James Dimon Comes to Howard

On Friday, March 6, James “Jamie” Dimon, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase & Company, will speak at Howard University’s 147th Charter Day Convocation.  Dimon is a celebrated corporate titan and the head of a scandal-ridden entity that serves as a marquee face of corporate greed and largesse in a time of financial uncertainty, growing class stratification, and a searing debate about higher education’s relationship to addressing inequality in America and the world.

Dimon will not be the first major business figure to speak at a recent Howard ritual.  At 2002’s Charter Day Convocation, Franklin Delano Raines, the first African-American CEO of a Fortune 500 Company when he became Chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae, spoke of the denial of Black capital and the unfulfilled promise of “Forty Acres and a Mule,” two years before accounting irregularities saw his departure near the beginning of the subprime mortgage lending frenzy.  At 2004’s Opening Convocation, Stanley O’Neal, then CEO of Merrill-Lynch, spoke eloquently about being the Alabama-born grandson of enslaved Africans and the promise of Black economic progress, even as his company speculated in 40 billion dollars worth of subprime mortgage bonds.

Nor is Howard the first university to honor Dimon.  Among others, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws in 2010 from Syracuse University.  Syracuse's then Chancellor, Nancy Cantor, had been Provost at the University of Michigan during the Supreme Court's pivotal Grutter Affirmative Action decision and later remarked, as Chair of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education Accreditation 2009 team visiting Howard, that Howard's unique mission and work was more important now than at any time since its founding. Cantor's relationship with Dimon was undoubtedly connected to the JPMorgan Chase Technology Center at Syracuse and the jointly designed collaboration between JPMorgan and the program in Global Enterprise Technology.  He was also a director of the College Fund/UNCF, among his many other board memberships. 

Nevertheless, at this particular moment in American and world history, there is almost universal derision of Wall Street excesses that continue to preside over growing structural inequality.  Last week, JPMorgan announced the elimination of 8,000 additional jobs in its consumer and mortgage-banking units, bringing the total to 24,500 in those two divisions since the start of 2013.  This occurs as the company’s net income targets soared above the 27 billion dollar mark.  Several weeks before, the company’s Board gave Dimon a 74 percent pay raise for 2013 that, at 20 million dollars, brought his pay nearer the range of its annual pre-derivatives-missteps levels.  JP Morgan’s stock soared by 33 percent last year with a profit of 18 billion dollars, the company’s Compensation Committee’s putative justification.  As many commentators have observed, Mr. Dimon made more in two hours of work than the average minimum wage worker makes in a year. 

Rewarding a CEO who has presided over 30 billion dollars in legal costs, fines, and penalties for wrongdoing is a defensible action consistent with corporate values.  Speaking to any university community at its founding commemoration, however, provides a special moral windfall that monetary largesse cannot bestow.  Immoral business actions, while legally and financially defensible, also communicate larger social values.  Howard’s Bully Pulpit offers an extra measure of significance as one identified with representing and uplifting the oppressed, whose capacity for the indulgence of ironies is unquestionably enhanced by the propaganda that structural inequalities can be challenged by individual merit, hard work, and individual achievement.  If Howard received Dimon’s 2007 annual pay of 49.9 million dollars, we would be able to subsidize 60 percent of all student financial aid for an academic year.  The ironies are almost embarrassingly evident.  What, then, will the University hear from a man repeatedly feted by Time Magazine as one of its 100 most influential people?

In a fantasy, James Dimon would use the unique platform of Howard to announce a course change in corporate citizenship and, as a show of good faith and a smart investment in human capital, present Howard, UNCF, and the Thurgood Marshall Fund with a billion dollars to be divided among all HBCUs as a down payment on more to come.  Perhaps, more realistically, the James and Judith K. Dimon Foundation will donate tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars to Howard as it has done in recent years for schools ranging from his alma mater, Tufts University, to the University of Chicago, Harvard, Duke, Tulane, and others.

The Blue Octagon of the Chase Bank part of JPMorgan Chase emerged in the early 1960s as one of the country’s first abstract symbol corporate logos.  Its shape (which looks like a cross-section of a wooden water pipe) was partially inspired by Chase Bank’s original parent, Alexander Hamilton’s Manhattan Company, which provided Lower Manhattan’s water through wooden water pipes before the creation of New York’s municipal water system.  As Thousands of Howard freshmen traveling to the New York African Burial Ground each fall have learned there, those pipes coursed through the burial sites of thousands of Africans, many of who had been enslaved by that emerging corporate gentry.

I have examined the Magna Carta and a Gutenberg Bible in New York’s J. Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, its world-class book collection assembled primarily by Washington D.C.-born Belle da Costa Greene, estranged daughter of Richard Theodore Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and one time Dean of the Howard School of Law.  Will Mr. Dimon’s researchers help him make these connections in his oration? These facts after all, are minor trifles in a world that prizes amnesia when discussing profits and losses.  Our academic regalia are vestiges of medieval Europe, its pomp and circumstance a constant reminder on the high holy days that old times, and the moral obligation of remembering as a foundation for visioning, are the academic’s bailiwick.  

Straddling the realpolitik of its curious existence in a world turned upside down by race, Howard has always walked the line.  A university established near the dawn of reconstruction as both statement and symbol of national hope, Howard was founded 14 months after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment and 17 months before the Fourteenth Amendment.  Its charter states that Howard was founded as “a university for the education of youth in the liberal arts and sciences,” though, in a controversial move that found General Howard testifying before Congress, money from the War Department’s Freedmen’s Bureau was appropriated toward the construction of the university’s first building.  Clearly, while the “Freedmen” were not mentioned in the initial charter, the purpose of Howard was then, as now, clear: It would be an institution built on the premise of racial equality, with its primary beneficiaries being Africans.

Perhaps James Dimon will bring a message strewn with both advice and money for a Library Science Program to make a statement about literacy, especially in public education, in the name of Belle da Costa Greene and her father and their connection to Washington, DC, Howard and the larger idea of the book as foundation for learning.  Or a generous donation to the Montague Cobb Biological Anthropology Laboratory, reconnecting the work that the laboratory and Howard scholars did on the New York African Burial Ground, evoking the slavery-ambivalent Hamilton and the Chase Manhattan Bank he founded.  Perhaps at least an acknowledgement that Dimon’s researchers have ensured that he knows the significance of Charter Day.  Perhaps we will rise in standing ovation, bewitched, bothered and bewildered.  Perhaps.  Perhaps.

Chokwe Lumumba (1947-2014): Long Distance Runner

On Tuesday, Chokwe Lumumba, a long-distance runner in human rights and Black Power lore and the Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, died suddenly.  Like another beloved and transformational mayor of a generation ago, Chicago’s Harold Washington, Lumumba’s sorely-taxed heart failed.  As was also the case with Washington, Chokwe’s death leaves us numb, hopes for progressive Black municipal politics robbed of another focusing champion.  Some of our dampened eyes will no doubt turn with renewed vigor to Newark, where Amiri and Amina Baraka’s son Ras continues to gain momentum in his quest for a post-Corey Booker/post-“postracial” mayoralty.  We will look to the movement he represents, perhaps, with a less wary sense of impending mortality, hoping that his relative youth will stay the bitter scythe that lay these more senior symbols of popular will low before their, and our, time.

Some who will not publically celebrate Lumumba’s passing will, in the ugly corners where they give voice to their deepest fears and hatreds, gratefully expect a return to more familiar power arrangement in Jackson.  Let them be wary.  When giants pass, sometimes apprentices, robbed of the luxury of time to be noncommittal or opaque, find purpose and emerge strengthened.  Chokwe Lumumba was representative of one such recent moment in African-American history, when courage and youth met determination, talent and indignant defiant self-determination.  That moment saw its own martyrs: the Mississippi-slain Emmett Till and Medgar Evers; Martin King, Malcolm X and others whose deaths catalyzed the emergence of a new generation of leaders with now iconic names:  Stokely. Angela. Rap. Kathleen. Huey.

Lumumba, a contemporary and eventual comrade of the aforementioned generation of “Black Power” leaders, was born Edwin Taliaferro in Detroit, his mother Priscella's family having immigrated from what James Brown famously referred to as “LA—Lower Alabama.”  He began “movement work” as a teenager and, like the others, saw his idealism sorely tested by the killings of Malcolm X and Martin King.  Lumumba said that he had only come to the movement and stayed in it because of these two figures.  When they were killed, he said, “then I became a leader.”  Like Carmichael  and LeRoi Jones, young Taliafero took a new name with connections to African culture and political struggle.  His first name, Chokwe, came from a central African cultural group who resisted Portuguese colonialism well into the twentieth century; his last name came from one of the world’s most celebrated and mourned political figures, the first Prime Minister of independent Congo, the martyred Patrice Lumumba. 

The day after King’s death (a man Lumumba said his mother thought was the “Black Moses”), Lumumba joined the movement to establish Black Studies programs, first at Western Michigan University and then at Kalamazoo College.  Seven years later, he graduated, summa cum laude, from Wayne State University School of Law and began work that would make him one of the most well-known Black Power/Civil Rights lawyers in recent memory.  His work as a crusading lawyer in Detroit and his efforts to create African-Centered schools and community organizations reached a historic watershed when he joined the celebrated Republic of New Afrika.

In his new book, America’s Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community, American University Law Professor Robert Tsai chronicles the political and legal philosophy of the RNA, including its vision of a declaration of independence for the Black nation in the United States; a provisional government and people’s parliament for those living in the borders of “free national territories” in the U.S. south; the call and legal rationale for reparations for descendants of American enslavement; and the argument, using the U.S. Constitution’s so-called “Civil War Amendments,” for holding a plebiscite on the question of citizenship among Africans in the United States.  Tsai argues that the RNA vision, far from impracticable, expanded and complicated the meaning of governance and law as set forth in the U.S. Constitution.

As a law student at Ohio State, I remember devoting considerable time to thinking through and debating the legal arguments and alternatives as presented by Lumumba, Obadele and the women and men of the RNA.  The exercise allowed us to infuse our youthful enthusiasm and growing understanding of the relationship of language to power and institutions with a sense of purpose beyond mere survival and/or accommodation.  Lumumba’s rationale for reparations made both moral and legal sense, and revealed the law for what it most often is: The instrument by which the few organize, access and control the many. Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia like to talk about the relationship of morality to concepts like natural law, but Chokwe Lumumba revealed how, through study and lived praxis, once-oppressed people can access, leverage and acquire power and make more inclusive, humane and socially effective law. 

With this vision, and  primarily because of his work with the RNA (and subsequently the New Afrikan People's Organization, or NAPO) , Lumumba would relocate to Jackson, Mississippi.  He had been in Detroit in August, 1971 when Mississippi police attacked RNA members on a farm they had attempted to purchase in Jackson. Thanks to assistance from another Alabama to Detroit transplant, Rosa Parks, Lumumba worked with Michigan Congressman John Conyers to ensure that Imari Obadele and other leaders of the RNA in Mississippi were not killed in the wake of this state violence.  Years later, Congressman Conyers would introduce HR 40, a bill to establish a commission to study reparations proposals for African Americans.

Lumumba would eventually move to Jackson, spending the rest of his life traveling the country and the globe confronting oppression in the courts, in the streets, and in elected office—first on the Jackson City Council and, in 2013, as Mayor of the city.  He worked as attorney for Geronimo Pratt, Assata Shakur, Mutulu Shakur, “The Pontiac Sixteen,” and many others, including Tupac Shakur.  He fought against capital punishment and won the release in Mississippi of Jamie and Gladys Scott from a wrongful armed robbery conviction in a celebrated 2011 case.  He helped create and assist organizations that fostered intergenerational apprenticeship and movement activity, from the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America to the aforementioned NAPO and the  Malcolm X Grassroots Movement to the National Black United Front. 

Lumumba died after having just won a hard-fought struggle to acquire levers of municipal power.  We live in an era when scholars who, from Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley to Benjamin Barber, argue that interconnected cities are emerging as a model form of transnational governance.  History will note that Chokwe joined the Ancestors just as the citizens of Jackson had begun “Freeing the Land,” even as Black students sit guard over the statue of James Meredith three hours away, at “Ole Miss.”

Therein lies the rhythm, the underlying fixed element in an otherwise variable dance of fate.  Perhaps Gerald Horne is correct in calling the post 1960s generations of Black intellectuals largely “lost,” many looking for “postracial” explanations for indelible markers of racial oppression, and the precarious position of the Black “middle class” as some sign of “progress” or the realization of the dream of those who struggled for something very different two generations ago.  The idea that “millennials,” born after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, are not in tune to the dreams and aspirations of the masses of our people is belied by the evidence of Black students at Michigan, Dartmouth, UCLA, and elsewhere who struggle to connect, to understand, as Black enrollment at those and many other HWCUs decline.  Individual progress, especially the illusory “gains” of the tottering Black middle class, has never meant group progress for African Americans, as Howard social scientists from Ralph Bunche, Franklin Frazier, Andrew Billingsley and Joyce Ladner to Bill Spriggs and Rodney Green have constantly reminded us.

A growing number of fertile minds, entranced by the echo chamber of a race angst-tinged academy  and the lure of prophecy for hire, are working to interpret the era of “Black Power” as a phase in the accomplishment of “the American Dream.” This misuse of  intellectual capital amounts to a unilateral declaration of surrender on their parts.  When compared to the revolutionary, provocative, deeply considered and sharply contested ideas and actions of Chokwe Lumumba and the generation of workers he represented, the “vanguard” of subsequent generations appear to be populated by those who looked upon the face of state violence and blanched. 

There are certainly understandable reasons for choosing the safety and comfort of Blackness as metaphor, multiculturalism as trope and neoliberal academia as shelter. COINTELPRO was and, in its new and improved manifestations, is real. The nominal rewards of political, bureaucratic and/or professional status and access are sometimes difficult to imagine living without or in perpetual fear of having them removed.  And as for our students, well, we are encouraged to have them emulate these failed people, who have come to be celebrated as stylish, ultimately irrelevant frauds. They will not be counted among the surviving images of memory; and they do not care. They have their earthly reward.

Chokwe Lumumba was not elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi by himself.  We progress, on all fronts, as a group, in tactical coalition with others of like mind and objective.  We can only work with the hope that new voices will arise, perhaps shorn of the timidity, mediocrity, and willingness to compromise of the two generations between the 1960s and today.  While our students are everywhere, and we must support, nurture and help educate them wherever we are, it is our job at HBCUs to train them en masse, beneath the gaze of those who think they will not appear.  I used to tell Brother Chokwe that he, Alton Maddox, and Derrick Bell were three brothers whose personal and intellectual example and consul had transformed my own work as a teacher, researcher, and organizer.  I had looked forward to seeing him again, to flying from Thurgood Marshall Airport into Medgar Evers Airport and seeing his picture and name there, as Mayor.  Thank you, Brother Chokwe.  Counselor.  Thinker. Doer. Afrikan. Freer of the Land. You were a long distance runner. Your memory—and the work you did and left for us to do—remains, and the time is fast approaching when subsequent generations must become leaders.

Chokwe Lumumba's Inauguration Speech

Black History Month, Day 1: Lessons for Institutionalizing Carter G. Woodson’s Vision

In 1926, Carter Godwin Woodson, out of the material and human resources derived primarily from Black communities, fashioned a Black-controlled public ritual dedicated to reviewing the results of the annual year-round study of what he called “Negro life and history.”  Woodson believed that the steady and regular accumulation and dissemination of factually sound research would spur common-sense efforts of Black America to transform our social, economic and cultural conditions.  Joining the creation of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the creation of the Journal of Negro History and the Associated Publishers, and followed by the creation of the Negro History Bulletin, “Negro History Week” became another in his sequence of strategies to link the deep study of Black life to acts of community consensus and coalition building.  Nearly nine decades later, Woodson’s vision and strategies have been sorely misinterpreted, even by some who have fashioned careers from interpreting his work.

In the January 1943 issue of his Negro History Bulletin, Woodson gave what is still the best description of the purpose of “Negro History Week.”  The editorial for that volume reminds its loyal readership of schoolteachers and children, academics and rank and file members of his army of Black onlookers and co-conspirators that “this is the week set aside by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History for the purpose of emphasizing what has already been learned about the Negro during the year.” In 1976, the Association expanded the weeklong celebration to a month, creating what we now call “Black History Month.” Three generations hence, the month has become a point of both celebration and derision, not to mention a revenue stream for everyone from television programmers and department store marketers to enterprising “public intellectuals” of all colors and motive.

Woodson would likely not be surprised by the heady mix of ignorance and free enterprise that now mark the year’s shortest month as the locus of discussions of race rather than a brief reflection period for the preceding year’s study of Africana. In the March, 1950 issue of the Bulletin published the month before he died at his 9th street home in Washington, DC, Woodson recognized that many in the Black community had effectively inverted and eviscerated the purpose of Negro History Week, turning it into a convenient cul de sac for engaging in fleeting considerations of “the race problem.” In a hard-hitting editorial titled “No Study and Consequently No Celebration,” Woodson addressed the problem head on, saying:

“It is evident from the numerous calls for orators during Negro History Week that schools and their administrators do not take the study of the Negro seriously enough to use Negro History Week as a short period for demonstrating what the students have learned in their study of the Negro during the whole school year.  These mischievous orators, as it has been said again and again in these columns, have no message which they can connect with the celebration of Negro History Week.  About the only thing on the Negro which they know is the traditional discussion of the race problem and how it has been or can be solved.”

Emphasizing that there were many schools in the country that were, in fact, “tak(ing) the study of the Negro seriously,” Woodson nevertheless warned against the encroaching conflation of external definitions of Black life and its possibilities—the idea that our existence would be reduced during February to variations of answers to the question Du Bois had argued lies behind most recognitions of Black life:  “how does it feel to be a problem?

            In 2005, when the School District of Philadelphia created the country’s first mandatory African-American History high school course in a major school district, we anchored the course curriculum framework in Woodson’s vision for institutionalizing Black-centered approaches to studying ourselves and the world.  Our framework included a series of lessons called “Intellectuals of the African Diaspora,” each lesson a self-contained essay with lesson plans and primary source materials that included representative female and male thinkers from every corner of the African world. 

The first person selected for a lesson would provide the overarching thematic arc for the entire course, with questions deriving from this thinker’s life and work providing tools for baseline inquiries for each six week module’s planning and scheduling timeline. In this manner, students would enter both the work and the mind of a Black scholar, aligning their own growing curiosity with the questions asked by their intellectual ancestors and seeing themselves as both receivers and producers of knowledge grounded in their experiences.

Our team considered and debated a wide range of exemplars, from W.E.B. Du Bois (for his multi and interdisciplinary pursuit of the study of Black life in local, national and international contexts) to Claudia Jones (for her working class, Pan-Africanist approach to Black international institution building).  Finally, we settled on Carter Woodson.  His technique for approaching Black life has, in many ways, never been surpassed.

I assigned myself the task of writing the first lesson in the series “Intellectuals of the African Diaspora: Carter G. Woodson” It is included here as it appears in the first edition of the School District of Philadelphia’s “Lessons in Africana Studies,” the companion volume that, with the comprehensive Planning and Scheduling Timeline, comprises the core of the mandatory high school course.  There is also included here a talk I gave at the District giving some background on the thinking that led to the creation of the lesson.

           I encourage you to read and use the lesson, its structure, questions and primary source documents in classrooms of all types and ages.  Among the primary source documents included in the lesson is a list of fifteen possible activities suggested by Woodson’s Association for activities students can undertake during February.  If you are so inclined, please share your experiences with us and each other, particularly those of your students.  I have also included links to the homepage of ASALH and the National Park Service’s Carter G. Woodson Home, which are portals to a bevy of materials useful to restructuring the way we approach the study African life, memory and vision, especially in February. 

If nothing else, the life and work of Carter Woodson demonstrates that the task of the learner, whether as apprentice or fully developed scholar, is to undertake the search for meaning with will, passion, accretive mastery of content and technique, and stamina, to see where the road leads.  What is all too frequently missing in the study of African humanity are roadmaps for self-created structures that afford African people the ability to engage in that search independently and at once in comparative, interactive tandem with other genealogies and modalities of human meaning.

I close this first February posting with the words of Woodson’s close friend and collaborator, Mary McCleod Bethune, written after his passing, published in the Journal of Negro History’s May 1950 issue, and included at the close of the lesson:

“I shall always believe in Carter Woodson. He helped me to maintain faith in myself. He gave me renewed confidence in the capacity of my race for development, and in the capacity of my country for justice for her own people and for all peoples. With the power of cumulative fact he moved back the barriers and broadened our vision of the world, and the world’s vision of us.”