[NYTr] A Farewell Letter on the 2nd Anniversary of Katrina

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

ZNet - Aug 31, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=13666

A Farewell Letter on the Second Anniversary of Katrina

A Message from an Organizer to the Left and 
Progressive Forces inside the USA

by Curtis Muhammad  

With this second anniversary of Katrina upon us, there are a few words I
wish to speak. This letter is written to the progressive, left movement
for justice in the USA. In the last two years, every left organization
has been in New Orleans, but despite that there is still no sign of a
mass movement. There is still no sign that most activists are willing
to put their knowledge and resources at the service of the grass roots
and take their leadership from the bottom. I have found myself
wondering, have poor black people been so vilified and criminalized
that they are completely off the radar even of the so-called left? When
Katrina happened, I hoped and expected that this would be the trigger
to once again set off a true mass movement against racism and for
justice in the US, led by those most affected: poor, black working
people. When it became abundantly clear that this was not happening, I
found myself at the crossroads of hope and hopelessness, and began to
wonder how to spend the last years of my life in the service of my
people. 

The thing that I remind myself when I'm contemplating hopelessness is
the beauty of humanity and the fact that people have always fought for
what was right even when they knew they couldn't win. They tried
because they loved each other; I think it's because it's built into
human beings for people to look out for each other. There is a drive in
humanity to be just, to live in a society that is just, equal and
respectful. I believe that ultimately people will achieve a just
society; I believe humanity came out of a just society and will create
it again.

I do believe that there was a time that the lovers of life, the lovers
of humanity, the lovers of justice dominated the world. Some say this
was so during the hunter-gatherer days, when though there were evil
people they could never gain dominance. Their numbers were always
small, less than 1%; people ran their lives collectively, and therefore
the greedy could not dominate. Well then, I say what happened, there is
only that same 1% who dominates the world now.

This thinking, this logic has been the motivating factor in my life of
movement work: the belief that there is a basic humanity that is inside
the soul of most people. That this humanity can be harvested and
organized into a movement for justice to free our people from slavery,
bondage, oppression and exploitation. That the 80% of the world who
live on an average of $2 a day can and will overcome the 1% and return
us to a collective life organized around love, justice and equality.

Most of you who know me also know I'm a storyteller and believe story
to be a universal language that can be a vehicle for voice, the voice
of all regardless of status, class, cast, race, gender. Story is an
egalitarian language. So I wish to share with you my story, an
abbreviated story of my organizing work from SNCC in Mississippi
through the ghettoes of the US to the villages and jungles of Africa,
to CLU, PHRF, NOSC, POC and finally the International School for
Bottom-up Organizing. My story is meant to clarify why I now choose to
live, work, teach and write outside the US and away from the grip of a
drastically de-energized and often opportunistic and reactionary left
in the USA.

                          *

I grew up in a community that, of necessity, had to take care of its
own. In rural Mississippi in the 40s, 50s and 60s, mothers and fathers,
grandparents, uncles and cousins protected the children from the
hostile, racist world and collectively helped each other meet their
needs. Nonetheless, when I was a child traveling to church on Sundays,
I had to pass the tree from whose branches my cousin was lynched. The
community of my birth gave me both my strength -- my faith in the
people, my dedication to egalitarianism, and my undying hatred of
racism and the oppressive few that control the world.

When SNCC came to town, I found my direction. It was both a community of
love and a set of organizers devoted, at the risk of their lives, to the
folk on the bottom: the poorest black folk in Mississippi, those who had
nothing, not even the knowledge of how to read. SNCC introduced me to
the struggles of my brothers and sisters around the world, and
particularly in Africa. I became an internationalist and a
revolutionary. The lessons of Ella Baker and SNCC have stayed with me
throughout my life; I labored to make them a reality from Mississippi
to the ghettoes of our major cities, from my time in the revolutionary
movement in Africa to my work as a labor organizer, and I have done my
utmost to apply them in post-Katrina New Orleans.

In 1998, I helped to organize Community Labor United (CLU), a coalition
that was founded with a commitment to bottom-up organizing. (CLU
principles included "ending the exploitation of oppressed peoples
everywhere; educating, organizing and mobilizing the masses within our
organizations and communities from the bottom up.") After eight years
of organizing in some of the poorest areas of New Orleans, it became
the "first responder" after Katrina, and led the formation of the
People's Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF).

As a founding member of PHRF and an organizer and New Orleans resident,
I was back in the city within 8 days of the flood, struggling with
overwhelming pain and anger. I felt that Katrina represented an historic
moment. Never before had all levels of government united to attempt
genocide of 100,000 black people at the same time. Even in the 60s in
Mississippi, they were murdering us in ones, twos and threes. I threw
myself into the attempt to put the knowledge and resources of the left
and nationalist organizations and "movement" people under the direction
of the bottom: the poor and working class black folk who had been left
to die in New Orleans. PHRF became a coalition that committed itself on
paper to that goal.

What followed was a dramatic learning experience for me and for all
those whose commitment is truly to the people and not to their own
particular grouping. Within months, mainly as a result of a speaking
tour I went on for PHRF, we had raised about a million dollars from
folk across the country who were deeply moved by the attempted genocide
of over a hundred thousand black folk. And by December, there was
already conflict over who controlled that money and how it was to be
used.

The New Orleans Survivor Council was organized by PHRF with the
understanding that it was to become the leadership of the organization
and the movement, and should control all resources. By April of 2006,
when the NOSC began to sound like it wanted oversight of the funds, the
interim leadership of PHRF took the money and ran, firing its own
organizers for daring to tell the poor black residents in NOSC that
they had the right to control the resources raised in their names.
Undaunted, the young organizers continued working for the survivors and
formed a new group called People's Organizing Committee (POC).

This event was a turning point for me. I realized that the words of
those who I had considered my comrades were empty, that their so-called
commitment to bottom- up was a fiction; that their real commitments
were to various organizations and their own egos. Our attempt to
institutionalize bottom-up had led instead to a coalition of
opportunists.

When I had spoken to mass audiences about Katrina in the fall of 2005,
I had spoken of my discovery of the depth of the fear and hatred
America has for poor, black people. The images on the media of those
left to die could have been taken in sub-Saharan Africa or the
Caribbean: those people were very poor and very black. With the
desertion of PHRF, I was confronted by the knowledge that this hatred
of poor black people extended into and throughout the progressive
movement, even within exclusively black organizations. I felt very
lonely in my continued commitment to lift up precisely that segment of
oppressed Americans to lead the movement.

But POC plunged ahead, still dedicated to that vision. Thousands of
volunteers came in the spring and summer, and many continue to come to
this day. The hearts of so many people are in the right place. The New
Orleans Survivor Council and its member group Residents of Public
Housing continue to work to put bottom-up leadership on the map and
fight for the right of our community to return and control its own
destiny. But the past year has also revealed further weakness and lack
of vision in our movement.

>From the days immediately following the flood, we recognized that
immigrants, brown people, some of the poorest and most desperate of our
brothers and sisters from countries to the south, were being brought
into our city. They were put to the dirtiest, most dangerous clean-up
tasks, and later to replace the forcibly dispersed black labor force,
for slave wages and in slave conditions. From the start, we called for
organizing this new part of the New Orleans community in unity with and
under the leadership of the black folk on the bottom.

This call was part of my message in the speeches I made in the fall of
2005, and several immigrant organizers heeded the call and came to work
with us. However, despite many serious attempts to develop unity
between black survivors and immigrants, it has become clear that those
organizers refuse to unite with and take leadership from black folk.
They have organized immigrant slaves into separate groupings with no
contact with the NOSC, despite their initial commitment to unity. They
are essentially, wittingly or unwittingly, following the government's
agenda, which is to build a racist, assimilationist immigrant
"movement" that will serve the needs of a war economy and patriotism.

And so we come to the second anniversary of Katrina. Bottom-up
organizing is still embryonic, though hanging on to life and with a
small, dedicated band of survivors, organizers and volunteers. But the
rest of the movement is in shambles, or under direct or indirect
influence of our enemies.

Through the experience of the last two years, I have also come to the
conclusion that the infiltration of and direct attacks on the movement
that started (in my lifetime as an activist) in the late 60s and early
70s with Cointelpro have never stopped. Our movement has been
successfully divided into thousands of groupings, non-profits and NGOs,
and the left has been rendered ineffectual. It is not an accident that,
for forty years now, the movement has been so totally reformist, or
that those who want to be revolutionaries are so isolated as to be
irrelevant. The government and its agencies have a stranglehold on the
people, the culture and even the left. I do not think it is possible in
the U.S. at this time, for me, to develop and train organizers with a
real understanding and commitment to the folk on the bottom.

And thus, I find myself at the crossroads of hope and hopelessness. I
find myself possibly in the position of writing not mainly to the
current readers of these words, but to those future revolutionaries who
will learn from our impasse. I find myself deciding to work toward
creating an international organizing school as a vehicle to discover,
recruit and train radical organizers. I want to continue my
investigation of the movements in Mexico and South America among very
poor -- members of the informal economy, workers, campesinos and
landless people -- learn more about how class and hue interact to shape
oppression, take inspiration from the fact that the struggle continues,
un-abandoned, worldwide, and share my own knowledge and experience with
the rebels of today and tomorrow.

I have lived 64 years and have struggled intentionally for justice for
about forty-six of those years. I am thankful and appreciative to all
those who have traveled some of that distance with me: those who helped
nurture my children, who stood with me when I was imprisoned and
tortured, those who have always supported my work and stood by me when
all seemed to stand against me. To these worthy friends, comrades and
loved ones, I will always honor you, be there for you, and know you are
there for me.

Still, I have arrived at a place in my life where I wish to share
everything I have and know with the "sufferers." My principle continues
to be the struggle to engage the poor, oppressed, voiceless, and those
who have the least and suffer the most. The only struggle that matters
to me now is finding justice for those who have never had it.

This is me, where I am, trying to figure out how to organize our folk
in a way that we always look at need as the principle of justice. If
you are looking for me, look among the youth, the poor, and the
struggling masses trapped in slave-like conditions throughout the
world, for I am no longer available to an opportunistic and racist
left. I NOW SEEK REFUGE AMONG THE POOR.

This is my struggle.

Wish me well,

Curtis

People's Organizing Committee 
http://www.peoplesorganizing.org