno The Prophet, Amirah Sankofa of St.Louis, a new trailblazing force in the Midwest for this new movement, to voices like 17 year old Minster Hannibal Rushadeen chairman Malik Zulu shabazz national assistant out of New York, who has been working hard in forging alliances among the youth within ‘the new black power movement.’

He also introduced forces like Professor Griff, not just one of the hardedge voices of the legendary hip hop group Public Enemy, but an independent thinker and activist in his own right and Dr. Wesley Muhammad, a new voice among Black scholarship to expect a lot from.

Mukassa Ricks was central among the veterans who participated in the conference. Ricks actually was the first person to put the phrase “Black Power” to use in anticipation of the epic March against Fear in Greenwood, Mississippi, in June 1966, ushering in a new era in the movement. Ricks, who served then as the advanced field scout for Kwame Ture’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was an exuberant participant all weekend no matter the subject at hand, defying his age, his recent health challenges and in any ‘in the box’ expectations.

The coming together of the Black Nationalist wing of the community was no small feat. Historically, a very fractured and contentious wing of the struggle, especially as a consequence of the government’s provocative and illegal sabotage operation of its efforts known as COINTELPRO, this conference saw leading elements representing very different traditions come together making vows to move forward on the basis of common grounds.

Shaka Shakur, a Sunni Muslim from Harlem, said this after a workshop tribute to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. “Our generation is going to get past all the old stuff,” referring to both the religious divide between Black Sunni or Orthodox Muslims and adherents to Elijah’s Nation Of Islam, and the contentious political divide over the immortal Malcolm X. “We both love Allah and our people and that’s what’s important to unite on.”

The next nights plenary was equally moving in addition to Attorney Shabazz’s unusually emotional call for unity and a new shared vision, he proudly shared the stage with legendary people’s attorney Chokwe Lumumba, the silver stalwart of the New Afrikan Independence Movement from Jackson, Mississippi. Lumumba turned heads from all around the country recently when he won a surprisingly overwhelming victory for city council in Jackson just weeks ago. To be sure, the elected wing of the Black community was glaringly absent.

Michael Roberts, the proud owner of the Crowned Plaza, the host site, may very well have been the night’s “show stealer,” according to quite a few observers. Roberts, who owns 11 hotels, a radio station and a television station, moved the crowd with the substance of ownership in his remarks in a way rarely seen in these kinds of gatherings. Honoring his hardworking parents who endured the last violent days of segregation when the range of his accomplishments was impossible to even imagine, Roberts proudly proclaimed “I am free Black man!”

James Carey, who travelled 13 hours from Elizabeth, New Jersey to participate, was deeply touched by the spirit and by the content of the conference. Carey, a strong voice against police brutality and street violence in his area for the Peoples Organization for Progress, said “I’ve been to a lot of conferences by progressive forces, but this one has the spirit and drive towards unity that was missing a lot from the others.”

The workshops themselves were just as moving as the plenaries. Roberts himself led the Black Economics workshop. He was joined by land keeper of the Nation of Islam, Ridgely Muhammad. Many were also touched by the full workshop on Black Self-Defense and Community Survival featuring Captain David Foreman, the Party’s national minister of defense. Foreman, a founding officer of the Party from Dallas, is a veteran of the Party’s two most important missions, its armed confrontation of the KuKluxKlan in Jasper, Texas under Khallid Abdul Muhammad in June 1998 and ‘Operation Rescue’ in the aftermath of the Katrina devastation of New Orleans, where the Party rescued several hundred Black citizens from New Orleans’ beleaguered 9th ward under Shabazz’ leadership in 2005.

Recalling the spirit of the Million Man March and the Million Woman March, many were also moved by the separate sessions just for ‘brothers’ and just for ‘sisters.’

Leonard Jeffries, the legendary elder scholar, moved the session on the ultimate drive for unity that is a ‘United States of Afrika,’ with a surprising practical note. Flanked by elders Mukassa Ricks and the Nation Of Islam’s international repersentive Minster Akbar Muhammad, who each made profound contributions to the workshop themselves, and pressing the Africentric theme of ‘restoration,’ Dr. J, as he is most commonly known, recounted his personal journey to uncover and connect with his grandfather who was killed by the Klan in a neighboring Georgia county in 1915 and how “our recovery” of those kinds of ancestral roots are important building blocks on the road to that unity “that we must not neglect, and that is a very important part of our contribution in the Diaspora to that unity that we must build,” he emphasized.

The shadows of government repression were also present. The conference ended in a sobering tribute to Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. Better known perhaps as the Black Power legend, H. Rap Brown, Al-Amin was railroaded into prison for killing a Black Fulton County Sheriff in 2000. Ironically, Al-Amin’s work on the Black Power front in the south in the 60s paved the way for the very possibilities of Black sheriffs now existing all throughout the south.

Perhaps, the best overall impressions of the conference came from the grassroots themselves, from people like Joyce Peters, a transplanted New Yorker now living in Atlanta. Peters brought her teenage daughter and “thoroughly enjoyed it.”

On the workshops, she added “the breakout sessions were very well ran and extremely interesting and informative.”

“As a result of my experience this weekend,” she declared in a personal note of thanks to Attorney Shabazz, “I want to become an active member in the new Black Power movement.”

“This is the vision and spirit of the honorable Dr. Khallid Abdul Muhammad,” Attorney Shabazz said of the gathering. “This is his call for the putting together of the Afrikan United Front.”

The conveners are exploring a possible national Black Power Convention in New York sometime in the fall. They are also locally looking at the possibility of a statewide Black Power conference in Georgia in the coming weeks.

The historic Black Power Conferences were first held in the mid 1960s. In 1966, the late Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell hosted the first in Washington, DC. Out of that gathering came the first national conference which took place in Newark in the aftermath of the epic Newark Rebellion in late July 1967. A second national conference took place in Philadelphia in 1968. Perhaps, the most memorable of those conferences was the national Black Political Assembly which took place in Gary, Indiana in 1972.

#