Saturday, November 26, 2022

HASN'T SHARIF BEEN THROUGH ENOUGH!

 

Hasn’t Sharif Been Through Enough!

A BlackEyed Cloud Over Newark’s Holiday

by Zayid Muhammad

 

            On Wednesday, November 23rd, on the eve of Thanksgiving, legendary street peacemaker Sharif Amenhotep found himself surrounded by legions of Newark police officers as they sought to affect the confiscation and removal of his Red, Black and Green Mini Bus from his vending area on Branford and Broad Street.

            As the police sought to affect the removal of Sharif’s bus, they placed him under arrest for protesting its removal. The incident got particularly dicey when officers appeared to be cutting or doing something to the underside of the vehicle, according to observers. Amenhotep, upset about what was happening, got under the vehicle to see what was being done to it. The furor of the incident would see Sharif getting his foot broken in two places and put in handcuffs.

            The community, outraged by what they were witnessing, angrily challenged the police officers. It was only a consequence of Deputy Mayor Rahman Muhammad, a labor organizing veteran, and former Newark AntiViolence Coalition member Tyrone ‘Street Counsel’ Barnes, pleading with both the police and an angry public, that averted an insurrection that could have potentially led to numerous people getting hurt and harming the re emerging image of the city immeasurably.

            Most infuriating about the whole incident were a number of things...

1. Was the vehicle being illegally being removed?...Anecdotally it was said that a city ordinance dictated that the vehicle, or any such vehicle, be removed in the evening after the business day ends. Amenhotep had been in compliance with the ordinance. Why then were police were trying to effectuate its removal during the day when it was lawfully parked is a key issue. That’s what drove the incident; Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the order to remove the vehicle was given by the city business administrator even though such an order appears to be in total violation of local law;

2. Amenhotep is arguably one of the best known anti-violence activist in the city, known as ‘The Soul of the Newark AntiViolence Coalition once upon a time and who tragically made national news when he sojourned to South Carolina to shake up several communities there when his daughter Sanaa disappeared and ultimately was found dead only as a consequence of his pressuring law enforcement in those communities to do more! Given Amenhotep’s profile, why then was the area swarmed with police, and why was there NOT anyone in police leadership on hand who could have addressed the situation and properly de-escalated it?;

3. It is just as important to appreciate that not only was Amenhotep wrongly arrested and injured in the incident, but the police leadership that was on hand would not even acknowledge the presence of Deputy Mayor Rahman Muhammad, who sought to de escalate the situation, and who sought to identify Amenhotep as a respected community activist and get him the medical attention he obviously needed once he got hurt. Many are grateful that irate community members ready to take on the police did acknowledge Muhammad and Barnes and how that prevented a bad incident from becoming exponentially worse!

            All of this begs more important questions.

            Isn’t Newark going through a historic police reform effort?

            Hasn’t its community based Violence Intervention efforts brought down violence in the community by 50%?

            Haven’t these efforts garnered national attention as a number of cities are now examining how they can employ similar strategies to combat violence in their respective cities?

            Hasn’t this new ‘eco-system’ showed Violence interventionists actually working well with the police in the face of critical challenges like the averting an attempt to ‘riot’ at the old first precinct in the Summer of 2020 and most recently when two police officers were wounded by a man with a rifle in a mental health crisis, where the violence interventionists not only assisted with critical crowd control efforts and follow up services, but who also helped move people from the building where the shots were coming from to a nearby school and attending the anxieties of those shaken residents there...something I would much rather be writing about to be sure?

            With that kind of well established ‘eco system’ in place, how does what happened to Amenhotep even take place?

            It shouldn’t have!....At all!

            If there is to be a protest condemning what happened, it should be a ‘united front’ of those organizations in that ‘eco system’ uniting for the respect of their work and presence in the community.

            The nuances of the incident should be taken up in an investigation by the new Civilian Complaint Review Board examining just how that how incident was wrongly handled. This incident and other incidents of inappropriate police behavior should also regularly inform the groundbreaking Trauma To Trust program of Equal Justice USA with a regular updating of that program’s ongoing trainings to help Newark police officers address contemporary problems within its own police department honestly. Police officers should also know who their elected and community leadership is. The disrespect of Deputy Mayor Muhammad must certainly be addressed. And if it proves to be so that the incident was driven by an overreaching city Business Adminstrator, then he needs to also be held accountable, and important checks on the authority of that office need to be put in place immediately to prevent another incident like this from happening again. Community folks who were on hand angry about what they saw, especially those who may have videotaped the incident, should come forward and work with the Brick City Peace Collective and the CCRB and getting their footage and testimony in the proper hands.

            Hands off Sharif Amenhotep!

            Salute to Deputy Mayor Rahman Muhammad and Tyrone ‘Street Counsel’ Barnes.

            Shoutout to Mayor Baraka and Public Safety chief Frage for facilitating the release of Amenhotep.

            Stop Police Brutality! Peace in the Streets!...

 


‘Baba’ Zayid Muhammad is an elder activist in the greater Newark-New York area. (‘Baba’ is Yoruba for ‘father’). He is the founding press officer for NY’s Malcolm X Commemoration Committee. He is a well known cub of the Black Panther Party. He is a founding elder member of the Newark AntiViolence Coalition and its outgoing media advocate. He is the lead organizer for Newark Communities for Accountable Policing (NCAP) and the Newark Strategist for Equal Justice USA...

 

©2022

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

places and spaces ( for my niece Ghana Imani Hylton, who rescues culture*)

 places and spaces

( for my niece Ghana Imani Hylton, who rescues culture*)

to Donald Byrd’s Places And Spaces…

 

come

let’s go…

let’s get away from this…

even if just for a moment

or for an hour…

let’s just get away

away from this worry

away from this stress

away from this madness

away from this mess…

come

let us go to that place and space

that beckons  us

over oceans

over mountains

over time…

to places and spaces

detailed and precise

like saturated rhyme…

for that astral sequined season…

let us go to that place

hydrating hopes and dreams

and cradling long memory…

to that timetravelling transcending place

to that braided glorious and seeded place

to that prayerful candlelit calm place

to that place

trumping

oppression alienation and negation

to that place

of birth rebirth

life love and ancient affirmation…

that electromagnetic place that draws us in

this witnessing sea of faces place

that just might inspire us to win!



come

let’s go even if just for a moment

or for an hour…

come

let’s go and be touched by its power

come

let’s wet our dry and empty eyes

with this wonderous art

come

let’s be washed and rinsed

by this ankh-oiled art

by this wood warm welcoming art

by this spheric soulful art

by this concentric polyrhythmic circular art

by this temple tight and towering art

by this Hannibal Barca big and bold art

by this pyramid prominent poppin art

by this saxophonic soaring

melting toxic ice art

by this kingcrossed simba sure art

this falcon full flying art

this hurt hood rescuing art

by this art beading our sour and sore eyes

back to great places and spaces

where we once were

this art that clothespins our hearts

to the rhythms of the wind

this art that put back together

what oppression took apart…

so come

let us take heart

come

let us take part

come

let us answer the invitings

of these ancestral whispers…

these whispers

chronicling this wabembe

this 3 eyed medium

this mathematically precise brushstroker…

come

let us be held

come

let us be taken

come

let us be lifted

come

let us be reawakened…

come come come

and let Wabembe’s

brushes

stroke

our starving eyes

blue sky high…



*Jersey based poet Ghana Hylton is the daughter of Newark wordsmith Sandra West and the late master artist Carl ‘Wabembe’ Whiteurs. Upon Wabembe’s untimely recent passing, Ghana was faced with the enormous task of saving her father’s  lifetime collection of original works ‘inside a weekend’ from an indifferent California landlord who would have simply trashed them. Somehow Ghana was able to put aside her differences with her father disengagement, sojourn all the way from Jersey, and salvage a collection that will cement a place in their family’s legacy for generations to come…She is also the curator and owner of Akwaaba, a hugely respected showcase for visual and performing art in Montclair NJ...

(c)2017

Monday, April 4, 2022

Musing on Martin...On The 54th Anniversary of his Assassination...

Musing on Martin...On the 54h anniversary of his assassination...
by 'bro. zayid''

The memory of the evening of April 4th, 1968, still weighs heavy on those of us who remember that day, weighs heavy on us in a haunting way...

Upon its 50th anniversary, i came to nervously realize that i belong to the last of us who are old enough to remember that fateful day and to have some memory of Dr King still being very much with us.


With the stalking spectacle of the January 6th Insurrection, with the continued slaughter of Black and Brown innocents by police all over this county, with the failure of this country to do anything meaningful about it and ultimately betraying its 'George Floyd' moment, and with war hawks and oil barons saber rattling in a way that could trigger something that not even they and their priviiledge can comeback from, Dr King's assassination is weighing particularly heavy on me today.

I'm glad for what's left of my beleaguered psyche that i will be in the streets today fully present in a march spearheaded by a beloved comrade Lawrence Hamm and the People's Organization for Progress in Newark.

Yet i am deeply worried that not enough of us are. 


April 4th, '68 meant this country going up in smoke. April 4th meant the 3rd and the largest exponential growth spurt of the Black Panther Party, immediately making them "the number one threat to the internal security of the united states," a price too many are still paying for, Sundiata Acoli, Imam Jamil Al-Amin, Kamau Sadiki, Veronza Bowers, Mumia AbuJamal, to name few, a distinction no one asked for.

So today, we come to this haunting anniversary with this country truly at a crossroads for its very future. 

The forces or reaction who killed our beloved 'Drum Major for Justice'' have reorganized and are fully mobilized in ways we have not seen in a long time. How is it that this country can pass an AntiLynching Bill 140 years after its first call, 140 years later, but would not touch Voting Rights legislation to protect the ultimate reason lynching was once an recreationally accepted part of the american social landscape, fear of a mobilized and organzed Black vote, one that made a real difference in that short refrain of history that once was Reconstruction?

"Democracy is nothing but hypocrisy," i hear Malcolm in my head unapologetically. "I don't see any American dream; I only see an American nightmare," so he asserted in the epic presentation that he gave us that made the case for a fully mobilized and organized ballot...His searing 'The Ballot Or The Bullet'...

I mean what happens if we lose the congress this year and the white house again '24 to 'them'...
The architects, the participants, the cheerleaders of January 6th?...Those strapped with so much hate and the most toxic vitriol?

There are a lot of them. More than many of us care to know or see. 

They appear to be more passionate and organized about their privilege, falsehood, racist and sexist hate, than those of us who are about hope, healing, reconciliation and restoration.

Do we realize that so much of this enormously fulfilling work that we are doing...this wonderful healing, paradigm shifting work that we are doing...will be targeted for elimination by 'defunding' or worse by targeting us and what we are doing as being unAmerican, or unPatriotic?

Some of us may even become new targets for repression as others of us become renewed targets of repression. 

It's a dark, dangerous space.

It absolutely can happen!

Be clear about this also...They are sabre rattling because what we are doing is correct and the more we continue to break ground, the more that backwards violent place of privilege becomes isolated and put on the path to being defeated by our mutual 'love for the people'' using some Panther language.

So to my daughters and sons, my granddaughters and grandsons heartily riding yr precious waves of this transformative work that u are all doing and becoming, keep coming, keep doing it, but be clear, we all may have to fight for our right to do so and at times and places, maybe even for our very right to exist and to do so.

So train up. Use us battleborne ol' heads to the fullest to help u get ready. 

Esu (eshoo) a spiritual force of our Ancestors' spiritual tradition is indeed telling us that we are at the crossroads. The question before is which way to do we go...On the shoulders of our Ancestors, and in the language of one in particular Kwame Ture,"Forward is the Motion"!

It is time for Violence Reduction and Social Justice to intersect, to connect like the healing hug and kiss of our grandmothers!

i so cherish u all!

Come 'Beloved Community'! 

Come!
(c)2022