PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness
ISSN: 1543-0855
Issue 6 (2007)
PROUD FLESH INTER/VIEWS: ACKLYN LYNCH
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PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness ISSN: 1543-0855 Issue 6 (2007) PROUD FLESH INTER/VIEWS: ACKLYN LYNCH |
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Greg Thomas
On July 10, 2007, we finally sat down with Dr. ACKLYN LYNCH to conduct this interview at his home, this place to be on Geranium Street in Washington, D.C. There are so many things to do with and in the life of this man that we had postponed this thing several times before it jumped and took off. He gave us all the time in the world. He gave so much of his self and history which it is all-important to document. He would discuss Paul Robeson and Eric Williams; George Jackson and his mother, Georgia Jackson; Frantz Fanon and his wife; Howard University, which fired him five times for being a firebrand, and many other college or university appointments; Black Studies and Black music; sports and C.L.R. James; Trinidad, Babylon and Africa; European systems of oppression and Black cultures of resistance worldwide. Thank the Ancestors, Y’all—Here is Bro. ACKLYN LYNCH!
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PROUD FLESH
Dr. Lynch, how old were you when you came to the U.S. from Trinidad?
ACKLYN LYNCH
Twenty two.
PROUD FLESH
You were twenty-two?! Okay. For some reason, I assumed you were younger. Did you come here to go to school?
ACKLYN LYNCH
No, no, no. I went to school in Trinidad and then I worked. I went to Saint Mary’s [College]; I worked; I played football and cricket at the highest level.
PROUD FLESH
You did?!
ACKLYN LYNCH
Oh, yeah. I was a good athlete. And I worked. But I always had the dream of coming to America since I was ten or eleven years old.
I was from very, very poor people. Between the ages of nine and ten, when I was studying for “exhibition,” Mr. Granderson was the principal of Eastern Boys Government School. It was also called “Market School,” since it was located next to the Port of Spain market on George and Nelson Streets. At the time, we had a competitive examination that would be given to every student under eleven years old in the country. Everybody in the country competed for these sixteen scholarships—rich, poor, middle-class and lumpen. “Grander” was a master teacher. He worked with the mothers and the women in the market; and he took four boys into his home every year, for over a period of about five or six years. He was just an ordinary schoolteacher, a principal of humble, lower-middle class status. He owned a house. We would live with Grander and we would study all day and all night. He would teach us not only books, but how to play football and cricket. He taught us ethics. He would let us know that these market women were really our mothers and our aunts. So if they had a tray of mangoes and the mangoes fell on the ground, we were not to steal them and run away. We were never to steal from these people. He was very, very strict about those things. If they gave us food, we must eat it; we must not throw it away or feel that they were less than us. So, Grander’s groundings were very important to me. He made us understand that we had to work hard to get out of poverty. Most of our parents also believed that. He took us into his home. When I was between nine and ten, he looked at all the boys carefully and gave us direction. Every year, out of the sixteen “exhibitions,” Grander’s school would win four. Then he also had free private lessons in the afternoon for girls (who were also poor) as well as boys. Our parents would buy chicken, rice or cooking oil, or whatever, and that’s how they would pass it on in order to supplement his generosity and commitment.
At that age, Grander gave me Richard Wright’s Native Son. . .
PROUD FLESH
Wow.
ACKLYN LYNCH
. . . and the music of Paul Robeson, and the music of Duke Ellington.
PROUD FLESH
Wow.
ACKLYN LYNCH
At ten years old, I knew I was coming to the United States—not coming to the States, really, I was coming to Harlem, U.S.A., where I would find my destiny. . . 1942.
PROUD FLESH
Right.
ACKLYN LYNCH
Everybody else was going to England or Canada. My idea was that if I didn’t win an exhibition scholarship, which would mean that I would have to pay to go to high school, another friend and myself would stow away on a boat to Mobile, Alabama. We knew what had to be done and how to get from Mobile to Harlem. It is interesting because eventually I came to New York and my friend went to London; and he joined the Communist Party and became very, very important in the Communist Party in England. And he died in the hospital in one of those Fanonesque-type cases sometime in the early 1970s (1971 or 1972).
PROUD FLESH
I hear you!
ACKLYN LYNCH
Anyhow, I won an exhibition scholarship. I stayed on and played football and cricket. I was the eldest of eight children in my family. When I reached the point when I couldn’t stay much longer, I told my mother and she said, “Okay, I’ll go back to work.” She meant back to work as a nurse’s aide on the nightshift. It was seven of us at the time (one had died). I was the breadwinner. I was making $65 each month. I came to New York where I could make that in day and send money back home. She went back to work at night. I would send money back home and one-by-one get everybody abroad. I left Trinidad with $50 and stayed with a friend in Brooklyn (whom I’d met on the plane). Within in two days, I had a job; and, within a week, I had my own little place to live.
As soon as I came, I told the people I stayed with in Brooklyn (whom I didn’t know), “I want to go to Harlem.”
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
They took me to the Savoy Ballroom, and the rest is history.
PROUD FLESH
Incredible.
ACKLYN LYNCH
I met all these people, especially musicians. I walked up to them and said, “My name is ACKLYN LYNCH. I’m from Trinidad. And I’m here . . . ” Their responses were kind, generous and even engaging. I was deeply interested in the music of Mr. Ellington, Mr. Gillespie, Mr. Parker, Mr. Roach, Ms. Holiday, Ms. Vaughn and Ms. Fitzgerald.
I worked for awhile and then I came to Howard University.
PROUD FLESH
Okay.
ACKLYN LYNCH
I came to Howard in 1957. I got a job. I went to Edinburgh, Harvard, Johns Hopkins Universities: I did well academically. I stopped playing sports and worked assiduously while at Howard. I stopped playing football and cricket after my freshman year because I realized that I couldn’t study hard, work in a restaurant or department store and study for long hours. I had to deal with E. Franklin Frazier, Loren Williams, Emmett Sam Dorsey, Sterling Brown and Eugene Holmes, all of whom were radical socialist thinkers. I was also privileged to be at Howard University while the Reverend Dr. Mordecai Johnson was President. In essence, I came to Howard at a critical moment—after McCarthyism, prior to the Civil Rights Movement, but in the exciting years in which some of the best Black professors in the country were on the campus.
I went to Edinburgh in my junior year in order to study philosophy. That’s when I met Africans. That’s when I got to know about London, Paris, Rome, Athens and Algiers. That’s where I got introduced to Fanon, Césaire, Damas, Padmore, James, etc. A new world opened up to me as I traveled through the United Kingdom, Western Europe and North Africa.
PROUD FLESH
I see.
ACKLYN LYNCH
I came back here into the Civil Rights Movement. And as a senior student at Howard, I organized a model U.N. conference in the spring of 1961. I still have some of the documents kept in my garage.
PROUD FLESH
[Applause] Uh-huh!
ACKLYN LYNCH
It was the first time a historically Black university had hosted a model U.N conference. It helped Dr. James Nabrit to get a job at the U.N. after he left Howard University as President; he became one of the U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations in 1961 under the Kennedy administration.
PROUD FLESH
Who was this?
ACKLYN LYNCH
President Nabrit was a civil rights lawyer. He became President of Howard after Dr. Mordecai Johnson.
PROUD FLESH
Oh.
ACKLYN LYNCH
I mounted this major event at Howard University. Frank Savage and all the brothers and sisters who went on to do other things were involved in it. We discussed disarmament in the nuclear world. This is March of 1961. We discussed the Vietnamese question, the South African question, the Algeria question. We discussed the challenges of underdevelopment in Third World countries. . .
PROUD FLESH
Wonderful.
ACKLYN LYNCH
But at Howard I was privileged. I arrived in 1957 when the last of the great Black professors were able to guide me through the critical period between 1957 and ’61. It was a fantastic experience and it prepared me to be a serious student, a political activist and a long-distance runner.
PROUD FLESH
Okay. A remarkable experience, for sure.
ACKLYN LYNCH
The school was in turmoil between Dean Frank Snowden and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the strategies of the Civil Rights Movement and its moral implications. Kwame Ture, Michael Thelwell, Charles Cobb and Courtland Cox, all of them came around 1960. That’s the year I was graduating. They had come in as freshmen the year I was abroad and they were there when I got back. They immediately got deep into the civil rights struggle. There were other brilliant students at Howard at the time, some of whom became life-long friends: Fletcher Robinson, Billy Quinn, Sylvia Anderson, Timothy Jenkins, Mary Berry, Gayle Hansberry, Al Fraser, Ella Delegall, etc. Dr. Bernard Fall was an energizing force on the Vietnamese question and the Algeria Revolution. He was the advisor to the International Students Association in the Political Science Department.
PROUD FLESH
Nice.
ACKLYN LYNCH
When I came back to Howard, I put on all these conferences at Howard. I put on difference conferences in 1968, 1969 and 1970. So this thing with Abbey [or “A Salute to Abbey Lincoln: Celebrating 77 Years,” on September 9, 2007], I’ve been doing these kind of events ever since I’ve been here!
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
[I’ve been] putting on something. Or as Sterling Brown would say, “putting on dogs.” I feel like I just be putting on dogs all the time!
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
I was telling them yesterday, “You know, I would really like to just sit back and observe some young people, some other people [do this].” I would love to see that happen next year, so I could look on and learn from what younger people would be doing. It seems like I’ve been doing this from 1961 to the present.
PROUD FLESH
So what do you think of Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggle of Stokely Carmichael (2003), co-authored by Michael Thelwell, and the account of Kwame Ture’s early years in Trinidad, for example?
ACKLYN LYNCH
We both attended Eastern Boys School. But he was younger; he didn’t stay long; he only spent a year or two there. And he writes about it.
I’ll be quite honest with you. I don’t particularly like how Michael Thelwell approached Stokely’s early life, in that first chapter. I thought Michael was patronizing. I thought he didn’t know Trinidad. He didn’t know our culture, he didn’t know our people. And he talked about it from a distance. He talked about it almost like a tourist. He never got into the essence of the culture. But that’s very difficult for Michael to do. He’s Jamaican, but it’s not because he’s Jamaican or because he has a Jamaican sensibility. It’s only later on [in the book] when you get Stokely’s visit to Vietnam, Cuba and all these other places, that he’s really in control of that because that’s his intellectual strength. He can handle that. But in the early part, a lot was missing.
Stokely lived near to some of the most important steel bands and carnival bands in Trinidad, but it never registers in the book. Stokely went to the “Market School,” but Mr. Granderson never shows up and Mr. Granderson was renowned in the country for what he was doing, as I just told you earlier, taking poor people and moving them to a whole ’nother level of accomplishment.
PROUD FLESH
I see.
ACKLYN LYNCH
Paul Robeson came to Trinidad when I was there and I think Stokely would have been there, too. You’re talking 15,000 to 20,000 people, Black people, poor people, taking their children. My mother took all her children because Mr. Granderson said, “You all have to go and hear Paul Robeson sing.”
PROUD FLESH
Really?
ACKLYN LYNCH
You see, he came to sing for the rich people, who could afford the tickets. When he came, he said, “Well, where are the poor people?” He did two concerts for the rich folk and then he did two outdoor concerts—free of charge—for poor people. This big six-foot six tall man put his hand to his ear and sang for more than two hours at each concert. Man, it was amazing!
PROUD FLESH
Amazing.
ACKLYN LYNCH
The location: Woodford Square. People came from all over the island to hear this man.
PROUD FLESH
Where did he sing again?
ACKLYN LYNCH
Woodford Square.
PROUD FLESH
Yeah, that’s what I thought you said. . .
ACKLYN LYNCH
And that’s where Dr. Eric Williams would come to speak [regularly] later on as a result what Paul Robeson did in 1946.
PROUD FLESH
Get outta here!
ACKLYN LYNCH
That’s right. Dr. Eric Williams comes in 1952 and ’54, and does the same thing.
PROUD FLESH
That is deep, this connection.
ACKLYN LYNCH
Yeah. But Michael doesn’t get up into that at all. He doesn’t know it at all. He doesn’t seem to understand it or he didn’t do the research or it’s not of his interest. He was trying to move quickly along through the first part of [Kwame Ture’s] life.
PROUD FLESH
To SNCC.
ACKLYN LYNCH
SNCC, which is what he was comfortable with. He was not comfortable with Stokely in Trinidad.
PROUD FLESH
SNCC dominates that book way too much, the near-nine hundred pages of it. The nostalgia piece of SNCC, that is.
ACKLYN LYNCH
Which is all that Michael knew. Michael really doesn’t know Africa, although he gives himself an African name. But he doesn’t have an African sensibility. Michael has a hard time with Black women, and Black people. He’s one of those fair-skinned Jamaicans who believe in the privilege of being “fair” and “bright.” He would “ground” with his “brothers,” but not like Walter Rodney. He would “ground” with them as an articulation of privilege, not as somebody who really is part of them. Kwame had that better than he had it; and, therefore, it shows up in the book. [Michael] writes well. He’s a brilliant writer.
PROUD FLESH
The packaging of the book is also ironic because they took Kwame Ture back to “Stokely Carmichael”—in the very title: Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (“Kwame Ture” is parenthetical)—while you still get Michael’s name underneath it with his new African name included out front: “. . . with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell.”
ACKLYN LYNCH
Right.
PROUD FLESH
Now, you’ve taught at a lot of colleges and universities.
ACKLYN LYNCH
Yes, all over the blasted place!
PROUD FLESH
All over the blasted place! Can you just give us an itinerary, looking back?
ACKLYN LYNCH
Howard. Federal City College (FCC), which is now UDC or University of the District of Columbia. Michigan. Vassar. UMASS-Amherst. Medgar Evers. UMBC (University of Maryland, Baltimore County). And Temple.
PROUD FLESH
Temple?
ACKLYN LYNCH
Yeah, I taught at Temple for a year.
PROUD FLESH
So this would all be from what year to when, exactly?
ACKLYN LYNCH
I started teaching in 1967 and I finished five years ago in 2002. The Howard experience was unique.
PROUD FLESH
This is what I want to hear.
ACKLYN LYNCH
I was a different kind of professor. I walked in there, I had all that culture from New York under my belt. I had a New York dress style. I was a real “pimp.” My shit was clean, I was like Duke Ellington, Max Roach, Miles Davis—wrapped up tight!
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
And then I did classes that nobody had ever done: “Conversations in Blackness.” It was a class from three to four o’clock in the library, Monday/Wednesday/Friday. Next thing you know, on Friday, from three o’clock till eight o’clock [it went]; and students would leave other classes [to come].
PROUD FLESH
Whoa!
ACKLYN LYNCH
It’d be packed, packed, I mean packed. People sitting all over the corridors. The Dean would come, “This is not pedagogy. We’re going to destroy the class.” And students would say, “Hell, no. You ain’t doing that.” And I would bring people in, including Kwame Ture. I’d bring in preachers, pimps, bankers, scientists, physicists, artists, doctors, lawyers, all kinds of people. That’d also help me to have the vision for the “Towards a Black University” conference,” this class on a Friday night at Howard where historically students don’t go to class after one o’clock! They came every Friday; it was a “happening,” but a remarkable learning experience.
PROUD FLESH
Right.
ACKLYN LYNCH
They stayed there till eight or nine o’clock at night. Some of them used to follow me home afterwards. I was living in a little room. They’d follow me home at night and I’d go and I’d cook and we’d continue talking. And then I’d put ’em in a taxi and say, “Y’all gotta go home. I’m tired!” It was a hell of a class.
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
Then the next semester, I had another class, a research class. My classes were getting bigger and bigger. I formed cells. I put six students in each cell. Each student had to go to a part of Washington, D.C., and do all the research. They had six or ten blocks. They had to do demographic-geopolitical analysis. They had to come and tell me everything: who lived in that block, how the people lived, incomes, churches, liquor stores, every damn thing. Then one person from that block they would select to come in and talk. The Dean was furious.
PROUD FLESH
Great!
ACKLYN LYNCH
In the meantime, we’re reading. We’re reading Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, all of Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, E. Franklin Frazier, Carter Woodson, etc.
PROUD FLESH
All of W.E.B. DuBois, not just The Souls of Black Folk like these other Negro academics today.
ACKLYN LYNCH
No, no. My god, we got deep into Black Reconstruction, Dusk of Dawn . . . You should see my reading list—awesome.
I also took students to New Jersey for two weeks, to go and work with Amiri Baraka for Kenneth Gibson, when Gibson was running to become the first Black mayor of Newark. All the university went mad. Ed Love joined us and played a major role in organizing the campaign.
PROUD FLESH
I can see it!
ACKLYN LYNCH
I mean, the parents, the university said, “Fire this guy, he’s a communist!”
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
And then the women professors started saying I was sleeping with the girls, the sisters and so on.
But Ed Love and myself took students to work in Newark and then we went to Alabama—to work to support the run against [George] Wallace. That got worse. The Black schools did not take us in. One white boy we thought was an agent came in and tried to share drugs with people; and I put his ass out. The guy running against Wallace was a dentist. We worked hard for his campaign and returned to D.C. safely. There were sixty-five of us. Nobody got hurt. That was another time they said [at Howard], “You got to go.” That was also the period too that we decided that the “Towards a Black University” conference had to come about.
I got fired five times at Howard.
PROUD FLESH
Five times.
ACKLYN LYNCH
This was just one of them. They students said, “No.” The brought some chains. We had big rallies outside of Douglass Hall: “Brother Lynch can’t go.” They put the chains down on Dean Frank Snowden’s desk and declared that “slavery was over.”
We also had good theater. We had “Towards a Black University,” “Pan-Africanism: Towards a New Definition.” We did some interesting things. I brought Bernice Reagon here, when they were the Harambee Singers; Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln; Randy Weston; Archie Shepp; Sun Ra; Yusef Latif; I brought all these people to Howard when I was there—with a little bit of money.
That’s why Haile Gerima and all of them came; and those who came to join the struggle were Jeff Donaldson, Ed Love, Donald Byrd, Skunder Boghossian, Paul Carter Harrison, etc. We were all there. Nation House was built by students and the African-centered school became a reality.
PROUD FLESH
So the “Towards a Black University” idea grew out of all this?
ACKLYN LYNCH
It grew out of all that activity that I was putting together.
We organized a group called Ujamaa. Ujamaa included Q.T. Jackson, Adrian Manns, Ewart Brown, John Holton, Norman Reid, Akili Ron Anderson and Paula Giddings. Ujamaa ran in the school election; and we won so that Ujamaa had access to the funds and they were able to sponsor these ideas that I had. They put up the money and we did the work. It was the only way we could have done it because the university did not. The university closed down buildings; they insulted us; they wouldn’t give us the auditoriums and all kinds of stuff.
PROUD FLESH
Really?! The so-called “capstone of Negro education,” huh?
ACKLYN LYNCH
They would say yes in the beginning; and then they would say no afterwards; and then we’d have to fight with them. That’s why the school closed down, because of all that tension.
I went to hear Dr. James Comer at Howard Medical School last week. They had invited him and they made big speeches—celebrities and deans and everybody came out and so on. Afterwards, in the question and answer period, after he talked, I said, “You know, this is very, very funny. But in 1968 I tried to bring James Comer here for ‘Towards a Black University.’ He was one of the speakers. He was supposed to speak at the Medical School and y’all locked him out. We wanted him to speak on Fanon’s work; and y’all locked him out. Here you all are celebrating him now that he’s sixty-something years old.” I got up and the whole place went like, “Oh, shit.”
PROUD FLESH
Wow.
ACKLYN LYNCH
So life is very funny.
PROUD FLESH
You also brought Walter Rodney and Audre Lorde to speak at certain points, correct?
ACKLYN LYNCH
Also Sonia Sanchez, Sarah Fabio, Pharoah Saunders, Barbara Ann Teer, and Larry Neal. I first brought Rodney to Howard. I also brought him to different places, wherever I went: Amherst, Medgar Evers and Michigan. I brought Sylvia Wynter to different places: UMASS-Amherst, UMBC, Michigan. I brought C.L.R. James everywhere I went. These were exciting times. We also brought brothers from Attica, Soledad, San Quentin, etc., to speak to us. And we invited artists from Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa.
When I went up to UMASS, for example, we also did a tribute to Richard Wright, a tribute to Paul Robeson, a tribute to C.L.R. James, in which we’d study all their works. We did a conference on China and Africa in 1974. We brought Chinese professors in and Rodney was at that; he was one of the speakers.
PROUD FLESH
Really? Amazing.
ACKLYN LYNCH
Yes, because he had come in contact with the Chinese in Tanzania. We did all those types of things. We had our Duke Ellington night, our Stevie Wonder night, Donnie Hathaway night. We took over the radio station for x-number of hours. We thought a revolution was going on there. All of the brothers who got out of Soledad and Attica [Prisons], we brought them there and they stayed there for awhile just before they went over the border to Canada and went to Africa or wherever they went. People thought it was a whole revolution with all of them—Max, Archie and all them. But Michael [Thelwell] and them destroyed that; they are counter-revolutionary people.
PROUD FLESH
Can you fill us in from scratch and tell us how you got to UMASS-Amherst?
ACKLYN LYNCH
By the time I got back to Howard in 1966, SNCC (which had been very cliquish) was going through the Black Power thing. I was very clear on that, and teaching that. Marion Barry got here and they were going to turn D.C. into “the Black city.” So I got deep into that. I became the person at Howard who was connected with that Black movement.
In July 1968, I gave a series of four lectures on Frantz Fanon at Gaston Neal and Baba Lumumba’s New School of Social Research, located on 14th Street near U Street in D.C. It was packed every night in the month of July. Nobody had ever done this before in the community.
PROUD FLESH
He was just translated!
ACKLYN LYNCH
All of this turmoil is taking place. Howard is firing people left and right. But the thing is mushrooming. In two years, the two major conferences—which had three thousand people at them; the best scholars; the best poets; the best writers; the best musicians. They got rid of me at Howard and I was asked to come head up the program at Michigan.
So I go up to Michigan. By that time I was married and Martha was pregnant. She was living and working in D.C. I got an apartment in Ann Arbor and I returned to D.C. on weekends. I get up there and we’re working and we’re working and we’re working. But, you know, when you’re working a lot and you ain’t getting nothing done, you should understand that something is wrong.
PROUD FLESH
Yeah.
ACKLYN LYNCH
There was this whole set from Detroit there before me. They did a number of very evil things. They said that I was married to a white woman in D.C. . .
PROUD FLESH
Hilarious!
ACKLYN LYNCH
. . . and that I was fucking the sisters [there], which was not true: one, I was not married to no white woman in D.C.; and, two, I wasn’t with none of the sisters there—they were working with me. I’m glad that I never got into that, because if I did, they would’ve lynched me.
I expressed my disagreement with these drugs that had been moving in from Detroit. I didn’t know much about it. I was just getting news from concerned people. But I was very naïve about this issue at that time, 1969 to 1971. However, Marvin Gaye kept crying “What’s Goin’ On” and “Make Me Wanna Holler.” It was COINTELPRO time, not “Nation Time.” We had just experienced the tragedy with Bunchy Carter at UCLA. The air was thick with violence and venom, orchestrated by COINTELPRO. I would get run out of the University of Michigan by hardliners who labeled me as an agent coming from D.C. and working for “the Man.”
I had a series of lectures there: I brought Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party. I brought [Minister Louis] Farrakhan (I brought Farrakhan everywhere I went, every school I taught at because I felt the Nation was important).
But word started getting out, all kinds of negative things about me. Then I became “the Man.” ’Cause I’m coming from Washington, and I married to a “white” woman: therefore, I had to be “the Man,” and I’m going back to Washington every two weeks.
PROUD FLESH
Right, right.
ACKLYN LYNCH
So I gotta be taking back all this data to Washington.
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
So they called a meeting which they were going to execute me. And an old Black woman in the community objected and intervened. The next morning her brother came and told me, “You better get out of town. This is what the deal is, to take you out.”
PROUD FLESH
Okay.
ACKLYN LYNCH
I said, “I’m outta here.” I went to Africa on my own just to get peace. I went to East Africa and spent some time in East Africa and then I come back. I got a job at Vassar College. I’m teaching part-time at Vassar. I’m teaching part-time at FCC [in D.C.]. The students who had known about what I’d done in the “Towards a Black University” conference, Pan-Africanism, the things that I’d written on prisons and the work that I’d done in prisons, they invited me to speak up at [UMASS] Amherst. So I went to give a lecture. I go up there and Michael Thelwell is the “King.” He knows me and he greets me in his very regal way—you know . . .
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
I gave this talk which blew everybody away. I’m talking about global politics but I’m also talking about prisons. Now I know this thing. I got George [Jackson] under my belt. I got the “Towards a Black University” conference under my belt. I got Walter [Rodney] under my belt. I got Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James under my belt. I understand our culture. So I could talk on anything. Everybody up there said, “Well, we want him to come up here.” That’s how I got offered the job. Martha was pregnant at the time. So we move up there, bought a small house.
While I was there, we did a lot of great things: the concerts, the cultural events. We brought people from Senegal and New York, dance companies and theater companies. We put on great conferences on music—seven days of everybody, you know, Dizzy Gillepsie, Papa Joe Jones, Duke Ellington and Max Roach, everybody was there. They came through. We did art exhibitions. We had all kinds of singers. Bill Hassan, Gloria Joseph, Zala Highsmith-Taylor, Andrea McLaughlin, Paul Chandler, Joe Sam and Rosa Blanco were the soldiers on the battlefield. We worked around the clock. We studied hard with Simon Gouverneur, Sonia Sanchez, Bob Marquez, Pedro Alcantara, Rudy McCoy, etc.
PROUD FLESH
So this was the Black Studies department that you were in?
ACKLYN LYNCH
The Black Studies department. Mike Thelwell was the Chair. It included scholars like John Bracey, Johnnetta Cole, Chet Davis, Julius Lester, Playthell Benjamin, and Esther Terry. The Black Studies department split in two after the second or third year. It was Michael Thelwell, the administration and faculty on one side and then the students, Bill Hassan and myself on the other side. We had different views on education and Black culture. We were radical Black or Third World nationalists and they remained the traditional civil rights integrationists.
When I brought Max, Archie Shepp, Paul Carter Harrison, Nelson Stevens, Diana Ramos, Ed Love, etc., this had a counterbalancing effect on the department’s stature. The war started. They eventually got rid of me. We just packed up and came home [to Washington, D.C.]. I bought this house. Martha came and lived for a year, first in 1974. I spent a year traveling back and forth. Then, in 1976, I was back here [in D.C.].
PROUD FLESH
It was you who brought in Max Roach and Archie Shepp, yourself, when you were in Amherst?
ACKLYN LYNCH
Yes, I had this idea that Amherst was a great location not too far from New York. I’d seen the responses to the conferences and cultural events which we were mounting. I believed that we could find a space there for musicians where they could come and write their own music. If they were sick, they could get health care; they could get legal advice (because I also brought lawyers and doctors who had committed themselves to come up there and work, and we would build these things): I had a whole plan. It was cross-cultural in design: painting, theater, dance, music, etc. Once the artist began creating their work from that center, then they could go back on the road. These people in Black Studies didn’t want that. They just destroyed it. They did not want to hear that. They wanted individual performers, like a Duke Ellington, to come up, play and leave so they ain’t too much damage done.
PROUD FLESH
Right. This kind of thing is very familiar these days especially.
ACKLYN LYNCH
I wanted to have a holistic approach up inside these mountains, this valley. There were five schools in the valley and I had organized a group called the Third World Alliance for the whole valley, which was an alliance between Hispanic students and Black students. When we took over the radio station, we got forty percent of the time; the Hispanics got fifteen percent of the time; and the white boys kept forty-five percent of the time. We became the popular energy. That’s how that Amherst thing was. But there were great differences between us in terms of personalities and ideas.
Mike and them did not like me because they always felt threatened by just my presence, or the things that I would say, or even the people that I would bring and the events that I would put on; and since we left they’ve done nothing because they wanted to be do-nothing people. They never had any confidence in the lumpen class, or in poor people, as much they were in SNCC and all that. The never had any respect or love for poor people. They still don’t. They see themselves as “superior intellects.” I couldn’t live like that. They argued that I was a disrupted force and not a team player. “Whose team,” I asked, “the one which worships white-supremacy in intellectual and cultural circles?” I couldn’t hang, I couldn’t survive; I returned to Washington with my wife and two children.
PROUD FLESH
Okay, so when you came back to here to live permanently in 1976, your next teaching gig was where?
ACKLYN LYNCH
I went UMBC [University of Maryland, Baltimore County] in 1979. I didn’t get a job for three years. Nobody would hire me. I was blacklisted. Nobody would hire me. Then, Willie Lamousé-Smith called me one day and said, “Look, we have a vacancy at UMBC. I heard a lot about you. I don’t know who you are. But I heard a lot about you. Would you consider coming to work for us?” So I said, “Before I would do that, let me tell you want my track record is, and who I am.”
PROUD FLESH
Right.
ACKLYN LYNCH
Because I’m going to be a problem for you . . .
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
. . . and I’m going to make some demands, and so. . . . He says, “Well, look, I don’t care. We need somebody. . . ” I did not know that he had lost three professors and wanted me to fill the spot for three professors.
PROUD FLESH
Damn.
ACKLYN LYNCH
In other words, I was going to teach political science; I was going to teach Caribbean Studies; and I was going to teach literature.
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter] Ridiculous.
ACKLYN LYNCH
And then the next semester I was going to teach economics; I was going to teach Caribbean history; and then philosophy.
And I stayed there for more than twenty-five years.
What he did is he very quickly made sure that he hooked up me and got tenure. He could have lost me. He did everything. He gave me the amount of money I asked for. I asked for $20,000. He gave me $20,000, what I wanted. After that, I never asked for money again. Whatever they gave me, they gave me. But then I was able to organize students and get resources for them, help them win elections.
PROUD FLESH
Now is this the time in which you did a “Black Women and Jazz” event, or something to that effect?
ACKLYN LYNCH
It was called “Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues.” Toni Cade Bambara, Sonia Sanchez and Ruby Dee. Abbey [Lincoln] was going to be the fourth woman [featured in this annual event] . . .
PROUD FLESH
Ohhhhhh.
ACKLYN LYNCH
. . . when they closed it down.
So this latest event [“A Tribute to Abbey Lincoln”] is an attempt to repair that damage.
PROUD FLESH
Okay, cool. So Nightmare Overhanging Darkly. How did you come to write and publish this book? That’s the first part of this question. And, secondly, what do you think when you look back today and read this same book published in 1992?
ACKLYN LYNCH
I had written a lot of essays. I got hooked into Fanon’s essay-writing. Actually, that was the person whose notion of writing essays I thought was cool. That’s something I still like to do. And Haki [Madhubuti] got after me. I would be writing essays, but I wouldn’t be doing anything with them. I’d be distributing them myself to friends. He got after me and said, “Why don’t we publish these essays? I have all these essays from you. Other people have all these essays from you. Let’s see if we can find some coherence, some logic.” Therefore, we found about four of them. We had to add on two that would kind of close it out. The last two [or final section]—“At the Dawn of Another Day.”
PROUD FLESH
Nice.
ACKLYN LYNCH
That was written at the time. He said, “Well, why don’t we do that?” So Haki was really the person who pushed me to do that. I was not (and I am still not) a big person who is concerned about writing as opposed to getting things done.
For example, this was a fight in Amherst, Massachusetts, I would get invited to go to McGill University to give a lecture; and I would make a deal with McGill and say, “Look, if you give me a bus, and you find places for forty students to sleep, I will bring forty students up on this bus and you don’t have to pay me.” That used to happen! We used to go on up because these students had never left the United States and had never been to Canada or to McGill. When they returned, they would be talking about this so much that Mike Thelwell and them would get mad . . . like, “Who hell does he think he is?”
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
“That’s ridiculous.” “It’ll create a precedent.”
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter] Academics not grabbing money—for themselves, how horrible!
ACKLYN LYNCH
In other words, they want to get their $5,000 [honorarium or speaking fee] and that’s it.
PROUD FLESH
Sure enough.
ACKLYN LYNCH
They don’t want any precedent like that, you know, “Acklyn does this, why can’t you all?” That as simple as it was created a big, big fight. Nearly everything I did had to be “wrong.”
The “Tribute to Sterling Brown,” “Tribute to Paul Robeson,” “Tribute to Margaret Walker,” “Tribute to Richard Wright”—in which we studied all their books—those things were supposedly “wrong.”
But when I got to UMBC, I did a lot of the same things but with a different mood. So I did “Revolutionary Black Writers,” and Sylvia Wynter was one of the people I brought. [Kamau] Brathwaite was one of the people I brought. Jimmy Baldwin, I think, was one of the people I brought. Toni Cade Bambara was one of the people I brought.
Then I did something else and I brought Kwame Ture, C.L.R. James and James Turner. I would do these things in groups (of four, five and so on).
That’s UMBC. So they didn’t bother me. At UMBC, I didn’t have to contend with people like Mike Thelwell with whom I’m competing. It was a different problematic and a different space to live in.
PROUD FLESH
Okay.
ACKLYN LYNCH
That’s why I stayed there so long, and I got tenure.
And then Freeman Hrabowski came and I believed he was going to make a difference. But he made a very selfish difference, for the “bright” students, sacrificing those not labeled “bright” and those who came from Cherry Hill or whatever. He did well as an individual in terms of marketing himself and the school, etc. But he sacrificed the Africana Studies Department for the Meyerhoff Scholars and the average Black student for the Asian students in science and technology. It was a bold decision which we must examine critically. How do you face the twenty-first century as “globalization” redefines success and excellence without a soul? Freeman is a fine example of the contradictions we face as we move up the ladder in academia and “corporate America.”
PROUD FLESH
Okay. Before, I read Nightmare Overhanging Darkly in pieces. I read it like, “Oh, I’m gonna read this part, for this reason.” Or, I see the part with Archie Shepp or the blueprint for a whole new education system, etc. But in preparing for this interview, I read it straight, from cover to cover, and that’s when I noticed that this may be the only book today in existence that seriously engages or pivots around the ideas of George Jackson from beginning to end.
ACKLYN LYNCH
And Malcolm. I think Haki thinks that way, too.
PROUD FLESH
Yes, Malcolm.
I see all of that there. But, elsewhere, there’s nothing on George Jackson out there in book form at all. There’s a lot of worthless stuff on Malcolm. So to see this book and to see that basic orientation, becoming circular, over and over again, it was really striking.
Now, we asked Elaine Brown a question similar to this one after reading her The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America, which is full of Fanonian formulations. She said it was just second-nature, after all that Black Panther Party political education. When you were doing the stuff for Nightmare Overhanging Darkly, you had the title of course—which is taken from Comrade George’s Soledad Brother, but did you see it as a George Jackson kind of project?
ACKLYN LYNCH
I was very disturbed that here we are coming out of Attica, here we are coming out of Soledad, here we are coming into a period in which loads of brothers are going to be imprisoned, whether they are Black, Hispanic or Native American: I saw the prison-industrial complex growing; and, therefore, I felt that I had to really look at what George was saying closely about this phenomenon.
I saw a distancing from the lumpen-proletarian class and I think that George is the ultimate lumpen-proletariat. I was very worried that the Communist Party here in the U.S.A also abandoned the lumpen class and I didn’t want George as a representative of the lumpen to be abandoned again. So I consciously wrote about him or introduced him into my work.
I actually taught a class on George too, you know, in Amherst.
PROUD FLESH
Oh, yeah?
ACKLYN LYNCH
Oh, yeah. And I taught a class on prison writing. You see, I’ve always taken chances and taught classes with “funny” kind of names.
PROUD FLESH
Yeah! [Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
I taught a class at UMBC called “Knowledge and Responsibility.” It was packed.
And I was teaching in prison while I was doing that piece on George.
PROUD FLESH
Perfect.
ACKLYN LYNCH
I was teaching in prison in Massachusetts and then Attica, New York.
I saw very clearly.
We had a big rally up there for Attica and I spoke: I had to come to battle with some of the white boys who wanted to claim it, you know? I refused to let them claim it. We had to define it in different ways in the battleground. That’s what Michael and them didn’t like about me, that I would confront these white boys for their bullshit, while they would just do the opposite and comfort them and make these white boys feel . . . like Johnnetta Cole’s husband and all of them. They didn’t know shit. They didn’t know nothing! They were poor teachers. They were not intellectuals—just jokers, newspaper people, journalists.
So, yes, I was conscious of it and I do believe that George Jackson is one of the major intellectuals of the twentieth century, in any society. And it’s interesting that he has never been tainted by university life.
PROUD FLESH
Yes, indeed.
ACKLYN LYNCH
But he was able to draw so much knowledge, not only organically (from his people’s experiences, from his family’s experiences) but from the books that he read so seriously.
PROUD FLESH
And you met with his mother?!
ACKLYN LYNCH
I met with his mother. I gave her a painting.
PROUD FLESH
What was that like?
ACKLYN LYNCH
She was very small, small like me, about my complexion—a small woman, not a big, big physical woman. I spent a day with her. She was very nice, “Acklyn, it was so nice for you to come.” And she was very conscious of the fact that I had been writing about George.
PROUD FLESH
Oh?
ACKLYN LYNCH
Because every time I wrote, I sent one of the essays to her. So although she had never met me, when she first met me, she said, “I’m so glad to meet you because you’ve been sending this stuff to me,” in Pasadena, California. “And I’d been reading.” She felt very strongly that I had captured her son’s spirit. And she told me how important it was to engage him . . .
PROUD FLESH
Yes.
ACKLYN LYNCH
. . . and how she grew, as a result of those two boys . . .
PROUD FLESH
Right.
ACKLYN LYNCH
. . . and the things that they did. Even though it was painful, she herself grew. So I spent a day with her once, like six hours; and then I went back another time and spent another two or three hours with her. Those are the two occasions I saw her. I gave her a painting and I told her that this is what I’ve been doing; that these are the friends I’ve met; and that I’ve talked about George all over Latin America. He was big in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and these places where I talked about him and people knew about him . . . Argentina.
PROUD FLESH
Wonderful.
ACKLYN LYNCH
They knew about George Jackson. He was well respected. So I told her about that.
PROUD FLESH
And she appreciated it.
ACKLYN LYNCH
She appreciated it—that I was helping to keep her son’s name alive. For me, George is very important.
PROUD FLESH
Didn’t you say that you also had lunch or dinner or something with Frantz Fanon’s wife, Josie?
ACKLYN LYNCH
Yes. I had dinner with Fanon’s wife and that’s how I found out about Fanon’s death, which surprised me a bit: it happened right here around Washington. But she was here. I was invited and I went. We sat down and talked. It was very useful, very good. Fanon had difficulty with his children, who couldn’t understand his life and what he was doing, his commitment. I had that opportunity to talk to her, to listen to her and her story. I remember it very, very well.
PROUD FLESH
Okay.
ACKLYN LYNCH
I might have that invitation around her still, because I keep all that kind of paperwork.
PROUD FLESH
Where was this dinner held?
ACKLYN LYNCH
It was at a hotel restaurant. I don’t recall who organized it. But I got a call from her and she asked if I would like to come.
PROUD FLESH
Really?
ACKLYN LYNCH
She got my number from somebody else.
PROUD FLESH
Okay.
ACKLYN LYNCH
That was when I was teaching at Howard.
PROUD FLESH
This was after he had just died?
ACKLYN LYNCH
He died in. . .
PROUD FLESH
1961.
ACKLYN LYNCH
Right, but this was 1967.
PROUD FLESH
Oh.
ACKLYN LYNCH
Some years later. Not right after.
PROUD FLESH
This is interesting because she never talked to many people publicly him.
ACKLYN LYNCH
No, not at all. The sense I got from her was that she never felt accepted. In other words, if Fanon’s revolutionary vision and world were here, the people who became disciples of Fanon didn’t fit her into it; they never saw the role she might have played in his development. My explanation of that is the same problematic of Richard Wright, Chester Himes, George Padmore, C.L.R. James, etc., who had white wives who were themselves dominant in their lives. There was a feeling in the national community that she would have been one of the same. People never got open to her or trusted her; and she in turn did not respect or trust them.
PROUD FLESH
Okay.
ACKLYN LYNCH
One of the things that we must remember, and it hit me when it happened in Michigan, is that a radical activist could easily be accused of being an “agent.”
PROUD FLESH
Easily, yeah.
ACKLYN LYNCH
It happened to Kwame Ture, Baraka, not to mention [Ron] Karenga and Eldridge [Cleaver]. I mean, the list goes on.
Very, very quickly and easily it could get out into the public sphere that you’re an “agent” or that you’re “working for the Man.” And that put’s you in a very insecure place, as here you are working against the Man. You are very vulnerable in those circumstances.
So that’s a reality we have to work out in the 21st century. Part of the problem is that we don’t have the information. We function a lot without information. We’ve never developed nationally or internationally an intelligence-gathering expertise for ourselves, like the Israelis probably saw it was necessary to do after World War II, or the Cubans after the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
PROUD FLESH
This is true.
ACKLYN LYNCH
We have never done it. So we go on hearsay and gossip rather than on the concrete intelligence that we could pass on in order to protect people’s interests. I got to understand that and often felt vulnerable to it.
PROUD FLESH
So let’s talk about another kind of dynamic—the way you use your home. It’s this great, longstanding community center, both culturally and politically speaking. It’s like what Erna Brodber would call “Blackspace.” When did that begin, here in your home, and how did you conceive it?
ACKLYN LYNCH
I would say it began when I was teaching at Howard. Even though I lived in a little room, it had posters; it had a little bed, but it had all the posters of the time, of the ’60s; it had music; and it always had a gathering of people—students or friends. I always had a gathering. I was always cooking or bringing people together. Now it’s really on a larger scale. But it was there, it was then.
I’d even go back to Trinidad—when I was eighteen or nineteen, I had organized a group of people and we used to rent a space and we would play Jazz. So we had a Jazz club in Trinidad of 1942-1946. We played Jazz. We played Robeson’s music. We’d talk and get together. So C.L.R. talks about it in more concrete terms when he said that he belonged to a club that was culturally reading and writing and doing poetry and those kinds of things. We weren’t into the poetry. We were reading, and writing, but we were listening to the music. We knew Bird, Dizzy, Max and Miles and Sarah, Billie and Dinah.
PROUD FLESH
Uh-huh.
ACKLYN LYNCH
I belonged to that and it was all built around cooking food and meeting and talking. So when I got here [to D.C.], it wasn’t hard to do it. Now it’s just elevated—to point of the Abbey and Randy [Weston] events or “Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues” or a major conference like “Towards the Black University” where 3,500 people show up. That’s a lot of people. We’re trying to decide now what we’re going to do since we can only hold but so many people this year for Abbey’s event; and the word is out. I’m getting telephone calls all the time, “Hey, man, I’m coming, man, keep a ticket for me.” And people from California, “I bought my ticket already, and I’ll stay at a hotel.”
PROUD FLESH
Wow.
ACKLYN LYNCH
So I’ve always had this proclivity to do these kinds of things. When I was a soccer player at home, I was the captain of a team one year; and my team won every single trophy in the island that we competed for. We really did it. Then the next year, the guys got rid of me. They had a coup. They put somebody in because they said they didn’t have fun!
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
I made them train every day. They couldn’t go to clubs the night before a game. They couldn’t hang out at no prostitute houses.
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
I was like a little dictator, so the guys had a coup; they got a new captain and said they would rather lose and have a good time. That’s when I knew I was coming to America. That’s when I knew that the way I was seeing the world was not consistent with my boys who I was running with. They didn’t want to hear that shit!
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter] This also set the stage for you to go on the road later as a manager of Max Roach, right?
ACKLYN LYNCH
Yes, and with Dizzy and Archie Shepp and all of them.
One of the things that has to be dealt with is this feeling of being a stranger at home, when I go back, and up here, even among African-Americans. So I wonder if that has been an asset for me and if it keeps me driving. I’m more attached to our people than a passport or birth certificate or a visa. My concern is about the people that I represent. Even for these people that I represent, that’s something hard to understand. I end up a lot of times being a stranger among my own people.
PROUD FLESH
A lot of us feel that way.
ACKLYN LYNCH
They love you. They appreciate what you’ve done. But in essence they put you in a little corner and they label you, where you are. I think that affects a lot of us and it affects our work: Abbey’s work, Sylvia Wynter’s work and Toni Cade Bambara’s work was affected by that because theses sisters are saddened at the thought that they are doing such incredible work and saying such incredible things but ain’t nobody listening or caring. We care about Beyonce! You can’t go nowhere with Beyonce!
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter] You know that’s right.
ACKLYN LYNCH
And when you work at a university teaching, you have a body of knowledge that you want to teach and have to teach, but you know that this body of knowledge is certainly not accommodating to the student body—only a few. Therefore you have to know how to phrase it and you have got to find other means of generosity or other opportunities to have discussions with these students who don’t agree with you and will never agree with you and will report you to the administration.
PROUD FLESH
Yes.
ACKLYN LYNCH
They will quickly run to the “authorities” and say things that are not even true, or what you said, which is what brought me to making tapes.
PROUD FLESH
Oh! That’s what did it! I see you record everything, every conversation, lecture or talk that I’ve ever witnessed!
ACKLYN LYNCH
So I can say, “Let’s go back and listen to the tapes. That’s not what I said. That’s not what I said.”
PROUD FLESH
Okay!
ACKLYN LYNCH
I’m very conscious of that, of how people misinterpret out of their own anger or out of their own lack of understanding of what it is that you are saying.
The other thing is the extent to which universities are $50,000 a year now and there’s this hustle to find money to go school. Universities are soulless institutions.
PROUD FLESH
I heard that.
ACKLYN LYNCH
And institutions that only provide work for a certain bureaucratic class and provide money and resources for an administrative, top-heavy faculty class. They don’t care, they don’t have a clue about education or the soul of the person sitting in the room. So when you come along and say, “I really want to do something with your soul. I want you to think,” you become a stranger.
PROUD FLESH
You do.
ACKLYN LYNCH
That’s why toward the end I just left. Everybody said, “Why don’t you stay on, you can get paid and. . . ?” You know, I didn’t have no money when I left. And I said, “I can’t do this anymore. It doesn’t make sense, walking in here day after day. . . ” And I felt that I was somehow contributing to this decadent situation, this tragic situation, of impotence. That was my struggle towards the end, especially after they banned “Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues.” They just took that off the map, [along with] a number of things. I felt I was really irrelevant because my ideas are not sustainable here.
PROUD FLESH
To return for a second, quickly, a question about C.L.R. Your relationship with him, was it D.C. based?
ACKLYN LYNCH
Yes. I knew about C.L.R. in Trinidad, of course. Everybody growing up like myself would know about this man. Plus, he was in Maple, the club that I played cricket with. So he writes about Maple. C.L.R. was always legendary to me before I knew him. He had a legendary face for my generation. He doesn’t enjoy the same thing now: I only think twenty people under twenty years old know who C.L.R. is in Trinidad and Tobago. He was legendary and it was a question of when I was going to meet this man.
I went looking for him in 1960 in Edinburgh but I didn’t see him. But I kept reading his stuff. When he came here in the ’60s, I was ready for him; I became one of the followers. The great thing about C.L.R. for me was C.L.R. was a brilliant and clear and masterful thinker, but C.L.R. never tried to indoctrinate us. I’ve always found that absolutely interesting. He never said, “Follow my path.” He never tried to say, “Become a socialist,” “Become a communist.” He just laid the arguments out: socialism, capitalism, communism, corruption, leadership, vision. . . . We looked at the literature carefully. He was just brilliant beyond comparison. But he was not propagandistic. Although he spent a lot of time talking about his experiences on the Left, which he couldn’t help but do, he didn’t try to persuade you to become part of the Left. I thought that was very interesting, and I liked him for that.
He read extensively and passed on all of his knowledge (and organizing skills). They’re model teachers for me, Mr. Granderson and C.L.R. They passed on the information from their reading. He [C.L.R.] too had students come to his home. I was one of them. He came to my house several times, incidentally. When I was supposed to get tenure, at UMBC, he wrote a letter for me.
PROUD FLESH
Oh, yeah?
ACKLYN LYNCH
He said something that knocked me out, and that I didn’t know. This was in the 1980s, the early ’80s. He said, “When I want to know some things about contemporary culture”—Jazz and paintings and art and books and so on, “I turn to ACKLYN LYNCH. I could go to his home and sit down and talk to him and listen. He helps me to understand these things that I need to know.” So somewhere on the way there was a respect. And then he talks about the respect he had for the relationship I had with [my son] Jair. I went to all his lectures, taped them and listened to them over and over again. He had a great impact on me. It was all about reciprocity.
PROUD FLESH
Okay.
ACKLYN LYNCH
I think he’s the most brilliant writer, just as I think Malcolm was the most brilliant speaker. I think C.L.R. and Dubois and George Jackson are brilliant writers; they could write, really write. They know how to use the language. James Baldwin should be included here—they know how to use that pen. But when it comes to speaking, Malcolm is head and shoulders over all of them.
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter] I know what you mean! We don’t even really have the tools to articulate what he does with that voice, the mouthpiece of his mind.
ACKLYN LYNCH
The logic, the tonalities, the rhythms, the clarity of the ideas, the sharpness of the line—Malcolm was a rhetorical genius; he was Bird and Trane.
PROUD FLESH
And the effect, where writers often come up short.
ACKLYN LYNCH
Malcolm was brilliant. So there are differences. But C.L.R. could write. And C.L.R. could teach. And C.L.R. knows what to do in twenty minutes; what to do in ten minutes; what to do in three minutes; what to do in one hour; what to do in two hours. He is the best person who measures time for when he’s speaking. When he measures time, he can come in right on the dot. Man, that’s just incredible. He knows how to answer questions, precisely and succinctly. Masterful, it’s a methodology that he had. It could be his training in the Communist Party. Or the group he had in Long Island . . .
PROUD FLESH
The Johnson-Forest Tendency?
ACKLYN LYNCH
The Johnson-Forest Tendency. It could be that set of training, in terms of his development. We had a bond because I came later than him in Maple and went through the same journey; therefore, when we met, we had a lot of things that we could talk about in common, about the Caribbean, which was useful to us. He came to my house on Geranium Street quite often.
PROUD FLESH
Alright. The general theme of this issue of our journal is “ResistanceS.” The first time I met you was at Haile Gerima’s store, the Sankofa store. I was coming to be part of a Hip-Hop forum. You came, but you had just recently given a talk there yourself, a talk on Jazz, which everyone was still raving about. It was so popular that you were scheduled to come back and deliver second part (“The Drum as a Locus of Resistance”). So could you give us an abstract of what you wanted to do with this talk, this topic, this title, and resistance?
ACKLYN LYNCH
The first thing is that once we assume or decide and recognize that music is the first sound, the first commentary in the eco-system—and then the word comes after, dance comes after, this means that music is for us, for Black people in particular, is a narration of experience. “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.” You can’t get around that.
PROUD FLESH
Right! [Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
That’s the narrative. It’s awesome. And therefore, it is not only something that you sing that is also a poem, it’s also a dance. “Strange Fruit.” “God Bless the Child (That’s Got His Own).” That’s how we talk. We sing it, or we play it. “Members, Don’t Get Weary.” You can see it. Max plays it. You hear it. Music has the narrative form that can be put into poetry, books, literature and so on. Music has a resistance form or fighting form that articulates our determination to reject the negative aspects of our experiences. If the negative aspect of our experience in Africa is some disease from the eco-system, we will invoke music for cleansing, in order to get rid of it. It has its ritualistic and spiritual effect, etc., etc.
The enormous tragedy then of slavery, of the Middle Passage, could only be preserved through the music and the attempt to express what that pain is—but more importantly to say no to it; to say that we have a different humanity that we want to accomplish. We take whatever the tools are—the drum, the whistle, the clap, the stomp; and we take whatever is the given imagery—whether it is the Bible, the chant or Be-Bop Hip-Hop, Reggae, Samba, Salsa or Soca, we take what is accessible at the time as the vehicles for providing an alternative to that experience: A Love Supreme, Freedom Now Suite, these are perfect examples. It takes years and years for them to get there. Music becomes a way to exorcise the demons. Resistance is not just an ongoing reality, we see something at the end of it. But the resistance must take place because the conditionalities that are being offered to us are totally unacceptable to our spiritual well-being. Therefore, I approach music from that angle.
It is an organic aspect of our lives. It is not a manufactured experience. It is not an experience that simply hails the beauty of the sunset or the greatness of the king, whoever it is. It is something else that deals with everyday life, everybody in the tribe; if we are so diseased or defeated, it always becomes the energy force and a statement to get out of that and be free—whether it is the Haitian Revolution, the runaway slaves, the Mambistas in Cuba or Brazil.
Now, having said that, the question becomes now, “What do I listen for?” Twentieth century music has spent a great deal of time on the romantic, the love side: “Summertime and the living is easy.” That can’t happen!
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
Ain’t no fuckin’ way it’s gonna be easy for us. So we may sing the song, but . . . “Ol’ Man River keeps on rolling / keeps on rolling along.” But Robeson has to change up those lyrics [from “I’m tired of living and scared of dying” to “I’ll keep on fighting till I’m dying”].
PROUD FLESH
Yeah.
ACKLYN LYNCH
So I will say no to this Ol’ Man River, this Mississippi River. The same way we would change up the mood and the word and everything of “Summertime” and give it another reference, if we want to use it.
I also make a distinction between the music that we create and the music we play because we can play Cole Porter’s music or we can play white boys’ music. But the most important music for me is the music that we write, sing and play—our original voice—whether it is in a period of improvisation or in a period where we write the music down, [as in] “God Bless the Child.” But it is what we say—[as in Randy Weston’s] African Cookbook—and you feel it.
Music must have meaning. It is not a technical function, of the mastery of an instrument. What are you trying to say? And so I’m always looking for that, whether it is church music or house music, yard music or street music.
The other thing about music is, whereas in a book you can spend a lot of pages and take a long time to say what you’ve got to say, in music you’ve got to say what you’ve got to say it quick. The decision to move from X to Y has to be made. You can’t be ambivalent about it, hanging around thinking, in that time-space continuum. The drummer will drum. The horn player is playing. And they have to say it all in five minutes, sometimes in thirty seconds. And they can say it all, very conscious of time and space in the ecology of their lives.
On the resistance side of it, resistance is resistance against two things: One, the colonization of our people on the continent. Music will always be opposed to that. And, two, the Middle Passage and its consequences in the Americas. Whatever material benefits or privileges we get from living in the Western hemisphere, it is very obvious that we were kidnapped and brought here destructively and that we will always be in a state of war against the dominant culture. The need to claim our own accelerates the need to improvise it so that no one else can take it from you. As soon as you write your Blues, they come and take your Blues from you and they gone. You gotta do something else and you’re gonna do it because the voice of resistance is always there.
I see us resisting. You see it in the title of the work, the way we name ourselves, the way we dress to come to music and you see it if you watch carefully when Max is approaching the drum or Randy is approaching the piano; they approach it with a certain reverence. So when Max says that drums are supposed to be felt and not heard, this means the touching of that inner voicing. When Sun Ra says if you’re not your own reality then whose illusion are you, he means it not only just as a holistic human being but as a musician; you can’t get on the bandstand if you don’t bring a reality to it. What are you saying?
You can put on any piece of music you want and I can tell you nine out of ten times whether it’s a Black person or a white person playing because of the way they do it. The same way when I come to a lecture and I don’t see who you are, I know right away. It’s not only the rhythms of the voice but how you say what you say, how you phrase the thing. And part of that is the music question, phrasing is the music question: I can tell that this is Billie Holiday or this is some white girl, Peggy Lee.
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter]
ACKLYN LYNCH
I can tell the difference. This is Tommy Dorsey and this is Count Basie. I can tell the difference in seconds or minutes. That’s very important to musicians and all of us.
The music is very, very critical. No piece of the music can demand autonomy or authority. The music is a very integrated aspect of our life from the first utterance to the last. Although people may have preference, but that’s market preference.
PROUD FLESH
Yeah!
ACKLYN LYNCH
“I prefer Jazz.” “I prefer Hip-Hop.” “I prefer Be-Bop.” “I prefer Gospel.” “I prefer Reggae.” “I prefer Samba.” “I prefer Salsa.” “I prefer Soca.”
PROUD FLESH
Yes, yes.
ACKLYN LYNCH
All those are market arrangements. They are not the music.
PROUD FLESH
Right.
ACKLYN LYNCH
The music ain’t got nothing to do with all of that. The music as Duke says is good music or bad music, music with a message or music that’s empty, vacuous.
And if it is an authentic voice and a distinct statement, and if we must travel within that statement out of respect for that voice, then it must be something that we take seriously. Because as soon as Abbey Lincoln sings, we know it’s Aminata Moseka, and the lyrics are written by her.
PROUD FLESH
Yeah.
ACKLYN LYNCH
Ain’t no half steppin’ or no half guessin’. You don’t think it’s Ella Fitzgerald. You don’t think it’s Carmen McRae. It’s Billie Holiday. Because Billie Holiday phrases and balances and does what she wants. Neither Dinah Washington nor Nina Simone nor Abbey Lincoln would want to imitate Billie Holiday. They would sing her song but not imitate it because they have their voice. Those voices are very real.
At a higher level, it [music] wants us to believe that life after death and life among our ancestors and life in the new world to come is certainly not going to be deformed by the commercial precision that “this is ‘Hip-Hop’ and . . . ” It ain’t. It’s more than that. It’s more than that. It’s more than that. It is the crafting out of a journey, through song, that we have experienced here and sent back there, to receive back there. I mean, it is the Middle Passage functioning. It’s the Middle Passage all the time, functioning in a different kind of way. That I think it is very important for us to see; and you can’t do this without listening closely and paying astute attention to the lyrics.
PROUD FLESH
So you wanted to add something in closing on George Jackson—and Frantz Fanon?
ACKLYN LYNCH
George Jackson, like Frantz Fanon, is a clinician. He clinically looks at the impact of oppression on the human spirit. He looks at it from the point of view of the prison experience or the experience of oppressed labor. Fanon looks at the impact of colonialism on the behavior of the colonial subject. These two people separately went to the emotional, psychological, and intellectual damage that oppressed people have faced. In a sense they are different from Malcolm as a rhetoritician who masters the art of helping you to understand the political equation and the political liabilities we are faced with, [while] Martin has developed the art of the preacher, but is searching for a morality that Western society is incapable of reaching. But Fanon and George approach the psychological thing in a way that I wish those who have come after them would have done. We spend more time on the economic side of independence (and sovereignty); and the social-prestigious side of independence (that is, the title “president’ or “congressman” or whatever it is, getting elected “mayor”), without dealing with what Fanon and George deal with, the psychological problems, despair and disparagement of every African regardless of their title, regardless of their prestige, regardless of their location in society. What is happening to the poor Algerian man is no different from what is happening to Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Sammy Davis, Haile Berry, Alicia Keys, Denzel Washington or Bill and Camille Cosby.
PROUD FLESH
Right.
ACKLYN LYNCH
What’s happening to the brother in the joint is no different from what’s happening to the brother or sister in the White House because they are all subject to neo-slavery—with regard to their ability to be sovereign beings. We should therefore take seriously our understanding of freedom, independence and sovereignty (nationally and globally): I’m not so sure we know the meaning of any of these terms!
PROUD FLESH
[Laughter] No, we don’t!
ACKLYN LYNCH
George Jackson raises the intellectual dialogue to another level. It is interesting that when he goes to Blood in My Eye and lays out the logic of why we should revolt and the conditions under which we should revolt, he never fails to remain faithful to his fundamental position. It is the nature of the oppression of the colonized person that prevents them from seeing their condition so that they may resist it. That brings them [George and Fanon] close to each other even though they are geographically far apart. Intellectually, they really are standing on the same ground.
PROUD FLESH
Without a doubt.
ACKLYN LYNCH
His letters to his father and to his mother are about the psychological question. His battles with the people who come to teach him in the prison—the general—it’s a psychological struggle. It’s psychological warfare. I think Fanon and George understood that better than any of the other people who have come to the forefront to provide leadership, the psychological warfare that we’ve been engaged in for centuries.
PROUD FLESH
[Applause] Thank you, Dr. Lynch!
ACKLYN LYNCH
I hope that works.
PROUD FLESH
That works beautifully.
Citation Format:
Greg Thomas. “Proud Flesh Inter/Views: Acklyn Lynch,” PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 6, 2007.
Copyright © 2007 Africa Resource Center, Inc.