Such was the blues
of Langston Hughes xxxx
What was the blues
of Langston Hughes?

Like democracy, this page is always under reconstruction

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africawithin.com

“My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Henry Armstrong … I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like ‘Tristan,’ goat’s milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike ‘Aida,’ parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.”
– Langston Hughes
(Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary)

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2012

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Clarence Lang named 2011 Langston Hughes Visiting Professor

Courtesy The Oread

When one looks at African American social movements of the 20th century, the political motivations and leaders of those efforts naturally come to mind. Clarence Lang, the 2011 Langston Hughes Visiting Professor, works to look deeper at such movements, to find out how they were informed by the every day activities of working class African Americans …

>>> Click here to read the whole story >>>

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Langston Hughes in 1925

Langston Hughes in 1939

Photographs by Carl Van Vechten

Langston Hughes in 1940

Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
–Langston Hughes
(“Democracy”)

Clickable

Langston Hughes

February 1, 1902~May 22, 1967

Courtesy photo

A pack of smokes, a desk, a lamp, a typewriter, a telephone, and a nimble-fingered Langston Hughes

Courtesy photo

James P. Johnson | 1894-1955 Master stride pianist and Harlem composer of “Carolina Shout” and “The Charleston,”"You’ve Got to Be Modernistic,” “Snowy Morning Blues,” symphonic scores, and further classics.

SNOWY MORNING BLUES

in tribute to James P. Johnson & Langston Hughes

New York, you know, has its New Yorks,
Manhattan her Queens, the Bronx
keepers of flames with all their names intact.
Now that’s a fact. Upside it, though,
you’ll put your heart and everything
you know or thought you knew of snow.

When Snowy Morning Blues plays James P. Johnson’s
game of catch-me-if-you-can, you can. He could, too.
New York ain’t no last word, you know.
Nothing’s what it used to be. And you, the you who sees
out past the end of the world, this snow, this wee wind-
fall he fells us with under eaves the way we all fall
under suspicion in detective movies.
Blam! Blame it on the blues, blame it on a blizzard.

Diamonded, grounded in its ice cream crisscross,
snow makes you take to the country again, harmonica in hand,
craving the guitar of a pianistic You-Gotta-Be-Modernistic
genius — you can’t get into this. Let snow tell its own story.
Let the blues roll on. Let snow fall right on time this time
blue, blank, blackening the city-within-a-city christened
in Dutch: Harlem, Haarlem,
Haaaarrrrrlem.
Vermeer, beware.

Al Young

© 2001, 2006 and 2007 by Al Young

from The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000; reprinted in Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry

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Historic photo

Langston Hughes in Lawrence, Kansas: Photographs & Biographical Resources
by Denise Low and T.F. Pecore Weso

Langston Hughes, the great American poet who inspired the Harlem Renaissance, spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas. Authors Denise Low and T.F. Pecore Weso assemble photos & new research about Lawrence sites associated with Langston Hughes. Hughes lived with his grandmother in Lawrence much of the time from his birth in 1902 until his grandmother’s death in 1915. Because of the efforts of Lawrence preservationists, many of the structures are still standing.

LANGSTON HUGHES at PAL
(Perspectives in American Literature):
A Research and Reference Guide
An Ongoing Project
© Paul P. Reuben

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Langston Hughes, the busboy-poet, Washington, DC, early 1920s

« Read the 1967 NY Times obituary account of how busboy on-duty Langston Hughes got “discovered” after he slipped three poems under poet Vachel Lindsay’s luncheon plate at the Wardman Park Hotel, where young Hughes worked. »

Visit the website of DC’s Busboys and Poets, a restaurant, bookstore, fair trade market and gathering place, where people can discuss issues of social justice and peace. Each Busboys and Poets location should enhance the community — allowing us to bring together a diverse clientele reflective of the surrounding neighborhoods. Busboys and Poets creates an environment where shared conversations over food and drink allow the progressive, artistic and literary communities to dialogue, educate and interact. Busboys and Poets is a community gathering place.

First established in 2005, Busboys and Poets was created by owner Anas “Andy” Shallal, an Iraqi-American artist, activist and restaurateur. After opening, the flagship location at 14th and V Streets, NW (Washington DC), the neighboring residents and the progressive community, embraced Busboys, especially activists opposed to the Iraq War. Busboys and Poets is now located in three distinctive neighborhoods in the Washington Metropolitan area and is a community resource for artists, activists, writers, thinkers and dreamers.

BRASS SPITTOONS

by Langston Hughes

Clean the spittoons, boy.
Detroit,
Chicago,
Atlantic City,
Palm Beach.
Clean the spittoons.
The steam in hotel kitchens,
And the smoke in hotel lobbies,
And the slime in hotel spittoons:
Part of my life.
Hey, boy!
A nickel,
A dime,
A dollar,
Two dollars a day.
Hey, boy! A nickel,
A dime,
A dollar, Two dollars
Buys shoes for the baby.
House rent to pay.
Gin on Saturday,
Church on Sunday.
My God!
Babies and gin and church and women and
Sunday all mixed up with dimes and dollars
and clean spittoons and house rent to pay.
Hey, boy!
A bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord,
Bright polished brass like the cymbals
Of King David’s dancers,
Like the wine cups of Solomon.
Hey, boy!
A clean spittoon on the altar of the Lord.
A clean bright spittoon all newly polished –
Come ‘ere boy!

© Estate of Langston Hughes

This spittoon-shaped poem first appeared in New Masses, December 1926; reprinted in Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927.

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Al Young comments:
Reading in my late teens I Wonder As I Wander — Langston Hughes’ autobiographical follow-up to The Big Sea – I was enthralled and inspired by the tales he weaves of his travels throughout the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Europe, the USSR, Soviet Asia, and China. One of Hughes’ lingering memoirs describes a voyage that he and 20 other African Americans took to Russia during the Great Depression to make a movie called Black and White. While his 1956 account of this episode does not match up with documents lately uncovered in the U.S. and in Russia, Hughes’ socio-romantic flashback lives on in imagination. This sunny picture invites us to peer into the faces of some amazingly contemporary-looking passengers, who made that fabled crossing: Langston Hughes with his friends aboard the Europa-Bremen, June 17, 1932. Seated front center from left to right are Louise Thompson Patterson and Dorothy West. On board ship was also Ralph Bunche, who was visiting Paris with Alain Locke.

Photograph courtesy of Yale University Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Hughes poses with neighborhood kids in the cramped, flowering confines of what they called “Our Block’s Childrens Garden” — and long before seed-leasing and genetic modification became commonplace.

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AVAILABLE BOOKS BY LANGSTON HUGHES ~ Compiled by Google

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AP Photo

Langston Hughes testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee, 26 March 1953. Hughes was forced to appear before the House of Un-American Activities. He refused to name the names of other radicals and denied he had ever been a member of the American Communist Party, but he did agree to let particular poems drift from his active repertoire.

• POLITICS AND POETRY Hughes viewed through the prism of Red Scare America
  Excerpt from The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume II (1941-1967)
  © 1988, 1989, 2002 by Arnold Rampersad

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© Roy DeCarava

SHIRLEY EMBRACING SAM, 1952

Gelatin Silver Print by Roy DeCarava

Nothing in black and white to decipher, no diction
to master, just the tenderest picture – pur fiction.
While Captain Marvel’s alter ego shouted “Shazam!”
Shirley was throwing her arms around Sam.
Not only this: her fresh-done air deserves a kiss,
too, just because a hug, well, how can you miss
your target when you know you know your man?
Sam, he looks like he might have some other plan
up that soft, slow sleeve he is suddenly knuckling.

To keep their domestic economy from buckling,
Korea waged war on Korea. General Ike held forth,
while America glazed over her own South-North
struggle. “Are you now or have you ever been?”
Senator Joseph McCarthy, ugly as homemade sin,
asked over and over and over again. “You can tell
just by looking at him,” Shirley told Sam. “Hell,”
Sam said, “I can tell he prejudiced by the way he talk.
He knows who to strike out, he knows who to walk.”

On some jukebox down the street Roy Hamilton sang
“You’ll Never Walk Alone.” The new song rang
up through the window and rested on Sam’s mind.
Just back happy from his Saturday morning grind
(a job is a job is a job), he’s gotten home early,
even to his own delight. And there stood Shirley,
fragrant, glad to see him again, to have him to herself
for the rest of the weekend. There on a dusted shelf
in the next room, the kitchen, next to the dream-book,
she’s got two tickets for them. Tonight she’ll cook
his favorite supper: meatloaf, rice and butterbeans.

Tonight they’ll duck out on these domestic scenes
their pal Roy DeCarava likes to hang out and shoot.
They’ll put on the dog, get up off some loot,
sip them some Four Roses, some cold Champ Ale.
The dress in the closet she bought at that sale,
Shirley will put the thing on and let her hair down.
Clean, these two have been known to clown.
They’ll go out and party, catch them some Dinah –
the hell with Korea, the U.S., McCarthy, Red China!
Did Shirley go curl her hair just for Sam? Partly.
Will they miss church tomorrow? No, not hardly.

Al Young
© 2001 and 2006 by Al Young

from Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001-2006 reprinted in Something About the Blues: An Unusual Collection of Poetry Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, this poem was composed to celebrate the beautiful, yea-saying spirit of “Shirley Embracing Sam,” one of the many Roy DeCarava photographs that illustrate Langston Hughes’ text for The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a book for younger readers published after the poet’s death.

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Associated Press

Poets Marianne Moore and Langston Hughes, New York 1952

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Gwendolyn Brooks with Langston Hughes, promoting The Poetry of the Negro (1746-1949), Chicago 1949
Courtesy University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne

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Snapshot of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin

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Partial draft typescript of “Harlem” with the poet’s handwritten corrections
Courtesy Kennedy Center

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In 1958, in sessions produced by Leonard Feather, Langston Hughes recorded some of his poetry with one band led by Charles Mingus, and another led by trumpeter Henry Red Allen.
Click here to sample Langston Hughes reading ‘Consider Me’ with the Mingus ensemble

• Critic Alan Kurz’s review of Consider Me, a portion of the Hughes/Mingus collaboration

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Langston Hughes on his Harlem doorstep, 1958
Courtesy Columbia University

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© Carl Van Vechten

Langston Hughes — the suave Ellingtonian, circa 1959

DINNER GUEST: ME

I know I am
The Negro Problem
Being wined and dined,
Answering the usual questions
That come to white mind
Which seeks demurely
To Probe in polite way
The why and wherewithal
Of darkness U.S.A. —
Wondering how things got this way
In current democratic night,
Murmuring gently
Over fraises du bois,
“I’m so ashamed of being white.”

The lobster is delicious, The wine divine,
And center of attention
At the damask table, mine.
To be a Problem on Park Avenue at eight
Is not so bad.
Solutions to the Problem,
Of course, wait.

Langston Hughes
© Estate of Langston Hughes

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Draft typescript facsimile: The Ballad of Booker T.

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A GAY PERSPECTIVE

Bronze Buckaroo’s remarkable blog: The Life of Langston Hughes

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Langston Hughes’ liner notes for the 78 rpm album, Josh White Sings Easy (1943)

Josh White as drawn by David Stone Martin
Visit Stefan Wirz’s stunning German-based music site for an extensive Josh White discography compiled by Wirz and featured on the web site of Josh White, Jr.

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Langston Hughes by Gordon Parks

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Click here to read all of Steve Smith’s New York Times review of Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama

© Ari Mintz for the New York Times

L~R: Tracie Luck and Jessye Norman in “Ask Your Mama!” at Carnegie Hall in March of 2009

Music Review | ‘Ask Your Mama!’

Playing Langston Hughes’s Jazzy Verse

By STEVE SMITH

Published: March 17, 2009 The New York Times Among the challenges confronting any composer intent on setting to music “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz,” a set of poems completed by Langston Hughes in 1961, probably the most daunting is that Hughes already called the tunes. His dazzling poems, by turns earnest, raffish and folksy, bulge with references to famous musicians and familiar sounds. Alongside verse set entirely in capital letters, Hughes provided detailed musical cues, some referring to specific songs or instruments, others pointing to general modes and tones. Hughes, who began the work while attending the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, reportedly planned to create a musical version with the jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus, among others, but died before seeing it through …

Click here to continue

© 2009 The New York Times

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Poet Karren LaLonde Alenier on Holly Bass,
Washington Música Viva, and
‘Channeling Langston’

A youthful Washington Música Viva performs the poetry of Langston Hughes to original music composed by Charles Mingus (with new music by Charley Gerard). Holly Bass, reader; Pepe González, bass; John Kamman, guitar; Chris Royal, trumpet; Carl Banner, piano; Charley Gerard, alto saxophone; and Harold Summey, drums ~ 2008.

Click here to peep what Michon Boston had to say on the occasion of Langston Hughes’ 107th birthday in January of 2009. Citing a passage from The Big Sea, the first of Hughes’ two engrossing memoirs, the poet-performer quotes the poet on his early 20th century assessment of Washington, DC’s “colored aristocracy,” a social class later redubbed the “black bourgeoisie.”

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From an early age, Langston Hughes heard and spoke Spanish, a language he loved; acquired during extended visits to his father’s estate in Mexico. Later as a working expatriate in France, Hughes learned and studied French, the international language then crucial to aspiring writers. An avid translator, he rendered into English work by Spain’s Federico García Lorca, Chile’s Gabriela Mistral, Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén, and Haiti’s Jacques Roumain.

Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes, Havana, circa 1950

Towne Street Theatre
4101 Budlong Avenue #4
Los Angeles, CA 90037

Phone 213.624.4796 / FAX 323.294.0507
info@townestreet.org

Baltimore Afro-American Archives

L-R ~ An aloof Langston Hughes poses with Soviet proletarian writer Mikhail Soltzov, Ernest Hemingway, and Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén in Madrid, 1938. As foreign correspondent for The Baltimore Afro-American, Hughes was covering the Spanish Civil War.

• Weblog of the American Literary Translators Association Langston Hughes Panel
  Saturday, October 21, 2006

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Escuche el Blues Abatido / Listen to the Weary Blues

Escuche el Blues AbatidoPoemas de Langston Hughes traducidos al castellano por Jorge Heredia

Blues/Blues Abatido www.jorgeheredia.com

“The Weary Blues,” escrito por Langston Hughes en 1923, incorpora las características musicales del Jazz, y de los Blues en la poesía. Hughes fue uno de los impulsores del conocido como Renacimiento de Harlem, un movimiento que se caracterizaba por la imitación de los sonidos e improvisaciones del jazz en la poesía.

EL BLUES ABATIDO

Zumba una melodía somnolienta y sincopada
Meciéndose adelante y atrás en un canto suave,
Escuché un negro tocar. La otra noche en la avenida Lenox
Bajo la penumbra pálida de una vieja luz de gas
Se balanceaba lento… Se balanceaba lento…
Al compás de este Blues Abatido.
Sus manos de ébano sobre las teclas de marfil
Haciendo gemir al pobre piano con melodías.
¡Oh Blues!
Balanceándose en su taburete desvencijado
Tocaba esa melodía tan triste como un tonto musical
¡Dulce Blues! Sale del alma de un hombre negro.
¡Oh Blues! Con una voz profunda canta ese tono melancólico
Escuché un negro cantar, y ese viejo piano que gime—
“No tengo a nadie en este mundo,
No tengo nadie más que yo.
Ya es es hora de dejar esta cara
Y guardar mis problemas.”
Pum, pum, pum golpeó el suelo con el pie.
Tocó algunos acordes y después cantó un poco más —
“Tengo el Blues Abatido Y no me puedo contentar.
Tengo el Blues Abatido
Y no me puedo contentar—
Nunca más seré felíz quisiera morír.”
Hasta bien entrada la noche canturreó esa melodía.
Las estrellas salieron y también la luna.
El cantante dejó de tocar y me fui a la cama con el
Blues Abatido todavía en la cabeza.
Durmió como una roca o un hombre que estaba muerto.

Spanish translation © Jorge Heredia

THE WEARY BLUES

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull of the pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway…
He did a lazy sway…
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with that melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan –
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t go nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

Thump, thump, thump went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more –
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied –
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”

And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

Langston Hughes
© Estate of Langston Hughes

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In POETRY SPEAKS Expanded (edited by Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby) Al Young introduces Langston Hughes

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Drowning Saxophone | © Eric Drooker

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Page always under reconstruction

Subatomic preon particles ||| Billiard balls in motion

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Visit Santa Clara County poet laureate Sally Ashton’s blogspot

* Sally Ashton’s three-voice poem, Stateside, at 99 POEMS FOR THE 99 PERCENT, a blog featuring 99 poems that address the social, political, economic, aesthetic, and cultural realities of the 99 percent

Read “In your body all bodies lie,” the Kenneth Patchen prose-poem that continues to inspire Al Young

Courtesy photo

Jazz & poetry partners Booker Ervin (1930-1970), saxophonist with the Charles Mingus Quintet, and poet Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)

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© David Gross | superbone.com

BOB BROOKMEYER: Trombonist, valve trombonist, bandleader, composer and arranger (1921-2011)

Bob Brookmeyer & Friends (Gary Burton, Stan Getz, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Elvin Jones) perform Hoagie Carmichael’s deathless “Skylark” in 1964

BobBrookmeyer.com

Charles Paul  Harris/Getty Images

JOHNNY OTIS: Drummer, vibist, pianist, bandleader, composer, arranger, singer, talent scout, producer, broadcaster, organic farmer, painter, preacher (1921-2012)

The 1989 NPR|Fresh Air Interview

Johnny Otis, R&B’s renaissance man, dies at 90 | Hiram Lee | World Socialist Website | 23 January 2012

Official Johnny Otis website

Courtesy Soul_Portrait

Courtesy newsone.com

ETTA JAMES: Singer, songwriter, bandleader, storyteller (1938-2012)

The 1994 NPR|Fresh Air interview

“Sing like your life depends on it”: Etta James—1938-2012 | Paul Bond | 26 January 2012 | World Socialist Web Site

Beyoncé remembers Etta James

© AP Photo | Ringo H.W. Chiu

Family, friends gather for Etta James’ funeral

Saturday, January 28, 2012  | AP

© NY Times

Etta James: “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” (1962)

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page under construction

AlYoung.org

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***** clickable

Celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Marin Poetry Center

MARIN POETRY CENTER presents Indigo Moor, Wanda Phipps, and Al Young. Three nationally acclaimed black poets will read in honor of Martin Luther King for the Marin Poetry Center on Thursday, January 19, from 7:30-9:00 pm.

Doors open at 7:00 pm as part of MPC’s Third Thursday Series at the Falkirk Cultural Center, 1408 Mission & E Streets, San Rafael, CA. Admission is $5 for general public and $3 for members. Book sales and signing afterwards. Refreshments will be served.

Get directions

]]> http://alyoung.org/2012/01/14/indigo-moor-wanda-phipps-al-young-at-marin-poetry-center-thursday-january-19-2012-730-9pm/feed/ 0 http://alyoung.org/2012/01/14/martin-luther-king-jr-january-15-1929-april-4-1968/ http://alyoung.org/2012/01/14/martin-luther-king-jr-january-15-1929-april-4-1968/#comments Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:00:49 +0000 Al http://alyoung.org/?p=21343

Celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Marin Poetry Center

MARIN POETRY CENTER presents Indigo Moor, Wanda Phipps, and Al Young. Three nationally acclaimed black poets will read in honor of Martin Luther King for the Marin Poetry Center in San Rafael, CA on Thursday, January 19, from 7:30-9pm.

Click here for further information and driving directions

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DO WE LIVE IN A MEANINGLESS UNIVERSE?
An op-ed from Michael Nagler
and the Metta Center for Nonviolence

Courtesy dreamstime.com

Las Vegas’ Musicians for Peace play tribute to MLK at REVERBNATION

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.

Francis Miller / Life

Happy Birthday to You

Stevie © Liam Yeates

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Nobelprize.org Biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Michael Ochs | Time | Getty Images

Born in Atlanta, Martin Luther King, Jr. moved to Montgomery, AL, with his new wife Coretta in 1955 after King accepted a position as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. King met Coretta while he was studying for his Ph.D. at Boston University and they were married in June 1953. Yolanda, their first child, above, was born in November 1955.

© Gene Herrick/AP

Coretta Scott King welcomes her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as he leaves a courtroom in Montgomery, Ala., on March 22, 1956

Martin Luther King and Malcolm X

Photo circa 1964 – Herman Hiller, New York World-Telegram & Sun – Released into the public domain by the original copyright owner

President Lyndon Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House, March 1966

(Photo: Yoichi Okamoto/Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum)

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Audiobook available

Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam

This post features a KPFA Pacifica audio and transcript of the full, lesser known sermon delivered at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, GA, April 30, 1967

The text and audio of “Beyond Vietnam,” the widely circulated sermon of April 4, 1967 (delivered at Riverside Church, NYC), may be viewed here at a link to Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr.Papers Project

The sermon which I am preaching this morning in a sense is not the usual kind of sermon, but it is a sermon and an important subject, nevertheless, because the issue that I will be discussing today is one of the most controversial issues confronting our nation. I’m using as a subject from which to preach, “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam.”

Now, let me make it clear in the beginning, that I see this war as an unjust, evil, and futile war. I preach to you today on the war in Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. “Ye shall know the truth,” says Jesus, “and the truth shall set you free.” Now, I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing, as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we’re always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony. But we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for in all our history there has never been such a monumental dissent during a war, by the American people.

Polls reveal that almost fifteen million Americans explicitly oppose the war in Vietnam. Additional millions cannot bring themselves around to support it. And even those millions who do support the war [are] half-hearted, confused, and doubt-ridden. This reveals that millions have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism, to the high grounds of firm dissent, based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Now, of course, one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It’s a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. But something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced. The truth must be told, and I say that those who are seeking to make it appear that anyone who opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or a traitor or an enemy of our soldiers is a person that has taken a stand against the best in our tradition.

Yes, we must stand, and we must speak. [tape skip]…have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam. Many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. And so this morning, I speak to you on this issue, because I am determined to take the Gospel seriously. And I come this morning to my pulpit to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation.

This sermon is not addressed to Hanoi, or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Nor is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in a successful resolution of the problem. This morning, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans, who bear the greatest responsibility, and entered a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

Now, since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is…a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed that there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam. And I watched the program broken as if it was some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hope of the poor at home. It was sending their sons, and their brothers, and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportion relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with a cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school room. So we watch them in brutal solidarity, burning the huts of a poor village. But we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago or Atlanta. Now, I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years–especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, “So what about Vietnam?” They ask if our nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be silent. Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They applauded our total movement; they’ve applauded me. America and most of its newspapers applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before thousands of Negroes getting ready to riot when my home was bombed and said, we can’t do it this way. They applauded us in the sit-in movement–we non-violently decided to sit in at lunch counters. The applauded us on the Freedom Rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying, Be non-violent toward Bull Connor;when I was saying, Be non-violent toward [Selma, Alabama segregationist sheriff] Jim Clark. There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, Be non-violent toward Jim Clark, but will curse and damn you when you say, “Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children. There’s something wrong with that press!

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964. And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was not just something taking place, but it was a commission–a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of Man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances. But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men, for communists and capitalists, for their children and ours, for black and white, for revolutionary and conservative. Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that he died for them? What, then, can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro, or to Mao, as a faithful minister to Jesus Christ? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with them my life? Finally, I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be the son of the Living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. And because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come today to speak for them. And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak not now of the soldiers of each side, not of the military government of Saigon, but simply of the people who have been under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution until some attempt is made to know these people and hear their broken cries.

Now, let me tell you the truth about it. They must see Americans as strange liberators. Do you realize that the Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation. And incidentally, this was before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. And this is a little-known fact, and these people declared themselves independent in 1945. They quoted our Declaration of Independence in their document of freedom, and yet our government refused to recognize them. President Truman said they were not ready for independence. So we fell victim as a nation at that time of the same deadly arrogance that has poisoned the international situation for all of these years. France then set out to reconquer its former colony. And they fought eight long, hard, brutal years trying to re-conquer Vietnam. You know who helped France? It was the United States of America. It came to the point that we were meeting more than eighty percent of the war costs. And even when France started despairing of its reckless action, we did not. And in 1954, a conference was called at Geneva, and an agreement was reached, because France had been defeated at Dien Bien Phu. But even after that, and after the Geneva Accord, we did not stop. We must face the sad fact that our government sought, in a real sense, to sabotage the Geneva Accord. Well, after the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come through the Geneva agreement. But instead the United States came and started supporting a man named Diem who turned out to be one of the most ruthless dictators in the history of the world. He set out to silence all opposition. People were brutally murdered because they raised their voices against the brutal policies of Diem. And the peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States influence and by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown, they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace. And who are we supporting in Vietnam today? It’s a man by the name of general Ky [Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky] who fought with the French against his own people, and who said on one occasion that the greatest hero of his life is Hitler. This is who we are supporting in Vietnam today. Oh, our government and the press generally won’t tell us these things, but God told me to tell you this morning. The truth must be told.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support and all the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps, where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women, and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the towns and see thousands of thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the United Buddhist Church. This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible but refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Oh, my friends, if there is any one thing that we must see today is that these are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. They are saying, unconsciously, as we say in one of our freedom songs, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around!” It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo, we shall boldly challenge unjust mores, and thereby speed up the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked places straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing, unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of mankind. And when I speak of love I’m not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of John: “Let us love one another, for God is love. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.”

Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All men are bothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State–they are God-given. Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America’s strayed away, and this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality.

It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home, America. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.” I call on Washington today. I call on every man and woman of good will all over America today. I call on the young men of America who must make a choice today to take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close. And don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, “You’re too arrogant! And if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I’ll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I’m God.”

Now it isn’t easy to stand up for truth and for justice. Sometimes it means being frustrated. When you tell the truth and take a stand, sometimes it means that you will walk the streets with a burdened heart. Sometimes it means losing a job…means being abused and scorned. It may mean having a seven, eight year old child asking a daddy, “Why do you have to go to jail so much?” And I’ve long since learned that to be a follower to the Jesus Christ means taking up the cross. And my bible tells me that Good Friday comes before Easter. Before the crown we wear, there is the cross that we must bear. Let us bear it–bear it for truth, bear it for justice, and bear it for peace. Let us go out this morning with that determination. And I have not lost faith. I’m not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven’t lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I can still sing “We Shall Overcome” because Carlyle was right: “No lie can live forever.” We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant was right: “Truth pressed to earth will rise again.” We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: “Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.” Yet, that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the bible is right: “You shall reap what you sow.” With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when the lion and the lamb will lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid because the words of the Lord have spoken it. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all over the world we will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!” With this faith, we’ll sing it as we’re getting ready to sing it now. Men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. And nations will not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore. And I don’t know about you, I ain’t gonna study war no more.

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Celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Marin Poetry Center

MARIN POETRY CENTER PRESENTS: Indigo Moor, Wanda Phipps, and Al Young. Three nationally acclaimed black poets will read in honor of Martin Luther King for the Marin Poetry Center on Thursday, January 19, from 7:30-9:00 pm.

Doors open at 7:00 pm as part of MPC’s Third Thursday Series at the Falkirk Cultural Center, 1408 Mission & E Streets, San Rafael, CA. Admission is $5 for general public and $3 for members. Book sales and signing afterwards. Refreshments will be served.

Get directions

]]> http://alyoung.org/2012/01/14/martin-luther-king-jr-january-15-1929-april-4-1968/feed/ 0 http://alyoung.org/2011/12/24/a-zesty-solstice-and-happy-holidays-from-alyoung-org/ http://alyoung.org/2011/12/24/a-zesty-solstice-and-happy-holidays-from-alyoung-org/#comments Sat, 24 Dec 2011 08:46:35 +0000 Al http://alyoung.org/?p=28895 Courtesy decktheholidays.blogspot.com

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© Vivian Torrence | Three North Carolina country shots
>> Visit Vivian Florig Torrence’s website >>

Al Young

Jeannie’s present

Maria Syndicus

Al and Michael Young in the run-up to Christmas 2011

© Maria Syndicus

Meanwhile, oozing light, Al Young finds himself back in downtown Palo Alto at the Prez, where he resided for years.

Courtesy sf-apts.com

President Apartments in summer

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Courtesy Persimmontree.org

Editor, Gail Entrekin

Published by Hip Pocket Press
Managing Editor, Charles Entrekin
Art Editor, Carol White
All work reprinted by permission of authors

The canary in the coal mine was a primitive early warning system used by miners to alert themselves to poison gases seeping into the mines. If the canary was found dead, it was time to get out quick. As a metaphor, its significance for me includes not only the salvation of the humans, but also the casual loss of the canary, that fragile and innocent bird with its lovely song, sacrificed without a passing regret. So often the poets of a culture are the canaries, the first ones to be hurt by trends so large that they are not immediately visible. This time the poets are raising our voices on behalf of the natural world, which cannot articulate its plight.

Issue Number 15, Winter 2011-12

• Northing | Clara Quinlan

• After Apples, Listening | Tom Sheehan

• Chinook Coming Home | Penelope La Montagne

• Folding Together| M Jackson

• Oak Tree Grove | Allegra Jostad Silberstein

• Rebellion of the Salinas | Robert Coats

• Release | Lissa Kiernan

• Remnants | John Smith

• The Deep Frozen Desert | David Chorlton

• The Night the Crickets Began To Sing | Gail Larrick

• Tree-Trimmers | Eileen Malone

• Wind as Conceptual Artist Lois Marie Harrod

© 2011 by Hip Pocket Press and each individual contributor

© Karen Johnson

Backstage of My Song, an evening with Harry Belafonte, a KPFA benefit held on the 30th of November at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church

BELAFONTE FOR BEGINNERS

Three years before “I Have a Dream” got preached,

the 1960 March on Washington

propelled us into DC. Once we reached

the Saturday when you were going on,

mean horseback cops reared up to stomp us. “Stop!”

one hollered in a trembling southern drawl.

“Let them kids live!” We thanked this rebel cop

with gut sighs, then we cut straight for the Mall.

You, Harry Belafonte, sang our songs.

You let us know you came down on our side.

Green college kids, we knew what rights, what wrongs

forced us to see you, hear you, while we died.

No caving in. No turning back. Just home.

Calypso? All we heard was: “Daylight, come!“

–Al Young

© 2011 Al Young

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Read the Pulitzer poet’s entire November 19, 2011 NY Times op-ed

Ben Margot/Associated Press | Clickable

Activists raised a tent in front of Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus as police officers in riot gear retreated on November 9.

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OFFICERS

Mr. Hansen, the cop at the campus gate,
Put me through college.
While the dean of women
Advised against it, too complicated, the cop said,
You get enrolled some way, and I’ll let you in.
Every morning, four years. On commencement day
I showed him my diploma.

Later when radio news announced Clark Kerr
President, my first rejoicing
Was with Mr. Taylor
At the campus gate. He shook hands
Joyfully, as I went in to a Marianne Moore reading.

And we exchanged over many years
Varying views of the weather.

Then on a dark night a giant officer came up to the car
When we were going to a senate meeting, strikebound by pickets,
And smashed his billy club down on the elbow of my student driver.

Where do you think you’re going? I suddenly saw I knew him.
It’s you, Mr. Graham, I mean it’s us, going to the meeting. He walked ||||away,
Turning short and small, which he was, a compact man
Of great neatness.

Later when I taught in the basement corridor,
The fuzz came through,
Running, loosing tear-gas bombs in the corridor
To rise and choke in offices and classrooms,
Too late for escape. Their gas masks distorted their appearance
But they were Mr. O’Neill and Mr. Swenson.

Since then, I have not met an officer
I can call by name.

– Josephine Miles

from Collected Poems: 1930-1983
© 1983 Josephine Miles

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