Buy Black on Black Friday

Buy Black on Black Friday

Why do we lack the economic vitality of Chinatown, Mexico town, white town, gay town? And yet Black America is the 16th richest nation in the world, but most of our money goes out the hood to feed and enrich others. When will we do for self and kind? Of course first there must be love of self and kind that is sorely lacking at this hour, although the economic situation is, as Elijah demanded, forcing black unity. Families are now living together who used to hate each other, but circumstance is forcing them to get along.

We cannot demand others give us economic justice when we don't give ourselves such. Why should the white man hire you when you don't want to hire you, you rather hire a Mexican, yet you would not think of going to Mexican town to ask for a job, nor would you go to Chinatown, white town or gay town. Yet from coast to coast Mexicans are working in Soulfood restaurants and other black businesses because you won't acquire the discipline to hold down a job. You want to tell the boss what to do. Smoke yo blunt and talk on the cell phone at work. One day you will help self and kind first, then help others.

Some of you declined to purchase my $100.00 book, The Wisdom of Plato Negro, Volumes I and II, yet you who went to college bought numerous hunid dollar books that drove you insane, that have you yet addicted to the virus of white supremacy. At least my hunid dollar book was written in an attempt to restore your sanity. Furthermore, the entire contents of the book is available for free on my blog.

You want economic justice, stop spending your money with those who hate you, who won't employ you. Are you some kind of trick sucker? Get a grip on your mind and fly right as the old folks used to say. If you boycotted Black Friday by shopping with your own kind or simply staying at home, America would ask what do you people want? If you boycotted the shops, stores and malls during the holidays, America would beg you to say what you people want!
Why are you spending $200.00 for tennis shoes that cost 50 cents to make in China.

But what do you want, Hamlet, or shall we call you Othello's children! Do you want a job or can you use the mind God gave you to create your own job? Don't you see that even if you possess the skills for jobs in the present era, you are not wanted. This is not entirely a racial matter but a matter of the filthy, greedy, blood sucking capitalist system you want to be part of. Imagine, even with high unemployment, the corporations are doing fine, making mega profits with bonuses.

Yet you are unemployed and possibly homeless since your good job was outsourced to India and China, and you were a victim of the sub prime loan scam. Of course the sub prime pyramid scheme shall ultimately backfire in the face of the capitalists as we see in France, England, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. And yes, ultimately it shall hit America. The shit ain't hit the fan in America yet. Wait until they do title searches on all the foreclosed properties that the new owners attempt to purchase. Yes, they shall indeed be toxic securities, absolutely worthless.

Think of all the black wealth that has gone with the wind, all the real estate blacks accumulated from sweat, blood and tears. The little inheritance our ancestors and elders acquired is gone because we were greedy and did not guard against being deceived, or did not exercise the dictum buyer be aware.

And so, in the Sisyphean tradition, we begin again the climb up the hill with the rock in hand. We should consider establishing micro-loan banks to help our people out of poverty as people are doing around the world. We must become entrepreneurs and do for self. There is no other way out of this conundrum unless we, in the manner called revolution, seize the institutions that have stolen our wealth and divest them in the name of the people, then share the wealth, feeling no sorrow for the blood suckers of the poor, the greedy capitalist swine and their running dogs.

Marcus Garvey told you, Up you mighty Race, accomplish what you will!
--Marvin X

Black Bird Press Books
1222 Dwight Way, Berkeley CA 94702

Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality is an enclyclopedia of knowledge.Marvin X is a griot if there ever was one.
--Mumia Abu Jamal, Live from Death Row
Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality by Marvin X is a dangerous book, for it reveals the inner workings of capitalist and imperialist governments around the world. It's a book that stands with and on behalf of the poor, the dispossessed, the despised, and downtrodden. He’s a needed counselor, for he knows himself on the deepest personal level and he reveals that self to us that we might be his beneficiaries. --Rudolph Lewis, editor, Chickenbones











Fly to Allah and Son of Man, proverbs, 1968, established Marvin X as the father of Muslim American literature and one of the founders of the Black Arts Movement.--Dr. Mohja Kahf

$19.95 each
























Marvin X is
guest editor
of the Poetry
Issue, Journal
of Pan African Studies, December, 2010,
an online journal. A print
edition is available from
Black Bird Press.

Donation $49.95
503 pages


In the Crazy House
Called America, essays,
2002. Do you doubt the
title?

People who know Marvin X already know him as a peripatetic, outspoken, irreverent, poetic “crazy nigger,” whose pen is continually and forever out-of-control. As a professional psychologist, I hasten to invoke the disclaimer that that is in no way a diagnosis or clinical impression of mine. I have never actually subjected this brother to serious psychoanalytical scrutiny and have no wish to place him on the couch, if only because I know of no existing psycho-diagnostic instrumentality of pathology of normalcy that could properly evaluate Marvin completely.—Dr. Nathan Hare, Black Think Tank, San Francisco

Donation: $19.95


Land of My Daughters,
poems, 2005.

Consciousness-altering, astonishing -- Marvin X is the USA’s Rumi & his nation is not “where our fathers died” but where our daughters live. X’s poems vibrate, whip, love in the most meta- and physical ways imaginable and un-. He’s got the humor of Pietri, the politics of Baraka, and the spiritual Muslim grounding that is totally new in English –- the ecstasy of Hafiz, the wisdom of Saadi.--Bob Holman, Bowery Poetry Club, NYC

I'm beginning to read your wonderful book (Land of My Daughters, poems) - Aloud! There's no way that the silence(s) in your poems could remain...quiet. There is a spiritual faucet of images, an outcry (un grito), humming deep and wild. And after I read your poetry, a ring keeps bouncing off my ears. Must be that preacher in you, that poet who has learned to dance with hurricanes! Un abrazo, Jose Angel

--jose angel figueroa, New York City

Donation $19.95


Love and War,
poems, 1995.
Dr. Mohja Kahf
said read these
poems for
Ramadan!

Donation $19.95




Mythology of Pussy and Dick
is empowering women and men,
old and young. "They steal this
book from each other as if it
were black gold!"--Paradise Jah Love

Donation $49.95
418 pages








Wish I Could Tell You the Truth,
essays, 2005.

Marvin X has been ignored and silenced like Malcolm X would be ignored and silenced if he had lived on into the Now. Marvin’s one of the most extraordinary, exciting black intellectuals living today—writing, publishing, performing with Sun Ra’s Musicians (Live in Philly at Warm Daddies, available on DVD from BPP), reciting, filming, producing conferences (Kings and Queens of Black Consciousness, San Francisco Black Radical Book Fair); he’s ever engaging, challenging the respectable and the comfortable. He like Malcolm, dares to say things fearlessly, in the open (in earshot of the white man) that so many Negroes feel, think and speak on the corner, in the barbershops and urban streets of black America….
--Rudolph Lewis, Chickenbones.com
Donation $19.95


Eldridge Cleaver, My friend
the Devil, a memoir, by
Marvin X. Recounts his
thirty year relationship
with the man he introduced
to the Black Panthers. Jimmy
Garrett says it was the funniest
book of 2009. Introduction by
Amiri Baraka.
Donation $19.95



















Tainted Soul
by
Ptah Allah El

A movie script based
on the life of a Black
Panther who hijacked
a plane to Cuba and was
transformed by the Cuban
revolution. $19.95









The Wisdom
of Plato Negro,
Parables/fables
by Marvin X,
Volumes I and II,
2010. "Marvin X is
Plato teaching on the
streets of Oakland.
If you want to learn about
inspiration and motivation,
don't spend all that money
going to workshops and seminars,
just go stand at 14th and Broadway
and watch Marvin X at work."
--Ishmael Reed

Donation $100.00 (includes volumes I and II)


Order Now directly from the Publisher. Not available in bookstores or online.
Some titles may be temporarily out of print. Please send money, add $5.00 for
postage and handling to:

Black Bird Press
1222 Dwight Way,
Berkeley CA 94702
















To book Marvin X for readings, performance, speaking engagements, please contact his agent:
Muhammida El Muhajir, www.suninleo.com.

When you listen to Tupac Shakur, E-40, Too Short, Master P or any other rappers out of the Bay Area of Cali, think of Marvin X. He laid the foundation and gave us the language to express Black male urban experience in a lyrical way. -- James G. Spady, Philadelphia New Observer

His writing is orgasmic!—Fahizah Alim, Sacramento Bee


He comes in the spirit of Imhotep to bring peace of mind to the world. — Ptah Allah El, Richmond CA

He’s the new Malcolm X! Nobody’s going to talk about his book, HOW TO RECOVER FROM THE ADDICTION TO WHITE SUPREMACY, out loud, but they’ll hush hush about it.

—Jerri Lange, author, Jerri, A Black Woman’s Life in the Media


Declaring Muslim American literature as a field of study is valuable because by re-contexualising it will add another layer of attention to Marvin X's incredibly rich body of work. Muslim American literature begins with Marvin X.
--Dr. Mohja Kahf, Department of English, Middle East and Islamic Studies, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Marvin X's autobiography Somethin' Proper is one of the most significant works to come out of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It tells the story of perhaps the most important African American Muslim poet to appear in the United States during the Civil Rights era. The book opens with an introduction by scholar Nathan Hare, a key figure in the Black Studies Movement of the period. --Julius E. Thompson, African American Review

Much of Marvin X's poetry is militant in its anger at American racism and injustice. For example, in “Did You Vote Nigger?” he uses rough dialect and directs his irony at African Americans who believe in the government but are actually its pawns. Many of the proverbs in The Son of Man (1969) express alienation from white America . However, many of Marvin X's proverbs and poems express more concern with what African Americans can do positively for themselves, without being paralyzed by hatred. He insists that the answer is to concentrate on establishing a racial identity and to “understand that art is celebration of Allah.” The poems in Fly to Allah, Black Man Listen (1969), and other volumes are characterized by their intensity and their message of racial unity under a religious banner.
--Lorenzo Thomas, University of Houston, Texas

He has always been in the forefront of Pan African writing. Indeed, he is one of the innovators and founders of the revolutionary school of African writing. --Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

I welcome reading the work of a “grassroots guerilla publicist” who is concerned with the psychological/intellectual freedom of his people. I think of Walter Rodney as the “guerilla intellectual” who was organically connected to the grassroots. Key book here would be The Groundings With My Brothers [and sisters]. Or Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like. I think though that Dr. M. is closely affiliated with Frances Cress Welsing’s Isis Papers: Keys to the Colors (along with Bobby Wright’s thesis). Of course we need to also consult that classic: The Black Anglo Saxons, and Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie. What I am most impressed with is Dr. M’s Pan-Africanist perspective. We all need to “Detox” as Dr. M states, wherever we are in this world. So the Pan-African element is important. Du Bois knew this, and many of the other giants. Even though they were also, ironically, “infected” like most of us in some way today. I think this citation from Step I is important: “…We are only powerless when we deny who we are and do not recognize we exist in harmony with the universal spirit of peace, justice and mercy. White supremacy is an illusion in the minds of those who believe it and those who accept the scam”….

--Mark Christian, PhD Associate Professor Sociology & Black World Studies Miami University (Ohio)