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Black Radicals Led Struggle against Slavery and Built Self-Sufficient Communities in Canada
Report on Research Trip to Canada, October 2009
November 25, 2009
"Self-reliance is the true road to independence." (Mary Ann Shadd Cary)
The second international meeting of the International School for Bottom-up Organizing held in Jamaica in August, 2009, agreed to the following proposal:
that ISBO continue to research the hidden history of historic movements of dark-skinned folk on the bottom and publish it widely, and we continue to discuss and deepen our understanding of how the lessons of those movements can help light our way to victory in the struggle for an egalitarian new world.
At ISBO's first meeting, in October 2008, we began a discussion about the relationship between class and hue (skin color). We suggested that one of the main reasons the revolutionary movements of the 20th Century, both communist and nationalist, had failed was because their thinking was distorted by the racism of the day, so they did not understand how hue and class are two sides of the same coin. That led them to downplay the history and experiences of dark-skinned freedom fighters throughout the non-industrialized world.
Our research is based on a belief that great wisdom and genius lies among the people on the bottom. By unburying and lifting up the experience of freedom fighters from the bottom, we will learn lessons that are necessary for us to move forward on a revolutionary path. We think this could be the missing link in revolutionary knowledge: the information we need to create a successful revolutionary movement. If we combine this historical knowledge with the genius and leadership of people on the bottom today, we think we can successfully build a new world of equality and justice.
In the 19th century, when revolution was in the air, black Americans put this sentence on a poster calling black men to join the Union army to fight slavery in the US: "If we are not lower on the scale of humanity than Englishmen, Irishmen, White Americans, and other Races, we can show it now." The general attitude then - and NOW - was and is that the darker your skin, the "lower on the scale of humanity" you are. This racist idea, which is internalized by people of every skin color, has blocked revolutionary leadership coming from the dark-skinned bottom, the very people who are most dead-set against the oppressors who rule us all.
History is written as if the liberation of African people from slavery in the Americas, and all other progress made since then, resulted from the efforts of white abolitionists, white political leaders, and a few famous black individuals. Nothing could be further from the truth. Poor black people have been the authors of their own liberation, have organized rebellions, escape routes and communities, and have given leadership to those principled white people who joined the fight for freedom and equality. Our research is aimed at making this truth known and applying the lessons of it to our own bottom-up organizing in the Americas and eventually the world. (ISBO is only in the Americas right now. However, we believe that the same principles will be found to apply worldwide.)
Throughout the Americas, "there were movements of enslaved people from the bottom that had principles of equality within them. These were slave revolts, movements to abolish slavery, underground railroad movements and maroon communities. They all had strengths and weaknesses, but we think we can learn lessons from them for our own struggle." (2009 ISBO Research Proposal) One common thread was that these folk set up self-sustaining communities, in which they provided their own food, shelter, transportation, communication, health care, and education, often giving leadership to and uniting with indigenous people and poor whites. Reconstruction in the US was an example of this we already have some knowledge of. In addition, we are aware of such communities in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Guyana, Jamaica, Venezuela, Brazil - in fact, throughout the Americas and even in West Africa - formed by previously enslaved people of African descent in the Americas. We have lived, visited and done research in a number of these areas in the past.
Two of us volunteered to use our own resources to continue this research and report on its lessons to ISBO organizers and other interested people. In October 2009, we followed the trail of former slaves from the US into Canada. We will soon travel to South America. This is a report of the trip to Canada. Note: photos from this trip can be viewed at www.peoplesorganizing.org.
We began in the province of Nova Scotia, which is on the Atlantic coast of Canada. Black people in Nova Scotia got there in several ways.
| At the time of the Revolutionary War for independence of the United States from England (1770s-1780s), Nova Scotia was a British colony. During the War, England offered freedom and land to American slaves who escaped from their "owners" and came over to help the British. Several thousand of these Black Loyalists were transported to Nova Scotia at the end of the war in 1783, and others came as slaves or servants to whites Loyalists at the same time. |
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A few years later, in 1796, several hundred Jamaican Maroons who had been double-crossed at the signing of a Peace Treaty with the British in Jamaica were also removed to Nova Scotia.
Nearly all of the Maroons and about 1,500 of the Black Loyalists demanded and achieved transportation to Africa. In 1792 and 1800, they became the founding population of the Sierra Leone Colony.
In addition, slaves also came to Nova Scotia on the Underground Railroad. All three of these groups were made up of people who valued freedom enough to take great risks to achieve it. Once in Canada, they faced brutal racism, discrimination and neglect. They formed self-sufficient communities in several areas, and their descendents have honored their history.
We visited several of these communities.
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Halifax is the capital of Nova Scotia and an important shipping port. The Maroons were brought here. During the four years they stayed, they played a major role in building the main British fort guarding over the harbour, which is called the Citadel. They lived in the community of North Preston, several miles away. They continued to be rebellious, rioting in the streets and refusing to become farmers on the land they were given. They demanded to be taken to Africa, which happened in 1800.
North Preston is still a black community. We were invited to tea in North Preston by a woman we met in a store. She is publishing a book about the life and wisdom of her grandmother who lived to the age of 107. Her grandmother was a griot in the community, and also a bush doctor. (A griot is a person in an African community who memorizes and teaches the history of the community by word of mouth.) Many of the black people in this area, including these women, are mixed with Mik’Maq Indians, who were living here before the Europeans arrived. They have organizations which bring together black and Mik’Maq as one people. This woman and the others we met in her home welcomed us with open arms. They served us a whole meal, including vegetables from their garden. North Preston is a rural community, and the home was heated by a wood stove. This would have been a very harsh environment for the Maroons arriving from a tropical climate.
Near North Preston, in Dartmouth, we visited the Nova Scotia Black Cultural Centre. The Maroon drummers we visited in Charles Town, Jamaica, during the meeting of ISBO came to this Museum in the summer of 2009, and one of the Founders of the Museum, Dr. Henry Bishop, hosted them and drummed with them. We met Dr. Bishop there and he introduced us to the Museum and in particular to the destruction of a historic black community in Halifax called Africville.
Africville was a community of black people living in Halifax beginning in the early 1800s. It suffered greatly from racism, unemployment and neglect by the city, which gave it no services and put slaughterhouses and dumps in the area. But still, it became home for hundreds of people, with an active church and its own school. In 1969, the whole community was bulldozed to the bare earth by the city, supposedly for the construction of a large bridge. Many homeowners had no title to their property, because their ancestors had settled so long ago, and they were only paid $500 for their houses.
| Visiting Africville felt like being in a town of ghosts. The site is near the base of the bridge and is now used as a dog park. But as we were driving away, we saw protest signs and stopped. One man, with help from his brother and others, maintains a vigil on the site of the old Africville School. The two brothers identified themselves as descendents of Jamaican Maroons. Their mother was a Mik’Maq Indian. They were young boys living in Africville and attending the school when their neighborhood |
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was bulldozed. They had stories about their heritage that we haven’t been able to find in writing. One of these stories is printed below.
When I was twelve years old, Africville School was bulldozed and we were sent to a new school. We were all put back a year because they said our education was inferior. But my teacher, who was from Jamaica, respected my intelligence and told me to go to the sixth grade classroom (the grade I was really in) and sit on the floor in the back. They were teaching about the ancestors of different Nova Scotia names, including mine.
I ran home and asked my grandmother where our people were. She took me to my aunt’s house and said, "Victor wants to know where his people are. Do you think we should share that with him?" My aunt said yes, and they took me up the hill to a place where the earth was sunk in. They told me "You are standing on your people. The British commander executed them (Maroons) here. It took six months to clean up the carnage. They were dumped in a hole here."
The story is that two young black girls were raped. They went to the Commander at the Citadel to get justice. The Commander looked around and saw that there were more Maroon soldiers than white people and decided it was a dangerous situation. So they executed some of them. Do you see that dead tree on the top of that hill? That’s where it happened. I was lying on the ground there one day in the 1990s and picked up a green human finger bone. The bones are rising to the surface.
We have tried to corroborate this story. A historian who knows the Maroon history says that the numbers and names of people on record that came from Jamaica and left for Sierra Leone four years later match up too well for a mass execution to have happened. But we also know that these stories told from grandparent to grandchild down through the generations come from some truth. Hopefully some day, someone will be able to unearth the reality behind this oral history.
Birchtown, Nova Scotia
From Halifax, we went three hours west to Birchtown. In 1783, thousands of Black Loyalists landed here on ships from New York after the American Revolution. They were supposed to get land and supplies, but mostly did not. They carved out a self-sustaining community three miles from the port town of Shelburne, where the jobs were, and had to walk those miles every day to work. The first winter they spent in tent-shaped pit houses, dug into the ground and covered with logs, like the temporary housing of soldiers of that time. Winter in Nova Scotia is very long and very cold. It is amazing that they survived.
A year later, white soldiers returning from duty rioted against the black workers, because the employers were paying black workers only one third of the going wages, so the whites couldn’t get jobs. This was Canada’s first race riot; several black settlers were killed and a big part of Birchtown was burned down. In an echo of that violence, the first museum commemorating the Black Loyalists was burned down a few years ago. We visited the new museum, located inside the old Birchtown School.
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The escaped slaves who left New York on those ships bound for Nova Scotia were all listed in a ledger called "The Book of Negroes," because as "property," the British were supposed to pay the Americans for them. They never did, but the book contains the names, former "owners," and other information about the men, women and children who settled in Nova Scotia after escaping slavery. The Black Loyalist Museum took all those names and put them on a big board. In a spine-tingling moment, Curtis saw |
his ancestor’s name on the board. He knew this was his ancestor because of the oral history passed down to him from his grandmother.
| A note about oral history: Many things about the history of our people on the bottom were never recorded in writing. Years ago, in some areas in Africa and other parts of the world where most people did not read and write, history was kept by word of mouth. This is called oral history. The people who kept this history were very brilliant people who could memorize centuries of information. This tradition has been carried on to the present moment in some families. Whether history is written or oral, a good researcher has to make sure it is true. But oral history is just as valid as written history. |
Our visit only scratched the surface. Each institution we visited (The Black Cultural Centre in Dartmouth, the Nova Scotia Archives in Halifax, and the Black Loyalist Museum in Birchtown) has a library and numerous individuals who have a great deal of knowledge. Also the people in the communities have much knowledge recorded orally and in writing, like the women who hosted us in North Preston and the men protesting at Africville. It is clear that ISBO needs to go back there and dig deeper. The people who founded these communities were made up of escaped slaves and former Maroons. They maintain a knowledge and spirit of their heritage, and they have faced severe racism in the past and present. They have united with the First Nations people (the Canadian name for Native American Indians) as one people. We are sure there is a history of common suffering and unified struggle to be uncovered there.
Ontario: Where the Underground Railroad Ended
Dresden, Ontario
This was the first place we visited in Ontario, and the home of a historic community called the Dawn Settlement, founded in the 1830s by slaves who ran away from the US South using the Underground Railroad. It was a self-sufficient farming community, and established a school called the British American Institute, "one of the first schools in Canada to emphasize vocational training." Although it did not last very long, it was an inspiration for things to come. A vocational school was a theme in the experience of escaped and emancipated slaves as they established communities where they could take care of their own needs. We will come back to this theme in the conclusion of this report.
| The Underground Railroad was not under ground and was not a railroad. It was a secret organizing movement run by escaped slaves and their supporters, black and white, that guided runaway slaves to freedom. Individuals, usually former slaves, would go South at great risk to their lives and act as "conductors" for freedom-seekers. They went from one safe house to another. White people and Native Americans helped by providing hiding places, food, and transportation, and by carrying messages and information. A famous leader of the Railroad was Harriet Tubman. Ontario was one of the main destinations, because slavery was illegal there. |
One of the leaders of the settlement was the Reverend Josiah Henson. A book called Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written based on his life, and it became a huge best-seller that influenced thousands of white people to fight against slavery. Henson was also a member of the Freemasons, and our research leads us to suspect that some members and leaders of the Freemasons were part of a secret society that helped organize the Underground Railroad and prepare for an armed struggle against slavery.
Chatham, Ontario
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The historic marker out front lets you know that you are at the First Baptist Church of Chatham, where a Convention took place in 1858 to plan a war on slavery. The plan was to start with a raid on the armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and then move into the mountains to establish a liberated zone where slaves could escape, and where the guerilla war against slavery could be based. The military commander would be John Brown, who was a white abolitionist that had led violent battles against slave owners who were |
trying to bring slavery into Western states of the US.
Chatham was one-third black at that time, and the Convention in 1858 was three-fourths black. The whites at the meeting had proved themselves in battle with John Brown against slavery in Kansas. The Provisional Constitution they approved laid down plans for a society that would be far more egalitarian than anything yet thought of anywhere in the world at that time. It assumed the equality of all humans, black and white, male and female. Chatham was a hotbed of the anti-slavery movement.
| We visited the Chatham-Kent Black Historical Society, (http://www.ckblackhistoricalsociety.org/john-brown/john-brown.html) which commemorates the Harper’s Ferry raid and provides the history behind it. In the back room the walls are lined with books, papers and huge three-ring binders full of information about the freedom fighters who established this community. The people who created this center and collected this |
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information, and who manage and share it now, are fully aware of the importance of the history they are sitting on, and very generous about sharing it.
The Harper’s Ferry raid and the Provisional Constitution have gone down in history as the work of one white man, John Brown. We knew that couldn’t be true: the ideas in the Constitution were too profound to come out of the brain and experience of one white man. We asked one of the people’s historians about it. We explained that we are dedicated to showing that people on the bottom are the authors of their own freedom. She responded, "I didn’t go to college, and if they taught you that we didn’t author our own liberation, I don’t need it." Nearly 80 years old, she is like a walking encyclopedia, pulling 100 year old books off her shelves to show us history that has been lost. She told us that she agreed that the Constitution was not likely to have been the work of John Brown, and named numerous black men who had met with Brown hosted him in their homes, in the US and in Ontario, including Frederick Douglass, George de Baptiste, William Webb, and William Monroe. Monroe, she said, chaired the Convention in Chatham and was a pastor in Detroit, where there were violent battles against slave catchers in the black community. As she put it, these men and others "could have had input, because it wasn’t what I’d expect; it outlines a way of life and how to treat people." [Click here to read Provision Constitution.]
North Buxton, Ontario
Just outside of Chatham is the rural community of North Buxton. From what we found out, this seems to be the place where Chatham got its radicalism. This community was originally called the Elgin Settlement, and was founded by freedom-fighters arriving on the Underground Railroad. A white abolitionist minister, acting on the advice of black ex-slaves, bought the original land and sold parcels to the escaped slaves at cost, making his own property available for people to live until they had the money to build homes. He then stepped back and the people ran the community.
The Buxton Historical Site and Museum are run by descendents of the first settlers who have dedicated themselves to discovering and sharing the history of this amazing community. Like most communities settled by escaped slaves, a majority of its members went back after slavery ended in the US to find their families and build communities during Black Reconstruction. But this community was known even in its time as a center of radical organizing. The school bell was donated by "the coloured inhabitants of Pittsburgh," one of many communities in the US that helped support it. The Museum tells the story of slavery and the fight against it, including violent mass uprisings against slave catchers in the 1850s. The people who were freed in these battles often ended up in Buxton.
This community was self-sufficient as well, with its own industry as well as agriculture. Once again, the school was a very significant part of the history. It was a one-room schoolhouse with one teacher for grades one to ten. There were two important lessons about the education at this school. One was that it was so excellent that its graduates were admitted to universities after grade ten. It was so excellent that the public school nearby, which served the white children, closed down because all the white parents took their children out and sent them to the Elgin School. The other aspect was that the content of the education produced anti-racist organizers. Many graduates became active conductors on the Underground Railroad, including a founding member of the black Freemasons, Thomas Stringer. They volunteered and recruited other black men to fight in the US Civil War, including the first black officer in the Union Army, Martin Delaney. They went back after the Civil War to help organize Reconstruction, including John Rapier, one of the first black Congressmen in the US. Stringer and Delaney were also part of the Convention that planned the raid on Harper’s Ferry and approved the Provisional Constitution, and Delaney led a trip to West Africa looking for land for former slaves to settle on.
Even later, when many of the people had gone back to the US, the community and its school continued to be conscious. In 1879, the spelling sentences in the curriculum were about fighting slavery. And to this day, every Labor Day weekend, there is a Buxton community Family Reunion that 4,000 people attend from all over the US and Canada.
"If we are not lower on the scale of humanity than Englishmen, Irishmen, White Americans, and other Races, we can show it now."
(in the fine print on the poster)
This is a poster recruiting black men to fight for an end to slavery by joining the Union Army in the US Civil War, signed by Frederick Douglass and about 50 other black freedom-fighters. For people living in Canada, already free and safe, enlisting in the US Army meant a risk not only of death, but worse yet, of being re-enslaved. But this risk did not stop them. |
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A final note about Ontario:
We are convinced that our ancestors in freedom-fighting organizing were in places like Chatham and North Buxton. The places beckon us back, to delve deeper into the stories of the community and into the three-ring binders in the museum offices. This is a place for ISBO. Should we have our next annual meeting there?
Conclusions and Ideas from the Research So Far
We are products of the Ella Baker "school" of organizing. Ms. Baker sent SNCC organizers into Mississippi to ask the people what they wanted organizers to do. At the time, young civil rights workers were staging sit-ins to integrate various businesses and transportation. But the poor people in Mississippi wanted power, and felt the way to get it was to get the right to vote, which the racist government denied to them. Ms. Baker said that the people have a consensus: it is the job of the organizer to find out what it is and organize them around it. SNCC agreed to organize for the right to vote, and a mass movement resulted. We have been asking the people in our community in Jamaica what they want us to do. In every house visit we get the same answer: skills training and education for the youth, so the youth can have a future and make a contribution to their community.
Because we are revolutionary organizers, we do research to serve our movement. We are not just trying to write books (though that might happen too). So we ask ourselves, how does our research connect to this consensus of the people in the community where we are organizing in Jamaica?
There are several themes becoming clear through our research so far. One is egalitarianism in the movements of anti-slavery fighters. Another one is the strong, black, bottom-up leadership that lies just slightly buried, but not hard to uncover, that puts the lie to the history we have been taught in most of our schools.
But one theme in particular that stood out to us on this trip is the one quoted at the top of this report: "Self-reliance is the true road to independence." This quote is from Mary Ann Shadd Cary of Chatham. (Shadd Cary was the editor of the Provincial Freeman, an anti-slavery newspaper in Ontario in the 1850s. She was the first black woman editor in North America, and the first woman editor in North America. Her descendents operate both the museums in Chatham and in North Buxton.)
We noticed that schools, and particularly vocational schools, were the focus of many of these communities. This was true in Dresden, Chatham, Buxton, and also across the US South during and after Reconstruction. These communities existed in the context of tremendous racism and dehumanization. They saw the necessity of sustaining themselves, so they taught their youth all the knowledge and skills necessary to maintain their farms, process and preserve their own food, build and maintain their homes, their health, transportation, communication, education, and revolutionary political organizing - all the necessities of life.
Children at North Buxton School |
These communities produced revolutionaries who transformed the world by ending African slavery in the Americas and establishing liberated areas where they lived. Today, ISBO is training revolutionary organizers to build egalitarian prototype communities and transform the world even further. The more we dig up of this history, and the more we apply it to our own practice, the faster we will move toward creating a new world and burying all forms of oppression once and for all. |
Is the first lesson from our research that we should create vocational training and bottom-up education for our youth?
A Note to Readers: We invite input, ideas, guidance, advice, information and stories to help us in our research. Please contact us at bottomuporganizer@gmail.com.
Thank you.
Click here to view the Photos of the ISBO Research Trip to Canada
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Summary Report of Second Session of the International School for Bottom-up Organizing
Jamaica, August 2009
September 21, 2009
Magic happened in Jamaica between August 15 and 23, 2009. It was one of those moments in history when the whole is something much greater than the sum of all the parts. As with any other moment in history, it was a link in a long chain of the people's struggles against inequality, injustice and oppression. The roots of ISBO go back to the organizing of plantation workers by SNCC in rural Mississippi in the 1960s under the guidance of Ms. Ella Baker, and further to the radical organizing in the South in the 20s and 30s, and before that to self-sufficient black communities that evolved out of Reconstruction, which in turn owed their inspiration to the valiant struggles of slaves and their allies in rebellions, maroon communities, the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement - not only in the United States, but all over the Americas.
Descendants of these struggles from Jamaica, Colombia, Venezuela, the US and England came together to learn from each other and to continue the process of creating a new movement based on bottom-up organizing. They left with a profound commitment to build a revolutionary movement to create a new, egalitarian world, a movement to be led by the poorest and darkest, especially women. They left with new tools, new knowledge and new comrades, to embark on deeper and more radical organizing, determined also to build strong and fruitful support networks, and to expand ISBO organizing to other parts of the Americas.
The second ISBO session built on the foundation laid in October, 2008 in Caracas, Venezuela, at the founding meeting of the organizing school. Since that meeting, ISBO produced a book of documents of that first session, called The Bottom Will Rise and Create a New World. Organizers are working on a second book now, which will include a detailed report on the second session, as well as documents developed during the organizing work between the two sessions.
The school began with personal introductions, in which each person talked about themselves and discussed how they came to be at the meeting. We heard moving stories about days without food, dropping out of school to work so the family could eat, struggling to make sense of a world that casts a person aside because of the color of his or her skin. These stories began to make comrades out of former strangers. Before moving on to the rest of the agenda, we held a workshop on the "house visit," and then went out in the community to try out what we'd learned, introduce ourselves to the community and invite people to a community meeting happening that afternoon. Attending the meeting was an education in itself, as the community was struggling to move forward after losing a great deal of money through mistakes involving untrustworthy individuals. Elders in the community took a firm stand about the need to fight for what's right, defeat the dishonest elements and stay on course.
Reports from two organizing projects in Colombia and one in Jamaica followed, illustrated by videos and photographs, and a report about fundraising efforts in England as well. These created lively discussions on topics such as the need for bottom-up organizations to remain independent from government agencies and corporate funding, the history and legacy of maroon communities, the Highlander school model, dealing with male domination in some projects, the role of the CIA in South America today, and the use of the international spotlight as a protective device for organizers working in police states. A particular focus was on the agreement that organizing on the ground everywhere in the world should be done on the basis of the same ISBO principles, not on the basis of solidarity between groups doing different types of organizing. On the other hand, solidarity and alliances with other groups could be useful in the organizing of support networks in the "rear," such as among supporters in the US and the UK.
Each day for the first several days, we had a lively discussion around two prompts: what is wrong with the world as it is? and what kind of world do we want to create? These discussions drew on the varied experiences and histories of the people and places at the meeting, and confirmed our consensus that we want to create a unified, just and loving world, in which each person's problem is also your own. A world in which religion does not oppress people or set them against one another, in which people are free to come and go all over the planet as we like, in which the genius of dark-skinned people arises from its position of degradation and oppression to provide leadership for all. An egalitarian world, in which people know how to collectively take care of themselves, in which inequality by race and gender are relics of ancient history, in which world power is a baby's cry.
Two trips away from the meeting place were key to the learning process. We spent most of one day at a maroon community, where we were treated to a lesson in maroon history and culture and took part in drumming and dancing, eating and swimming together with young Jamaican maroons. This experience was very inspiring, and cemented the sense between the Jamaican, Colombian and Venezuelan participants that we are all one people: ISBO members from other countries kept commenting that they felt like they were at home. On another day, we visited a beach and heard from a representative of a community group that is fighting to save the beach and the people who make their living on it from privatization by the tourism industry (and we enjoyed the sun and the sea!). We realized that, for all its good work, it is largely made up of small business people (including many not originally from Jamaica), and it hasn't figured out how to incorporate the poor and working people of the community who are the main users of the beach into the struggle. This helped us see the great importance of bottom-up leadership.
Several profound conversations happened as a result of group members raising issues. The first was a discussion of internalized racism, brought up by one of the newer Jamaican organizers. The essence of this discussion was, do we really think the dark-skinned people on the bottom can lead this movement, or do we think educated people, white people, or "outsiders" will be more capable, more honest? This challenged unconscious assumptions of black inferiority and white superiority of many members. Likewise, a discussion about whether the elders who initiated ISBO should continue to be the "movers and shakers," or whether young people were ready to step up and lead proved a very provocative and uplifting session. Several younger members dedicated themselves to stepping up for the long haul.
A particularly deep discussion resulted from some criticisms raised by female participants about certain behaviors of some male participants that were hurtful to women As one young man said when confronted with a possible one-minute time frame for his comments, "I can't say anything in one minute, because what I have too much to say." The group decided to allow as much time as each person needed, and spent four intense, emotional hours on the discussion. There were many revelations, many tears, and many self-criticisms. The pain suffered by women was exposed in raw form, and many young men expressed the pain they suffered because severe racist oppression prevented their fathers from being real parents to them: we realized that this is a serious and general issue we need to address. Everyone learned things they hadn't even known they needed to learn: things that weren't even on the school's agenda. At the end of the conversation, a young, male, maroon descendant from Colombia called for everyone to show their unity, respect and love for each other by hugging every other person in the room, which we all did. This act represented the magic that happened that week, as we saw the painful process of criticism and self-criticism create a higher unity and true comradeship.
On the last day of the school, we once again went into the community to do house visits. Then we helped community youth paint one of the community centers the local group is rebuilding. It was great fun, and each participant signed their name on the freshly-painted front of the building to commemorate the activity and the School meeting.
Finally, each participant committed him or herself to ongoing work. There will be a local organizing school in Colombia in the coming months to train new organizers to work with the current ISBO organizers. Fresh, young Jamaican organizers committed themselves to attend ongoing organizing classes to study and learn movement history, politics and organizing. An elder man volunteered to help be a father to some of the young men. Others volunteered to work on writing and translating the new book that will come out of this session, to create a hip-hop CD to accompany the book and tour with it, to build support work in England and the US, and to participate in international travel to open up new areas of organizing.
A year ago, an infant collective developed, which struggled through ISBO's first year, issuing a book, raising funds, and digging deeper in the local organizing. This session, though, went further than its organizers could have imagined. Suddenly, a youth group has sprouted in the community in Jamaica, young organizers are going door-to-door in their communities in Jamaica and Colombia, supporters in the US are committing time and a portion of their salaries to guarantee that the work can continue, young organizers are writing poetry and songs, and discussing their work with each other independently of the elders. The love and determination of these young people can be felt crossing borders and seas. Truly, something magical has happened.
A Note to Readers:
An organizer is one who creates, nurtures and maintains organization, and ISBO is an organizing school. We, the volunteer staff of ISBO, believe that the graduates of this year's session are organizers. Movement building is about slow grinding work, slow progress, creeping along inch by inch, and every now and then there is a big "leap forward" and the pace of progress and forward motion is speeded up. We believe that ISBO is experiencing its first "great leap forward."
If you wish to experience this great historical moment please watch out for the next edition of the ISBO book and read the notes from some of the most important sessions. While you are reading, please remember that ISBO recruits students from the bottom of society: the poor and often not academically trained, not "movement intellectuals".
Please send your comments to us so that we can continue to learn and grow. We welcome your input.
Thank you,
The ISBO Collective
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In the Upcoming Edition of The Bottom Will Rise and Create a New World from the International School for Bottom-up Organizing
April, 2009
The Bottom Will Rise and Create a New World is a work in progress. We have already
begun to revise the current book based on our organizing practice and on the
feedback we are getting from the first edition.
What Is This Thing about Hue and Class?
It has become clear to us that our readers do not understand how we make the leap
from noticing that the bottom throughout the world is dark-skinned to saying that it
is that sector that should lead our movement. We are working on how to do that.
Here’s a start:
When Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, which focused exclusively
on Europe, they predicted that the proletariat would rise up, overthrow capitalism,
and create an egalitarian future for humanity (socialism and communism). The
proletariat they wrote about was their "bottom:" its children were swept into factory
work by the age of six or seven; they worked from sunup to sundown, earned only
enough to stay alive until the next day, lived in squalor and disease, and usually died
before reaching the age of thirty. When the communist anthem, the Internationale,
said, "the international working class shall free the human race," it was saying, "the
bottom will rise and create a new world!"
The problem is, that vision excluded most of humanity. Marx and Engels were
products of their times, and saw the world with racial blinders on. Because of this,
they were able to see the bottom within their limited context, and were able to
propose that the bottom would be the salvation of humanity. Their racial blinders
excluded dark-skinned people from their line of vision because, to them, slaves and
colonial people were a different and lower category of humanity. Our vision today
drops the racial blinders. We must look squarely at the truth - that all of humanity is
one, and that bottom is dark. Everywhere in the world, those at the bottom have
darker skin than those at the top, and the lower you go, the darker they get. The
biggest problem our movement faces today is internalized racism - and it affects all
of us, whatever our hue. Once we can see that the European proletariat is not the
bottom, our internalized racism prevents us from imagining that the bottom has the
capacity to "free the human race."
This is the phenomenon we are trying to understand in our attempts to analyze the
unity of hue and class. We invite your thoughts and experience as part of this
process.
We see what ISBO is saying: What is ISBO doing?
Venezuela
ISBO’s first session was held in Caracas in October of 2008. The New Orleans
Survivor Council (NOSC) had a relationship with people in Venezuela dating from
when the government promised money to the people of New Orleans in the wake of
Katrina. An NOSC organizer lived in Caracas for six months prior to the first session
of the school to continue to deepen relationships with Communal Council members.
This relationship was consistently undermined by efforts of the US government,
culminating in derailing support for NOSC by replacing it with a collaboration around
a completely different effort (which is represented by several panels here at the Left
Forum). However, ISBO continues to train young organizers in Venezuela working
with Communal Councils.
Colombia
ISBO organizers are working in three areas. One is a mountain campesino
community, where they are building a local community organization, establishing a
cultural and educational center for organizers, running organizing retreats, and doing
radical cultural work with young people. They are experimenting with collective
methods of food production and distribution. In an Afro-Colombian town, ISBO
organizers are working with a deeply rooted community group fighting for its survival
against racist opposition, in an area where slavery persisted until the 1920s. They
work especially with young people in the hip-hop community. A collective of women
in an Afro-Colombian city neighborhood are the third set of ISBO organizers.
Jamaica
ISBO organizers are working in two neighboring communities in rural Jamaica. They
have established a community group consciously based on bottom-up principles,
intentionally separate from government and electoral politics. They are building two
community centers and dealing with local issues like water and postal service, as
well as running an organizing class that has already produced new leaders. Our
School operates out of Jamaica, which will also host the next session.
England
Organizers in England supported NOSC work and have had a relationship with the
organizers in Colombia from the beginning. They are creating a support network for
ISBO’s "front line" organizers, including cultural events, fundraising,
communications, artwork and printing.
United States
ISBO was born out of the demise of the organizing in New Orleans after Katrina. Our
estimate is that, after leaving the bottom to die, the government organized to
prevent rebellion by sending its agents within every organization that was part of the
rebuilding effort. These groups then united to reject and repudiate the only group
organizing along egalitarian principles of leadership from the bottom, the NOSC
(organized by People’s Organizing Committee). Some of these agents have become
public; most have not. It was this estimate that New Orleans and the US had
become thoroughly contaminated by a combination of sellouts and outright agents
that led ISBO’s initial organizers to base themselves outside the US. However, a
support network similar to the one developing in England is also developing in the
US. We expect that it will eventually give birth to new organizing projects within the
US, as honest, on-the-ground organizers come to grips with the infiltration, at
leadership levels, of virtually all existing movement organizations by government
agents.
Watch for the next edition of The Bottom Will Rise and Create a New World
for detailed reports on these efforts and on newly developing projects in
Bolivia and Mexico.
Click here to download the Book Insert PDF file »
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Friends and Supporters of Bottom-Up Organizing:
March 23, 2009
Have you read with interest ISBO’s book, The Bottom Will Rise and Create a New World? Well, we are pleased to invite you to attend ISBO’s (and the book’s) "coming out event" at this year’s Left Forum in New York.
Curtis Muhammad has been invited to organize a panel there, which we have entitled "How Do We Create a New World?" and subtitled "Do we help save the old dying world, or do we help speed up its certain death?" We will also get a booth, and introduce the new book to the crowd.
Thousands of activists attend this event, and it will be the first time ISBO and its revolutionary work will be represented at such a gathering.
Our panel will open up the theory and practice of building egalitarian prototypes from the bottom up, led by dark-skinned folk, and particularly women. In addition to Curtis, invited panelists include:
- A representative of the legacy of independent, Afro-Colombian communities with roots in the palenques of escaped slaves (see article)
- Martha M. Vega of the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York
- An organizer from the project ISBO is working with in Jamaica
This is a call to action for ISBO organizers and friends! If you have read some of our work, and find you are in substantial agreement with it, we are reaching out to you. If you know that we movement folk should be about building a new world, an alternative to the old that is rapidly decaying, we are reaching out to you - our friends, supporters, radicals, loved ones! We need your help in New York, April 17-19. We want every person in attendance to leave with a knowledge of our work. We want to find those people who can help establish ISBO and/or Friends of ISBO on the US side. WE NEED YOU TO COME HELP!
If you will be in New York April 17-19, please contact us and we’ll put you to work that weekend! Even if you have a few hours, we can use you. If you would like an ISBO representative to meet with your group or organization, let us know that, too: we will have people available.
Contact us at: bottomuporganizer@gmail.com
- or call - 773-675-2017
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Afro-Colombians Resist Eviction Attempt
March 23, 2009
On New Year’s Day, international representatives from ISBO made connection with young Afro-Colombians in the town of Villa Rica: a town in which slavery still existed into the 1920s. These inspiring young people do organizing out of a community center they call the Palenque, which was the name for independent communities of escaped slaves, which existed in Colombia for hundreds of years.
A few short weeks after that meeting, our new comrades were informed that they were to be evicted from their Palenque after the departure of the one white man who had been on the board of the foundation that runs it. When ISBO heard about this, we wrote a letter to the Mayor of Villa Rica and to the landlord, who is a well-known white sociologist who works for the UN and the World Bank, among others. Below is the text of that letter.
The Honorable Mr. Mayor and Gustavo de Roux
Sirs:
The International School for Bottom-Up Organizing is writing to you on behalf of oppressed dark-hued people from all over the world. The tragic and shameful event of evicting black descendants of African slaves because they lost their white sponsor is unacceptable. We will not tolerate this kind of white supremacy, Ku Klux Klan behavior in Colombia or anywhere else in the world. We will wage an international campaign against you until you cease and desist; we will expose you as hypocrites and racists in every arena, in all institutions with which you have relationships, including the United Nations and the World Bank.
La Fundacion Villa Rica has been working with the community for the past 16 years, organizing cultural projects, young pregnant mothers sessions, prevention of infant fatality, drug addiction awareness programs, a community nursery run voluntarily by the mothers, homework and study support, music and lyric workshops to get young boys off the streets, making the space available for the use of the general community, maintaining it, and generally doing the work that the local government should be doing with no financial support whatsoever. In addition, La Fundacion built a performance and meeting space within the Palenque. Currently the community are preparing for "Oraciones," a festival of traditional music, dance and song celebrated every year, involving the whole community and dating back to the days of slavery. We cannot forget that Villa Rica was a distribution hub for slaves, and slavery was still practiced as recently as the 1920s.
Mr. de Roux, you write and speak about community empowerment of Afro-Colombian people. What is a better example of this than the work the community is doing in the Palenque? You promised La Fundacion the space until 2013. Now you are evicting them one month after the departure of your main contact and the legal representative of the Palenque - a white man. You are exposing the fact that your words are empty and hypocritical. You are simply a racist who does not trust hard-working black community members to run their own center.
Mr. Mayor and Mr. de Roux, please do not forget that the Palenque folk are the descendants of those who rose up to break the chains of slavery. We demand that you stop the eviction of La Fundacion Villa Rica now! The people must keep their Palenque. The international community of sufferers supports them.
NEWS FLASH: VICTORY! Although we sent the letter to our friends at La Fundacion, they confronted their landlord before we were able to send the letter to him and the mayor! In what they described as a long and angry meeting with many community members, Mr. de Roux backed down and agreed to abide by the terms of his original agreement with them.
But the struggle continues: In February, the Mayor withdrew funding at the last minute from a major cultural celebration they produce each year called Oraciones. Keep watching here for updates.
For more background information on the situation of Afro-Colombians, see the following website: http://isla.igc.org/SpecialRpts/SR2murillo.html
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Hey all you ISBO Organizers and Friends:
The International School for Bottom-up Organizing has made an amazing start. Since October, when organizers from five countries met in Caracas, we've been fighting and organizing! We had to fight just to get everyone to the meeting, almost creating an international incident at the Colombia-Venezuela border. That struggle built a spirited, unified collective that understood we have to be radical in order to build a school to train revolutionary organizers.
Since then, ISBO international organizers have traveled to Colombia to visit the local ISBO group, which is organizing in a mountain community of African- and indigenous-descended people. They met with three other groups connected to the ISBO organizers, all in Afro-Colombian communities. In one of these communities, slavery was still practiced in the 1920s, and just in the last month, we've organized international support to help them confront the racist landlord who was trying to evict them from their community center. We sent a strong letter denouncing racism, which gave them a morale-boost. It also resulted in a flurry of e-mails internationally about racism and militancy, which was a good learning and teaching opportunity. The end result was a large, long and militant confrontational meeting which forced the landlord to back down. The Colombian ISBO group will soon have a retreat to process and consolidate this victory, which will involve people from at least three organizing projects.
Meanwhile, in Jamaica, our organizing project has made several qualitative steps, on the heels of months of work which included a spirited roadblock protest demanding water that resulted in the arrest of an ISBO organizer. In recent months, the community group has overcome the tribalism of a few who wanted to divide in two by village. We've organized a highly successful Afro-Jamaican cultural activity that involved nearly two dozen costumed youth dancing through the community to everyone's delight. A solid collective of people from the bottom has taken the reins of leadership and is facilitating meetings, doing house visits, and has a fundraising party, a community workday, and a protest for the return of the post office planned all in the next month. It has roofs under construction at two community centers and has established a relationship with a professor at a major university who will be sending students to the area on fieldwork assignments to help with the organizing work.
Things are moving so fast in Colombia and Jamaica it is taking our breath away.
In England, a dedicated group of young immigrants has been working hard to organize fundraising events for their ISBO friends in Colombia and for ISBO in general. They have stepped up, along with supporters in Chicago, to get our book published: it will be out within a couple of weeks, in English and Spanish.
At this moment, ISBO is focusing on our next scheduled session, planned for May. The Jamaican comrades are researching a way for us to carry out our agreement from last October to take a radical action against slavery during this session of the School. People held as chattel are the bottom of the bottom, and we are committed to organizing a new Underground Railroad! Our international representatives are about to embark on travel in Central and South America to recruit for the School.
However, all of this work and planning are in jeopardy. ISBO has a desperate need for financial and organizational support. Unlike the 1960s, when everyone was aware of the profound organizing and struggle going on in the South, today ISBO is still in its infancy, and many people, instead of looking to the bottom for inspiration and hope are looking to the president of the United States. Simultaneously, the financial crisis is drying up sources of donations, lowering the prices of many things in the US (but not air travel!), while in places like those where our front-line organizing is occurring, the currency is devaluing rapidly, causing immense hardship and difficulty.
We need people who can see the profound nature of this work and will step up and help. Just to pull off this meeting, we need to raise an additional $15,000 to $20,000 US in the next few weeks. And that will just get us through May! So we have a huge need for fundraising. Because current ISBO membership is still small, our main organizers are on the ground in local organizing projects, which leaves us without anyone to effectively organize communication, publicity, translation, web support - and on and on!
We are asking you to step up in any way you can. Can you donate a few months, weeks or even days of your time and skills? Can you take on a piece of the work on an ongoing basis? Can you volunteer a few hours a week to help with translating, web design, phone calls, list serves, a newsletter? Can you throw a fundraising party, solicit friends, or give a donation? You name it: the people need you! And need you URGENTLY!
When a visitor from the university recently asked one of our organizer-trainees, a blind man who raises a few dozen chickens in Jamaica, what he envisioned five years from now in his community, he expressed vividly the power of what ISBO is doing. He said, "My vision is the youth recognizing their self-worth and getting educated. I don't mean pencil and paper educated, I mean educated in their history and struggle. My vision is the people on the bottom recognizing their power and putting the wealthy and so-called educated on the bottom. My vision is that the bottom will rise."
Please look at the list of needs above, and the budget and see what you can do to help. The bottom needs and deserves the skills and resources of those of us who possess them!
In hope and struggle,
International School for Bottom-up Organizing
773-675-2017
Send donations to:
ISBO c/o KRCC
6146 N. Lincoln Ave.
Chicago, IL 60659
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Victory at the Colombia-Venezuela Border!
October 2008
Note: The first meeting of ISBO was held in Caracas, Venezuela. Two comrades from Colombia coming to attend the meeting were stopped at the Colombian border by the Venezuelan consulate, in a demonstration of power politics between pro- and anti- US/CIA forces in the Venezuelan government. This is the story of how a small but dedicated band of radicals got our comrades across the border and to the meeting.
The call came Monday from Bogotá: the Consulate is closed for a holiday, what should we do? The coordinator of the International School for Bottom-up Organizing (ISBO), who was already in Caracas setting up the week-long workshop, told the two young, rural organizers to come to the consulate at the border. Tuesday morning, the trouble started.
Although officials in Caracas had assured us the Colombian comrades should have no trouble coming into Venezuela on their British and Colombian passports, the Consul General in Cucuta had other ideas. The two were handed a list of all the requirements they would need to meet. By the end of the day, it was clear they were being denied their visas. Already on a shoestring budget and traveling cross-continent by bus, they were stranded in a truck stop with drug addicts and drunks.
Meanwhile, School participants from other countries were gathering in Caracas, and they went to work. ISBO organizers had been in Caracas several times over the past few years as organizers of the New Orleans Survivor Council, and had contacts within the government, but none of them would return phone calls. By Wednesday night, those contacts had been exhausted, a press release was being prepared, and the consulate was demanding an official letter of invitation from a government Ministry.
Thursday morning, the organizers went downtown to intervene personally with the government. The small band from the US, UK, Jamaica and Venezuela went to the Ministry of External Affairs and found a young, English speaking brother and sister on the sidewalk, who were immediately sympathetic. The young man, who worked in the Ministry, took the letter of invitation we had prepared and said he’d work on it after lunch.
We headed down the street to the General Assembly, where several hundred union protesters were gathered. We barged through them to get the attention of an official. We were trying to find the Assemblyman we knew from earlier trips (who hadn’t returned our phone calls), but instead found a different Assemblyman who whisked us away to speak with an Army general. The general listened and promised to make some calls to the Consulate in Cucuta.
Back at the Ministry, where we walked through the pouring rain, the young man invited us in to help us correct our letter, get it scanned, and fax it to Cucuta. We called the stranded comrades, who received the letter by email and went to the Consulate the next morning, letter in hand.
The Consulate attempted more sabotage on Friday, saying they hadn’t received the fax (which was sent three times) and telling the comrades to get various health and police paperwork. The general talked about sending some men to chastise the Consul General, who was clearly making up requirements not permitted by law. The young man at the Ministry stayed in close phone contact with us and did some things behind the scenes. Another government worker came on board at that point, in the Consular department, and also made phone calls. We let the Consulate know that we had contacted the Venezuelan and North American press.
One of our participants, who has military experience, suggested that he be allowed to go to the border and find out from the poor people there how to get the comrades across. We discussed it and agreed that if all else failed, he could go, but that the rest of us would go as well, as back-up.
Suddenly, the Consulate did an about face. An official came to our comrades, asked for their passports and photos, and went to stamp the visas in them – no other requirements! There was much jubilation on both sides, but the saga still wasn’t over.
As they left Colombia, the Colombian immigration officials threw up a new obstacle, demanding the payment of a large fine for an alleged violation that hadn’t happened. At that point, the comrades just walked across the bridge to the Venezuelan checkpoint and showed their visas, first the one that had been stamped by Colombia, then the other one. Before he saw the missing Colombian stamp, the official had stamped both visas. Then he ordered them to go back to the Colombian side and get the missing stamp. Once again, the two young comrades refused to buckle under. They simply went and got on a bus headed for Caracas.
That night, they endured six more checkpoints, with aggressive, armed National Guard, police and soldiers, but each time they made it through.
Saturday, two days late, ISBO started its official session. But the three days spent fighting the border authorities weren’t lost. We learned lessons about the conflict between Colombia (supported and instigated by the US) and Venezuela, and within the Venezuelan government. We realized that the US in particular is afraid of what we are doing and pulled out the stops to prevent our front line comrades from reaching the meeting. And we all discovered the power of direct action, of being militant and not being intimidated by power, even in a "foreign" country, even against armed border guards. The struggle has cemented our unity, solidarity, and spirit. It has taught us the power and significance of building revolution from the bottom up and intensified our commitment to this work.
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Genocide
May, 2007
We are in the middle of
genocide of black
people, people of
African descent. This is
not the sort of genocide
that we have been alert
to in the past, where
millions of people are
decimated over a
relatively short period
of time in a small
geographic and political
region. No. This
genocide is moving along
at a steady, relentless
pace, moving faster and
faster with many focal
points. But make no
mistake: there is a
“systematic program of
action intended to
destroy a whole racial
or national group”
(Webster’s New World
Dictionary). Hundreds of
millions of people of
African descent are
being killed before our
eyes.
Everywhere on this
planet the darker
skinned people are the
poorest, the least
empowered politically
and economically, the
most reviled, the most
feared. In the
continents in which the
disasters of slavery and
colonialism were most
intense for Africans,
black people have been
particularly devastated.
Africa is now a
continent in tragic
ruin: AIDS is ravishing
its people, orphaning
its children, without
much international
response many of
Africa’s governments
have collapsed under the
historical weight and
destruction of colonial
control and the tribal
divisions used by that
colonial system; tens of
millions of Africans
have died from disease,
hunger, violence, and
abject cruelty with
little but a “tsk, tsk”
from the rest of the
world. IMF and World
Bank policies have
ensured that the natural
resources of these
African nations continue
to benefit the colonial
nations and never attend
to the needs of its own
people.
In the US, while the
labor of enslaved
Africans created the
massive early wealth
that allowed it to
become the primary world
power today, those black
people who survived the
massacres of the Middle
Passage, slavery, and
the post-reconstruction
Jim Crow era went on to
be permanently shoved to
the bottom of the
American barrel. The
people who are
descendents of Africans
enslaved by the US have
a huge prison
population, the worst
education and health
care, systematic
disenfranchisement from
the vote, the highest
unemployment, deep
alienation from society,
and constant harassment.
These facts are greatly
class-based, allowing a
handful of middle class
black Americans to
succeed, to thinly cover
the degraded reality of
the vast majority of
their dark-skinned
brothers and sisters.
The success of the black
middle class in the US
allows Americans, white,
brown, yellow and black,
to say, “So what’s wrong
with the others? Why
can’t they make it too?”
Former slaves have been
fighting for their
freedom against America
from the beginning of
the American slave trade
to the present. The
civil rights movement of
the 1950’s and 60’s was
not a fight of mostly
middle class blacks; it
was a fight of primarily
poor black folks; and it
was a fight for freedom
that ignited a movement
in the US toward a moral
and just society, a
movement that was shut
down early in its
development, killed by
US government
intervention both overt
and covert. Poor black
people in the US and in
the world have been
dealt one massive blow
after another and the
pattern is clear.
So many white people and
even many middle class
black people truly
believe that poor black
people are incorrigible,
that they have no
potential for change,
for uplift, for
self-organization. That
is certainly the
repeated message of the
corporate mass media.
Those in power rely on
this racist consensus to
keep the society divided
and in despair. Black
people serve as an
example of what happens
to a people who do not
toe the line.
Sadly, even many in the
progressive community in
the US—reformers,
radicals, advocates,
activists, service
providers, and
revolutionary
theorists—rely on this
consensus to justify the
development and
implementation of
ideologies, programs and
practices without any
leadership and direction
from the community that
is supposed to be
served, those who are in
most need. There have
been times in history
where poor people did
lead struggles for
change, but even then
too often those with
class, race and/or
gender privileges took
the credit and power for
themselves.
In New Orleans, after
the natural devastation
of Hurricanes Katrina
and Rita, and the
unnatural disaster of
the governments’
policies to leave poor
black people to die and
then to remove the
survivors and make it
virtually impossible for
them to return, the race
hatred and revised
methods of genocide in
the US became clear for
all to see. New Orleans
went from a city that
was 75% black to a city
that is now 75% white.
It had a large poor
population and it is now
overwhelmingly middle
and upper class. The aid
and relief money that
came in for New Orleans
primarily went to real
estate development
schemes, renovation of
houses of the middle
class and wealthy, and
the growth of a social
service infrastructure
that gave handouts to
hundreds of national
organizations to gain
wealth and power off the
tragedy that is New
Orleans. The money went
to the corporations and
the bureaucrats to line
their wallets and
bolster their prestige.
Virtually no money has
gone to the poor to
rebuild their own lives.
For decent people who
really do not want to
see the genocide of
black people, who want
to live in a society
that embraces decency,
New Orleans seems
incomprehensible.
Hundreds of billions of
aid dollars have been
allocated, and not much
is happening. Social
service agencies can set
up clinics and gut
houses with the best of
intentions. But without
the participation of the
poor themselves, without
their leadership, ideas,
and on-the-ground
knowledge, no real
change can happen. At
best, these structures
will be a poor fit with
the people’s needs and
priorities, and will
create a set of missed
opportunities.
Systematic and
society-wide distrust of
the poor has brought
real change in New
Orleans to a standstill.
Unfortunately, the piece
that is New Orleans fits
perfectly into the
genocidal puzzle of US
government policy for
poor black people. Under
this system, there is no
place for poor black
folks to go but down.
Facing the genocide
internationally, facing
the genocidal policies
nationally, is a first
step. Ridding ourselves
of our learned fear of
the black poor, opening
our eyes to their ideas,
organizations, hopes and
dreams, can allow us to
truly stand in
solidarity and help to
create a space for the
poor themselves to lead
the movement for change.
This is a moral as well
as a political call.
Every great religion,
every great body of
spiritual and social
thought, speaks to the
need for support for our
brethren with ‘the
least,’ for seeing the
humanity of the poor,
the disenfranchised, the
needy, the basic
equality of all people.
One thread in human
history has been this
desire for equality, for
a humanistic and loving
approach. We know there
are other, more sinister
and cynical approaches
that are hegemonic
today. For those who
know that our planet
cannot continue to exist
unless we begin to
systematically embrace
each other and ensure
our safe passage through
our years here by caring
for each other and our
planet, we must answer
the call to turn against
genocide and the
destruction of our
world. New Orleans Survivor Council
Curtis Muhammad
Return to the Breaking News Articles
A Timeline of Organizing in
New Orleans after Katrina
March, 2007
- August 29, 2005: Hurricane
Katrina misses New Orleans
and people who were left in
the city by the government
heave a sigh of relief.
- August 30, 2005: waters
rise, levees are destroyed,
homes and people are washed
away by violently rushing
water. Approximately 6,000
people die within a few
days, 100,000 are trapped in
shelters or on roofs without
food or water, shot at by
police while trying to flee
the waters, then loaded on
buses and planes and shipped
all over the country. These
people were the poorest and
darkest-skinned people in
New Orleans.
- August 30, 2005: At a
meeting of “The National
Black Convergence”
leadership group organized
by Harry Belefonte, going on
during the hurricane, Curtis
Muhammad asked for an
immediate and united
response. The suggestion was
tabled for a later date,
missing the crucial
opportunity to defend poor,
black New Orleanians and to
open a new militant chapter
in the US struggle for
justice.
September 8: a group of
people from the Community
Labor United network met and
concluded that the movement
to respond to the travesty
should be led by the poor,
working class black people
who were hit hardest by it.
Two sectors of the
movement, the nationalists
and the internationalists,
began to develop a coalition
on a verbal agreement to
follow the leadership of
poor black people. A
name was chosen: People’s
Hurricane Relief Fund and
Oversight Coalition.
October through
January: PHRF sent Curtis on a
national speaking tour,
exposing the victimization
of poor black New Orleanians
and announcing the campaign
for the right of return led
by the survivors themselves.
The money began pouring in:
working people, poor people,
unions, progressive
organizations, all were
deeply moved by the
victimization of black
people in New Orleans and
responded generously. The
coalition planned its first
big event for December 9 and
10: a Survivor’s Assembly
and a March for the Right of
Return.
The strategy for
the Survivor’s Assembly
was that survivors would
be brought from all over
the country to the
Assembly, and would take
the reins of the
organization from the
Interim Coordinating
Committee (ICC) that
had been set up temporarily
to facilitate the passage of
resources raised on the
backs of the suffering of
the poor. Allied
groups in many cities began
finding and organizing
Katrina evacuees.
Early December: it
became obvious about a
week before the assembly
that there was not
agreement in this
coalition. $200,000 was
spent to get survivors
there, but the planning
committee held back the
agenda until a week before
the event. When they
unveiled it, it was clear
that the only role for the
survivors was to sit and
listen.
A struggle
developed around the voice
and leadership of the
survivors in their own
struggle. In the end,
survivors did not take
over the organization, and
the rally the following
day was dominated by
spokespeople for various
left and nationalist
organizations. That weekend
exposed the reality that the ICC was not committed to
follow the leadership of
poor black folks.
January 2006:
Curtis Muhammad, heading
the organizing committee,
hired a staff of young,
committed people,
dedicated to following the
leadership of poor black
people, and put volunteers
on the streets to find
survivors and listen to
their stories. This
grassroots organizing
followed the traditions of
Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee and Paulo Friere’s
popular education and
organizing work (which has
influenced Movimento Sin
Terra). The New Orleans
Survivor Council (NOSC) was
established out of this
work.
January: a
delegation from PHRF, including Curtis
Muhammad, went to the World
Social Forum in Venezuela,
gave a workshop on the
travesty in New Orleans, and
were very impressed with the
young social workers and
their organizing in the
housing developments in
Caracas.
The NOSC set down
principles for its work. In
the midst of trauma, people
put aside selfish concerns
to fight injustice. They
said that in order for
people to come home, they
would need four things: a
place to live, a place to
send their children to
school, a place to go when
they got sick, and a job.
NOSC set up set up an
egalitarian system to
prioritize requests: those
in the most need would get
first priority in the
rebuilding effort. First
help would go to elderly and
disabled without resources,
then single parents without
resources, then other
homeowners without
insurance, and finally
everyone else.
March: because at
first most volunteers were
middle class white youth,
an effort was made to
recruit black students to
come for spring break.
Well over a thousand
responded during the month
of March, organized by a
new network called Katrina
on the Ground. Residents
took heart from this
response of children who
looked like their own, and
were inspired to take more
initiative.
March-April: The ICC,
serving as temporary
coordinators of PHRF, was
moving PHRF in a different
direction. They began
maneuvering to take over PHRF and the people’s
resources. Most people on
the ICC represented
organizations that aspired
to leadership of the
movement. They were
impatient with the slow work
of building leadership among
the people at the bottom and
anxious to lead a national
campaign, affect local and
national elections, and get
international attention.
They became irritated at the
young organizers, out there
talking to the Survivor
Council members, teaching
them organizing skills,
explaining the work to the
hundreds of youthful
volunteers and putting them
on the streets in the
service of the Survivor
Council.
mid-April: the
Survivor Council began to
ask questions about the
money PHRF had raised in their
names (mainly from Curtis
Muhammad’s speaking tour,
over one million US
dollars), and began to
request oversight over that
money. Overnight, the young
organizers were accused of
insubordination and fired. PHRF’s ICC deserted the
Survivor Council and left 60
high school volunteers in
the city without guidance,
kept control of the
remaining $800,000 raised in
the name of survivors, and
began organizing around its
program of influencing the
upcoming mayoral election
and preparing for an
international tribunal.
mid-April: the day
after being fired, the
young organizers decided
to continue working
without salaries. Curtis
Muhammad threw his lot in
with them, and promised to
raise money to help them
keep doing “Bottom-Up”
organizing. The
group re-named itself the
People’s Organizing
Committee (POC) and
continued its work with
survivors and volunteers,
asking the Survivor Council
to supervise them and act as
their employer if money
could be raised to sustain
them.
May – August: POC
coordinated a large and
complex summer volunteer
project. Hundreds of
volunteers supported the
work of the New Orleans
Survivor Council, gutting
homes and doing door-to-door
organizing, and discussing
what they were learning. The
work expanded to include
organizing in the trailer
parks where survivors were
still living, working with
immigrant workers who had
been brought in to take jobs
formerly held by Katrina
evacuees, public housing
residents, parents trying to
open a school, and allying
with a grassroots oriented
legal group, and an
environmental committee.
August 29: on the
anniversary of Katrina, NOSC
and POC participated in
organizing and attending the
march to commemorate the
hurricane and its victims.
New Orleans residents
attempted to take empty FEMA
trailers from a lot; Curtis
Muhammad was arrested for
trespassing (charges were
later dropped when many
residents attended court).
September: a new
group of organizers
replaced the original
group, who went back to
work and school. All the
areas of work continued,
though with far fewer
volunteers because young
people were back in
school.
October: Curtis
Muhammad, on a visit to
New York to raise money,
was told that a move was
afoot among foundations
not to provide funding for POC or Survivor
Council initiatives.
September –
December: New Orleans of
Survivor Council
consolidated its own
leadership group. Public
housing residents formed
an organization within the
Survivor Council and
worked toward reopening
developments that the
government had slated for
demolition. POC organizers
and immigrant organizers
formally joined forces and
resources.
January – February:
Residents of Public
Housing reoccupy units in
a public housing project.
Survivor Council
organizers join forces
with immigrant guest
workers to attempt a
citizen’s arrest of a
slave trafficker. High
school volunteers are
threatened with arrest for
helping to clean up public
housing apartments. The
Survivor Council sets as a
priority developing plans
and resources to build a
section of world-class
levee around the Lower
Ninth Ward as a
demonstration project.
February: members
of the Survivor Council, POC and
Residents of Public Housing
go to Venezuela to appeal
for support for building the
levee, taking control of
public housing and
maintaining and training
organizers.
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