Eric Mann: An Interview
By Wanda Sabir

Although the room was smoldering, the spirits were high two weeks ago when Eric Mann came to town to speak about his latest instrument, a book which addresses “the crisis of Black people in the U.S. which requires national and worldwide attention and aid to challenge the ideology of white supremacy which shapes national policy.”

If as Mann, author of Comrade George, states, “ideas are a material force,” then a tool such as Katrina’s Legacy:White Raism and Black Reconstruction in New Orleans and The Gulf Coast can offer much in the "how-to" gray area, good intentions often fall into. I am reminded of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz who was killed just before he was to take the plight of African Americans before the United Nations as a crime against humanity; the same with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who was killed just as he began to connect US domestic policy to US foreign policy, a puzzle which has gotten easier and easier to assemble as the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and September 11 approach.

In a conversation over the phone last week, the author spoke about the importance of having a means of publishing and moving one’s own materials, so at the reading he encouraged people to buy books for their friends, teachers to order copies for their classes, and throughout the room almost everyone had 2-4 copies. In fact the event planners ran out of books and were taking orders when I left.

Wanda Sabir: I wanted to talk about the book and your plans for August 29, and what you are doing at the Strategy Center, a place in Southern California where socially conscious people can learn organizational skills. Since the disaster hit the Gulf region, the Bay View Newspaper has published up to the moment coverage of what was taking place on the ground there and even brought on an editor in exile from New Orleans, CC Campbell-Rock. Willie Ratcliff, publisher of the paper along with Mary Ratcliff, co-publisher and editor, have been working with Common Ground Relief which has been gutting churches, childcare centers, schools, etc., without cost, to develop an arm of the organization which could direct people to contractors who were honest to mitigate the fraud and theft which is still happening as people try to get back on their feet. In late spring this year Mr. Ratcliff went to New Orleans to meet with Malik Rahim, one of the founders of the volunteer collective and other contractors.

Eric Mann: “A lot of what I want to do is get people to read the book. The thing at this point in history is during the 1960s we had a few best sellers like ‘Soul on Ice’ by Eldridge Cleaver and ‘Soledad Brother’ by George Jackson, but even then when I worked for Students for a Democratic Society or the Congress for Racial Equality we still had a lot of movement folks who knew how to build a movement, when they went to publishers were told, “No, people want to know why the war is wrong, not how to build a movement.”

“My answer was, ‘How do you know? You never published any books like that. If you keep publishing what’s wrong, how’s that going to help build a movement?

A commercial marketer would say, ‘Well yeah, our market analysis says no one will buy a book like that.’

“So even back then we had movement press. Students for a Democratic Society put out its own radical information. We published our own pamphlets, our own books because we wanted to get the information into the hands of the people of the people who wanted to do something, in this case: the people at Common Ground, the people in Bayview Hunter’s Point who are sick of the (war) against black communities in San Francisco part of the trend in New Orleans.

“The reason we formed Frontlines Press when I came back from the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, was I did these dispatches while there (I loved South Africa. I feel that’s a place I could live and work, let’s say at a clinic helping children, but I still have the revolution to take care of here in the United States, right?) So I did these dispatches from Durban they were called, in 1991 from the World Conference Against Racism. Now those would go out every night in emails and on list-serves, and it would be mind-blowing the next day in Durban I’d be having lunch and when introduced to an African or Asian, I’d say, ‘Hi I’m Eric Mann.’ ‘Eric Mann? I just read your article last night’, would be the response.

“I’d say to myself, ‘Damn! That’s great! I wrote that last night.’ My wife Lian would edit it and it went out the next morning.

“We’re really trying to get books in the hands of people. At the bay area event with 120 people last week, we sold over 200 books and that’s a lot of book. In New Orleans, one professor ordered 100 books from us for his college. Kamozie Woodard, he teaches Black Revolt and the Urban Crisis, has ordered the book for Sarah Lawrence College and the New School in New York where he teaches. It’s really starting to take off. We’ve going through 1500 books in 8 weeks. The first and last thousand we’ve gone through in two weeks. The book is in its second printing.

“We’re going to New Orleans next Monday, August 21, and we shipped 46 (boxes) and the office is down to 20 (boxes). We published that 1000 just in time for the August 3 opening. The August 3 opening we sold 325 in LA, the August 10 in the Bay Area we sold 200. It’s great. People really want this book, especially black people (hit by) the tragedy of Katrina... “Katrina’s Legacy: White Racism and Black Reconstruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.” I think people are excited about a third reconstruction, the idea of fighting what we call the second counter-revolution which took place from roughly 1980 when Reagan came into power, through Bill Clinton who we consider part of the counter revolution, through George Bush, we’re in a lot of trouble. And I think a book which focuses on how can we build a movement to help the people of New Orleans, how can we help that movement to be part of an overall black liberation movement and how can an overall black liberation movement be a part of a multi-racial, internationalist movement to challenge US imperialism is a lot more hopeful than just a book about just the suffering of New Orleans which I talk about quite a bit.”

Wanda Sabir: You said that most often that’s what people talk about, the suffering as opposed to okay, now what can we do about it to defeat the system that continues to promote policies which result in the suffering of certain populations which are majority African people especially in New Orleans.

With regards to “Katrina’s Legacy” and Hurricane Katrina in particular in the mass removals of African people wouldn’t you say that although presently it’s most often called gentrification, yet right after the Civil War ended and enslavement of African people became illegal, the politicians were looking at sending black people back to Africa, and many were put on ships and sent to Liberia. Do you think this might be the same kind of thinking: We don’t have any use for them, let’s just get rid of them?

EM: “I think its two things. As we know indigenous people were killed to get their land. black people were brought here to work the land. They built the country’s wealth on their backs, I called it in my book, the United White Southern States of America.

“What’s really terrible is in order to justify slavery, but also inside the white Christian European mind that I can’t understand is a real hatred of black people at the same time exploitation of black labor. W.E.B. Dubois goes into this a little bit. He wrote: the poor whites hated black people. If you can imagine this in a strange way – the black slave lived a little better than the poor white, the poor white was not relevant to the economy and they mainly spent their lives as slave catchers. If you were a slave of black hue then unlike a white slave you couldn’t blend in with the population, so every white person knew you were a slave because all the slaves were black, most of the blacks were slaves. This hatred of black people, and I have to say, I grew up a white Jewish kid, but I always had a love of black culture, hatred of white supremacy.

“I don’t think white culture is good, (nor) do I look up to white culture. I find white culture to be a Neo-Nazi culture. It has no attraction to me. I feel that at Congress for Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society, being in prison for a year and a half, living in the black community most of the time and now having a black granddaughter, I just realized that our family – I don’t know why, but we love black people. We’re not part of the black community; yes we are a part of the black community but we aren’t black; we get it.

“My wife and I made certain choices to align with black people. Most white people have a phobia of, I think it is a phobia because they think black people are going to come get them in the middle of the night for what they’ve done to black people for 300 years, for 400 years, (for 500 years).

“Why?

“Because on some psychiatric level you know that you deserve, if you’re white, to be paid back for the racism of today. Insecurity, hatred turns into a false belief in the inferiority of the people you oppress and a false belief in the superiority of the oppressor.

“So today here’s one of the problems why black people were hated and needed. They were needed to build the plantation economy. We know shortly after slavery they were re-enslaved back into the (what was called) the Jim Crow system, back onto the plantation. Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the great civil rights activists of all time, whom I was fortunate to meet in the ‘60s.”

WS: You met her? But you’re not old enough?

EM: “Yes, I am.”

WS: You met her? You were at the conference where the New Party… wanted to be seated. At this point I’m stuttering. Everyone knows Sister Hamer, the sister who said she was “sick and tired or being sick and tired.”

EM: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party? Yes, I was there. I was a young kid and I met Fannie Lou Hamer after that when she came to Newark when I was just organizing in Newark. If we had more time I’d tell you more about that. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Freedom_Democratic_Party).

We promised to have another conversation about Sister Hamer another time.

EM: “Fannie Lou Hamer, when SNCC found her, she was a virtually an indentured slave on a plantation who did not know she had the right to vote. Forget about did not know she could exercise that right to vote because a lot of people knew they had the right but would get killed if they exercised it, so I think a lot of my book, the reason why I call it ‘White Racism and Black Reconstruction is because I’m taking on one enemy which is both the imperialist system and the white racism within and calling for black reconstruction.

“A lot of whites who read this book will be anti-racist whites and for them, it’s going to strengthen out ability to talk to (other) white about the vicious, brutal, hateful policies of keeping 250,000 black people out of New Orleans.

“If you see the second quote at the beginning of my book it’s from Abraham Lincoln, he says to his general, ‘Now that we’ve won the war and now that we have 150, 000 black people with arms and we got 4 million black free people what are we going to do with them, maybe they’d like to go to a nice warm climate?

“They’re in a nice warm climate. It was warm enough for 400 years to pick cotton, now you want to figure out…what he is saying is white people, north or south will never come together as long as the blacks are around. What he is saying is his goal is to reestablish America as a white country and the fight over blacks just divides the whites.

“The last thing I want to say Wanda in this long, convoluted discussion is here’s the scary thing. I think that black people are becoming more marginal to the economy as a group. The one thing that kept them in the game was white people needed black people to clean their homes, to do the most difficult jobs in American society, they wanted segregation, they wanted low wages, they wanted police control but they still wanted black people to work for them. Today that’s not the case, and this doesn’t mean that there are no blacks employed, but the level of black unemployment in this country is a human rights violation. The level of black people in prison…we have 2.2 million people in prison. 1 million are black. Why? Because they are just warehousing young black kids who get into trouble, some for such minor offenses. Some didn’t even do what they are accused of and are rounded up in a new police state (ideology) against black people.

(note: I was reminded of Comrade George Jackson who was given a life sentence at 18 for a petty offense most would have served at maximum six months in jail, and what a waste of a brilliant mind and spirit this was.)

“My book talks about the racist re-enslavement complex because in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution it says Congress shall outlaw slavery in any form dash dash except for those people convicted of crimes dash dash in the United States. So basically, they couldn’t finish one sentence – Congress shall outlaw slavery, before saying 'unless we arrest them.' Who would have known the 13th Amendment had a back door clause?” To be continued.

Visit www.frontlinespress.com to order a copy of this provocative book by the author of the bestseller: “Comrade George (Jackson).” Also visit www.TheStrategyCenter.org where one can learn more about the National School for Strategic Organizing.

Kwame Ture, founder of the All African Peoples Revolutionary Party said that to be ready for revolution, not to mention successful at one's aims for the revolution, one had to be organized.