Black Panther history, FBI surveillance, and storytelling

Game Stations Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Blackness Yeah, you know, it's kind of like, you know, when I was really studying King Solomon, one of my favorite people to study, right? He had like gold mines. People know that. He had like gold shields. He had gold, right? However, other rich people had things like donkeys, mules. That was their wealth, you know, because in Ecclesiastes, he's talking about, he's talking to somebody, I think Queen Sheba, he's saying, you know, I got things that are so precious. I can't even let people look at them because it would just drive them wild. They try to steal it. They got it, you know. But anyway, yeah, so I can appreciate that type of wealth at a time when others had goats, you know, and we're wealthy, right? Why don't we play that video? All right. Okay, we're getting that video ready and we'll move on to Melvin Ishmael, who's been sort of quiet. I mean, we're going to really get into Fred Hampton and, you know. And various aspects of the Black Panthers in a few minutes or, you know what? We could go there now. I forgot I'm in control of this. Right? Yeah, so we can go there now. That's one of the things I like a great deal about Melvin Ishmael Johnson is that, like he said, like your mother told you, he reads books. And I thought when he said it, do people still read books? You know, I mean. Oh, yeah. And so I was impressed with that. So why don't we start off with Chicago and we'll talk a little bit about that. What I'd like you to start off with is your experience that time on the bike and what really got you thinking, well, this isn't cool. It's interesting. In Chicago. Every person, every person, every black person has an experience of something that. Sort of. Defined your relationship with society. And for me, it was this. I was in the Boy Scouts on the West. Grew up on the West Side of Chicago. One Saturday morning, me and three of my buddies, we were going to ride south down Pulaski Road to earn right enough miles to earn our cycling merit badges. So we left early in the morning. We're riding, riding, riding. As we were riding way, we started out on fourteen hundred south. We rode one hundred and fifty. Hundred and sixty hundred. We just rode. And at some point we passed this little little league stadium. When we were coming back, there was a little league game going on across from the stadium. There was a water fountain. So one by one, we stopped at the water fountain because we were thirsty. You know, this is before bottles. And I was the last one. And when I got there, I was trying to guzzle up all the water on the earth. And as I'm guzzling the water, all of a sudden I became aware of my friends who had ridden on. Each one. And I became aware of them yelling and yelling and waving and waving and then pointing and pointing. And when I became aware of that, I became aware of the sound. And I looked. That little league game had stopped. The stands and the field had emptied. And dozens, if not a hundred or so, of these white folks are running after me. With baseball bats and bricks. And balls in their hand to throttle me. Because I'm the only one there. My friends have ridden on. And I still have the image in my mind of this little white woman who couldn't have been more than five feet something tall. Calling me everything but a child of God and holding one of those objects in her hand. And I rolled my butt off. Now here's the thing that I find most interesting about that. We rolled out of danger. And we laughed. And we went on home. And I don't think I ever told anybody about it. Because that was the way things were. Let's also clarify that, you know, a lot of white people forever, seems to me, didn't want blacks to drink from the same water fountain. So we just want to clarify that's what that was all about. No, this was about me being in their neighborhood. Really? They could care less. Is that right? That was it. I was there. I thought it was that. No, I was there. And that's the way. You know, a lot of people don't know. When Martin Luther King came to Chicago, he came there to deal with housing issues and what have you. And they were going to have a march. Before the march started, he was hit upside the head with a brick. And he said, I have been in demonstrations in Alabama. Yeah. In Georgia. In Georgia. In Georgia. In Georgia. He said, I have never seen hatred and racism like here in Chicago. And he left. Yes, it was vicious. There was a priest, a Catholic priest who taught racism from the pulpit over in Mayor Daley's neighborhood. Oh, yeah. It was rough in Chicago. Mayor Daley's a story in itself. That's a whole bunch of stories. But there was an area of Chicago, Cicero. It was an area and there's a street. And Cicero was one of those sundown areas. Don't be there when the sun go down. Because you would be. If you were lucky, you just got beat up. But you could be stabbed. You could be shot. You could be killed. Too tough. We're not going to get on to the other beating I read about with you for right now. We'll let that one go. But this led you ultimately to the Black Panther movement. Yeah, well, I... What would you call it? Black Panther movement? It was the Black Panther Party. Party. And my mother, who was from Barbados, my mother taught me that you had to stand up what you believed in. She instilled in me the belief that if you saw something wrong, something being done wrong, you had an obligation to do what you could. And I was like, okay. I'm going to do what I can. And look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look at the look You know these things are happening, but when it literally hits you upside the head. Yeah. And so that was my awakening. And then I read the autobiography of Malcolm X. And so I read and read and read Lerone Bennett. I read all these things about black history and culture. I joined the youth wing of the NAACP. There were black student organizations being formed. Now I was going to St. Ignatius College Preparatore, a very prestigious institution, primarily white, like 95% white in the black community. In the black? Interesting. On the west side of Chicago. And I joined the Black Panther Party in 1968. And in 1969, me and my buddy Gary, we led a. We wanted, as was the norm at that time, you submit a list of demands. We wanted more black students, black studies, things of that nature. And the administration basically said, get the heck out of here. So we led a walkout and we were both, we were leaders. We were kicked out of school. Now my father was old school. And fortunately my father was at work the night that this happened. Otherwise I would not be here talking to you right now. So we were kicked out. We were kicked out of school and I became a member of full time member of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party that was led by Fred Hampton. And that was a personality, a person, a dynamic individual. Now, when Fred was murdered, he was 21 years old. But he was, as they say, an old soul. And one of Fred's great strengths was the ability to bring people together. Because when you've got an organization, when you've got a group of people, you've got all these different personalities. And so within the Illinois chapter, the Black Panther Party, you've got all these different personalities. And then he, Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party created the Rainbow Coalition. Okay. Yes. The Black Panther Party created the Rainbow Coalition, not Jesse Jackson. He trademarked the name sometime later. I got you. All right. We had this alliance with a variety of organizations. We had this alliance with a variety of organizations. We had this alliance with a variety of organizations. But the Rainbow Coalition was the Illinois chapter, the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, who had been a Puerto Rican street gang who had become political, and the Young Patriots, hillbillies. They wore little black berets with little Confederate flags on them, right? And there's this movie, American Revolution II. You can find it on YouTube, I'm pretty sure now. Where two members. They were the leaders of the party. They went up to uptown to talk to a meeting of the Young Lords and poor white folks explaining why we should be working together and not fighting against each other. Y'all hungry, we're hungry. Y'all getting screwed, we're getting screwed. We should be working together. And after the meeting, there's the guy who directed the film, Mike. The guy who directed the film, Mike. The guy who directed the film, Mike. He was asking one of the hillbillies, the older guys, what he thought about this concept of working with these black folks, this black organization. And he said something like, well, if them Black Panthers gonna support us, I guess we should support them Black Panthers. Now, a couple of weeks after this, Bob Lee, who was one of the Panthers, and Hank, who was the other one, who were organizers in that panther, he said, I'm gonna support the Black Panthers. And we Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil Fil see past these petty, ultimately petty differences. But that's a tremendous thing because these are things that have been built up for not just decades, but centuries, right? That was one of his great skills, was to bring people together, which is one of the reasons that he had to be killed. Well, we're going to talk about the film you saw that you're in. Like I said, just for the audience, originally I was on my way to do a film on the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panthers. And when I got into it really deep, I realized several things. I had went predetermined. Well, I interview these OGs and I'll download some footage and they'll go, Black Power, and that'll be the movie, right? But then I discovered that all these brothers are still very, very, very, very active all throughout the community, right? I was like, well, wait a minute. So the reason I began this show, and I met Michael that day, the reason I began this show is so I have a better way to get to know them. And I felt that what they had to say was very important in terms of linking this generation with the last generation and the generation before that, meaning what they learned from their parents also. So I just want to say I'm very happy to have it go this way. I'm unorthodox. This show is all about doing a documentary, but it allows me to really get into the story of what's going on in the world. And I want to say thank you to the people and to the essence of the people I'm doing. And I realized that a great deal of what I was basing my knowledge on was probably misinformation, right? So I had to start again. So I've learned a lot of things right now. The way you were just speaking about Fred Hampton, you know, like he was, you know, something very, very special. So many of our leaders, like I told you earlier, and the Panthers who were assassinated, you know, and we'll talk a little bit about that, were assassinated. I feel all of them should be remembered, acknowledged, prayed about during Black History Month, just like Martin Luther King or any other person that was assassinated during the movement to try to gain some type of freedom or... Justice. Justice. There you go. That's what everybody wants, right? Justice. So before we go any further, because I meant to have done it before, you know, the Pan-African Film Festival is a very, very important event. It's going on now. We urge all of you to go out and see as many of the films you can. I myself, I love looking at the African films. It's just so beautiful. They're beautiful, and they're talking about things I have no knowledge of. I love it. But why don't you tell us about the film that you went and viewed that you yourself were in. You told me, man, I forgot. Yes, the documentary is called The Black Panthers, Vanguard of the Revolution. And it was shown at the opening, last night at the Pan-African Film Festival. It's going to be shown again on Saturday, and I think, again, on Sunday or Monday. You can find out about it at paff.org. What's the brother's name again, the head of the... Babu. Babu thing. We've got to say his name. Yeah, yeah. All right, go ahead. Babu. Yeah, this was an amazing film. This was an amazing film. Like, it took them seven years to put all this together, and they did an excellent job. As I... As you mentioned, I had forgotten about it. I was interviewed a couple of years ago, and, you know, life goes on, and I get interviewed a lot of times for something that may never happen. So, I didn't think about it. So, Monday, I got an email from one of the... From the... What is she? Not the director, but I can't remember. Ugh, Lawrence. Saying, oh, where... The film is at the opening. Are you ready for the red carpet? Yeah. But it was an amazing film. It... It... She interviewed... They interviewed dozens of Panthers from all over the country. All right. Akua, Fred Hampton's wife, the mother of Fred Hampton Jr., another one of my comrades, and they had this footage, like I said, from all over the country. Roland was in there, Wayne, you know, you know, L.A. Panthers and what have you. It was just an amazing film. They... They showed the formation of the party, how the party grew. A lot of people, many misconceptions. They don't realize that the Black Panther Party was an international organization. In fact, to this day, as I travel, I remember going to Australia and New Zealand and reading how Aboriginal and Maori organizations had been... come together based on the concept of the Black Panther Party. One of my storytelling friends, Bob the Storyteller, he was recently in, I think, Peru, and he had contacted these Afro-Peruvians and connected with them and they said, look, when you come, can you bring us information about the Black Panther Party? This was just a couple of years ago. So the party's influence still resonates because it was an amazing... I mean, when you... You look at these two guys, UEP Newton and Bobby Seale, students at a college who had this idea and the way it... I mean, they weren't scholars, they were learned, but they weren't PhDs or what have you, but they had an idea, they had a concept, they saw a problem, and they said, we're going to do something about this. And many of us, we see stuff and we say, mm-mm-mm. And that's most people. And it's not saying those people are wrong, but it's not the norm to go up against the power of racism, the power of the U.S. government backing that racism. It's not the norm to say, I'm going to kick their butt. And they said, we're going to kick their butt. Now, I want to jump in. I want to talk about, just mention a book. It's called The Burglary. The Burglary is a book about these peace activists who in 1971, March 8th or 9th, it was the night of the Ali-Fraser fight. They broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Oh, Hank. Yeah. And they stole several suitcases of FBI files. And in those files, is this one document with this word, COINTELPRO. For those of you who are not aware, that's the counterintelligence program, a program developed by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to be used, well, against everybody. But specifically, he targeted the Black Panther Party, black organization. You know, in this book, J. Edgar Hoover Named the book again? The Burglary. Burglary, okay. J. Edgar Hoover's secret FBI, something like that. Every black person was to his mind, a subversive. And he told his agents that each of them should have six black informants. All of his agents. I mean, before I read this book, I used to read this book, I used to read this book, and I used to refer to J. Edgar Hoover as a gutter-sucking slime. After this book, I can't do that because it's an insult to gutter-sucking slime. All right? You see, I mean, he turned on Nixon. I mean, he turned on everybody. He killed the Kennedys. Yeah, it's, well, but that was, they were enemies to him. Nixon was supposed to be his boy. And he turned on him. He had documents on everybody. Let's, for our viewers that may not be up on that, and I want to bring Ishmael, Brother Ishmael, that's what I'll call you tonight, in a little bit. Let's give our viewers and our listeners an opportunity to get a better understanding of the timeframe, just how many years this type of thing went on with J. Edgar Hoover. Do you have an idea where it sort of began? And just the genealogy of it. Yeah. So, J. Edgar Hoover's first major case was to neutralize Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. So he used an informant called confidential informant number 800. Really? Yeah, that was the beginning of his tactic. He developed a tactic called infiltration and disinformation. That became the counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, see. And he, a little before Dr. King, one month before Dr. King was assassinated, J. Edgar Hoover sent out a memo to most of his trusted FBI agents. It became known as the Hoover memo. They discovered this later through the Freedom of Information Act. And it was to prevent the rise of a black messiah who could unify the black militant masses. And then he began to name names. He said, he looked at Malcolm X as being the black messiah. That's what he looked at. He was, but yeah. Yeah, and that's the way he perceived them. And then he named, he said, Elijah Muhammad is too old. You know, Stokely Carmichael, you know, he aspired for that role. I love Stokely Carmichael. But the real threat he felt was Dr. Martin Luther King, if he ever moved away from his, he called it liberal white doctrine, you know, and move, that can inspire the black militant masses. And then less than a month later, of course, Dr. King was assassinated. And if you look at both Dr. King, you look at going all the way back to Marcus Garvey, because Marcus Garvey probably had to lie down, and he was the largest international movement still in existence today. You know, because he, he were able to, at first he tried to get his movement off the ground in Jamaica, but couldn't get off the ground. He came over here to join Booker T. Washington. But Booker T. Washington died in 1915. So he go back to London, and he joined Deuce Muhammad Ali, who was renowned then. He had a magazine called The Orange Review. And he had did a lot of work on, Egyptology and stuff like that. And Deuce Muhammad Ali told him that, here's what you need. He said, first of all, when you go back, don't go back to Jamaica. So when you go back, go to Harlem. And he said, when you go to Harlem, make sure that you have an organ, a media organ that can reach the people. See, because Garvey had learned a lot from Deuce Muhammad Ali. He's a magazine. That's why he got the slogan from Africa for the African, that come down through there. One of my favorite also. Yes. And then so when he go back, he started the Negro World. And that took off. That was the medium in which he could reach out to all of the people that supported him. And I often think that this was a key that led to the assassination of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King. Is because when Malcolm broke away from the nation of Islam and began to travel and begin to look at things on the international point of view and begin to network with the UN and all of these other African leaders, you know, Kwame Nkrumah, some of these that had been students over here. Yeah. He became dangerous to them. And same thing with Dr. King. When Dr. King broke away from the traditional civil rights movement, spoke out against the Vietnam War, and then the Nobel Peace Prize gave him an international voice, you know, basically signed his death warrant on that. He said, I may not get there with you. Yeah. But the person behind all of that was the tactics that J. Edgar Hoover developed. And then after Malcolm... Hold on, I got to interrupt just for a second. All right. I realize now that you yourself experienced that. Mm-hmm. Wow. So we'll move away from that in a way. You were great and everything, but he actually personally experienced... That's what I read, right? Yeah. Why don't you share that, and we'll come back to some other things. So my first wife and I, we met in the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, and we left the party in 1970. And in December, I was working at the post office at the time, I was told I had to go to the ninth floor. Da-da-da-da-da. And I go up there, and there's these two FBI agents. And basically, they want me to rejoin the Black Panther Party and be an informer. Well, my answer to them is similar to the Hi John story. Okay? Yes, Martel. Mm-hmm. And they said, well, you have two options. Either you'll work for us, or you won't work. We can make your life very difficult. I wasn't working for them. And they proceeded to destroy my life. And I was like, I'm not going to work for them. I'm going to be a cop. So I'm working at the post office. One day, I get this document in the mail, all right, in triplicate, how many guns I own, how many rounds of ammunition I had bought, conversations I had with people in a bookstore at some place about revolution or what have you, about my having been kicked out of high school for leading this walkout. They was all up in my beeswax, okay? And I had to leave that job. I'd go apply for other jobs. And a job that during the interview, they said, oh, you're perfect. We'll let you know when to start. And I didn't hear anything. And they'd say either, who are you? Or, oh, no, we found somebody else. Poof. Over a two-year span, I had eight break-ins in three different apartments. They had a woman calling my wife like she was my girlfriend. I mean, they got, they destroyed my life. Because, and you have to remember, I had left the party at this point. But they were still, and it's because they could. Because they could. And the interesting thing or the irony is that that's how I ended up in the army. Because they're after me. I mean, it's me versus Jed and the FBI. Yeah, not much of a chance. Yeah. And I said, okay, what can I do? How can I get these people out of my life? How can I get these people off my back? And I said, if they're gonna watch me, I'm gonna go someplace where they can watch me. And I joined the army. And I said, I'm gonna play soldier. I'm gonna get these people off my back. And after I did, I went through basic training and then AIT, advanced individual training, in Fort Polk, Louisiana. We called it Fort Puke. One day, I was in my AIT unit and I was walking past my old basic unit. And one of the permanent duty guys comes up to me and says, Mac, Mac, these FBI people, they've been asking everybody about you. I said, okay. Because I knew this was gonna happen. The very next day, my first sergeant at my AIT unit says, Mac, these government people, they wanna talk to you. I said, okay. I'm a storyteller. I told them a story. I told them I've seen the error of my ways and I'm here to serve my... Man, when I got through talking, I had one of the FBI agents in tears. And I got him off my back. I got him off my back. Now, on another level, because I joined the army, because I went to Korea, because I studied martial arts, I got introduced to oriental medicine, which eventually led to me becoming an acupuncturist. I got involved with... I learned meditation techniques, read the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching. Again, expanding my mind, expanding my consciousness that would lead to other things that would happen later on in my life. But yeah, years later, my ex-wife and I each got our FBI files. Now, they redacted all the hell, okay? I mean, they must have used up several crates of black markers. But they had things like when we had arguments, when we made love, all right? They went... And you were a bug? Oh, yeah. They went to the neighborhood where I grew up, and they went directly to the parents of my childhood friends asking about me, okay? COINTELPRO. It was... Well, see, that's why I had to cut in. I realized that he actually experienced that, you know? And I could see the madness of it. For people who didn't know that they were dead, they were doing that, and things started happening. You have to like, well, why am I going crazy? Is, you know, God turned his back on me? Or, you know, like, what's going on? Oh, by the way, and he mentioned it, that people don't understand that J. Edgar Hoover began his madness in the 1920s, okay? In the 1920s. And, ooh, he wrecked, he wrecked, and he wrecked some more. I read Paul Robbins' son's wife's book. I had no idea they had done what they did with him with all the shock treatment and all these things they did. But our time is running out. Having too much fun? And I want to say that this particular show is really just what I wanted this show to be. Just what I wanted this show to be, and I really appreciate you both being here for my first show. What we're gonna do is our time is running out, and so we're gonna jump back in, and we'll get back to one of the other videos. We'll get back into the stories, and we got kind of heavy, but this show is actually for that. Oh, you know, one of the brothers that broke in that he was talking about, I'm trying to get him on the show, and other people who did magnificent things, which I can only say is they risked their lives and their livelihood and their family, everything. So in Black History Month, I just want to commend all the brothers that were assassinated and committed. The political president. And fed the children and did all these magnificent things that people seem to forget about the Panthers for. And so we'll go back to the storytelling. We're gonna go where now? We'll play the video, and we'll... We'll see what happens. We'll see which one, because I had three. Sure. Oh, he's ready now. My name is Michael D. McCarty, and I am a storyteller, and I'm gonna tell you all some stories. And this is a story about a character that you might have heard something about. You ever heard of a character named Anansi the Spider? Yes. Once, Anansi was in his home, and one of his spies came. You see, Anansi loves to eat, and there are feasts all over Africa. But nobody wants Anansi at their feast because he would eat up all the food. So he has spies that let him know when a feast is taking place. And one of his spies said, Anansi, Anansi, tomorrow there's gonna be a feast at this village over there. What time will the feast begin, he said? Sometime tomorrow after the sun sets. And he said, well, I'll be there, he said. But then a couple of hours later, another one of his spies comes and says, Anansi, Anansi, tomorrow there's gonna be a really big feast at this village over there. Oh, great, he said. What time will that feast begin? Sometime tomorrow after the sun is highest in the sky. Oh, so now he had a problem, a dilemma. Two feasts on the same day, both starting sometime after the sun is highest in the sky. And then, he said, I'll be there, he said. When is the glorious feast Now this was a long time ago. There were no cell phones, no email, no regular phones, but Nuncie was quick with it and he came up with a plan. He called two of his sons. He tied a loop of rope around his really big belly and gave the other end to one of his sons and said, now you go to that village over there and when that feed starts you pull me and tuck me and I'll come and run it. Then he tied another loop of rope around his really big belly and gave the other end to his other son who went to that other village. Now he's waiting. Oh boy. He's going to have so much food to feast in one day. And then all of a sudden this son starts pulling. Nuncie starts running towards him. But you know what happens, don't you? The other guy pulls. And so Nuncie's getting pulled this way and that way and this way and then that way and then no way. And the rope around his belly's getting tighter and tighter and tighter. Well all of that belly had to go someplace. What? Can you guess what part of his body that belly went to? His butt! All of a sudden the belly went boing, boing, boing. And Nuncie had this really big butt. And to this day when you go to the library and you look up books of spiders you will see spiders with really big butts! that they have inherited from Nuncie. And that's the end of that. Now did you hear that laugh at the end? In a few minutes we're going to play the last few of the end. I'll let him introduce it. It's such a beautiful commercial. But we're running low on time. I don't want to make certain that we do give props to various people like you both do things at Chaos. Let's talk a little bit about Chaos and what Mr. Caldwell is attempting to do in Leimert Park. Yeah, Ben Caldwell, the Chaos Network on the corner of Leimert Park Boulevard in 43rd Place. That's where I have my Griot Workshop. The second Tuesday we'll be meeting this Tuesday at the 10th at 7pm. And it's where people come to work on developing stories. We help people. If you have a story we'll help you get it right. If you have an idea we'll help you make it into a story. Now I went to one of those and we're going to talk about your thing there too. I went to one and I'm thinking well these people don't know how to tell stories. And this little beautiful lady got up and told this story. I was like she was so great. What did you say she does and her name and what she does? Barbara Clark. She is a great person. She runs Women's Voices at the Institute of Musical Art. She and her daughter Dawn Clark Johnson put on storytelling events on a monthly basis. And Barbara also runs a storytelling workshop for seniors. Also at the Institute of Musical Arts and Spoken Words on 54th and 10th Avenue. Okay and one more time, her name? Barbara Clark. Excellent. Storyteller extraordinaire. And what did you do at Chaos? You did a thing with J. Edgar Hoover. Yeah, we did a play called... Yeah, we did a play called Catch the Tagger. Tagger was a code name for Marcus Garvey. J. Edgar Hoover gave all of his targets a code name. Code name for Dr. King was Zorro. That's what he called Dr. King. Yes, Mark Lang and Dick Gregg wrote a book called Zorro about that. But we did the play Catch the Tagger over there dealing with J. Edgar Hoover's effort to neutralize Marcus Garvey. It's an excellent place to work with. Ben's a great, excellent person. Ernest is also over in that area and being on this spot. He's owned this spot for a long time. And you know, there's not many people in Leimert Park that own this space up there. Oh yeah. Yeah, but he's one of the few... And less and less with the movements that's going on right now. Yeah. And also, he's doing something very special with designing streets and... Oh yeah. And making changes and improving some Leimert Park. Yeah, that street there, 43rd Place. It's changed now, right? It's blocked off. They have events there. There's a whole lot of stuff going on. Yeah, so I want people to go ahead and get back into Leimert Park. If you haven't been there, it's just such a magnificent place. It's our culture. And so I'm not surprised to find these two gentlemen there. And we want to go talk about Babu, right? Pan-African film festival. Pan-African film festival. Babu, but that's what he's doing right now, right? But Deacon Alexander, a former member of the Black Panthers here in Los Angeles, told me that way back in the day in the 70s that Babu used to bring films to them in order to educate them. They'd sit down and watch films. So even then, he was using films to educate black people, which I thought was very deep, that he would evolve and manifest into the Black Pan-African film festival. It's something that he's always been doing and a message he's always been giving. And I just can't say enough about that. I just wanted to get that out before we run out of time. So we're down to about three minutes. And I think I should take a moment to say a little bit about Skid Row Film Studio. We got Jeremy in here. Jeremy Hansen has been doing our engineering in the back and everything. Hey, how's it going? Yeah, he's been doing our engineering. Yeah, he's been doing our videos. Why don't you, can you be heard? Yeah. Yeah, why don't you give an invitation to people that might want to do shows here? Yeah, absolutely. We're open to everybody. If you are interested in doing a show here at the studio, just visit our website at skidrowstudios.com. And there is an option on there, a tab you can hit, reserve studio time. That's all you need to do. Book a time and we'll work with you and get your show on the air. So this is a podcast. So this is a podcast, which means two things. That means that it'll be up and available on iTunes as well as Stitcher. It'll be available on our website for download. And on iTunes, I encourage everybody to subscribe to the show. That way, whenever you do new shows, all your listeners will automatically get it on their computer. Fantastic. Okay, we're going to play that last video. It's only 22 seconds. But I want to make sure we get in. And this is Michael at his most beautiful. His voice is resonating. And when you see it, you're going to like, what is he doing? But let's get that video in just to make sure. I mean, it's such a beautiful piece. Short, beautiful. And listen to this laugh. Filming is Filming is Drain the rainbow, taste the rainbow. So we're down to one minute. We also may not have mentioned something to do with the zoo. We got less than a minute. Okay, tomorrow and Sunday, there's a program at the L.A. Zoo for Black History Month, Lula Washington Dance Theater. At 10.30, I'll be telling stories at 12. African Soul Dance Company will be performing at 1.30. And at 3.15, Leo Key and the company Blues Band will be tearing it down. At the zoo, huh? At the zoo, at the L.A. Zoo. Okay, we're down to 30 seconds. And say something about the Qumran Report. Qumran Report coming up Monday, this coming Monday, we'll be talking to Josh Hamms, and we'll be talking to Tanuk, talking a little about black theater and the National Theater Company. Right here on the 21st, we will be... We're doing a reading called Malcolm and Yuri, dealing with Malcolm X and Yuri. All right, so this is Michael Blaze, and you've been listening to Echoes of Blackness. Thank you. Thank you. Great show. Great show. I tried to get this... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.