The Other Side of Lumumba

"I personally have always rejected the Puritan premise of original sin, however, any notion that I'm not serious, not intellectual, does not summarize my feelings." Michael Tombs "I personally always believed that a warm, enthusiastic, confident, and concerned voice puts all of the resources to learn at the student's command; eventually, I had to ask myself "The Grand Question" and its answers helped shape my choice of institutions of higher learning for the remainder of the 20th Century. These ideas offended a number of the so called white elite and their racist establishment, however, they were accepted by a huge segment of the African American community. They informed the Black Youth Organization (BYO) of the popular dialogue of the 1960s, in addition, many of the on campus demands of the 1960s protesters relied on beliefs such as acceptance, positive regard, & family life. As our distance from Elijah Muhammad grows, the American critiques, in my opinion, seem increasingly irrelevant. What Muhammad provides- what all Messengers provide is a unique vision. Before being dismissed and forgotten, Muhammad was attacked on a series of particular grounds. Reviews of Islam's literature showed the necessity and the sufficiency of his teachings difficult to prove, although the evidence of Sunni and Shiite culture remains strong...

Amiri Baraka is, in my opinion, a literary genius: He knew how to write, but he knew it so well that he could make a world of it. Certainly Baraka's ideas prevail within the American literary community, however, from Amiri Baraka comes my contemporary emphasis on revolution and its power to mobilize a student's struggles through liberation. Much of my observations of Baraka have to do with who Baraka is. An African American raised in Newark rather than urban. (He was born in Newark, NJ and moved to Harlem) East coast rather than west coast and he did not display, during our early years together, the dark complexity of Negro intellectuals in the Newark student protest of 1968. Baraka became a university professor, international published scholar, with many books and more than one hundred articles to his credit. It is my pleasure to encounter him again, to have access once more to his writings." ~ Michael Tombs