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Curtis E. Gatewood leads marchers
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Marchers
urge end to war, death penalty
By Frank Norton, STAFF WRITER
About 150
supporters of the NAACP this morning sang and
marched from
First
Baptist
Church
in downtown
Raleigh
to the state legislative building about four
blocks north.
STAFF WRITER
About 150 supporters of the
NAACP this morning sang and marched from
First
Baptist
Church
in downtown
Raleigh
to the state legislative building about four
blocks north.
For the
complete story ... http://www.newsobserver.com/102/story/558347.html
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Independent
Weekly- Durham
,
NC
FEBRUARY
14, 2007
NAACP,
others call for change and creation of a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission
BY BOB
GEARY (condensed edited version)
-
Raleigh
,
NC
"HK
on J" stood for "Historic Thousands on
Jones Street
," where the General Assembly is located. But
before the 2,000 who attended marched to
Jones Street
, they gathered in Memorial Auditorium, 10 blocks
away, where NC NAACP President William J. Barber, II
and a host of his progressive allies took them
through a detailed recitation and explanation of the
14 points.
Curtis
Gatewood, chairman of The HK on J
organization committee and second vice
president of the state NAACP, directs
participants on the march to
Jones Street
.
Photo by
Derek Anderson
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"It
was a teach-in," said
Chapel Hill
activist Pete MacDowell, "and a pretty
effective one."
The
14 points range across subjects from education,
which comes first ("All children need
high-quality, well-funded, diverse schools"),
to the war, the final point ("Bring our troops
home from
Iraq
now"). In between: livable wages, child care,
health care, better housing, prison reform and
election reforms.
The
moral fabric of low-income minority communities was
another theme, with speakers like the Rev. Curtis
Gatewood, an event organizer and the former Durham
NAACP branch leader, denouncing the "gangsta
mentality" and vowing to attack the
club-and-drug culture within.
"First
of all," Gatewood declared, "you need to
understand that our community is going down."
Gatewood was referring to hip-hop gangster
rap artist Yung Joc’s hit record “It’s Going
Down”. Young
Joc’s lyrics go on to say “Meet me at the club
– It’s going down.”
“Don't meet me at the club,"
Gatewood shouted, slurring the word. "You need
to meet me at the library."
The enthusiastic crowd responded with cheers
and laughs.
October 3, 2001
"No Palestinian Ever Called Me
Nigger"
By Lorenzo Komboa Ervin (more about this
heroic author included)
Curtis
Gatewood is the outspoken leader of the
Durham
,
North Carolina
branch of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He
recently made "controversial",
though truthful and courageous remarks
denouncing the United States government for
planning military retaliation for the
Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks, and
the use of Black males as cannon fodder and
mercenaries in any front line attack.
At a September 15th monthly local NAACP
meeting, he said that African Americans
should not have to fight in any military
action, and that a violent
U.S.
counterattack would be wrong. "Black
males can no longer be used as sacrificial
lambs at the time of war," he said in
his three-page statement.
"Those black males who make it back
home alive from war are likely to come home
and be discriminated against by the [very]
people whose businesses were headquartered
in the
World
Trade
Center
, racially abused/profiled by an American
police officer, killed on the streets in
their crime-infested neighborhoods, or
harmed by Bush administration
policies," he said.
He also said that the
U.S.
government has oppressed Africans, Middle
Easterners, and other people of color
worldwide. Because Bush was selected
president by a "right-wing Supreme
Court", he said, the attacks were *not*
"an attack on freedom."
Media reports of the remarks sparked
threatening phone calls to the NAACP
offices, according to an NAACP officer,
Anita Keith-Foust. It also caused NAACP
national President, Kweisi Mfume, to
denounce the remarks and to apparently
silence him from making other such comments
in the future, similar to the fashion former
Nation of Islam spokesperson Malcolm X was
silenced by NOI leader Elijah Muhammad in
1963, when he spoke out about the
assassination of President John Kennedy,
calling it a case of "...chickens
coming home to roost..."
What should we make of all this? These
comments by Gatewood certainly echoed my
own, and I am sure those of many other Black
people. We are supposed to, as Malcolm X put
it over 35 years ago, "...bark when the
white man says bark, and bite when the white
man says bite!" He was referring to our
being used as troops all over the world. Now
we are supposed to fight and die for a
racist corrupt government in yet another
imperialist war, when it is the
USA
which has clearly brought on this attack. We
are supposed to fight for a country where we
still have limited social, economic and
political rights, and where we are still
subject to death by any racist cop or
citizen, where there is widespread poverty,
mass imprisonment of the youth, and massive
unemployment concentrated in the Black
community. The obvious question is what the
hell are we fighting for? To avenge
America
? To mourn
America
? Why, we don't owe this country anything,
and what we do owe them, they don't want!
They have killed and enslaved generations of
our people, down to the present day. They
have yet to pay reparations for those crimes
they have committed against our people; they
refused to even discuss the matter at the
recent World Conference Against Racism in
Durban
,
South Africa
.
Our fight is *in America* and *with America*
for full human rights and liberation, not in
Kabul, Pakistan, Khandahar, Islamabad,
Algiers, or hundreds of places we know
nothing about and have no beef with their
people. It is this country which is *our*
enemy, and which is depriving us of our
human rights. This hypocritical country,
which is bleeding us dry and subjecting us
to continued oppression and servitude in
numerous forms. We ain't got this situation
straight yet, and now we are supposed to go
galavanting across the globe to fight for
this white racist government. Colin Powell
may be a dog for Bush, but it don't mean the
rest of us have to
be!
Curtis Gatewood just said something that all
of us should be saying. We need an
*independent political stance* away from
military intervention, and to say *no you
cannot just use Black kids for the next
Vietnam
*. However, shamefully, most of the Left,
Liberal, and Black organizations (even
so-called "radical", or
"nationalist" groups) did not
follow the lead of this courageous man,
instead they mourned with
America
.
Well, our time of mourning has to be
tempered with the cold understanding that we
have to look out for *our interests*, not
the Pentagon's or Wall Street's. We regret
the thousands of deaths of people who died
in the process at the WTC, but we know it is
Washington
's fault this happened. We also know that if
this happened in the Middle East, carried
out by
Israel
or the US Army, hardly anybody in this
country would say anything.
Clearly this country is not the
"peace-loving, innocent country"
that George W. Bush claims it is. This is
the biggest gun runner in the world, and the
biggest instigator of wars. This is a
government of thieves and enslavers, and
they have dominated the peoples of color of
the world with military and economic force
ever since its creation. We cannot jump like
dogs to defend these people.
It is not the people in the Middle East or
Africa who call us nigger, and keep us
oppressed, it is the white government in
America
. If anyone on the face of the earth attacks
the slavemaster's plantation, I ain't going
to be standing out front growling to stop
them from setting his house on fire. That's
his problem, and you reap what you sow. The
real terrorists are in the Pentagon, the
executive boardrooms on Wall Street, and in
the White House, where they have always
been. Hell, the
United States
secret intelligence services (CIA, military
intelligence, DEA and others) created the
Taliban as a government and Osama Bin Laden
as a terrorist, if that is what he is. Do we
now want to die and kill others over this
cynical reality? Don't be fooled by
right-wing patriotism, which is nothing but
American fascism.
So we should support Curtis Gatewood, hold
him up as an outspoken hero. We need to ask
why all of the other Black and progressive
organizations have not been as forceful in
their comments, and we need to ask why they
are not building an anti-war response to
this military retaliation planned by Bush.
We need to all start to speak the truth to
our people, and not curry favor for jobs or
social approval. We need to do things which
are considered unpopular in a hysterical
climate, but have to be said and done
nevertheless. George W. Bush is not our
friend, Colin Powell is not our brother.
They want to kill us off, either in war, in
prison, or with a policeman's gun. We face
genocide from this government, always have.
Now we need to get organized to build a
movement which can put forth a progressive
agenda on how to use military spending, so
that money they want to squander on war can
be used for schools, hospitals, and to
rebuild the inner cities of this country
which look like bombed out cities already.
Whatever organization you belong to, start
to push them to come out against the war and
to actively campaign against war in the
Middle East
or anywhere else. We have got to get our
kids to say "Hell no, we won't
go!" and "No Viet Cong ever called
me a Nigger!" just like they did during
the Vietnam war of the 1960s. CP
More information about the author, Lorenzo
Kom’boa Ervin:
Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin
(born 1947
in Chattanooga,
Tennessee) is an American writer,
activist, and Black
anarchist. He is a former member of the Black
Panther Party.
Ervin grew up in
Chattanooga
. As youth street gang member, Ervin joined
the NAACP
youth group when he was 12 years old and
took part in the 1960 sit-in protests which
changed racial discrimination in public
accommodations in the city. After being
drafted and serving two years in the U.S.
Army, where he was an anti-Vietnam
War organizer and was Court-martialed,
he joined the Student
Non-violent Coordinating Committee in
1967 shortly before it merged (temporarily)
with the more militant Black
Panther Party.
Ervin hijacked a plane to Cuba
in February 1969, in order to flee
prosecution for allegedly trying to kill a
local KKK
leader. It was while in Cuba and later in
the then-Republic of Czechoslovakia,
that he first became disillusioned with state
socialism, recognizing it as dictatorship
rather than the "dictatorship of the
proletariat" as various Communist
governments claimed. In Prague,
Ervin was betrayed to
U.S.
officials by pro-CIA
elements left over from the Dubček
regime shortly after the Soviet invasion of
the country. After he was briefly captured
and held at the American Consulate, he fled
to East
Berlin where he was kidnapped by a
special team of by American and West German
special agents sent to recapture him. He was
drugged and tortured during interrogation in
the basement of the U.S. Consulate for
almost a week, and after almost dying from
this mistreatment, he was illegally brought
back to the USA
where it was falsely announced by the State
department and the FBI
in a press conference that he had
"turned himself in" at JFK
airport.
After a farce of a trial in a small town in Georgia,
where he faced the death penalty before an
all-white judge, jury, prosecutor and
defense attorneys (appointed by the court),
he was sentenced to the rest of his life in
prison. Ervin remained politically active in
prison where he was first introduced to the
ideals of anarchism
in the late 1970s. He read many books on the
subject sent by prison book clubs, and the Anarchist
Black Cross, an international prisoner
support movement, adopted his case. Also in
prison, Ervin wrote several Anarchist
pamphlets that are probably the most widely
read writings on anarchism and the Black
liberation movement. Anarchism
and the Black Revolution is still
popular, and has gone through DIY
several printings.
Because of years of solitary confinement and
prison mail censorship, his case was kept in
obscurity. It was not until he was one of
the "Marion
Brothers", a group of prisoners
who became well known as they struggled
against the first Control Unit at Marion
Federal Penitentiary, that his case
became a public concern. Ervin's own legal
challenges and an international campaign
eventually led to his release from prison
after 15 years of incarceration.
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