Posted on 10/03/2002 11:03:11 AM PDT by RCW2001
EWARK, Oct. 2 — Amiri Baraka, the state's poet laureate, stood on the podium at a literary festival here today to say that he would not heed Gov. James E. McGreevey's demand that he step down for writing a poem that implied that Israel knew in advance about the attack on the World Trade Center.
Before a mostly supportive crowd of about 200 in a stately hall of the Newark Public Library, Mr. Baraka said his critics were attempting to "repress and stigmatize independent thinkers everywhere."
"I will not apologize, I will not resign," Mr. Baraka said, causing most in attendance to applaud. Others, however, sat silently.
On Friday, Governor McGreevey called for Mr. Baraka to step down because of some passages in his poem "Somebody Blew Up America," which Mr. Baraka wrote in October 2001 and which has been widely disseminated. Mr. Baraka was appointed poet laureate this summer, and the governor has acknowledged that he probably does not have the power to force him to resign.
"We wholeheartedly disagree with what Mr. Baraka is saying," Kevin Davitt, the governor's press spokesman, said today. "Unfortunately, our political hands are tied on this one. The most we can do right now is to continue to urge Mr. Baraka to resign and to explore any legislative possibilities to prevent any such future misfortunes like this."
The poet laureate is chosen by a six-member selection committee appointed by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. State law makes no provision for removing someone from the post.
After the event at the library, Shai Goldstein, the New Jersey regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, said the Newark poet had "added insult to injury" by perpetuating what Mr. Goldstein called a "big lie" that had circulated through many parts of the world that somehow Jews were responsible for the attack on the trade center.
"When you repeat any part of the big lie, you're not part of the solution of getting to the truth, but of perpetuating that lie," he said. "He has disgraced the position and himself."
Mr. Baraka was the keynote speaker for an event marking the library's designation as a literary landmark by the New Jersey Center for the Book. In his address, he spent almost 45 minutes going over his poem almost line by line, and insisting that it had been distorted and subject to "trash propaganda."
"It is a poem that aims to probe and disturb, but there is not any evidence of anti-Semitism," he said.
One part reads:
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
Mr. Baraka insisted that Israel and its prime minister, Ariel Sharon, as well as President Bush, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and many United States allies, knew of the pending terrorist attacks, citing various reports in the news media in the Middle East. Such accounts, however, have been widely discredited.
He noted that the poem also pointed out atrocities committed against many groups, including the Jews.
Mr. Baraka's appearance attracted many supporters. Some said they supported the poet's right to talk about oppression in the world.
The principal of the Morton Street Middle School in Newark, Carl Gregory, brought about 20 of his students and teachers to hear Mr. Baraka.
"His is definitely a poem that gets people to start asking questions at a time when people in power don't want us to ask questions," Mr. Gregory said. "I want our children to be exposed to great literature, and he is a great poet."
Library officials said that while some invited guests canceled their attendance, they did not consider asking Mr. Baraka to call off his speech.
"We know Mr. Baraka, we know the kinds of things he has written," said Charles E. Cummings, a Newark historian who is on the library's staff. "That's what the library is about, the First Amendment. We are totally a bastion of free speech."
Catherine Boback-Kinsella, a former librarian in nearby Harrison, N.J., who now works for a museum in Harrison, said she did not believe Mr. Baraka should have written the poem, but she listened to him politely. "Very, very liberal," she said afterward, shaking her head. "I don't know that there's much truth in it. You could say a person has a right to free speech, but when it comes to times of threatened national security, he should have been more sensitive himself about what he was saying."
Amiri Baraka is the phony Muslim name of Leroy Jones who has been a destructive leftist/Marxist/black nationalist ever since the Newark riots of 1968. The real question is how did such an outrageous leftist get appointed in the first place. His main scam seems to feeding at the trough at State University at Stony Brook in New York.
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Brief Biography of Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) |
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| Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, on October 7, 1934. His father, Colt LeRoy Jones, was a postal supervisor; Anna Lois Jones, his mother, was a social worker. He attended Rutgers University for two years, then transferred to Howard University, where in 1954 he earned his B.A. in English. He served in the Air Force from 1954 until 1957, then moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There he joined a loose circle of Greenwich Village artists, musicians, and writers. The following year he married Hettie Cohen and began co-editing the avant-garde literary magazine Yugen with her. That year he also founded Totem Press, which first published works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others. He published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. From 1961 to 1963 he was co-editor, with Diane Di Prima, of The Floating Bear, a literary newsletter. His increasing hostility toward and mistrust of white society was reflected in two plays, The Slave and The Toilet, both written in 1962. 1963 saw the publication of Blues People: Negro Music in White America, which he wrote, and The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, which he edited and introduced. His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York on March 24, 1964. The controversial play subsequently won an Obie Award (for "best off-Broadway play") and was made into a film. In 1965, following the assassination of Malcolm X, Jones repudiated his former life and ended his marriage. He moved to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. The company, which produced plays that were often anti-white and intended for a black audience, dissolved in a few months. He moved back to Newark, and in 1967 he married African-American poet Sylvia Robinson (now known as Amina Baraka). That year he also founded the Spirit House Players, which produced, among other works, two of Baraka's plays against police brutality: Police and Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself. In 1968, he co-edited Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing with Larry Neal and his play Home on the Range was performed as a benefit for the Black Panther party. That same year he became a Muslim, changing his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka. ("Imamu" means "spiritual leader.") He assumed leadership of his own black Muslim organization, Kawaida. From 1968 to 1975, Baraka was chairman of the Committee for Unified Newark, a black united front organization. In 1969 , his Great Goodness of Life became part of the successful "Black Quartet" off-Broadway, and his play Slave Ship was widely reviewed. Baraka was a founder and chairman of the Congress of African People, a national Pan-Africanist organization with chapters in 15 cities, and he was one of the chief organizers of the National Black Political Convention, which convened in Gary, Indiana, in 1972 to organize a more unified political stance for African-Americans. In 1974 Baraka adopted a Marxist Leninist philosophy and dropped the spiritual title "Imamu." In 1983, he and Amina Baraka edited Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women, which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and in 1987 they published The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka was published in 1984. Amiri Baraka's numerous literary prizes and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, the Langston Hughes Award from The City College of New York, and a lifetime achievement award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He has taught poetry at the New School for Social Research in New York, literature at the University of Buffalo, and drama at Columbia University. He has also taught at San Francisco State University, Yale University and George Washington University. Since 1985 he has been a professor of Africana Studies at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. He is co-director, with his wife, of Kimako's Blues People, a community arts space. Amiri and Amina Baraka live in Newark, New Jersey. This bio was last updated on Jul 19, 2001. A Selected Bibliography Poetry Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961) Prose Home: Social Essays (1966) Drama Dutchman and The Slave: Two Plays (1964) Fiction The System of Dante's Hell (1965) |
Read the article: the Governor didn't appoint him.
McGreevey doesn't need state law, he has a politically activist liberal court that can rewrite that law at anytime.
Group-think?
History mostly. All minorities tend to the left. Jews define ourselves as a minority.
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BONEHEADED LIE-BERAL QUOTES
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Oh, good. Perhaps Mr. Cummings will invite me to speak at the library next month. I should very much like to share my poem, "Nuke Mecca." It's quite short. Quite. Short.
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