Englewood Ministerium Remembers & Notes DC & LA Black Cultural Centers' Lifting-up 1967 Newark Rebellion & Its Nation Conference on Black Power Aftermath at 50/Part 5
Rev. Joel Washington (Khunanpu Sangoma)
Published: September 2, 2017
1. This piece continues Part 4's sampling of the 286 organizations represented at 1967's first National Conference on Black Power in Post-Rebellion Newark, NJ. The list is reported, by African American journalist, Mr. Chuck Stone, member of the Conferences Continuations Committee, in Floyed B. Barbour's 1968 anthology, THE BLACK POWER REVOLT-sub-titled-Black Power in Action.
2. The point here is to offer our readers a politically correct or accurate sense-impression of the depth and range of the turbulent mid-1960s-to-mid-1970s Black Power Movement-itself sorely in need of revival today.
3. This second part listing, then, of Mr. Chuck Stone's alphabetical sampling of representative organizations at the 1967 Black Power Conference, Newark, NJ, is as follows:
"....Omega Psi Phi, Organization for Self-Improvement, Pepsi-Cola, Progressive Labor Party of Bermuda, People United Against Slum Housing, Princeton Co-operative School Program, Rochester's Dept. of Urban Renewal, Reformed Church of America, Self-Help Organization of America, St. Paul Urban Parish of Minn., Socailist Workers Party, Southern Christian Leadership Confrence, Student Afro-American Society, Tanzania's Mission to the U.N., Training Resources for Youth of Brooklyn (TRY), TIME, UAW-CIO, "Us" (Organization), LA, Urban League, The Worker, Washington Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, West Side Conservation Association, Yale University Child Development Center, "Young, Black and Angry," ZOAR Baptist Ministry, and Zimbabwe African People's Union."
4. Mr. Stone, commenting on the above cross-sampling, exudes "Unified, that's Black Power!" He goes on to rhetorically question however "How could those organizations be organized, harnessed and made to work for Black people in one effecient unit?"
5. Dr. Maulana Karenga, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies, CSULB, Creator of Kwanzaa and Nguzo Saba, Author, INTRODUCTION TO BLACK STUDIES, 4TH Edition (IBS) and ESSAYS ON STRUGGLE: Position and Analysis, then a doctoral candidate as well as Chair of Us Organization, LA, "Introduced" (as he observes in his IBS work) "during the Black Power Conferences the concept of operational unity which (Maulana Karenga) defined as 'unity in diversity, unity without uniformity' and which became a standard reference and call to unity in the Black Liberation Movement."
6. Contributing to his role as "chief organizer and foremost theoretician" of the 1967 & 1968 Black Power Conferences, young Maulana Karenga,as documented in IBS, responded as follows: "Addressing the issue of the struggle for Black Power Maulana Karenga asserted it was a struggle to achieve three fundamental things: self-determination, self-respect and self-defense."
7. Dr. Karenga further develops his formulation above on the three ends of Black Power wtih "By these goals (Maulana Karenga) meant Black people's control of their communities, destiny and daily life through institutional strength; community control; a sense of expanded self-worth and ability rooted in struggle; and the capacity of Black people to exercise their right to defend themselves against attacks of racism, especially by police, as (Min.) Malcolm said 'by any means necessary.'"
For more information of the African American Cultural Center at Reformation Church Chicago ("Young Barack Obama's community organizing sanctuary"), please go to: https://afroculturalcenter.wordpress.com or https://lifteveryvoicesite.wordpress.com