The photo is of a writer named Gilbert Moore. Biography seems to be one of the main ways that people try to accommodate the occasion of Black History Month. I think there's something very good about that. Clearly there are and have been people who have done amazing things whose lives are worth celebrating. But what's the measure? And what's the best way to access history, especially when there are so many tributaries to it?

One of the disputes about whether or not Black History Month is a worthwhile idea at all, it seems, has to do with what the main stream is, and whether or not the main stream; or perhaps the winning side of history, is what the study of history really should be. We're in the habit of thinking in terms of winners and loosers. But life as we know it is rather more complicated than that.

I thought about Gilbert Moore because of a book he wrote about the Black Panther Party back in the seventies. Sad to say, I don't think I actually completed the book, and I gave it away to a very earnest young woman who had involved herself in the New Black Panther Party. The book was first published as "A Special Rage" and the Harper paperback reissue as simply "Rage." It's out of print, but copies are available from sources like ABE www.abebooks.com/

Moore's telling the sotry of Huey Newton and the Black Panthers is really aware and nuanced. He was sent to cover the trial for "Life" magazine. But what was particularly interesting to me was the story Morre tells about himself. He explains how this assignment changed his course, afterwards he quit his job for mainstream media, reasoning that there must be a better course to follow. I'm not remembering the book so well, and I don't know much about what Moore's done since. The mentions on the Internet I found were from this page www.reportingcivilrights.org/ Reporting Civil Rights which is a very cool page to look at to see a rather long list of reporters who brought the news to the attention of the nation. Very interesting to see the names and to reflect on what they'eve done since. Here's the link to the brief biography of Gilbert Moore www.reportingcivilrights.org/aut....jsp

Since I didn't have much to say about Moore, because I don't know much, I thought to write about someone else. Gordon Parks isn't a bad choice en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks What an accomplished person! Certainly the life and accomplishment of Parks is worth celebrating.

There seemed something really important in Moore's book that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Well, of course it's a book worth reading, but something more. Then today via a really wonderful blog called 3 Quarks Daily 3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/ I was alerted to an interview of David Scott by Stuart Hall www.bombsite.com/scott/scott2.html I'd heard of Stuart Hall, probably the most canonized of the founders of Cultural Studies. LOL something engaging in discussions here at Tribe is how frustrating I am to younger intellectuals here because I'm so ignorant of Cultural Studies, Theory, and Post Modernism. In any case David Scott wrote a book, "Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment" published early last year.

Here's a link to a brief cover of the book www.frontlist.com/detail/0822334445 From that page:

"Scott explores the political and epistemological implications of how the past is conceived in relation to the present and future through a reconsideration of C. L. R. James's masterpiece of anticolonial history, The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938. In that book, James told the story of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the making of the Haitian Revolution as one of romantic vindication. In the second edition, published in the United States in 1963, James inserted new material suggesting that that story might usefully be told as tragedy. Scott uses James's recasting of The Black Jacobins to compare the relative yields of romance and tragedy. In an epilogue, he juxtaposes James's thinking about tragedy, history, and revolution with Hannah Arendt's in On Revolution. He contrasts their uses of tragedy as a means of situating the past in relation to the present in order to distill from it a politics for a possible future."

I haven't read the book, but something in that points to what I find so important about Gilbert Moore's "Rage." It has to do with the way the past is concieved. The story Moore was assigned to tell about the trial of Huey Newton in one way or another was through the lens of vindication. Surely his editors at "Life" were interested in the vindication of law and order. And maybe Moore had some impulse to write about Huey as a hero, or to vindicate the Panthers in some way or another. But--oh lord and I maybe so wrong about this--Moore found that romanticising the story in either direction was to get the story of the Black Panthers and the trial of Huey Newton wrong. He was too good a journalist for that. He couldn't produce the story for "Life" in the way the magazine needed it to be told. So he wrote a book where the essential tragedy could be told.

Again from the link about Scott's book:

In tragedy, the future does not appear as part of a seamless forward movement, but instead as a slow and sometimes reversible series of ups and downs.

Yeah, part of the problem of remembering Black History is fitting it into a story of the steady forward movement of the mainstream: A black man invented traffic lights and narratives like that. On the other hand, there is a real opportunity in Black History Month for going up the muddy tributaries and exploring the little explored recesses of our past.

From the comments to my last post Potash writes about Satyagraha. The English rendition I like the most of satyagraha is "soul power." The soul embraces the contraries--the ups and downs. "The struggle is my life." That's not just true for Mandela, but as true for everyone of us. Of course we must resist, of course we must seek liberation, but for us all it is sturggle. Farmer had soul power.

From www.interchange.org/jfarmer.html

As the turbulent decade of the 1960's unfolded, some blacks who despaired that they would ever have an amicable relationship with the white majority and regarded nonviolence as more of a weakness than a strength, on occasion would ask Farmer, "When are you going to fight back?" Farmer would always reply, "We are fighting back, we're only using new weapons."

Non-violence is not weakness, nor is it pacisfism in Farmer's construction; it is a weapon in the struggle for justice. Just one weapon, but perhaps something of what makes it mighty is that it allows us, when we embrace non violence, to transcend the habit of making meaning history in romantic terms of vindication; instead forcing us to see the tragedy, the struggle of ups and downs in the flow of human experience. Embracing non violent struggle isn't to invite conflict but to invite amellioration of troubles: progress in fits and starts.

Gilbert Moore found Huey Newton neither hero nor villian. What's so intersting about the book "Rage" is that Moore came face to face with the limitations of viewing the past in romantic visions. So now I'm really curious about what's happend in Gilbert Moore's life. Does anyone know?