which was headed by Kristin Cleage Williams, Jaramogi Abebe's eldest daughter, commemorated the 10th anniversary of his passing last Feb. 20 and celebrated his birthday on June 13 thru circular letters to the Nation and its friends, attaching rare documents from the JAAA.

The other committee members are Sala Andaiye (Adams), H.R. Lewis, Paul Lee and Lt. Tacuma Ribbron. The bulk of the archives were organized by Kris, Sis. Sala and Lt. Tacuma.

RARE INTERVIEW

Yesterday, Bro. Paul was blessed to receive in the mail an unsolicited and unexpected gift, which the JAAA is honored to share with you: A rare interview with Jaramogi Abebe, who was then the pastor of Central Congregational church (which became Central United Church of Christ in October or November 1965 and the Shrine of the Black Madonna in January 1968).

It was conducted by the late, great Albert J. Dunmore, the managing editor of The Michigan Chronicle, and published in the Feb. 10, 1962, issue of that paper.

Because of the length of the article, it was necessary to scan it in two parts. Sis. Kris not only merged them into one, but also improved the quality of the image. It's attached in PC jpg format.

THANK YOU, TOM KAGE, PETER GOLDMAN AND GOD

The gift was from Tom Kage, an antique dealer at Northville, Mich. Recently, longtime PAOCC friend Peter Goldman purchased from Mr. Kage for the JAAA three original documents from the Michigan Freedom Now party (MFNP), which Jaramogi Abebe co-founded in October 1963 (we'll return to this below): a handbill, a bumper-sticker and a tin pinback button. We've attached photos of these documents for your reference.

Appreciating Bro. Paul's interest in the history of modern "black" Detroit, Mr. Kage mailed him a folder of precious old documents, including the interview. He attached the following note: "I just found this group of papers and thought it may be of interest to you regarding your research for your book."

When Bro. Paul called Mr. Kage to explain how valuable the interview is to the JAAA and the Cleage family, he replied, "You know that's God, don't you?" He promised to keep an eye out for any other documents that might be useful to the JAAA and the Cleage family. We would like to thank Mr. Kage, and God, for their generosity in support of our modest efforts.

THANK YOU, AL DUNMORE

Veterans of Detroit's civil-rights, Black Power and radical movements will be eternally grateful to Al Dunmore for providing among the city's fairest coverage of these movements in The Michigan Chronicle, mostly thru the exceptional reportage and commentary of Betty DeRamus and Carol Schmidt, even though Mr. Dunmore often editorially criticized them.

Black nationalists will be particularly grateful to Mr. Dunmore for asking Jaramogi Abebe in 1967 to submit a weekly column, "Message to the Black Nation," which Grace Lee Boggs, Jaramogi Abebe's able secretary, prepared from stenographic notes of his sermons and speeches. Thru this column, he was able to extend his already growing reach and influence.

A CHANGE IS GONNA COME

This interview, which appeared a half-century ago, is a time capsule of Jaramogi Abebe and the "black" Detroit freedom movement, both of which were in the midst of changes that would help to define the balance of the decade and influence subsequent decades.

However, unlike most of his contemporaries, Jaramogi Abebe was conscious of this historical moment

.

"The Rev. Cleage," Dunmore noted, "contends Detroit is in the process of basic changes in organizational and individual leadership. 'There are only a few organizations which seem to be looking to the future. Too many of our organizations are hanging on to the past and are failing to recognize the needs of a fast changing social and economic pattern."

The following year, Jaramogi Abebe would help to shape that future by conceiving and helping to organize the historic "Walk To Freedom" march down Woodward Avenue, which was led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on June 23. Until recently, the march and the massive Cobo Arena rally that followed it were mostly ignored by historians, but it is now acknowledged as having been larger than the better-known March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom two months later.

As the momentum of social change helped to accelerate Jaramogi Abebe's internal change, so did his view of others involved in the freedom movement. Therefore, the praise that he offered of the Trade Union Leadership Council (TULC), a "black" United Auto Workers (UAW) caucus, and the "Negro Preachers of Detroit and Vicinity" in his 1962 interview would prove short-lived, as he saw them focusing on symptoms rather than causes.

FROM 'BLACK BROTHERHOOD' TO BLACK POWER

Nineteen sixty-three also saw Jaramogi Abebe's formal embrace of black nationalism, which he alternately called "Black Brotherhood" in the pages of the militant Illustrated News newsletter, published and edited by his siblings and family friends.

Along with his brother Henry, a brilliant attorney, Jaramogi Abebe added up the math of America's ruinous "race" relations and concluded that "racial" integration was irrelevant and that power -- which Mukasa Dada (Willie Ricks) and Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) would call Black Power three years later -- was imperative.

FAILING OUR CHILDREN

For this reason, Jaramogi Abebe soon abandoned advocating the integration of the Detroit Public Schools, as he so passionately did in his Chronicle interview. Nevertheless, the core of his critique of the failure of the school system appears to remain valid:

"...the time is long past that action should have been taken against the many inequities which exist within the Detroit public school system.

"'They existed 30 years ago ... they exist today. The inequities are obvious. The results of these inequities can be seen by anyone who cares to look ... and yet we continue to wait 'and study.'"

'NEGRO REMOVAL'

Similarly, his critique of the federal Urban Renewal program, which he and others called "Negro Removal" after it destroyed the mostly "black" Paradise Valley and Black Bottom neighborhoods, seems applicable to the present "racial" and class gentrification of Detroit, where poor African Americans are being rapidly displaced and housing, businesses and institutions are being grafted upon their neighborhoods to serve the needs and desires of outsiders.

"We are calling together community leadership organizations and individuals to act in this matter of Urban Renewal," Jaramogi Abebe advised Mr. Dunmore. "We feel this entire question of housing is tied up in the manner in which Urban Renewal will be handled.

"At present time, the lack of concern for persons who are dislocated by Urban Renewal projects is only helping to create blighted areas in other sections of the city.

"All a person has to do is to walk through any community which has been earmarked for 'open occupancy' and they can see what is happening. We have enough departments and institutions established to correct these ills but these agencies seemed to be completely unconcerned.

"The Board of Health, the Bureau of Building and Engineering, the City Planning Commission and other such bureaus have the machinery through which they can act to prevent the extension of this blight."

BLACK SLATES

Jaramogi Abebe called for the African American community to become "even more politically alert" and elect more "black" people to public offices. "There are a number of Negroes capable of serving these districts, Negroes who are as liberal and as pro-union as Representative John Dingell and, at the same time, far more capable of representing this large Negro constituency." (Five decades later, Dingell is still in office.)

The following year, Jaramogi Abebe, militant brothers Milton R. and Richard B. Henry (later Gaidi Abiodun and Imari Abubakari Obadele), James and Grace Boggs and organized the Michigan Freedom Now party, which is considered one of, if not the first all-"black" (with the exception of Chinese American Grace Boggs) political party in U. S. history.

In 1964, the MFNP ran a full slate of "black" candidates for office, with Jaramogi Abebe as its gubernatorial candidate. While none were successful, the party laid the foundation for the formation of the Black Slate, an independent political lobby, a decade later, which Coleman A. Young often credited for helping to elect him as Detroit's first African American mayor. The slate also helped elect many other African Americans to city, county, state and federal offices.

Before the organization of the MFNP, Jaramogi Abebe contended that "more pressure must be placed on the political machinery in city government" -- something that is just as important now that African Americans occupy these offices, which the efforts of Jaramogi Abebe and others helped to bring about.

BIRTHING THE FUTURE

Also in 1963, Jaramogi Abebe and the group that founded the MFNP organized the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference at Mr. Kelly's Lounge and King Solomon Baptist church on Nov. 9 and 10, with Nation of Islam (NOI) national spokesperson and New York Minister Malcolm X as the keynote speaker.

If the movement for Black Power or "black" self-determination has several birthplaces, this historic conference was among the most important, popularizing and legitimizing thru Jaramogi Abebe's and Malcolm X's speeches both the term and the philosophy of black nationalism.

(Malcolm X's famous "Message to the Grass Roots" speech, in which he quoted Jaramogi Abebe several times, was recorded and posthumously released as a long-playing record by Milton Henry.)

'POSITIVE ACTION'

As you'll see in the interview, Jaramogi Abebe was fighting to redress many of the same problems that haunt "black" people in Detroit and thruout the country today.

"Employment, education, housing and politics are all areas in which positive action must be taken," he declared. "Some one [sic] has to attack these problems on as many fronts as possible."

Since Jaramogi Abebe, like Malcolm X, was deeply interested in the African decolonization movement, which was then freeing the continent from decades and even centuries of European political domination, it's possible that his use of the term "positive action" was adopted from or influenced by the strategy employed by Osageyfo ("Redeemer") Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in leading the British Gold Coast colony to freedom as the independent nation of Ghana in 1957. In any case, the strategy of education, protests and selective boycotts was the same.

'APOSTLE OF YOUTH'

By 1962, Jaramogi Abebe, the son of a "race man" father and a "race woman" mother, was already a veteran of civil-rights struggles in his previous pastorates at San Francisco, Calif., and Springfield, Mass.

While always a realist, he also felt the sense of optimism shared by many in the freedom struggle as it picked up steam, overturning the old order of "racial" subjugation and opening up opportunities previously denied African Americans.

"When first class citizenship is achieved," he said hopefully, "I can go back to pastoring and working with young people."

In high school, Jaramogi Abebe was the chairman of the youth group at St. Cyprian's Episcopal church and later became the youth minister at the Rev. Horace A. White's Plymouth Congregational church (now Plymouth United Church of Christ). In all of his ministries, Jaramogi Abebe had an emphasis on young persons, earning him the nickname the "Apostle of Youth."

Indeed, after the five-day 1967 Detroit Rebellion, which hastened Jaramogi Abebe's call for a "transfer of power" from the city's entrenched, nearly all-"white" political leadership into the hands of what would soon become the "black" majority, the membership of his church precisely doubled: From 600 to 1,200 members.

For good reason, some called the Shrine the "young people's church" because the bulk of its new members -- many of whom soon became its leaders -- were under 20 years old.

FOUNDATION OF THE 'BLACK' NATION

While Jaramogi Abebe soured on the goal of obtaining first-class citizenship and came to see the only secure future for his people in forming a "black nation within a nation" based on creating a counter-culture and building counter-institutions, one constant would remain: His belief that there should be no separation between the sacred and the secular, between the church and the "black" freedom struggle.

Indeed, he believed that the natural foundation of the "black nation" was the "black" church, which is why he proclaimed the creed of Black Christian Nationalism (BCN) on Easter Sunday, March 26, 1967, to return the African American church to its revolutionary African roots.

To underline this vision, he unveiled on this occasion a striking eighteen-by-nine-foot chancel mural of a Black Madonna and child, which still proudly presides over the sanctuary.

"I am convinced," he said in the 1962 interview, "it is the church's duty to act in any area where the welfare of the community is at stake. As long as I feel this vacuum exists, I intend to speak out and act in any manner in which I see fit against these obvious inequities."

BEGGING THE QUESTION

Asked her opinion of her father's 1962 interview, Kris Williams replied:

"As I read it, I thought how the more things changed, the more they remained the same. We gained 'control' of Detroit, and yet the schools never improved, the neighborhoods looked worse each time I visited. Urban renewal and highway building stopped, but still communities disappeared. What if he could have seen where it would all go? Could something different have been done then so we didn't end up where we are now? What could any of us have done differently, wherever we were, so that reading the article wouldn't leave me feeling depressed?"

Which is why the JAAA is sharing this interview with you. After all, it implicitly begs the question: What are we doing today to redress the problems that Jaramogi Abebe and many others fought so hard to deal with then, and what lessons could we learn from their successes, and their failures?

On behalf of the JAAA, I have the honor to remain

Strict-Lee Ol' Skool BCN,

Bro. Paul  

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