An examination of reviews and articles on Elaine Brown’s The Condemnation of Little B (2002) is necessary for any discussion of the objectives of this book and our collective struggle. It will be interesting to see how Condemnation has been defined, or re-defined, since Brown undoubtedly wants us to understand and ameliorate the wretched condition of Blacks in america. She examines the case of Michael Lewis, and the incarceration of Black children as adults in general, so that we can confront the national criminalization of Blackness and end the internment of Blacks within united states prisons. Although some reviewers are able to recognize the importance of Condemnation, they all miss the connection between the demonization of Blacks and america’s political economic order.
The u.s. has the largest prison population in the world. There are more than 2 million people incarcerated in the united states and, as Brown explains: “By the end of the millennium, blacks, about 12 percent of the population, represented 46 percent of all prisoners in the United States of America” (352). Inmates are exploited as a source of cheap and free labor, as many private corporations contract with government agencies to hire them out. Brown writes further that, in order to create jobs and attract these corporations, “economically impoverished cities and towns lobby for prison construction – a scheme that necessarily requires more prisoners” (353).
This scheme is insidious because it works to ensure our enslavement. Reviewers of The Condemnation of Little B, perhaps predictably, fail to make this point overall. Yet the link between slavery and prisons was outlined clearly by the 13th amendment to america’s constitution – a legality that does not abolish slavery at all; it simply redefines slavery: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, EXCEPT as a punishment for crime whereof the party has been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Thus, to make Condemnation’s case, Brown quotes W.E.B DuBois who wrote in Black Reconstruction: “For there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor.” She maintains that Michael’s incarceration “was looming as part of a new scheme of convict labor, free labor in America, on which DuBois had so profoundly reflected a century before” (349).
Brown, the first and only woman to serve as Black Panther Party (BPP) “Chairman,” introduced readers to her 1992 narrative, A Taste of Power, with the line – the one declarative statement that always manages to annoy mainstream feminists who charge Brown with investing in masculine images of power: “I have all the guns and all the money” (Brown 1992, 3). Yet, Brown’s assertion always inspires me and directs my attention to her re-inscription of the BPP stance of self-determination and self-empowerment, as Blacks who have duly served notice. Now Brown’s The Condemnation of Little B, written ten years after A Taste of Power, and more than 30 years following her activism as a Panther leader, again announces her presence and keen comprehension of what it means to be Black in america. Brown chronicles our social condition and, in so doing, offers a vital strategy to confront racism.
Throughout Condemnation, Brown takes on the task of investigating the conviction of 13-year old Michael Lewis, nicknamed Little B, a Black child born and raised in Atlanta who is now held captive in Phillips State Prison in Georgia. He serves a life term as an adult on a trumped-up first-degree murder charges. Michael was arrested in 1997 for the death of Darrell Woods, also Black, a husband and father of two sons, glorified by the local press as a consummate “family man.” Woods was fatally shot sitting in his car as his wife went into a grocery store to, allegedly, “buy a soda.” But Michael’s case, as Brown reveals, was ludicrous from the word “go.” His conviction, and the conviction of Black youth in america overall, emerges out of
new social and political policies rife with racism, particularly in relation to crime and punishment. These latter day theories, about black boys are rooted in the culture of American slavery, wherein the black male was identified as inherently savage, an immoral or amoral being possessing a bestial nature, and thus by nature inferior to whites and fit only to serve as a slave (Brown 2002, 102-3).
What constituted “evidence” against Michael would have never held up in kourt if the accused had been white. But as George L. Jackson explains: “All Black people, wherever they are, whatever their crime, even crime against other Blacks are political prisoners because the system had dealt with them differently than whites” (Jackson 1990, 99).
Atlanta’s local press, with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution leading the charge, immediately criminalized Lewis and labeled him a “thug.” Mayor Bill Campbell condemned Michael as an “evil” in the city and, following his conviction, which only took a matter of hours in a trial that lasted a mere three days, District Attorney Paul Howard vowed to appear at Michael’s parole hearing to make sure he spends the rest of his life in prison.
Adding to the list of absurdities, the only “evidence” used against Michael was the collective testimony of admitted drug dealers and addicts, “informants-cum-addicts,” as Brown writes (Brown 2002, 24). This includes a damning statement made by Valerie Lewis, Michael’s biological mother, a statement deemed valid despite the fact that, only two years earlier, the juvenile kourt declared Lewis an “unfit” mother in her third “deprivation hearing” (83). Michael had been declared a ward of the state. Still, at the time of his arrest, he was living on his own, and had not attended school for two years. In other words, young Michael was found “guilty” when, as Brown powerfully states, “he’s not to blame” (Weaver, E1).
When the police came to get Michael, the entire city, if not the entire country, had already held Michael, like all Black children, to be responsible for his social condition. In “LITTLE B REVISITED: Author Decries Tarring of Suspect,” Brown says of Michael and the city’s relationship to him at 13:
Nobody was there for him. There was no system in place, no institution in place. So I thought at the time, ‘Now if he killed somebody, why is anybody surprised? You throw him in the sewer and now you want him to act like he’s been nurtured and cared for all his life?’ (Weaver, E1).
Brown does more than zero in on the public condemnation of young Black males; she also looks at how mainstream notions work to vilify young Black females. Shawntello Young, also from Atlanta, lost her eight-month old daughter, Tameka, when her child choked to death after swallowing a cockroach. Local news agencies, as in the case of Michael, were quick to condemn 18-year old Shawntello as “just another Black teen mother,” ill-equipped to take proper care of a child she should not have had in the first place. While Black male youth have been envisioned as criminal, a “menace to society,” Black female youth are made to be criminals in part because they’re perceived to be sexually promiscuous and irresponsible mothers. Brown writes there was a broad indictment which believed that Tameka died because her mother either neglected or abused her. There was no recognition that Tameka choked to death because of conditions brought about by poverty. The poverty was itself widely ignored, or viewed as a simple inevitability. Brown explains:
This implicit distribution of personal responsibility to black mothers themselves for the death of their babies, a variation on the themes raised in the death of Shawntello Young’s baby, evades the more compelling objective realities. In the case of Shawntello Young, this evasion went not merely to the issue of the gross neglect on the part of the AHA [Atlanta Housing Authority] with respect to maintenance of Perry Homes. It also had to do with the total environment of poverty and neglect to which Shawntello and Tameka and all the other Perry Homes children had been subjected (Brown 2002, 98).
In the case of Michael, the court dismisses the fact that agencies put in place to assist Michael summarily failed him. In the case of Shawntello, we are supposed to ignore the reality of her living in a housing project that federal agencies generally run as slums. More specifically, as Brown details, the public is also suppose to ignore the fact that the Herman E. Perry Homes project, where Shawntello and her baby lived, was in such wretched conditions that the AHA was, at the time of Tameka’s death, seeking approval to demolish it. Perry Homes was surrounded by a battalion of neglected filth. Yet, Shawntello is made wholly responsible for the death of her child even as she shares space with a city park overrun with vermin (the site of repeated rapes), a sanitation landfill, and a highly polluted river (99-100).
In “Little B’s Prosecutor: Brown Has It Wrong,” former Fulton County Assistant District Attorney Suzanne Ockleberry asks unwittingly what should be the essential question: “Why would you want to send a 13-year old to prison if someone else did it?” (Ippolito, E1). The question is an imperative one because, as thinking people, we should be concerned with “why” Michael was wrongly accused, and “whom” his captivity serves to benefit. But Ockleberry’s rendition of this question reveals her position as a state agent who is either completely unable or unwilling to understand the critical context in which Brown explores Michael’s case. The real question, given Brown’s research, should be formulated: “Who indeed would want to send a 13-year Black boy to prison when someone else is guilty?”
With unflinching precision, Brown answers the question as she presents a comprehensive report enabling us to understand how america became a colonial “nation state,” thanks in large part to Black exploitation, and how contemporary america is able to continue this exploitation thanks to what Brown calls its “rhetorical duplicity” (Brown 2002, 128). The author explains:
There has been no twilight of racism falling over America. The dawn of a new age of racism has risen, in which a new forked tongue would lick the country’s wounded with new lies, as it would fashion a new language permitting America to comfortably coexist with a continuum of racism and its horrible ramifications (356).
Brown targets Lewis’s case in order to confront “New Age Racism,” its very emergence. She thus details the link between chattel slavery and neo-slavery. Exposed is the racial brutality inherent in american consciousness, a consciousness that always defines crime as inherently Black and “evil;” mainstream media statistics as wholly objective; federal agencies or agendas as compassionate if, unfortunately overwhelmed; and presidential politics, finally, as culturally inclusive. This is a reactionary consciousness which depends on the idea that racism, when considered “bad,” no longer exists, while it defines its very identity through a vilification of Blacks for being Black. And in the end, or “in the main” as Brown often writes, this consciousness without fail holds us responsible for why our communities are besieged by enforced poverty, hateful police, etc. etc. etc. Brown explains that americans “have shifted responsibility onto blacks by saying ‘Well, if blacks are poor, there must be something wrong with them. If they’re going to prison in these large numbers, it’s because they’re committing the crimes. There’s no more racism in America; they just can’t make it’” (Weaver, E1).
Condemnation continues the analysis Brown began in A Taste of Power. Both texts fix her sight on the every-day sociopolitical economic predicament of Blacks in a state constructed and sustained by capitalist white-supremacism. Condemnation forces us to confront this reality. Brown powerfully unpacks the mythologies of Thomas Jefferson, and dismantles the widely perceived image of Abraham Lincoln as the “Great Liberator” as she recalls his letter to Horace Greeley, editor of The New York Tribune. Lincoln wrote: “Dear Sir … I have not meant to leave anyone in doubt. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it” (Brown 2002, 141). For Lincoln, the concerns of “slaves” are clearly separate from the concerns of the “union.” The enslaved are not members of the union. What’s more, Lincoln’s statement implies that Blacks in america are responsible for the sanctity of this union, and that Blacks in america can be exploited, held forever in bondage, in order to safeguard the continuation of his union. Just as the “3/5’s compromise” was a measure initiated by the u.s government to appease its southern electorate, preserving their “nation” as a whole, the thirteenth amendment was guided by the same intent. The 13th amendment was never meant to free Blacks; instead, its intent was to ensure the continued exploitation of Black labor. What essentially took place was a name change. Slavery would no longer be called chattel slavery, for the new slavery, as Jackson writes in Soledad Brother, is “updated to disguise” (Jackson 1994, 251) the “plantation,” which in many respects became the national prison. Just as Lincoln has been erroneously embraced for “freeing slaves,” one of his successors, William Jefferson Clinton, has also been erroneously hailed as the nation’s “first Black president.” He is bestowed with this “honor” because, as Brown points out, most of us are unaware that during Clinton’s eight-year reign, more Blacks were sent to prison in america than under Ronald Reagan and George Bush combined.
Brown recalls her formative years in A Taste of Power, of course, growing up in North Philadelphia, and recounts her political activism that leads to her prominent Black Panther politics. Her narrative operates in the same manner as Condemnation insofar as she articulates what it means to be young, Black and struggling within a society that continually demonizes Blackness. In the opening chapter of Condemnation Brown says that she was anguished when her thoughts turned to how Michael must be feeling, “suspended as he was over an abyss of absolute abandonment in the universe he occupied.” She then connects her childhood to Michael’s:
I could remember feeling something like that myself as a child. I could remember trembling in fearful aloneness, feeling unwanted in a world into which I had been born, black and female and poor, circumscribed to a Philadelphia ghetto and predestined to isolation from the mainstream of society, a whites-only preserve (Brown 1992, 10).
The kinship between herself and Michael is keenly strategic. A Taste of Power illustrates how the BPP was able to name and actively confront racial oppression. It understood that racism does not function individually or anomalously; racism works well as an economic system that institutionalizes itself as “white supremacy.” According to the BPP, a critical step toward liberation involves our recognition of the relationship between our collective oppressive social condition and the racist economy of state power. This position is clearly articulated in Condemnation. An essential point of the text is for the reader to comprehend that Lewis’s captivity, masked as legal punishment for a crime, works to serve a specific purpose. Lewis joins the ranks of over 1 million incarcerated Blacks whose status as inmates (i.e., legal slaves) guarantees a steady work force within the ever-growing “prison industrial complex.”
A Taste of Power and Condemnation are also written to target a highly specific audience. For the point of telling of her life story and Lewis’s is not simply to tell a story for story-telling’s sake. The story in-and-of-itself is certainly vital. It serves a highly specific purpose and moves both texts into the genre of narrative. Moreover, the very act of story-telling is highly significant in its connection to the ideal of self-determination, a state of consciousness that american society seeks to deny Blacks at all times. Self-determination was the key term in George Jackson’s formulation for escape from bondage. Jackson explains that because “Slavery is an economic condition. Today’s new slavery must be defined in terms of economics” (Jackson 1994, 251). Under chattel slavery, he writes, a slave was the property of one man who “exercise[d] the property rights of his established economic order,” and the owner could “could move that property or hold it in one square yard of the earth’s surface” (251). Chattel slavery, he continues, is an “economic condition which manifests itself in the total loss or absence of self-determination” (251). Neo-slavery, like its predecessor, is arranged through an economic system that benefits a “small knot of men” (252) who exercise property rights in their established economic order by controlling the acquisition of the worker’s (read: neo-slave) wage. “The sense and meaning of slavery comes through as a result of our ties to the wage,” Jackson states, since the wage must be had in order to survive. Because the neo-slave’s wage is determined by others, neo-slavery is “an economic condition which manifests itself in the total loss or absence of self-determination” (252). The BPP Field Marshal proclaims: “Only after this is understood and accepted can we go on to the dialectic that will help us in a remedy ”(252).
A Taste of Power and The Condemnation of Little B both function as neo-slave narratives. Both texts are positioned to address the socio-economic condition of Blacks in america in order to confront our oppression. It is therefore irresponsible and dangerous to read Brown’s work as an isolated textual event, as so many reviewers have done. What has happened to Michael is an extension of what happened to our ancestors who were first enslaved by europeans. Brown, positions Condemnation to be read not as the singular life story of a Black teen male, who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and who was haphazardly apprehended and incarcerated as a consequence. Rather. Condemnation testifies to the political position of all Blacks in america, past, present and, if we don’t take heed, future as well. The brutal injustice that Michael endures has been or can be endured by all Blacks in america. He is Us.
Consider how the “library of congress” officially catalogs the text. For that institution, The Condemnation of Little B falls within the following areas:
1. Lewis, Michael, 1983 or -4 2. Murder – Georgia – Atlanta. 3. Murder in mass media. 4. Discrimination in criminal justice administration – Georgia – Atlanta. 5. African American juvenile delinquents – Georgia – Atlanta – Public opinion. 6. Atlanta (Ga.) – Race relations.
Notice that “Race relations” is listed last, and relegated only to Atlanta, as are all other classifications with the exception of “Murder in mass media.” By tethering the text to a limited geographic location, this list contradicts Brown’s assertion, proclaimed throughout Condemnation, that “in the end, in the main, it would seem that all black people in America live in the Bluff” (Brown 2002, 79). Earlier, Brown identifies the Bluff as the “black ghetto” or more specifically, the “barracoon …where black people have been quartered since the end of [chattel] slavery” (69).
Michael’s date of birth is perhaps most interesting here. The year, as written, points to uncertainty. The entry reads: “Lewis, Michael, 1983 or 4.” What are we to make of this unknown, given the fact that Brown, within the opening chapters of the book, provides an in-depth historical analysis of southern Blacks, their position as “slaves,” and the way in which the rebuilding of the region was dependent on cheap labor born of chattel slavery? What are we to make of this entry when we further consider that Assata Shakur, former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army solider, opens her life story with the following line: “The FBI cannot find any evidence that I was born” (Shakur, 18). We can’t even stop there. Frederick Douglass begins My Bondage and My Freedom with, “…in regard to my birth I cannot be as definite” (34). Behold these other indefinites:
“I do not know how old I am” – John Brown (Slave Life in Georgia, 324).
“I was born May 1815” – Henry Bibb (Narrative of the Life of Henry Bibb, 13).
“I was born in the state of Maryland” – James Pennington (Fugitive Blacksmith, 114).
“I was born in Maryland, in 1812” – John Thompson (Life of John Thompson, 417).
“I was born a slave” – Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 544).
“I was born in the year 1784” – William Grimes (Life William Grimes, Runaway, 187).
“I was born. I am not able to tell what year or month” – Moses Roper (Narrative, 493).
Now, “Lewis, Michael, 1983 or 4.” Brown dedicates Condemnation to Michael with the message: “For Michael/Until you’re free.” The dedication is an integral part of this discussion as well. I think an essential question is, “What needs to take place “until,” what does Brown require for Michael to be free? It seems as if the author, at this key point, at the very outset, is speaking to her readers about our relationship to Michael as well. She extensively researches our condition in america for us to understand and effectively engage in the struggle for liberation.
However, Brian Gilmore in “The Dispossessed,” his review of Condemnation in The Washington Post, claims that the “one glaring flaw” of the text is that the author
…provides so much information and data that at times you almost want to scream, ‘Enough already!’ Layer upon layer of studies, reports and anecdotal evidence from various sources sometimes bogs down her excellent prose. And at the end … there is unfortunately, no resolution to the story of Little B (Gilmore, T04).
What Gilmore seems to be missing is the fact that Brown provides critical information which has been suppressed and misread. What happens then when a mass of people begin to understand and articulate the magnitude of their oppression? What happens if we don’t? The battle is already lost if we turn our backs on the information; as a matter of fact, this very stance works to perpetuate oppression. Oppression positions itself to appear overwhelming, invincible, so that resistance appears futile; our victory appears only as an impossibility. Assata writes that when a friend told her, “Ignorance is bliss,” she responded: “The hell it is. When you don’t know what’s going on in the world, you’re at a definite disadvantage” (Shakur, 152). On this note, Brown writes:
If blacks would survive, it seems we must first wake ourselves from this nightmare and come to grips with its reality. If blacks would ever finally march out of the hell of Monticello, where we have lived for seemingly time immemorial, we must look away from the brutal master of this house and become masters to ourselves. We must seize our lives and destinies and collect our dues. The goal of freedom must return to the top of our agenda, for it is the only business of the slave” (Brown 2002, 357).
When Brown proclaims, “Little B is not one in a million. Little B is one of millions of children like him in America” (84), are we really to believe that the text is meant to speak only of Michael’s freedom as an individual? Narratives by Black writers have never been so exclusive in their intent. Nor have they been written without making the audience a central part of the text, which is to say that Black narratives have always been consciously political. They seek to impact – or better yet – activate the reader.
This “until” Brown points to in the dedication is definitely linked to the wealth of information the author presents for our consideration. How can Michael be made free if we don’t understand the point of his enslavement and how his status in america is our status in america? How can Michael be made free if we don’t liberate ourselves from mainstream discussions about Blacks in america which are generated by, again, its “rhetorical duplicity”?
Gilmore also writes:
The book is also about what the author sees as the real problem in America: what she calls the “New Age Racism,” in which even white liberals and middle-class blacks turn their backs on a critical, unpleasant racial truth – that in our post industrial society, poor African Americans don’t really own anything and are nothing more than a “potential consumer market” (Gilmore, T04).
And, in a later passage, the reviewer connects The Condemnation of Little B to Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks:
In 1903, DuBois mused eloquently on the end of Reconstruction and the agricultural age. Brown’s book arrives in 2002 just as the embers of the civil rights movement have gone out and the powerful industrial age has given way to a high-tech economy with global tentacles. The similarity between these two book and the conservative and apathetic times in which they appear is striking” (Gilmore, T04).
Brown and DuBois present their texts as a means to an end, our understanding what it means to live within a country or world that defines itself through color lines. Brown, in company with DuBois, understands that the emancipation proclamation and the 13th amendment did not in any way rid america of slavery. The two examine the position of “successful” Blacks in america, and as Gilmore writes, “their complete disconnect from the black poor” (T04). While I agree with Gilmore on these points, his analysis could have been extended. Brown devotes an entire chapter, “The Abandonment,” to a discussion of how prominent Blacks have benefited from the criminalization of Blacks, and the extent to which their success capitalizes on mainstream conceptions of Blackness. In her condemnation of Black intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and government officials, Brown parallels them to “House Slaves,” “Black Slave Overseers,” and “Nigger Drivers” (Brown 2002, 210), who “worked in the bosom of the Master’s house” and who “suffered a little less brutal life than the “Field Slave” (210). She adds:
Because of the fragility of the foundation of New Age Racism, in its subtleties and deviousness and newness, without the support of the New Age House Negro, the whole structure might collapse. It is this complicity of blacks that has enabled the New Age Racist agenda. (219).
Kai Maristed of The Los Angeles Times offers a similar critique of the text as Gilmore. But what is most interesting about this reviewer’s comments is the writer’s praise of Brown’s keen ability to
…trace the historical and political arc that connects bigotry in America from Revolutionary times to the present …to show how the legacy of Jefferson has impoverished the chances of Little B, along with his brothers in all the Bluff’s of our abandoned inner cities. (Maristed, E3).
The reviewer does a good job of not only acknowledging the historical significance of Michael’s case, but also recognizing that Michael’s incarceration is not some isolated issue. And although, like all other reviewers, Maristed does not mention Shawntello Young, this reviewer does at least give attention to Michael’s younger sister, Tavia, or “Ta-Ta” as Michael affectionately calls her. The inclusion of Ta-Ta is critical because too often mainstream notions ignore the fact that our children are loved and have strong family ties. New Age Racism dictates that Black children be seen as inherently criminal because our youth don’t, so it’s said, benefit from loving family ties.
Publisher’s Weekly says that Brown “spins a narrative,” and writes: “There’s too much history and criticism here for a quick breakout, but those same qualities will give the book staying power, particularly on campus” (283). What’s at stake here is venue, or how and where Condemnation will be read. The book should become a central work in academy studies, it surely needs to move outside of “academic” study which has a tendency to examine texts with a cold calculating eye, one unconscious of real meanings connected to the Black communities.
How will Black communities engage Condemnation? Essence, for example, devotes scant attention to Brown’s work in its review. Their reviewer places Condemnation within a catalog of reviews:
Elaine Brown’s 1994 memoir, A Taste of Power -- which chronicles her rise in the Black Panther Party – is a perennial best seller. Her latest nonfiction book, The Condemnation of Little B (Beacon Press, $24) takes on the American judicial system and the Black middle class as she analyses the tragic case of Little B, a 12-year old [sic] man-child on death row [sic] in Atlanta for murder. She not only makes a convincing case for the boy’s innocence but sheds light on the corrupt billion dollar prison industry (102).
In actuality, Essence’s review is not really a review at all; it’s more of a synopsis, a superficial and flawed one at that. While it mentions Brown’s analysis of the Black middle class and the judicial system, it spends little time thinking about why the author is compelled to make this intervention. Michael’s case remains an isolated instance rather than a collective concern for Black youth, for Black people; and there is no mention of Shawntello Young which, for a “Black women’s magazine,” is surely alarming.
Condemnation’s most incisive review appears in Black Issues in Higher Education. Robert Fleming remarks that “The Condemnation of Little B …tackles the most pressing problems confronting the African American community—the escalating imprisonment of our youth.” Though Fleming may not reach the point of linking the number of Blacks in prison with the concept of neo-slavery, he does discuss the inherent racist corruption that functions to imprison Blacks in record numbers. His close reading of the text allows him to summarize key aspects of Condemnation which other reviewers miss, or choose not to include. For instance:
No fingerprints were found on the weapon, an old World War II rifle with a defective mechanism that was too big for the frail, tiny boy to handle or shoot repeatedly. Never read his Miranda rights, Little B was interrogated without legal counsel present. Brown, with often penetrating sociopolitical and legal analysis, not only attacks the wily prosecutors, the hapless defense team, various toothless city agencies but the well-heeled, African American community that cheered loudest for the boy’s conviction without knowing all the facts (Fleming, 63).
While Gilmore contends that Condemnation contains too much material, Fleming, by contrast, applauds Brown’s extensive research and utilizes the text to bring forth more pertinent information. He cites a 1999 NAACP Defense Fund report which reveals that “two thirds of the juveniles on death row in the U.S. are children of color, mainly black, and quite a few of them did not receive proper legal representation or full constitutional protection like Little B.” In closing, Fleming echoes the critical message delivered throughout The Condemnation of Little B, writing that the book “issues a terrifying wake-up call to all who are ready to write off increasingly demonized, underrated youth. Don’t ignore this one!” (63).
In the end, Condemnation has earned the attention of many reviewers who overwhelmingly praise Brown’s work. However, we need to be concerned about how the text has been read or mis-read thus far. Condemnation provides every indication that the author continues the radical politics she began during her Black Panther years:
In their courts, on their streets, in their social practices, under the atrocities of Jim Crow and de facto discrimination; in their violent rejection of the nonviolent efforts of blacks to become real citizens, in the heartless assaults on and murders of those who tried to lead blacks to freedom, from Nat Turner to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King to Huey P. Newton, and in the subtle language of New Age Racism – [this country] told blacks that we have served our purpose as slave labor for the development of the American economy and that there is no room for us to exist here anymore” (Brown 2002, 357).
This is not a book to read and then put aside. It’s very clear that Elaine Brown writes so we can begin to liberate ourselves. A call to arms, activism, resounds throughout her latest offering. She knows the history of Black struggle, and that america as we know it lacks the capacity to accommodate the freedom of Black people.
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© 2003 Africa Resource Center, Inc.