Modibo Kadalie oral history interview, 2010-11-12

MATTHEW QUEST: Good morning. This is Matthew Quest, Professor of History at Georgia State University. Today we're interviewing Modibo Kadalie, on behalf of the Southern Labor History Archives at Georgia State University. We're going to begin -- oh let me say in brief that Modibo Kadalie has been a witness to many Metro Atlanta strikes and is originally from the Savannah area in Georgia. And some of his most distinguished contributions has been as a member of the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers and as an organizer of the African Liberation Support Committee and Sixth Pan-African Congress. 00:01:00Nevertheless, our focus today will be on his rich experience in the labor movement and southern civil rights. We're going to begin. Modibo, may I ask, where were you born?

MODIBO KADALIE: I was -- I was born in Savannah in 1943, at the Charity Hospital.

QUEST: I see.

KADALIE: The black hospital there.

QUEST: The black hospital.

KADALIE: Mm-hmm.

QUEST: There was a white hospital at that time?

KADALIE: Yeah, there were -- there was another white hospital across town. Charity was for the black people.

QUEST: Where did you grow up?

KADALIE: I grew up in Riceboro, Georgia, in a little community called Crossroads, about 26 miles south of Savannah.

QUEST: I see. And who were your parents?

KADALIE: My father was Evans B. Cooper. He was the Principal and the County Agent in Riceboro. He was originally from Hancock County, and he married my 00:02:00mother in 1938. She's from Bartow, Georgia in Jefferson County. And they moved to Liberty County to begin their life, and I was born in '43. I have an older brother who was born in '41. You'll have to excuse me; I'm going to be drinking water periodically.

QUEST: Gotcha.

KADALIE: And you know, we can -- it doesn't have to be that stiff does it?

QUEST: Mm-mm. We can pause and rewind, start again.

KADALIE: Mm-mm.

QUEST: OK. Now you were saying that your father was the Principal of what county?

KADALIE: Liberty County.

QUEST: The town high school?

KADALIE: No, he was Principal of an elementary school. Well, he was the Principal of the high school at first.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: Then he was the County Agent, then he became Principal of an elementary school, because during the -- during that period the war happened, and so he left and went and served in the Army. And then when he came back, he was Principal of the elementary school and County Agent, then he became Principal of the Liberty County High School, which closed in 1974.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: He was also active in the NAACP.

QUEST: I see. Was he a leader of the local NAACP?

KADALIE: Yeah, he was President for many, many years, but I really don't think he was President at the beginning of it.

QUEST: I see. And what was it that your mother did for a living?

KADALIE: My mother was a school teacher and a librarian, and she ended her career as the Reference Librarian at Savannah State University.

QUEST: I see. How did both your parents influence your early education?

KADALIE: Well, they were active --

QUEST: What impression did they make on you?

KADALIE: They were active in the community the whole time, and we lived right in the middle of the community. And, you know, we had the churches and the schools and the graveyards. Everything was -- we were right in the middle of all of that. And -- they were, you know, really intellectual people; we had newspapers coming in from all over the world, we had --

QUEST: Like, what kind of newspapers?

KADALIE: Well, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, the -- of course the Jet and the Ebony, but we had the Baltimore Afro-American. All these were 00:04:00coming in, and the Amsterdam News. They would come in by mail on Thursday. (laughs)

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: Because that's a big day. Thursday was the big day. And I think they got some kind of weekly mail order edition of these publications, but the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender was my father's favorite.

QUEST: I see.

KADALIE: He liked the Barbed Wire for America, too.

QUEST: OK. Now, you're growing up in Liberty County, is that right?

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah.

QUEST: And in the 1940s, the 1950s.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: And what were your early impressions of the power and dignity of labor?

KADALIE: The people -- the people actually were pulpwood people.

QUEST: The majority of the community in Liberty County?

KADALIE: The majority of --

QUEST: The majority of the working men?

KADALIE: -- the working men. Young men and older men, and they were, um -- they were really just physically strong people, man. I mean, they could lift stuff, and this was in the day of labor intensity. They didn't even have -- I remember 00:05:00when they brought power saws in. Before that, they had the crosscut saws. And I remember these people used to load their pulpwood on top of these big trucks by hand, with a snake or with little thing with a hook on it, but it was manual.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: And so these men were very, very strong, and the women would fish in the streams. It was a very rich African influence in my earlier life, and even though my father and mother were not originally from that community.

QUEST: How was it a -- if you could clarify, how was it an African influence?

KADALIE: It was an African experience, because the people would sing, and they would go to work, and these people spoke with words, which I used to speak, but -- and they would --

QUEST: You mean like Gullah-type words?

KADALIE: Yeah, well they were Geechees -- we would call it Geechees -- and of 00:06:00course, people looked down on us, as men. They were darker people, strong. They would eat fish, they ate rice, they talked different, they worshipped different. So they were not the everyday upcountry people, like my father and mother were.

QUEST: And how did your mother and father perceive them?

KADALIE: My father loved them. He loved the soil, he loved - he didn't even leave. I mean, he came down there in the middle of a school year, because the Principal had died. He came from Savannah State, and he really never left, except to serve in the Army. And my mother was - they loved them, too, but they taught us to speak standard English. So I would speak Geechee on the playground and standard English at the dinner table.

QUEST: I see.

KADALIE: And ah, so I learned to be semi-bilingual.

QUEST: I see.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: OK. And how was it that your parents encouraged you toward higher education? When did - at what point did you go off to college?

KADALIE: I was asking my mother about this recently. I didn't know this, but they were - they had taken the SAT and were standardizing the SAT among southern African American people. And my father wasn't the Principal of the high school at that time, he was Principal of the elementary school. Somehow, I think I scored highest in the county there, and they -- they actually came and recruited me to go take this test. I didn't know that. I thought that my father just took me to take the test. So I went to take this test in Savannah, and I did the best I could, and I came to Morehouse as an early admission scholar. I was 16 at the time.

QUEST: As a result of having taken the early standardized test?

KADALIE: Yes. There was an SAT normative thing.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And then they had some standardized college admissions.

QUEST: So you began -

KADALIE: None of - none of us could go to Harvard and Yale or the white schools. So many of us -- I guess we'd go to those other schools now, but we went to Morehouse. If you were a girl, you went to Spelman; if you were a guy, you went to Morehouse, you know, the elite black school.

QUEST: Right. As I understand it, you had a certain experience on the swim team at Morehouse.

KADALIE: Oh yeah, yeah.

QUEST: And you credit this with kind of foreshadowing your understanding of self-organization.

KADALIE: Yeah. I was part of the sit-in movement, but you know it was - I was just a foot soldier. I went down and sat in and came back. And then I noticed that the elite in Atlanta, -

QUEST: What year was this at Morehouse?

KADALIE: This was 1959, when I went. The spring was the sit-in, in 1960.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: The spring of 1960 was the sit-in.

QUEST: And you went to school at Morehouse with Robert Allen and Julian Bond.

KADALIE: Julian Bond was one of the leaders of the sit-in.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: Robert Allen was more - he was a low profile guy. He did physics; he got a bachelor's in physics.

QUEST: Oh, OK.

KADALIE: Julian Bond -

QUEST: Later, he becomes the editor of the Black Scholar, Robert Allen.

KADALIE: He becomes - well, he became one of the correspondents for - what was it?

QUEST: The Guardian.

KADALIE: The Guardian.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: In New York, and then he became editor of the - one of the editors of the Black Scholar. But he was there, too.

QUEST: Right. You said Julian Bond was leading the sit-ins in 1960.

KADALIE: Well, he was one of the ones who did that. Alice Walker was there too, at Spelman, but I didn't know her. I don't know if she was - what her role in the sit-ins were -- was, but I was a foot soldier and went down. And the sit-ins were kind of one -- you know, and then when they had the conference in -- they formed SNCC at Shaw University, I think it was in March. It was after the 00:10:00sit-ins, in February. It might have been even April, I'm not sure, but it was 1970. But I was a swimmer and an athlete. And we had a coach there named Coach Haines, and he was very respectful. He let us, you know, work and train on our own. And then in my junior year, he left, and we had a very authoritarian coach, Coach Dallington, who really didn't know much about swimming, but he was, you know, "You do what I say, you do what I say do." And it got to the point where I was physically attacked, and then the guys just rallied around me. And it was a very shocking, informative experience, because I was kicked off the swim team. But the guys just decided they wasn't going to swim no more that year, and that broke a - that broke a monopoly. Morehouse used to win the SIAC Championship every year. That was the first time we didn't win, because we'd simply - I 00:11:00couldn't swim because I was off the team, and these guys decided not to - but I didn't instigate at anything.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: They did that on their own. It was a very remarkable situation to see these guys do this. Nobody said nothing, nobody roused, no nothing. They just came in the day after we came from Tennessee State and cleaned out their lockers. And they came up to my room and said, "Coop, what we going to do?" (laughs)

QUEST: Now Modibo, you had - at the beginning of our discussion, we haven't established that at some point, and we could get to it later, but you had changed your name. So you were not born Modibo Kadalie.

KADALIE: No, I wasn't - I didn't do that until 1969/70.

QUEST: OK, so at that time -

KADALIE: At that time, I was Edward Cooper.

QUEST: Edward. Edward Cooper.

KADALIE: Yeah, that's why the guys called me Coop. I swam the 100-yard butterfly, the 200-yard butterfly.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And swam the third leg on the relay team.

QUEST: I gotcha.

KADALIE: Four-by-100 freestyle.

QUEST: I gotcha. So you graduate in what year?

KADALIE: I never did graduate. I finished in January of '63, and I just went on home. Because if I hadn't - really, that was the time when all this stuff happened with the swim team. And if I hadn't finished the requirements for graduation, I don't think I would have ever graduated from Morehouse.

QUEST: Mm-hmm. So you did finish?

KADALIE: I did finish the requirements, and I am listed on the program for June.

QUEST: But you didn't go to the ceremony.

KADALIE: I didn't go to the ceremony.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: I didn't come back.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: (laughs) Never again.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: As a matter of fact, I didn't come back for many years.

QUEST: And at some point you go for a Master's degree at Howard?

KADALIE: At Howard, yeah, in physiological psychology. I don't know if you -- that was in August of '63. And I remember seeing the March on Washington between 00:13:00- I saw it on TV in New York. I had gone upstate New York to work, and then I went to Howard the August - the September afterwards.

QUEST: Mm-hmm. OK. So you get your Master's degree in psychology from Howard University in D.C.

KADALIE: Yeah. I don't get that until four or five years later. In the meantime, what was happening is -

QUEST: So you enrolled, but you didn't get it for four, five years.

KADALIE: I had finished the requirements. I thought I finished my thesis, I thought, by that summer of '65, but somehow it was typed on the wrong bond paper, and it never - and I never could get my degree.

QUEST: So there was a bureaucratic glitch.

KADALIE: There was a bureaucratic glitch, yeah.

QUEST: Holding you back from getting your degree.

KADALIE: A big-time bureaucratic glitch.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: Which put me in a real dilemma, because I couldn't get my draft board 00:14:00transferred to Washington D.C., even though I had lived there for two years. And so I had - I was called to get a physical examination for the draft and induction into the Army.

QUEST: For the Vietnam era?

KADALIE: Yeah, for the Vietnam period.

QUEST: But you were supposed to have a deferment, because you're in school.

KADALIE: I was supposed to have a deferment. As a matter of fact, I did have a two-year deferment. And then I was going to ask for another year of deferment, but the lady said I had to come to the draft board in Liberty County. So I had to come to Liberty County to catch the bus to come up to Atlanta to take my physical. And there was an altercation. It just seemed like the stuff would never leave me alone, you know what I mean? I came in on the bus, a school bus, and sat in the front of the bus. This was in 1965. And the lady - and of course 00:15:00my friend, Bobby Gordon, sat right next to me, and we were childhood friends you know, and we were just talking. And we noticed all these other white guys were talking about how they were getting a deferment; they went to Tech and the University of Georgia and all that kind of stuff. And they said, "Well, we're just going to do this, and then we know we're going to get a deferment." So the lady asked me to go -- get up from my front seat and go sit in the back of the bus. I felt like Rosa Parks, you know? I said, "No, I can't go." (laughs) This is 1965, this is a U.S. - the Army is desegregated. What is this? And this was the draft board lady. She was appointed to chair the draft board in the county. And so I go to come to Atlanta, and I go back to Howard, and then I noticed that, as soon as I got back to Howard, I get a letter in the mail saying - no, I got the letter - I don't know where they sent the letter. But the letter said 00:16:00that I was no longer -

QUEST: You no longer had a deferment.

KADALIE: No, no longer - I was no longer 2S, or whatever the classification -- that I was classified as 1Y, for some reason. I think that has to do with my eyesight.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And then two weeks later, I was classified -- reclassified 1A, and then two weeks later -- and then some time later I got my - I was gone then. As soon as I got classified 1A, then I left Washington, D.C., packed up my stuff and went to Nova Scotia.

QUEST: OK. So, let's talk about that for a second.

KADALIE: OK.

QUEST: So at this point, because of the troubles with your draft status, you choose to be a draft dodger, which I don't know if you see that as a pejorative.

KADALIE: Actually you know, I didn't even - at that point, I didn't - I wasn't 00:17:00in solidarity with the Vietnamese people's struggle. I really wasn't opposed to the war. What I was opposed to is the injustice of the draft board.

QUEST: Of how they were pushing up your status.

KADALIE: Yeah. And I wanted to go to school, I wanted to get a PhD when I was 23. And I was on track, you know what I mean?

QUEST: And they disrupted that.

KADALIE: They disrupted it, and it threw me for a loop, man. When I went to Canada, man, I think I was in a state of clinical depression. I really do. (chuckles) But I went to Canada -- I went to Nova Scotia, because I read in the library that more black people lived in Nova Scotia, and so I went there.

QUEST: You went there. So in August of 1965, you go to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

KADALIE: Halifax, Nova Scotia.

QUEST: You're trying to avoid the draft, but at the same time, as you say, you're not necessarily in solidarity with the Vietnamese people. You're not anti-war.

KADALIE: No.

QUEST: You're kind of depressed that they have disrupted your path to a PhD.

KADALIE: That's the motivation behind it.

QUEST: That's the motivation. So you say, "I'm leaving all this behind."

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: And you fought - for a little while, you become a dock worker in Halifax.

KADALIE: Yeah. As a matter of fact -- I had to feed myself. I stayed at the Y. So I even entertained going to school for a while.

QUEST: In Canada?

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah.

QUEST: Did you go to school?

KADALIE: I went over there, and they just - the only thing that I was interested in is -- I wanted to know what them Russian guys were talking about on the shipyard.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: And I went down there. Well, I saw them in the city; they'd come in and go out of the city. And then Rocky Jones and some more guys said, "Look, you can get a job on the shipyard, because they need all kinds of laborers, because they've got to load all this wheat up, to take it to the Soviet Union." So, I went -

QUEST: OK, you have to tell us who Rocky Jones is.

KADALIE: Rocky Jones, his name is Burnley Jones. Burnley was a local activist and kind of a community leader over there, which I got in touch with him through 00:19:00another guy named Denny, Denfield Grant. He's now a minister down in Barbados somewhere. I don't know where he was. We were just young guys.

QUEST: Rocky Jones ends up a prominent leader of the Black Power Movement in Canada.

KADALIE: Yes he does, he does, he does.

QUEST: At that time he was or not yet?

KADALIE: At that time, he was just a local activist who was a friend of mine. We used to drink on Friday night, you know? (laughs) And you know, we used - he was trying to show me what was going on in Nova Scotia. I got in touch with him through some mutual friends, and then he told me about the job - that I could get work down at the dockyard. And so what I did is, I didn't go back to the school, except I kept some of my Russian books, and I studied Russian.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: And then I had some friends who helped me study Russian, so I could read what the - these books these guys had.

QUEST: What were the books about? What were they talking about, these Russian --

KADALIE: What was it, Lenin and The State. They had Lenin and The State, and then they had Lenin and the ah, -- they had a collection- -- most of them had works of Lenin, and you could see his picture on the red books. It was about this big.

QUEST: So these Russian dockworkers that were coming over with these boats, and they were --

KADALIE: You'd find them - you'd find them in the bar sometimes.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: I never knew any of them personally.

QUEST: But this is during the Cold War, so you were fascinated.

KADALIE: Yeah, it's the Cold War.

QUEST: You were fascinated to be in a dialogue with some Russians.

KADALIE: Yeah, they were Russians -- you know the communists, who wasn't supposed to attack - we was ducking and covering under the chairs and seats and stuff, because they were going to attack America with their nuclear bombs.

QUEST: So here's a chance to talk to some Russians.

KADALIE: Yeah, to see what the hell was going on.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: And some of them could speak a little English and stuff, and I could get - and that's when really, I began to see that there's another way of looking at this thing. And they supported the Vietnamese people, too. I began, through 00:21:00Rocky Jones and these associations, discussing and reading stuff, I came to support the Vietnamese and be a conscious active draft evader. And I really - the war hadn't really gotten off the ground that much yet.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: I don't know of anybody else who went up there before I did. In 1965, there was no draft dodging people up there, so I became - I guess I became a draft dodger, but the movement began to be a real movement after that. And Rocky Jones and some other people started advocating anti-war kind of thing. But the Canadian government never supported the war anyway, because it was selling wheat to Russia. And Russia supported the Vietnamese people's struggle.

QUEST: OK. So how was it that you end up in Oklahoma?

KADALIE: Well, the Saint Lawrence Seaway -- but my life was -- things happened. The Saint Lawrence Seaway froze over from the whole year, but it was thawing out in the spring. So all those lucrative ships were going up the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and they would be unloaded at Toronto and Montreal, and then shipped across by rail, so those jobs dried up. And I went up to upper Canada, and then I ended up working. Stayed in Montreal for a while, and then I ended up working in-- That summer, I ended up going to Detroit.

QUEST: Summer of '68?

KADALIE: Summer of '65.

QUEST: '65, OK.

KADALIE: No, '66, the next year. I worked Stroh's Brewery, and I met Charles Simmons.

QUEST: Stroh?

KADALIE: Stroh's Brewery.

QUEST: S-T-R-O?

KADALIE: S-T-R-O-H-S.

QUEST: Stroh's Brewery in Detroit in '66.

KADALIE: In Detroit, '66.

QUEST: You met Charles Simmons.

KADALIE: I was going to work there that summer.

QUEST: And Detroit, of course, shares a border with Canada.

KADALIE: Yeah. I remember coming into Canada with no gas in my car. Man, I'm on top of the Ambassador Bridge, I was driving.

QUEST: So to Detroit, you had no gas in your - coming into Detroit.

KADALIE: Yeah, and I ran out of gas, and I didn't have no money. And I usually put the car in neutral, because I had a Volkswagen. Put it in neutral and coasted down. Because I was at the top, and I coasted down into the Immigration thing. Of course, you just say well, you know, the guy said, "Where you going?" And then you've an American accent, and they let you go. So I went on and then called my cousin. Stayed in my aunt's basement that summer, saved some money and 00:24:00worked at Stroh's Brewery. At the end of that summer, then I went back up to Canada.

QUEST: OK. At the end of summer of '66.

KADALIE: Yeah. I went back to Canada.

QUEST: And Charles Simmons, who is Charles Simmons? Why is he a significant person in your life?

KADALIE: Charles - well, Charles Simmons had just come back from Cuba. He was one of the student activists. I think, he and a gentleman and some other people, had gone -- John Baker, which we could talk about later --

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: -- had gone to Cuba. He's originally from Detroit.

QUEST: Is he part of the Uhuru Group?

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And now he just happened to - we broke into work that same day at the Stroh's Brewery. As a matter of fact, our lockers were right beside one another.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And he - I was reading some Russian stuff, but mostly I was reading Kalil Gibran and some other poetic, romantic, Camus -- you know, philosophers --

QUEST: Existentialist.

KADALIE: Yeah, I was just reading.

QUEST: Dabbling.

KADALIE: Just dabbling. And he was reading Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, so we were exchanging books. And I'm sure he had already read my stuff before, but he was interested. And so we would talk. I don't know how deep you want me to go into -

QUEST: You're doing fine, you're doing fine. I'm looking at the time, we're doing fine. So, Charles -

KADALIE: Charles Simmons later became important, because -

QUEST: He's a major leader at the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

KADALIE: He put me in touch with the League when I came back two years later, after being in Oklahoma.

QUEST: So what gets you to Oklahoma?

KADALIE: Well, let me explain.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: After the end of that summer, I went back up to Canada.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: Now, I'm conscious. I'm a different guy now. I mean, conscious to the extent that I could be.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: And so, you know, I'm saying, "We need to help these guys get up here and settle down in Canada." So, I didn't go too far --

QUEST: Help these guys -- facilitate the draft movement.

KADALIE: Yeah, right. They started to come over at Detroit, and I started 00:26:00knowing who they were and how they -- who supports this.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: And so I didn't go all the way up to - I didn't go all the way up to - back up to Montreal, Nova Scotia. I went back to London, Ontario, which is close to Detroit, and I worked in a library. And I was also entertaining notions of going back to school. So I went up to the school, and I don't know, man, just the school thing was -

QUEST: What school?

KADALIE: The University of the Western Ontario. I had thought about going there. And I went up there, and I just couldn't any more. I actually was - I actually got a job as a researcher in a lab for a few minutes, but I was doing rat work like I was doing at Howard. Rats and pigeons and all that stuff. One day, I just walked out.

QUEST: You were doing research work regarding psychology in rats and pigeons?

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. At a lab at the University of Western Ontario.

QUEST: At Western Ontario which was - OK, which carried over your work that you had been doing at Howard.

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah, but I was you know, I could do that stuff.

QUEST: Right, yeah.

KADALIE: But you know, my heart and mind and everything was just - and so I -- my college sweetheart, Charlotte Ellis, she came up a couple of times, and then we decided to get married. She worked in the library. And then I got a little part-time job -- you know, just part-time jobs wherever I could. And then we decided -- Charlotte says, "Look, we don't have to do this; you've got a Master's degree in psychology, and, you know, we need to go somewhere and get you on your career." So she got in touch with some of her family members back in Atlanta here, and they found a job for me at Langston University in Oklahoma.

QUEST: That's how you get to Oklahoma.

KADALIE: That's how I get to Oklahoma. Charlotte's mother's and father's friend was the President, and that's how I got there.

QUEST: So you're in Oklahoma from '67 --

KADALIE: '67. I know it, because the World's Fair was in Montreal in '67.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: So we went to the World's Fair, and then we left and came to Langston.

QUEST: So you were - are you an administrator?

KADALIE: No, no, I'm on the faculty.

QUEST: You're on the faculty teaching?

KADALIE: I got a faculty appointment.

QUEST: Teaching?

KADALIE: Teaching psychology.

QUEST: You were teaching psychology at Langston University in Oklahoma from '67 --

KADALIE: To '69.

QUEST: To '68, I thought.

KADALIE: '68, yeah.

QUEST: Because you're inspired to go to Detroit because of an event in '68.

KADALIE: Yeah. That was the Dodge Main strike.

QUEST: OK. Why don't we take a break there, and we can come back, and we'll talk about the Dodge Main strike and your moving to Detroit.

QUEST: OK, again this is Matthew Quest, Professor of History at Georgia State University. We're back here with Modibo Kadalie, doing an oral history for the Southern Labor History Archive at Georgia State University. And in this segment, we are going to be discussing the period, 1966 to 1973, where our major themes will be the urban uprising in Detroit, of 1967, the Dodge Main strike of 1968. From 1969 to 1971, Modibo was involved with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. He is a professor at Highland Park Community College, and subsequently, he is involved with local community activism around the People's Action 00:30:00Committee. In these years, he meets two very influential people in his life: the Pan-African historian C.L.R. James and the dynamic Black Power activist, who we find out happened to grow up right near him in Savannah, Kimathi Mohammed. But we're going to begin with reflections on the Detroit rebellion and his early friendship with another member of the League that he met at the Stroh's Beer Factory, Charles Simmons.

KADALIE: Charles Simmons.

QUEST: Now Modibo, what would you like to share with us again, about Charles Simmons, around 1966/'67?

KADALIE: Well, he had just come back from Cuba, as I said. We were just friends. We worked on the same pasteurizer, we were just - we worked on the same shift, had lockers right there together, and we shared books. He always bring some 00:31:00books, he'd put in his locker; I had some books. We just shared like that. The friendship grew, and I was going to the Wayne State Library, and I met a young lady down there by the name of Cheryl Simpkins. Cheryl and I became very close. And so I had a date with Cheryl, and I was supposed to bring Cheryl by the apartment, and Charles was supposed to let me -- because I lived in the basement of my mother's oldest sister, Leena. And I lived in the basement, and she lived there with my cousin, Sam. But I remember -- so Charles said, "Why don't you come over to the place and take a look, and then we will see what we can do." So I went over there one night. As a matter of fact, I was supposed to leave and go back and pick up Cheryl, but Charles and I started talking. And I do remember this, I do remember this very night. I mean, I walked into the place, and he had 00:32:00Malcolm X on the wall. He had Che Guevara. He had Marx, and he had Ho Chi Minh; I didn't know who that was. I asked him who that was, and he said, "That's Ho Chi Minh," and I said, "Oh, OK." And he had these pictures all around, and we started talking. We talked all night long, and the sun came up, and I forgot all about Cheryl; I really had. I had to apologize to Cheryl later, but we were talking, and the sun came up, you know. And I said, "Oh my goodness." But it was -

QUEST: What year was that again?

KADALIE: This was the summer of '66.

QUEST: The summer of '66.

KADALIE: Yeah, mm-hmm. And I later -

QUEST: This is before you go to Oklahoma or after?

KADALIE: Yes, before.

QUEST: Before, OK.

KADALIE: So then later, I go back up to London, Ontario, and I'm back and forth. I did get married that December. I went down and picked up Charlotte, my wife at the time, and she lived in London with me until the end of the -- until about 00:33:00June. And then she got - she and her family helped me get the job at Langston, but what I want to do is talk about the -- we didn't leave Canada until after the World's Fair. We went back up to Montreal.

QUEST: Montreal.

KADALIE: Lived in a house with some hippies and draft dodgers -- an abandoned house -- for about a week or so. These people were just squatting in the house, and we were squatting with them. So we lived there for about a week and then, you know, got to understand what the fair was all about, and then we packed up our stuff and was beginning to start to Oklahoma. We were going to start to Oklahoma in September but that July--

QUEST: Mm-hmm. Let me ask a quick question about 1967 and Montreal. Did you come across the Caribbean International Service Bureau people, Alfie Roberts?

KADALIE: No, I didn't.

QUEST: Did you stop in McGill, you have a McGill Black Spark newsletter that's from 1967.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: So you were around McGill at that time.

KADALIE: Yeah, but I didn't know those people.

QUEST: So you saw their publication.

KADALIE: Yeah, but I didn't know they were.

QUEST: But you didn't know them, you never met them.

KADALIE: I didn't know who they were.

QUEST: OK. And they were talking about C.L.R. James.

KADALIE: Yeah, but I didn't know who he was.

QUEST: You didn't know who C.L.R. James was?

KADALIE: No.

QUEST: But you had the publication.

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah.

QUEST: That's interesting.

KADALIE: I had the publication; I picked up newspapers and stuff.

QUEST: So they were circulating stuff, but you never met them.

KADALIE: No, I never met them.

QUEST: And you didn't know who C.L.R. James was, at that time.

KADALIE: No, I didn't. The only thing that I remember about the World's Fair is that Indians of Canada Pavilion.

QUEST: Oh, OK.

KADALIE: Which was kind of haunting. You know, you go in there, with nobody there, and there's this voice talking, you know what I mean? And that's -- I saw the Ethiopian Pavilion and all those big, extravagant -- but it was the Native Americans that got to me. Anyway, in the meantime, we're still living in London, and the Detroit Rebellion broke out in July of that year. I wanted to come back 00:35:00to Detroit, but I couldn't come back, because the borders were sealed off. But after the rebellion had subsided, I did manage to come back to Detroit and visit my cousin, Sam. He lived -- we lived on Sturtevant Street with my aunt -- when I worked at the Stroh's Brewery, I lived with my aunt, in the basement -- and it was not very far from 12th Street, which is now Rosa Parks Boulevard. And there's a Safeway food store in there. So I began to talk with Sam and ask him what happened, and Sam said, "Man, the niggers went crazy around here, that's all I can say." (laughs) So I said, "How did they go crazy?" He said, "Man, they just looting and carrying on and burning houses down." I said, "Sam, wait a minute. Let's go up to the Kr--" He says, "They took all the food out of the Kroger." So I went up to -- it wasn't the Kroger, a Safeway. Safeway. And so I 00:36:00went up to the store, and it was, you know, there was nothing in there of value. And I said Sam, "How long did they take to take all this food out?" He says, "All those little boys and stuff, they formed a line and they--" I said, "Well, what did they do with the food?" He said, "They distributed it up and down the street." And he said, "They distributed it to the old lady at the end of the street, first. They made sure she was taken care of." I said, "Sam, did you get anything?" He says, "Yeah. When you go home, you can see all that I got." And then I went across the street to the barbershop -- there was a Muslim barbershop across the street. black Muslims. And these guys were saying, "I'm with Rap Brown, I'm with Rap Brown." They called him Rap Brown.

QUEST: They called him Rap?

KADALIE: Yeah. I said, "Did you ever see what was happening across the street?" He says, "Yeah, them little brothers cleaned that place out." I said, "How long did it take?" He said, "Well it didn't take them but a couple of hours, they had 00:37:00everything out of there. (laughs) And I said, "Did they burn it?" He said, "Then they burned it down." But anyway, the point I'm making is that these little kids -

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: - had organized.

QUEST: When you say little kids, teenagers?

KADALIE: Teenagers and little kids. And they organized the food distribution and then worked it, and was feeding everybody man; really, they were. But see, and then I found that very amazing, I found that very amazing. And then after that, I went to -- we went out to Langston, and there we met this black president who was -- his name was Hale, Dr. Hale. He ran this place as if it was his own fiefdom: no democracy, no nothing. And he was regarded as a leader of the black community, but the Board of Regents in Oklahoma put him there to keep the black 00:38:00people quiet. He was -- the guy was actually using the school's resources to get people loyal to him. He would even take advantage of young girls, because he could give them scholarships. It was really a messy thing. Now Charles Simmons -- the same Charles Simmons -- came to Langston University to finish his other two years, for some strange reason. Charles and I ended up, again, at the same place, and Charles was trying to organize forums against the war and all that. He was being frustrated. And this same president, Dr. Hale, invited me and Charlotte in -- oh, and Charles and them had organized an underground newspaper called The Grapevine.

QUEST: In Detroit?

KADALIE: No, no, this was in Oklahoma.

QUEST: Oh, in Oklahoma.

KADALIE: This was in Oklahoma.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: Charles and them lived in a town near Langston, and they produced a 00:39:00newspaper -- a mimeograph sheet -- called The Grapevine. In that, they were exposing all of the -

QUEST: So they heard it through the grapevine, like Marvin Gay.

KADALIE: Yeah, like Marvin Gay. And they were exposing some of the um -- you know, all of the -- you know, what the president was doing. And they would push it under people's doors; it would disappear. And Larry Simmons was there, too. Larry Simmons, who later was organizing -- we were supposed to organize the study group.

QUEST: Mm-hmm. We'll talk about that. But Larry Simmons is not related to Charles Simmons.

KADALIE: No they're not, but they're both from Detroit.

QUEST: OK. Two Simmons guys, both from Detroit, not related.

KADALIE: Yeah, it's strange. It's strange. But Larry was -

QUEST: No, but Larry - Larry is not present in Oklahoma, right?

KADALIE: Yeah he is.

QUEST: Oh, I hadn't known that.

KADALIE: Yeah he is. As a matter of fact, he was a student in one of my classes.

QUEST: That's how you guys became connected.

KADALIE: Yeah, that's how me and Larry got connected, yeah.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: And Charles got connected but then -- the point is, the President of the school offered me a scholarship. This is the first time I saw the rank nature of the petty bourgeoisie; really, I saw it in him. He brought my wife and I in and said, "Look, I'm prepared to help you get your PhD at the University of Kansas. I can give you a scholarship, and you can go there. But what you have to do in order to get the scholarship is tell me who these people are." And then he showed the Grapevine.

QUEST: Wow.

KADALIE: Then Charlotte -- this is when I knew my marriage was over. Charlotte said to me, "Eddie" -- I'll never forget this -- "Eddie, Dr. Hale is giving us a marvelous opportunity." And being a young man at the time, I just grabbed the table and turned it up and walked out of there.

QUEST: In his office with him there?

KADALIE: Yeah, him and his wife too. His wife had become Vice President for 00:41:00Institutional Advancement.

QUEST: Now for the transcript, you moved your hands. What did you do in the office?

KADALIE: I turned the table upside down.

QUEST: Up in his face?

KADALIE: Up in his face, him and his wife.

QUEST: And his wife.

KADALIE: Yeah, and walked out of there. But anyway, they didn't pick up my contract the following year.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: Simmons had left. Charles had left. He graduated, and he was defied at the commencement. And he demonstrated at the commencement. This next year, I demonstrated at the commencement, too. But Charles went to Detroit. Now that spring, in August -- I mean in the spring of '68 -- that is when the Dodge Main strike occurred. I read about it in The Guardian.

QUEST: Spring, 1968. You read about it while you was in Oklahoma.

KADALIE: Oklahoma, in The Guardian.

QUEST: And then how quickly did you get to Detroit?

KADALIE: I think it took me another four or five months or so. I'm not quite 00:42:00sure. I still don't remember how many years I stayed at Langston. But I do remember that, when I was there, the librarian would order any book I wanted to.

QUEST: Well, you couldn't have stayed there that long, because you got there in '67, and you come a few months after --

KADALIE: So it was '68. Well I'm not sure. See, I'm not sure that I didn't come back in '69, that's the thing.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: I know that - so it might have been another whole year, but I knew that I was - I was reading The Guardian, I was reading every newspaper I could get from Detroit.

QUEST: About the significance of the Dodge Main strike.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: Why was it - why was it exciting you so much? What was the big deal about it?

KADALIE: Well, I had been reading Nkrumah and I had been reading - see, I'm trying to remember. Of course, I was reading Che Guevara, and then I was following the Vietnamese conflict. And then I was reading some classical Marxist stuff. I knew that Detroit -- I was familiar with Detroit and then from the 00:43:00rebellion of '67 -- then I see this workers' strike. And then it seemed like it had a class stamp on it, you know, a real class stamp on it. The way it was reported in The Guardian, it looked as if -- and I knew about the Black Panthers. I knew that the Black Panthers were not on the right track. I know that they were just people who talked about street organizing against police.

QUEST: Now, when you speak of the Black Panthers, at this time you mean Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, those Black Panthers?

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, those Black Panthers, and then some local ones.

QUEST: In Detroit.

KADALIE: In Oklahoma.

QUEST: Oh, in Oklahoma, they had a chapter.

KADALIE: They had a local little chapter in Oklahoma, but these guys didn't know anything about anything; they were just mad. So when the League came out, when the Dodge Main strike took place, I knew I had to go to Detroit. Charlotte wanted me to come to Atlanta, because she had -- that's when our marriage started breaking up.

QUEST: She wasn't mad at you for flipping the table over?

KADALIE: She was, she was. She was mad at me for humiliating her in front of her 00:44:00friends, but, you know, I didn't really care nothing about that. And I told her that I'm not going back to Atlanta, because in Atlanta, that's where all them petty bourgeoisie Negroes were.

QUEST: And that's your experience also with Morehouse.

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah.

QUEST: That's why you didn't go back to Morehouse.

KADALIE: From Morehouse.

QUEST: That's your experience in Oklahoma.

KADALIE: Yeah, right.

QUEST: So you're experiencing HBCUs.

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah.

QUEST: And then you - and then later on you go again and work at HBCUs.

KADALIE: Well, I worked at HBCUs because of the students.

QUEST: Right, right.

KADALIE: But I'm talking about the hierarchy.

QUEST: The hierarchy, right.

KADALIE: So Charlotte actually comes to Detroit with me for a little while, and then our marriage broke up that same September or October.

QUEST: Of sixty...?

KADALIE: '68. '69, '69.

QUEST: So you arrive in Detroit around '68/'69; you think it's '69.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: You're going there because of the significance of the Dodge Main strike.

KADALIE: Right, right.

QUEST: What is the significance to your mind, of the Dodge Main strike?

KADALIE: The Dodge Main strike represented a separation of black working people who were raising their independent demands, and it was -- that didn't seem to be no bureaucracy on top of it. It seems like it was a spontaneous upheaval, much kind of like the little guys at Morehouse when they demonstrated against the swim team.

QUEST: The swim team coach.

KADALIE: Yeah, and then the upheaval in Detroit, when these people distributed the food and all.

QUEST: So you're witnessing this.

KADALIE: I'm witnessing some kind of phenomenon that I'm trying to explain to myself, you know. But I know it's important.

QUEST: But this is existing side-by-side with aspiring bureaucratic-minded leaders, whether of the old school, that you're seeing in HBCUs, or the Vanguard -- there's a lot of Panthers -- and you're seeing, from your perspective, the instinctive or spontaneous self-organization of black working people.

KADALIE: It seemed to be something happening independent of these leaders who are professing to direct and control people. That's what I saw.

QUEST: Are you saying this in hindsight or are you saying that that's actually what you were thinking?

KADALIE: No, I saw that these people were -- what I saw was their indignation that should be respected. I didn't see their individual indignation; I saw them engaging in collective indignant action, which I always respect, for some strange reason. I don't even know, and I've seen it so many different times.

QUEST: The Dodge Main strike -- the Dodge Main is a plant.

KADALIE: Yeah, in Hamtramck, Michigan.

QUEST: A car factory in Hamtramck. OK. And out of that, the first -- what they called the RUMs -- the Revolutionary Union Movements emerge, which were popular committees of workers leading strikes independent of the union.

KADALIE: Well, let me just say what happened when I got back to Detroit.

QUEST: All right.

KADALIE: When I got back to Detroit, Simmons was -- Charles Simmons was already there. Larry Simmons was already there. He got kicked out of Langston.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: So Larry Simmons, now, is a student at Highland Park Community College. So I come to Highland Park as a faculty --

QUEST: You didn't know that he was there, before you were teaching there?

KADALIE: No, no, no. I'm not even sure if he didn't come there until after I got there.

QUEST: Well that's a whole -- OK.

KADALIE: I'm not sure, but he ends up being there.

QUEST: Right, where you're working as a teacher.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: You both moved to Detroit.

KADALIE: Yeah, mm-hmm. And he ends up becoming the Student Government President.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: But he, you know -- but anyway, the point I'm getting at is, I come to Detroit. Charles Simmons introduced me to General Baker. I didn't know General was my relative or anything at that time, but he introduces me to General Baker.

QUEST: General Baker is who?

KADALIE: General Baker was regarded, at that time, as the chair of DRUM, which 00:48:00was emerging and becoming the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. He was the most influential worker.

QUEST: Of the DRUM strike.

KADALIE: Of the DRUM strike. And he was known, he was charismatic, he was culturally identified as a working -- he was not petty... There was nothing petty bourgeoisie about General at all. General was what people call -- he was a down brother, you know.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: I mean, he was sure enough down, and people respected him all over. I think they had just moved into their new office on -- I can't remember the name of the street -- in Highland Park, right down below the college. And so Charles Simmons took me over there, and we talked with General, and, I'll never forget, he says -- because I had my dashiki on, you know. I called myself kinda afro, you know, and so General said, "Well, you ought to take that dashiki off, because them Panthers out there -- they don't like no pork chop nationalists." (laughs)

QUEST: And what does a "pork chop nationalist" mean?

KADALIE: It's a cultural nationalist.

QUEST: OK. They perceived you -- because you have a dashiki on, there's the perception that you're a narrow cultural nationalist.

KADALIE: Yeah, that's their perception.

QUEST: OK, so at that --

KADALIE: Because of the dashiki.

QUEST: So at that time, --

KADALIE: Charles had on one, too. We both took them off.

QUEST: So within the Black Power Movement, there's a perception that there's the class struggle tradition, represented by the Panthers, and the cultural nationalist position, represented by people like Karanga and Baraka. But within the league, there's actually Africa-conscious people, so there's a false separation.

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah. But what that was a reflection about -- the Panthers, that they were from the west coast. There was some conflict between us and the Panthers. But anyway --

QUEST: Us is the Karanga's group.

KADALIE: Yeah, Karanga's group. So we took off our dashikis. (laughs) But anyway, that summer I taught at Highland Park. In the winter, this is when I realized -- this is when I realized this style of work started working. We knew that what we were --

QUEST: What style of work?

KADALIE: I'll explain.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: Simmons was there, Charles Simmons was there, but he wasn't active with us. Larry Simmons was active with us.

QUEST: At Highland Park, you mean?

KADALIE: At Highland Park Community College. And we started getting students from the classes and having study groups, to get them to address the problems at the school. The school had changed. The school had changed very rapidly, almost overnight. It was a suburban white community college one year, two years later, Highland Park was almost all black, and the student body was almost all black.

QUEST: Is this documented in the movie, Finally Got the News? They talk about industrial education.

KADALIE: I don't know.

QUEST: You've never seen that movie?

KADALIE: I saw the movie, but I don't know.

QUEST: But you don't know if it's in there.

KADALIE: Yeah. So we had a little cadre of people, and they'd come and go. Some of them were students in my class and all that kind of stuff, but we knew that, in order to make changes at the school, we're going to have to engage in some action -- a strike. And so we tried to prepare for the strike by -- for the spring, but the students needed to know all the information; how many black teachers and all that kind of stuff, and so we had the little study group thing. As soon as the spring came, the students wanted to move.

QUEST: What were you all studying in the study group?

KADALIE: Well, we studied some Marxist literature, but we were mainly trying to get the students to see that Highland Park needed to change. So we did some community study.

QUEST: Highland Park is a village kind of within geographic Detroit.

KADALIE: Well, it used to be a suburb of Detroit when Detroit was much smaller.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: But as Detroit got to be larger and larger with the influx of in-migrated African-American laborers from the south, it engulfed Hamtramck and Highland Park and some more places. But mostly -- it spread south to down by the Rouge plant. But Highland Park was really the blackest. It was blacker than Detroit. It got to be -- it became a black neighborhood city. But anyway, I was in the league by then, and we began to form the PAC, and we were supposed to be active in community activities. QUEST: We've got to break some of this down now.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: OK. So you're working with Larry Simmons at Highland Park Community College. Eventually, there are some student strikes there.

KADALIE: Yeah, that same next spring.

QUEST: Yes. You're also on the central staff of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, at the same time, which emerges for the first time in 1969, out 00:53:00of the Dodge Main strike.

KADALIE: Right.

QUEST: So what does the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, as an organization, represent?

KADALIE: As an organization, it represents some independent organization of black laborers. However, within the leadership, it was not clear what was going on. They were talking -- some of them were talking about -- Luke Tripp was talking about Mau Mau, Maoism. Other people were talking --

QUEST: You said Mau Mau. Mau Mau from Kenya, plus Maoism.

KADALIE: Yeah, plus Maoism.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And then some people who had read the pamphlets by Jimmy Boggs, about the need for a black vanguard project.

QUEST: James Boggs.

KADALIE: James Boggs.

QUEST: A disciple of C.L.R. and then breaks with C.L.R., and he has his pamphlet, Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party.

KADALIE: Yeah, which he --

QUEST: He's influential with some of these young people.

KADALIE: Yeah, he's influential, he's influential. So it's not clear exactly which direction the league was going. The only thing that's clear is that it's an organization of black workers groping, really. And so they are trying to 00:54:00organize it.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: That's when I met Ernie and --

QUEST: OK, let's hang on for a second. OK, so the league is thrown up as an organization of black workers just trying to venerate the different popular uprisings in the different auto plants in Detroit at this time, with Dodge Main being the first one.

KADALIE: Dodge Main was the first one.

QUEST: Led by General Baker.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: OK. At the same time, there's many different ideas. There are people within the league, like Charles Simmons and others, who have been to Cuba. There are people that are reading Mao Tse-Tung. There are people that are interested in Africa and imagine themselves building a Mau Mau Rebellion. There's the influence of James Boggs, and they imagine themselves trying to build a Vanguard Party, a Black Vanguard Party on some level. And then there's the influence of 00:55:00C.L.R. James, who is known as someone critical to the Vanguard Party.

KADALIE: He was known as a black anarchist.

QUEST: He's perceived by someone as an anarchist, and he always said he's not an anarchist. He thinks he's the most original Marxist ever, but he was perceived as a black anarchist. Who perceived him that way?

KADALIE: The Vanguardists and the League. See the League, at that point -- the initial core of leadership was made up of students and workers, who formed themselves into an executive board, an executive committee.

QUEST: And this committee included?

KADALIE: Included John Watson, Ken Cockrel, Luke Tripp, Jalali Farrakhan, Mike Hamlin, General Baker and Chuck Wooten.

QUEST: And Jalali Farrakhan is also known as Norman Richmond.

KADALIE: Norman Richmond.

QUEST: Otis Richmond.

KADALIE: Otis Richmond, and he also has Dennis.

QUEST: OK. Now this is -- now let me continue to ask a certain line of questions 00:56:00here. OK, so we have this mix of ideas in the organization.

KADALIE: You could call it a mix of ideas.

QUEST: And at the same time, C.L.R. is said to have been very influential on the League, but he's perceived as a black anarchist --

KADALIE: By some.

QUEST: -- by some who were Vanguard- or party-oriented. Now, C.L.R. is said to have influenced, primarily, John Watson and Luke Tripp.

KADALIE: I don't see that.

QUEST: But you don't see that.

KADALIE: I don't. I could not, because they were the most vanguardist of the group.

QUEST: OK, but they had done study groups with George Rawick and Marty Glaberman, who were members of the Facing Reality Group. And they were familiar with C.L.R.'s ideas before they went to Cuba, but you don't see them having any anti-vanguardist ideas at all.

KADALIE: No. They were vanguardists.

QUEST: They were vanguardists. Now in the movie, Finally Got the News, John Watson does talk about the potential for a general strike, led by black workers 00:57:00in Detroit, which at least in public, on the public record, is the most explicit influence, because that's C.L.R.'s ideas. No one else advocates a general strike or anything like that, in relation to black workers. But then, this is where it's important to trace how C.L.R. influenced yourself and Kimathi Mohammed, in the attempt to influence or combat the vanguardist tendencies within the League.

KADALIE: Yeah. Well, we saw -- let me explain.

QUEST: First, we have to say: who C.L.R. is, how you met him, and who is Kimathi Mohammed?

KADALIE: OK, let's talk about how I met C.L.R. and Willie and the cadre at Facing Reality.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: I was living with Jalali Farrakhan from the spring/summer of '69, all 00:58:00the way through '70, and he was coming and going, because he was a draft dodger, as well, from Canada. So that's why his name is not associated with the executive board as much as some other names.

QUEST: Because he's really based in Canada, across the bridge.

KADALIE: Plus, he's underground. We, at that point, didn't know what the American government was going to do about the draft dodgers.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: Anyway, we used to argue all the time about the Vanguard Party; it was a source of great contention among us. But we also used to go on book raids at these various bookstores in Detroit, like to the SWP Bookstore at Deb's Hall on Woodward Avenue. We used to go down there and get books -- to CP Bookstore, way up on Woodward Avenue, on the other side of the fairground. At first, they were down by Wayne, then they moved up by the fairground.

QUEST: Did you say SWP, Socialist Workers Party.

KADALIE: Socialist Workers Party.

QUEST: Communist Party. Socialist Workers Party had -- well, they didn't call it Pathfinder back then. It had Merit, maybe, Press?

KADALIE: Yeah, they had Merit Press, and they had the little publication. They had Pathfinder pamphlets.

QUEST: Oh did you? OK. So they had stuff on Malcolm and Peter Trotsky.

KADALIE: They had Malcolm, Trotsky, and they even had some stuff on Cuba.

QUEST: On Cuba.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: And the CP, you had international publishers; Paul Robeson.

KADALIE: Yeah and plus, they had stuff I wanted to get from them. They had hard copy books of Lenin's collected works.

QUEST: Oh, so you had his collected works. OK.

KADALIE: Yeah. And then I got another copy from across -- when I went to Africa. And then we used to go up into Canada, raid Lenny's Bookstores, and they had a TROT organization up there, I forgot the name -- that we used to go get their stuff. But anyway.

QUEST: When you said raid, it was a given back then that people in the movement would shoplift, or what they called "liberate the books."

KADALIE: Yeah, right. Yeah, we would liberate the books.

QUEST: And they took it for granted that you all were going to do that.

KADALIE: As a matter of fact, they made some available for us to liberate. They 01:00:00wanted to make sure we got this or that book. It was really funny, and, you know, I thought we were being clandestine, because we'd go in there with the big trench coats on and try to put books in like this, put books in the little pockets under there. And then we realized, these people knew we were doing this, and they encouraged us doing this, they put even stuff for us to do. They said, "Well these -- you don't have to steal these; these are free." (laughs) So then we went over to -- we found out -- I really didn't know who Facing Reality was, but they were at Woodward Avenue, right in front of the Ford plant -- the original Ford plant, and they were upstairs. So I went upstairs with Jalali; we were trying to liberate some books, but we didn't -- this was not really a bookstore like we ever seen before. It had books, but it didn't have much. Willie was in there.

QUEST: Willie Gorman.

KADALIE: Willie Gorman. That's the first time I met Willie, and Jalali --

QUEST: Willie is a member of C.L.R. James' Facing Reality Group.

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah. And so Willie was asking us what did we need, and what did we want. We said, "We're just looking man. We're just trying to figure out what's in here." And Jalali said -- we saw -- he got the little Facing Reality pamphlets, and Jalali said, "There's nothing in here to steal, so let's go." I said, "Wait just a minute." And Willie says, "What do you --" I said, "I wanted some books on the dialectic. I'm looking for some books on the dialectic," and Willie says, "We don't have anything right now, but I can give you this to look at, and you can come back next week, and I'll have you something." I said, "Fine, fine." So Jalali and I went -- Jalali said, "We don't need to go back there, blah blah blah blah. They ain't got nothing, blah blah blah." So I came back the next week without Jalali. Willie had a manuscript, Notes on the 01:02:00Dialectic, by C.L.R. James.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: So he started cross-examining me about the League, and I told him what my perception of the league was and what was going on. He, at this point asked me, had I heard of C.L.R. James. I said, "Yeah, I know. And I know you all were associated with C.L.R. James, blah blah blah blah." And he says, "Well what can we do to help the League somehow?" And I said, "Well you can give me this book right here, this manuscript right here." And then he says, "Do you think that people need some kind of lecture on the League -- on the dialectic?" I said "Yeah, yeah. C.L.R. could come and give a lecture on it." And he said, "Well, I'll see what I can do about it." That's when the inspiration for that first lecture came about.

QUEST: The lecture? Oh, so C.L.R. gives two lectures in -- it was around November/December, 1971.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: But you're talking about -- that you did a study group with him independently on the dialectic.

KADALIE: Yeah, well that -- you're right. The study group came out of that conversation.

QUEST: Out of that meeting with -- yeah.

KADALIE: But Willie had in the back of his mind that he was going to bring C.L.R. to a public lecture on the dialectic. He had that in mind. He said, "What do you think if we did this?"

QUEST: So, on Christmas Eve, what is it 1970? Is it 1970?

KADALIE: Yeah, we upstairs. We invite Larry Simmons to come, too.

QUEST: Yeah.

KADALIE: Kimathi was supposed to come.

QUEST: Yeah, but it was snowing real bad Christmas Eve in 1970.

KADALIE: Yeah, it was 1970.

QUEST: Christmas Eve, and then in 1971, a year later, November/December, 1971, he gives two public lectures. Really -- well, he has one to the Panthers, in his basement, but two public lectures to the League.

KADALIE: Yeah, mm-hmm.

QUEST: And C.L.R. gives --

KADALIE: Yeah, but by that time, people are reading -- trying to read his notes on the dialectic, and I'm trying to engage Jalali on this. He don't want no part of it.

QUEST: And so C.L.R. writes notes on dialectics in 1948 and then compiles it as 01:04:00a publication, at this time, for public consumption.

KADALIE: Yeah. The way in which he did that, it was a mimeographed, typewritten thing between two colored -- brown-colored -- I still have my copy. Two brown sheets of construction paper, with a -- taped in, taped it in to bound, but that was -- I thought that was the original work, but I guess he had prefaced it much earlier than that.

QUEST: Well, he had never published it, but he had circulated it among his organization as letters.

KADALIE: Oh, OK.

QUEST: And it becomes a bound book later.

KADALIE: OK, well that's the first time I came in contact with it. And Willie --

QUEST: What kind of personality was Willie?

KADALIE: Willie was a dedicated activist. His loyalty to C.L.R. was clear. He was always talking about C.L.R. and what C.L.R. meant to the movement, and he was always wanting us to know. He really tried to make all of the available 01:05:00information he could about C.L.R.'s writings to me at that time, and I guess I thank him for that. And then I would ask -- I would engage, saying, "You can come by the house all the time." My wife Michelle didn't -- she thought he was kind of a scruffy white guy.

QUEST: But tell the story at first -- so the first time C.L.R. and Willie came over the house, what does -- your wife, what is she --

KADALIE: Oh yes, my wife was saying -- she didn't know that C.L.R. was actually the C.L.R. He says, "Willie's bringing this black guy over now, who is this?" -- she basically saw that C.L.R. thought Willie was his mentor.

QUEST: So C.L.R. was a follower of the white left, led by Willie.

KADALIE: Yeah, led by Willie.

QUEST: But actually Willie is a disciple of C.L.R.; C.L.R. is the leader. But she didn't imagine that was the case, yeah.

KADALIE: She didn't know that, but she knew Willie. She knew who Willie was, because Willie had come over there before. So when Willie brings C.L.R., then he's just bringing a black guy tagging along. But it was clear to me. I don't know why she didn't see it, that Willie was -- there was nothing in the dynamic between Willie and C.L.R. to indicate that C.L.R. was his follower. I don't know where she got that from. I don't know where she got that from, but I think she just reacted to the fact them guys were smoking all the time. She didn't want the smoke in the house. It was something. But Willie, to me, was more influential, because I would ask him questions, and he would talk around the question, talk around the question, talk about -- when I'd ask him a question, I got stuff out of him, I really did. But it took a while, because he was so circumspect about his answers. But I think, you know, he was dedicated, no question about that. I mean his whole life was the Facing Realities Group.

QUEST: So, while we mention C.L.R., if we could sum up briefly -- You know, we know that C.L.R. is best known as the author of the Black Jacobins: the Classic Account of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution, but C.L.R. is not as well known for his theories about socialism and workers, even though he's well known as a socialist. So what -- if you had to sum up concisely, what are the lessons that C.L.R. passed on to you in his body of work, including Notes on Dialectics, and other books. What is C.L.R.'s contribution?

KADALIE: To me now, I want to tell you what he helped me with. Around the League, there were a lot of people reading dogmatic, straight up party hack kind of stuff, you know.

QUEST: From where?

KADALIE: From the Bolshevik Party, from SWP.

QUEST: Originally from Russia.

KADALIE: Russia and all that kind of stuff.

QUEST: From the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S.

KADALIE: And Ernie was really kind of Mao. He used to read on contradiction and on practice.

QUEST: Ernie Allen, who was Ernie Mkalimoto, was reading Maoism.

KADALIE: Yeah, he was reading Maoism. OK, but what Willie -- what C.L.R. did for me, he showed me -- see, I kind of always suspected that workers knew more than petty bourgeoisie people, because of my upbringing. Down home, working people knew all about the woods and fields and all that kind of stuff. The people who came in to teach them, they knew what the white people were bringing in to teach, you know. So when I read notes on the dialectic and then I read the history of the Pan-African revolts --

QUEST: Mm-hmm, by C.L.R.

KADALIE: By C.L.R. A very readable little book. It was black enough for me, and it talked about how the people in Africa were resisting colonialism.

QUEST: It talks about a lot of labor strikes.

KADALIE: Yeah it did talk about labor strikes and how they were organized and 01:09:00all that stuff, and how they did that themselves, without any kind of external intervention. So that's what C.L.R. represented to me: that workers had within themselves the capacity to transform their own reality. That's what he did to me. He was a black man; that made it more palatable, I guess. I don't know if he was white, would I have grasped it like I did. And plus, that he was always his own man. He was always putting forth his views, without having to say, "This is our line, this is our line and that's our line." I want to pursue that a little further, but I've got to go the bathroom right now.

QUEST: OK. So we'll take a pause.

KADALIE: Yeah, we'll take a pause for the cause.

[Silence]

QUEST: OK, we're back here with Modibo Kadalie. We are doing an oral history of the Southern Labor History Archive, and just before we broke, he was telling us about the influence of C.L.R. James' political thought on his conception of 01:10:00labor. So let's have him continue with that for a moment.

KADALIE: When I read History of Pan-African Revolts, that was a turning point. It was real easy to read, and it was a little, small pamphlet -- a small book, and I think it was the version that was just published in Washington, D.C., I think. Anyway, he just documented each resistance struggle and what the laboring population of Africa was doing in the face of the encroachment of imperialism. And he put names and dates and faces with it and what they were trying to do, so that was helpful. I read the Modern Politics, as well.

QUEST: Modern Politics, lectures from 1960.

KADALIE: Yeah. In Modern Politics, he was talking about the Greek city states, and he was talking about the role of the slaves. But really, when I read that, I really was kind of -- I had some kind of pause with the point that he was trying 01:11:00to push off to Greek city states as really models of democracy, and then it was big slaves, and the slaves were outside of the forum. So I had some problems with that, but the narrative that he gave -- and then when he started about The Jacobins, and then he's talking about Rob Spear and all that kind of stuff.

QUEST: The Black Jacobins.

KADALIE: Yeah. That gave me an idea of how bourgeois revolution had unfolded in Europe. And I've seen him actually assert -- I heard him assert that there's been only one revolution, and that's when the bourgeoisie came to power. And we were trying to understand the Cuban Revolution, the so called Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution and so forth, the Bolshevik Revolution, and C.L.R. really was trying explain how revolution takes place within the, you know, the points of production. Now I can associate that with the League, when he started talking 01:12:00about the revolutionary committees and the workers councils, and I could associate that potentially in the League. That's -- you can see that these ideas in the League were at least thrown around in the executive committee, but I don't think they really were understood and certainly they weren't embraced. And so the League was beginning to become top heavy.

QUEST: But C.L.R., through books like Facing Reality, that is the book, not the name of the organization, and Notes on Dialectics, has a certain conception of a self-organization and a self-emancipation of workers, which will become influential on your critical approach to the League and to other activities we're going to talk about, in Detroit. Talk about C.L.R.'s conception of the self-organization of workers. I think that might be the most influential.

KADALIE: Yeah. When he talked about how workers organized themselves, independently of a party or even a cadre; and that he pointed me into looking at a certain aspect of movement. And then when I started doing that, I began to see much more profoundly. Even his explanation of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He explained how the workers organized themselves, and then I noticed that all of his writings, even though he was writing the history of the Pan-African Revolts, he even wrote that from the motion of the masses. And he put the people on that -- the names of the people, but they were parenthetical, they were not even --

QUEST: When you say the names of the people, the names of the prominent leaders, the president.

KADALIE: Yeah, the prominent --

QUEST: But the people that appear to be the motion isn't through the leaders.

KADALIE: No, no. No, he -- it was a different way of looking at history, really it was. And I think that all of it wasn't grasped by me, but there were some 01:14:00impulses that I did know. I mean, I really did. I knew that leaders always turn people -- turn on people, and I know that once you set up these leaders, they somehow become instruments of their own motivation, as opposed to what the people really want. And so I -- and plus, I enjoyed reading C.L.R.'s writings, because I could hear him talking when he was -- after I heard him talk, you know. He really was talking through his writing.

QUEST: Mm-hmm. So, around the same time that you met C.L.R., you go up to Lansing, Michigan, and you meet someone else very influential in your life, who is around your age: Stanley McClinton.

KADALIE: Stanley McClinton, but he was --

QUEST: Who takes on the name Kimathi Mohammed.

KADALIE: He was known as Kimathi Mohammed.

QUEST: At that time?

KADALIE: Yeah. And so I would go up to Lansing -- I just got in my car. I knew some people who knew him, and I knew where to find him. And he was supposed to come down to the study group; he didn't show up.

QUEST: Oh, so you hadn't met him before the study group that he was supposed to attend.

KADALIE: I don't think, I don't think -- I'm not sure when I had met him, before or after that study group.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: I'm not sure.

QUEST: So you go up to Lansing, because he's a major Black Power activist at Michigan State.

KADALIE: But I've read some of the stuff that they had already written.

QUEST: They?

KADALIE: Marcus Garvey Institute.

QUEST: OK, that's what's based up there.

KADALIE: Yeah, and I wanted to know what this Marcus Garvey Institute was about.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: I really wanted to know. And I'm not sure that I knew that he was from Savannah, yet. So I go up there and meet him, you know, and we started talking, and he knew me and I knew of him, and so we started talking. You know, I just asked him, "Man where you from?" He said, "Oh well, I'm from Savannah," and I 01:16:00said, "Yeah?" And he knew were Riceboro was, where I grew up.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: Yeah. So we got to be real good friends after that, man. He was political. He was a really intense young man, and he had a cadre, a circle around him, and they were not party hacks or nothing, they were just -- they were trying to figure out what was going on. And I met Maina or --

QUEST: Maina wa Kinyatti, a historian of the Mau Mau, --

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: -- who was later a political prisoner in Kenya, --

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: -- was close with Kimathi, was a grad student at Michigan State at that time.

KADALIE: Yeah he was, mm-hmm. They were very, very close. And Kimathi was going through a similar thing that we were going through: the question of what is the role of student activism with community activism. So what he had basically done is taken that wing of the student activist and moved out into the Lansing community and set up the Marcus Garvey Institute.

QUEST: Now, Kimathi is also very much influenced by C.L.R., becomes close with 01:17:00C.L.R., probably closer with C.L.R. than you personally.

KADALIE: Yes, mm-hmm.

QUEST: And so Kimathi develops a certain -- he's developing similar ideas to you about -- one would argue, influenced by C.L.R., about the idea of self-organization of the workers as being more significant than any progressive leaders that might emerge.

KADALIE: Kimathi was trying to work out what is the role of the spontaneous mass movement to organization, which really was the question of the time to those people who were really interested in organization. The vanguardist thing was that the spontaneous organization is insignificant and what they needed is just a sign that they needed to have a party. But with Kimathi -- Kimathi seemed to be seriously engaged in this question. He seemed to be seriously engaged, doing 01:18:00the reading necessary.

QUEST: It's his perception, in Kimathi's archive, that he was working with you and C.L.R., to have an influence on the League, because initially the League was not a Vanguard Party or aspiring Vanguard Party; it was more like a network.

KADALIE: It was, at first.

QUEST: And so Kimathi, even though he's in Lansing, is part of the network, and you're part of the network.

KADALIE: But see, I didn't even know him at that time.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: But the network -- then when the executive board was founded, then that changed the whole thing; it became kind of a bureaucratic organization. But I remember this about Kimathi: he had some people in Detroit working with him, and he had some other people in Lansing working with him.

QUEST: Even Pontiac, Michigan.

KADALIE: Pontiac, working together.

QUEST: Because he had a network in the state.

KADALIE: He did have a network, and they had the information, and they knew what 01:19:00was going on, and they were engaged. And the thing I liked about this organization, the network, was that they had women who were prominent in the debate of that time. Kimathi was working, principally, through -- I don't know what he was doing with Marty, because I was never close with Marty, but Willie.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: Yeah. He was close with Willie.

QUEST: Well, you were close with Willie.

KADALIE: I was close with Willie.

QUEST: And he was closer with Marty and George Rawick.

KADALIE: Is that right?

QUEST: So it's interesting, because, when you think about the influence of C.L.R. on the League in the Detroit metro area at that time, there's a personal meanings with C.L.R., but there's also a filtering down influence through Marty Glaberman, George Rawick and Willie Gorman, who you guys know in varying degrees.

KADALIE: Yeah. Now, what Marty did -- I mean, what Willie did with me -- I had picked up -- I took Willie out there to pick up C.L.R. at the airport one time and apparently, he had been in some accident or something, but he was comfortable in my car. I think -- to the first lecture.

QUEST: There was a car accident, and he had a car accident where he was injured badly, in 1961, in Jamaica.

KADALIE: Yeah, maybe that's what it was.

QUEST: So he was very paranoid about --

KADALIE: He's very paranoid.

QUEST: About getting in a car accident.

KADALIE: Yeah. And so what happened was, any time C.L.R. would come to Detroit, I kind of knew it, because Marty would call me to go pick him up at the airport, because he requested that I pick him up at the airport.

QUEST: He liked the way you drove?

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah. So he -- and then he -- I think he just knew me as this interesting League guy who used to come and pick him up at the airport (laughs), who he wasn't scared of his driving. But I found him to be very -- I asked him 01:21:00questions and he would -- of course, sometimes, he'd go off worse than Marty and worse than Willie. I'd be trying to ask him some various questions, and he'd always reframe the question. I think I got a lot from it, but the dialogue sometimes broke down, and I didn't know what the hell he was talking about some of the time. (laughs)

QUEST: So, now Kimathi's trying to work out this dynamic of organization and spontaneity. He has this network.

KADALIE: Yeah he does.

QUEST: And he asked C.L.R. to speak up in Michigan State, twice.

KADALIE: OK.

QUEST: So you guys had both organized speaking engagements, met with him, had discussions with him, and now you're seeing a vanguardist or a centralization -- authoritarian centralized element --

KADALIE: Yeah, that's what's happening.

QUEST: -- emerging in the League and is moving away from being rooted with the workers and the workplace. But also, these strikes have declined.

KADALIE: Yeah, there was not much mass activity, but what was happening is there was student activity, high school student activity and other kinds of activity. When we hooked up to PAC, the People's Action Committee, it was really not --

QUEST: In Highland Park.

KADALIE: Yeah, it was in Highland Park, but it wasn't designed to be an organization in itself. It was designed to be a study group that had other activists coming to us, who were engaged in things, and we would discuss. So it really was kind of a clearinghouse kind of thing. But we did have certain books that we wanted people to read, and one of them was Black Jacobins.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: Yeah, one of them was Black Jacobins, and Du Bois' book, and of course later when Rodney started coming around.

QUEST: So Du Bois', Black Reconstruction and then Rodney came around with his drafts on how Europe --

KADALIE: He had his first draft, his galley proofs. But the point I'm getting at 01:23:00is our style of work in the PAC was one of trying to aid the natural and self-organization of people, wherever they were.

QUEST: And then you take from C.L.R.

KADALIE: Yes, that is what we get from him, and it's very effective. I can say, it was very effective. We were really at the epicenter. We were really more on top of things than the League's executive board, because people would come to me, and that's why we had all kind of people coming to us on the study group. The new Wayne State students, not the old guys. Those guys had gone since then.

QUEST: Now, we have to talk about the League real quick. The League starts to fracture, and the League -- most historians see two factions emerging: one around Ken Cockrel and another one around General Baker. Is that right?

KADALIE: I didn't see it like that.

QUEST: OK. So there's two fact- --

KADALIE: Most historians see that there's a group of people associated with workers and then another group of people who were more bureaucratic.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: Yeah. I think that's the simplicity.

QUEST: OK, so what were the factions or the differences within the executive board?

KADALIE: Well, there was -- when we got purged in the Easter purges.

QUEST: 1970, April?

KADALIE: Yeah, in 1970, April, the Easter purges. Those cadre were really struggling for internal democracy.

QUEST: The people that were purged.

KADALIE: Yeah, the people that were purged. We were struggling to make sure that the leadership understood the type of diverse work we were engaged in; that's all.

QUEST: So you were purged and Ernie Mkalimoto.

KADALIE: Me and Ernie, which is Ernie Allen, and then Shola and Kentala, and Loreen Small and her husband.

QUEST: Sonny Hana.

KADALIE: Sonny and myself and my wife at that time, Michelle Jones. We were just saying that there needed to be an election, and there needed to be some democracy in the League, that's all. And when --

QUEST: So you're now raising C.L.R.'s ideas?

KADALIE: No, we were not raising C.L.R.'s ideas.

QUEST: It's just a democratic --

KADALIE: It's just a democratic --

QUEST: -- critique.

KADALIE: -- critique of what was going on then. We figured if we could decentralize a little bit, then we could have some work. Now as it turned out, and this is my perception of it, as it turned out, that might have been good, because the PAC now was able to free to apply the C.L.R. style of work to the community. I really do. When I got purged, I was in Washington, D.C. doing something, and I came back, and they said I was purged. They didn't even tell me I was purged. They didn't even send me no letter, they didn't send me nothing.

QUEST: And you and Ernie were the organizers of the Internal Education, the study groups.

KADALIE: Yeah that's right, we were on the Education Committee within the League, and our task was to bring some education so that there won't be so much uneven development in the League. I was surprised -- really was surprised, because we hadn't done nothing really.

QUEST: So, you also wrote for the Inner City Voice, which is the paper affiliated with the League.

KADALIE: When Jalali and myself -- we lived together. We were compiling African Liberation stuff from Cabral and all that, and we were the ones who put that in -- and the PAIGC and the African stuff in the League.

QUEST: Oh, so Caribbean stuff.

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah. I interviewed Mrs. Garvey, as a little interview with Mrs. Garvey there.

QUEST: Amy Jacques Garvey?

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: OK. And you signed them Cooper.

KADALIE: Yeah that's what I was, that's my name, then.

QUEST: Now they also -- in the Inner City Voice, they covered the struggles that 01:27:00you had at Highland Park Community College, and there, they had little drawings of you with your afro and your glasses, and they said E.C. Cooper.

KADALIE: Yeah. I was the only African American teacher at the school that sided with the students at that time. And the students had a list of demands, you know: black studies, blah blah blah; all kinds of demands. The Board of Regents -- not the Board of Regents, the School Board, which was the overseer of the Community College -- was supposed to renew my contract by April 1st, I think, and they didn't do anything. So we went to court and got them to -- on the writ of mandamus, got them to either say I was going to have a contract or not. So they said, "Well, you're not going to have a contract." That triggered the strike. The strike lasted for about 28 days. It was a long, effective strike. It was one of the longest ones in student movement history. At the end, the 01:28:00students won everything but my reinstatement.

QUEST: And Larry Simmons was the leader of the student movement.

KADALIE: Larry Simmons, yeah. He was a very effective leader, too. A very effective, compassionate leader. We came in contact with the Highland Park police force and they damn near killed us all one day. But the point is the Highland Park struggle showed me some things. It was Marty -- and Marty --

QUEST: You mean Willie.

KADALIE: No, Willie, Willie.

QUEST: Willie Gorman.

KADALIE: Yeah, Willie Gorman. After the strike was over, he then began to sit me down and say, "Look, what we need to do is figure out what we have learned from the strike. What did the workers themselves, what did the students themselves do." And you know, I was able to understand that students camped out and fed one another, and it was -- during the strike, there was a lot of support. The 01:29:00community came in and supported us all kinds of ways. And it wasn't us telling them what to do. It was students every day, and we set up -- we got this from the south. We set up a freedom school in the student union, which was a little place in the back of the school, and that's -- we call that a liberated zone, and so we still had education going on. That was what was able to sustain the strike over a long period. If we had just struck the school and left and just had the picket line up there, it wouldn't have been as effective.

QUEST: Mm-hmm. So then you take this -- you're thinking about your style of work, influenced by C.L.R., Willie is asking you questions about the self-organization of students and workers. And then, when you have People's Action Committee, you talked about you had a wide variety of speakers come.

KADALIE: Well, they were not so much speakers, they were people who came in. It was open. They could come in and share.

QUEST: But it was like a public forum, you would have events.

KADALIE: Yeah, it was -- no.

QUEST: No?

KADALIE: It would meet every Sunday; every Sunday at 9:00 in the basement on the bottom floor of my house. And then they would come in there, and we would have the little reading list. And then other people could be invited, and they would come in there and share their experience in their activism. We had housing workers, we had the school board -- people who wanted to recall the school board, people who wanted to recall the Mayor of Highland Park. And then we had Boyd, Brown & Methuen come in.

QUEST: Who were they?

KADALIE: They were some impatient young men at the time. And they came in, and they were talking about the drugs that were taking over the black community, and how if all of us were serious, we'd go out and start busting these crack houses down.

QUEST: Well they didn't really have crack yet. Heroin?

KADALIE: Heroin, yeah heroin. Drug, dope houses.

QUEST: Drug, dope houses.

KADALIE: Drug, dope houses. And ah, --

QUEST: And so they were known for armed intervention --

KADALIE: Yeah they were, they were.

QUEST: They're trying to clean the drugs out of the community, when they first broke out.

KADALIE: And then some cadre among us were supportive of them. I mean, you know, and so when they started -- I really thought that once they started getting chased around like that, they were going to bust our house up. I really thought so. But they never bothered us. These guys got to folk heroes in the community, because they were effective, and they were serious. They would bust in and burn -- I mean, they would shoot it up, you know what I mean? And then one of our cars got to be associated with them, and so we had to take a couple of them underground. Boyd went to Atlanta, Ebo went to Kentucky, and they were underground, and they left. Them guys never really got arrested until later, and of course Brown got killed.

QUEST: OK. So --

KADALIE: And Walter would come by.

QUEST: Walter Rodney.

KADALIE: Yeah, Walter came by on several different occasions.

QUEST: Horace Campbell.

KADALIE: Horace, sure.

QUEST: Nelson Johnson.

KADALIE: Nelson Johnson.

QUEST: Owusu Sadauki.

KADALIE: Mm-hmm. That's when we got into the African Liberation Support work.

QUEST: So before you leave Detroit in 1973, you've already begun to do African Liberation Support Committee --

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: -- stuff. Now, --

KADALIE: That was in ALD '73, the PAC, along with some other community organizations.

QUEST: People's Action Committee?

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: Yeah.

KADALIE: With the PAC, the other PAC.

QUEST: Pan-African Congress. Ed Bond.

KADALIE: Ed Bond and all of them.

QUEST: That's why I was trying to clarify.

KADALIE: Yeah. But we -- they were pushing the PAC name out.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: And we were just a group of people --

QUEST: Local, yeah.

KADALIE: -- who were trying to, you know, influence local work.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: Self-organized work. And so we did organize those -- we organized about three, four busloads for ALD '73 in D.C., and then we became the principal organizers for the following year in Detroit.

QUEST: Now, how is it that you get to Atlanta exactly? Don't you show up in Atlanta in '73?

KADALIE: Yeah, I do.

QUEST: But you -- it's kind of an end around, kinda -- it's not a direct path to Atlanta from Detroit.

KADALIE: Let me explain this.

QUEST: You're home for a little while.

KADALIE: When we were at PAC -- when we were at PAC, we met at PAC, the PAC is actually an organization that was --

QUEST: You keep saying when we are at PAC. People's Action Committee?

KADALIE: Yeah, PAC.

QUEST: In Detroit?

KADALIE: In Detroit. When we had PAC, we were -- we had come in contact with a lot of different forces who were active in the black community. Some of them wanted to make us a wing of their party. In other words, when we left the League and our unit became independent, then other people saw this -- other vanguardists, really, saw this -- as an opportunity to come in.

QUEST: For example, like what?

KADALIE: Like the APP with Max Stanford and them.

QUEST: APP.

KADALIE: Yeah, APP.

QUEST: African Peoples Party, by Max Stanford. He wanted to come in and --

KADALIE: Yeah, they wanted to come in and do that. And he met with me on several occasions.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And I'm going to talk about that later.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: During the course of our dealings with these guys, there was a split in their organization which I was a part of, and so I had to go underground for about four, five months myself.

QUEST: So initially, you were a member of the African Peoples Party when it was first starting out.

KADALIE: I was, I was -- I was supposed to come to the convention.

QUEST: To the convention, which happened to be down by where you were raised.

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. As a matter of fact, I helped organize it.

QUEST: You helped organize the initial convention of the African Peoples Party, but then there was a factional split.

KADALIE: There was.

QUEST: And then you had to go underground as a result of that.

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah. And the organization never was what I thought it was.

QUEST: What you thought it would be.

KADALIE: Yeah. I thought I would have a voice in the formation of what it was to become. And when that came to be not the case, then I realized that I had made a big mistake. But, in the meantime, there was vanguard factionalism there that resulted in all kinds of conflict. And so what I decided to do was just take myself out of the equation.

QUEST: You were in D.C. for a little while.

KADALIE: Yeah, I went to Canada -- back to Canada.

QUEST: Canada, OK, OK.

KADALIE: I went to Canada; I always go to Canada. (laughs) I went to Canada and stayed up there for about three, four weeks.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And then I went to D.C., in a little safe house there, for another three or four weeks. And I was watching the papers; nothing really happened. I was looking for some FBI intervention at that point. And then I wound up going to Atlanta, and I stayed underground until I registered for graduate school. So they convinced me that I needed to go back to school.

QUEST: In Atlanta.

KADALIE: In Atlanta, at the PhD program there.

QUEST: So you come back down to Atlanta in 19- ?

KADALIE: '73.

QUEST: '73. What month was it? August?

KADALIE: August, yeah.

QUEST: August, '73. OK, let's stop there. OK, this is Matthew Quest, Professor of History at Georgia State University. We're back here with another installment of our oral history interview with Modibo Kadalie, on behalf of the Southern Labor History Archive at Georgia State University.

KADALIE: The date, date it.

QUEST: Today is November 12th. At this juncture --

KADALIE: 2010.

QUEST: November 12, 2010. At this juncture, we want to talk about two events, in the summer of 1973, that Modibo participated in before he finally arrived and got involved in Atlanta politics the following year. So what we're looking at is 01:37:00the Organization and Spontaneity Conference in Detroit, that he helped organize with Kimathi Mohammed, and the Kent State meeting -- organizing meeting of the Sixth Pan-African Congress, which also happened in the summer of 1973. And both of these together really tell us something about the legacy of C.L.R.'s ideas and practice for Modibo and Kimathi. So let's begin with the Organization and Spontaneity Conference in Detroit, summer of 1973. What was that about, Modibo?

KADALIE: Well, we called it -- myself and Kimathi called that conference, and we were trying to get people to address this question of organization and spontaneity. And he had written what later became the pamphlet, his groundbreaking pamphlet. But he wanted to present it around to various people, 01:38:00and he wanted to come to that conference and have an open discussion about that, along with some other things. So he was organizing the people in Lansing, and I organized some people in Detroit, and we had the conference, an all-day conference at a community center in Detroit. There wasn't that many people there; it was something like 35, 40 people there. And he presented it, and I did a little talk.

QUEST: Your talk was about?

KADALIE: My talk -- what I was trying to do with my talk is trying to assess the period and assess the role of organization in the period, from one period to the other. I made some statements about how stuff ebbs and flows, and the organization must be attuned to the ebb and flow of the mass movement.

QUEST: But whereas Kimathi was putting forward a theory of organization and spontaneity in general, and a critique of the tendency toward a black vanguard party --

KADALIE: Yeah he did.

QUEST: -- and the Black Freedom Movement, I think your -- while you had some general notes on the organization, did you not make your focus, your critique of the limitations of the League?

KADALIE: Yes, we did.

QUEST: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

KADALIE: It was -- we -- I wouldn't say we condemned the League, but we analyzed the League in terms of its limited vanguard outlook, and we -- our prognostication was that it couldn't go very far with that.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: As a matter of fact, some people in New Orleans said, as far as they were concerned, vanguardism was dead. So it was clear that we were trying to forge new ground in that direction, and that's why the conference was so important. We were scheduled to have another one in another couple of years but we never did. That was supposed to be the first in a series of Organization Spontaneity Conferences.

QUEST: Was this conference all of African Americans?

KADALIE: They were all African Americans.

QUEST: All 35 to 40?

KADALIE: Yes.

QUEST: And so would you say that this is the high --

KADALIE: About 30, 35 I would say.

QUEST: Would this be the highpoint for the influence of C.L.R.'s ideas on direct democracy among the Black Power Movement?

KADALIE: Well, it was clear that this group that was there had done critique of the --

QUEST: Vanguard Party.

KADALIE: The Vanguard Party. And they come to another conclusion.

QUEST: And that was based on C.L.R.'s inspiration, his writings.

KADALIE: C.L.R.'s inspiration --

QUEST: To Kimathi and yourself.

KADALIE: And the experience of the League.

QUEST: And the experience of the limitations of the League. I see, OK.

KADALIE: The League was very central to the discussion.

QUEST: Right. In contrast to that event, another meeting -- organizing meeting of the Sixth Pan-African Congress -- happened at Kent State University in Ohio, and you was at that meeting with Kamathi and C.L.R.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: What happened there?

KADALIE: Well, we got a van load of people, -- some from Lansing -- and they picked me up in Detroit -- and some more people from Detroit. We went down to Kent State, and we were under the impression, you know -- during those days, it 01:41:00seems like people had these very strict agendas and when they called people together, they didn't really want a discussion, they just wanted to rubber stamp stuff. So we got to the thing, and they gave us the call, C.L.R.'s call, which we already had. But we thought it was going to be an open discussion, so we immediately started drafting up a paper, talking about labor and what Africa should be doing at this particular point and what our position would be.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: And we thought that that would be included in the documentation of the conference. And when it was clear that we -- what we were saying-- We had written it up and presented it. As a matter of fact, Malcolm 2X read it. It was read at the --

QUEST: Greg Kelly.

KADALIE: Yeah, Greg Kelly, Malcolm 2X.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: We worked -- I mean, we really got that thing, and then he read it from the podium. And after it was all over, we thought that C.L.R. would unite with us.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: You know... (laughs)

QUEST: But what was the analysis of labor in Africa that you guys put forward, specifically?

KADALIE: We said that the --

QUEST: What was the --

KADALIE: The Sixth Pan-African Congress should have a working class labor and view on technology.

QUEST: Because there was a professional layer that was promoting science and technology.

KADALIE: Yeah, it was a bureaucratic group of people that wanted to institutionalize themselves and calcify themselves as some kind of institute of experts and guardians of the knowledge. We thought that the knowledge should be -- come from the masses, and there should be some kind of mass base information, based upon some useful kind of information, to help develop the African continent.

QUEST: So the assumption was that the wisdom of science and technology should come from the African people.

KADALIE: That's right, come from the working people, and we thought that that should be the thrust of this Pan-African Congress. Or, that we thought that, at least, they should record that there's some of us who believe that.

QUEST: Right. So you thought C.L.R. was would unite with you?

KADALIE: I really thought C.L.R. would unite with us and ah... So they went through some shenanigans and stuff and really, when it came to the end -- because we had really, we had the audience there; we were ready to push It to a vote.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: And they thought that we could win it. So Courtland Cox said --

QUEST: Who was a former organizer in SNCC.

KADALIE: Yeah, a former organizer of SNCC; he was chair.

QUEST: Right, he was chair of the Sixth Pan-African Congress.

KADALIE: He was chair of this meeting, too.

QUEST: Of the meeting, too. Right.

KADALIE: Yeah. And so he did a parliamentary maneuver, splitting our vote. He says, "We're going to vote this up or down, or we're going to vote it with some tweaking that we can do, or, on the other hand, some people can vote against it." (laughter) So what happened is our vote, what the majority said --

QUEST: You split with the first two.

KADALIE: Yeah, our vote should be -- the majority vote was to tweak it.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: So they said "OK, well we'll tweak it," and we never heard anything 01:44:00from it. And we thought C.L.R. would at least salvage the thing, you know what I mean?

QUEST: Right. And say oh no, no.

KADALIE: He just didn't do it, man, I mean... I remember when Kimathi and myself, we were going up back to Michigan, I said "Man, what the hell they'd get --" He said he didn't know, I didn't know, nobody else knew, but everybody was just shaking their heads.

QUEST: Now in Kimathi's private archive that Pat Liss holds --

KADALIE: What does he say?

QUEST: Well remember, there's a document from that meeting that C.L.R. wrote about labor in Tanzania, and then there's a handwritten note that suggests it was -- but that's not the original document that C.L.R.'s presentation -- he made a presentation at this meeting, I believe, on labor in Tanzania, but it somehow sanitized or --

KADALIE: Very sanitized.

QUEST: Or he didn't raise his full politics.

KADALIE: No he didn't, but we later -- some years afterwards, we -- after we saw 01:45:00what would happen, that he was hedging his bets at that point. But he was really out, and he should have known it really, that he was out. You know eventually, he hung around and hung around and then at the last minute he --

QUEST: He broke it down.

KADALIE: Yeah, he broke it down.

QUEST: And so he boycotted the Sixth Pan-African Congress and would not attend in June of '74.

KADALIE: No, he didn't.

QUEST: Because they -- the public reason was they banned non-governmental delegations, the grassroots delegations from the Caribbean.

KADALIE: Yeah, and they only recognized the state delegations.

QUEST: The states, right.

KADALIE: And so he just couldn't live with that.

QUEST: Right, OK.

KADALIE: But we went anyway. Kimathi didn't go.

QUEST: Kimathi didn't go, you went.

KADALIE: But I went and some other people. We took the essentials of that and made it the left caucus.

QUEST: Right, at the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania. So, OK.

KADALIE: And I've seen people who write about that, and they said they -- I think some left -- some groups in California, they thought of themselves as the only critical force there, and that's not accurate.

QUEST: OK. So in 1973, after these events, you move to Atlanta.

KADALIE: Yes.

QUEST: And you're staying in the Vine City community.

KADALIE: Yeah, Sunset Street.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: Right behind the post office.

QUEST: OK. And you're -- you start orienting immediately to this anti-repression coalitioning, because there's a struggle around police brutality with John Henry.

KADALIE: But I came down and I had gotten some money to go to school; I must say this.

QUEST: OK, no problem.

KADALIE: Hanes Walton, who was a friend of mine from Morehouse, he said -- I didn't know this, but he said that the people at Atlanta University was organizing a PhD program to legitimize activists, and they were trying to recruit people who were active. And they were going to develop a political science PhD program around the experience -- the political experience of African 01:47:00American people. And so I came down and talked to some people, and I applied, and so I was admitted. So I was getting ready to go to school that September, in the PhD program, Atlanta University at the time. And there was a big issue in the black community about John Inman, the police chief, a white police chief. I mean, they were murdering young black men almost on a weekly basis, you know. In the street openly, and the people were really upset about it. But there were anti-repression coalitions: one led by the petty bourgeoisie under Hosea, the other led by --

QUEST: OK, Hosea?

KADALIE: Hosea Williams.

QUEST: With SCLC.

KADALIE: SCLC.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And then there was one which was very elitist, around Hosea's personality; "Hosea is our leader, Hosea, Hosea." And on the other hand you, had 01:48:00the left Marxists; they had meetings, but nobody ever came to their meetings.

QUEST: That's Donald Stone.

KADALIE: Donald Stone, Donald Stone.

QUEST: I think Donald Stone was affiliated with RAM.

KADALIE: I don't know. I knew he wasn't for RAM then. He was with the Black Workers Congress, which was a splitter group from the league.

QUEST: OK, so James formed this Black Workers Congress.

KADALIE: Yeah, they -- the thing was proliferating all over the place, and activists were being thrown up and thrown to drift everywhere. But their coalition was around debating about the merits of the Vanguard Party. So both of them were elitist.

QUEST: OK, so the first -- the Donald Stone coalition includes people from Black Workers Congress and the SWP, in October.

KADALIE: There you go, those people.

QUEST: So they're debating the merits of the Vanguard Party.

KADALIE: And how they should lead this struggle, and Hosea was not the legitimate leader.

QUEST: So they were both elitist.

KADALIE: They were both elitist, you know what I mean? So here I am, you know, "As the board, we've got to do something." (laughter) So we set up a little 01:49:00formal, a little -- same thing we did in Detroit. Had a little group, a little study group. We called ourselves at that time, the Black -- no the - because we were still on the AU campus, and we organized some of the students under a thing called The Community.

QUEST: Black Issues.

KADALIE: No it wasn't Black Issues, it was Community Forum at that time. And we started to send a cadre to each one of these, each one of these groups. Hosea could mobilize more people, he really could, and so we then started becoming foot soldiers for Hosea and trying, at the same time, hold him at bay, and it was tough. It was so tough. The left people were calling us petty bourgeoisie, and Hosea was petty bourgeoisie, and they was calling us this and that, but we would go to the mass gatherings.

QUEST: When you say petty bourgeoisie, what do you mean by that?

KADALIE: Well, that was just a term that activists used to condemn people who they believe are black elite.

QUEST: Middle class?

KADALIE: Middle class. Well, upper class really.

QUEST: Upper class, yeah.

KADALIE: So we just called them the petty bourgeoisie, because there was no real black bourgeoisie. There was a big debate about whether or not they were really bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie.

QUEST: Ok.

KADALIE: A big debate, right? That just goes to show you what deferment was like: petty, petty, petty, well OK. The whole debate was petty. But the point is we'd go to the mass gatherings, and we would insist on at least talking. And so we started putting out a pamphlet, and we started trying to interpret this as a working class struggle. But we -- at the same time, we were trying to -- see Hosea saw us --

QUEST: It was Hosea against John Inman, for police brutality.

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah, Anti-Repression Coalition. So we drew up the demands, and Hosea would agree with the demands. Then we tried to get the demands to Don Stone and them to agree with. So Don Stone would come, and he said, "Well let's have a big -- you know, the meeting." So that went on and on and on, and 01:51:00eventually, Maynard Jackson ran for mayor.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: A lot of people supported him.

QUEST: In the coalitions.

KADALIE: In the various coalitions.

QUEST: Oh, OK.

KADALIE: The Marxists, to their credit, they kind of stayed clear of it. Hosea, of course, you know was for it. Political scientists at Atlanta University was for it, but they were interested in making sure that the election was not stolen. So they got -- and I was one of the -- you know, a poll watcher -- so I poll watched for Maynard during that particular period of time. He got to be the mayor, and he was beholden to everybody. Garbage workers voted for him and everything. He got to be the mayor, and we put pressure on him to fire the Police Chief, John Inman. So what he did, rather than fire him outright, he did another charter, and they did another -- the city council, they did another 01:52:00charter, and they made -- they created a super chief. In the old charter, the police department and the fire department was two separate units. Under the new thing -- under the new charter -- city charter, which Maynard had developed with the city council, there was a super chief, and he appointed Reginald Eaves as the super chief. And John Inman, at that time, barricaded himself in his office, so we had to go down there. Everybody was united then, because -- and I noticed this -- that at a certain point, these little differences that people had were set aside for a while, to get John Inman out of the office. So eventually got John Inman out. But that was my baptism of fire with the petty bourgeoisie and the Marxists and everybody in Atlanta, including Maynard Jackson and Reginald 01:53:00Eaves. Eaves later was fired, and they started hiring another chief. But the black community -- I'll tell you so understand it. Many people in the black community, under those situations, saw that Maynard Jackson would be like Barack Obama is today. And then later, of course, he turned on the garbage workers and everybody.

QUEST: Mm-hmm. So, tell me a little bit more about Black Issues Community Forum, which emerged. It first starts off as the Community Forum, and then, what you call Black Issues Community Forum, you have like a network of co-thinkers or co-activists.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: And these include people like Janita Mohammed and Belinda Kent.

KADALIE: Yeah, but they came in on the --

QUEST: On the Dessie, Cheryl Todd, Dessie.

KADALIE: Juanita came -- yeah Cheryl and Dessie Woods. What happened is Hosea was kind of impressed with us, you know, even though we were trying to keep our distance from him. But we came to him, and we said, "Look, we're having this forum, we need a place." So he had a church up on Hunter Street, Hunter and Chestnut at the time, and we met in the church basement twice a month. And we had leaflets and stuff. So any time there was like a housing workers strike or some kind of activity, they would come and we gave them a forum. And we didn't criticize them. We just gave -- like we did in Detroit. They came, and then some of the people who were in the leadership of those various issue-oriented campaigns, they stayed and became members of our forum, and so we addressed all 01:55:00kinds of issues: electric workers strikes and all kinds of things. High school stuff. And so the Dessie Woods thing became an issue that we addressed.

QUEST: So who were Dessie Woods and Cheryl Todd, and how did they have a defense committee around their case? How did that emerge in spring of '74?

KADALIE: Well, what happened was that Dessie Woods had a cousin or a relative in jail out in Reidsville, and they tried to get there. They didn't have any money much, so what they did is they started hitchhiking in Wheeler County, and these good old boys picked both of them up in a truck, got on the CB radio, tried to call some friends, and raped them. So before the guys could get there to do that, one of the -- I don't know who killed who, but the guy ended up dead, and so they got arrested for murder, and they were in jail themselves. So the defense committee came, and they came to us, and they were trying to figure out 01:56:00how we should do the defense.

QUEST: Dessie -- was it Cheryl Todd?

KADALIE: Dessie Woods and Cheryl Todd. Their families came.

QUEST: Oh, OK.

KADALIE: And some other activists came. And we put them in touch with some lawyers. But the point is we raised the issue, not whether or not they were guilty or innocent. We said if they killed him, they had a right to kill him. So we did the self-defense argument.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: And eventually, that's what their argument was, even though Cheryl Todd -- apparently she was not as closely related to it. And we had caravans going down to the courthouse when they were being tried.

QUEST: What courthouse was it at?

KADALIE: The courthouse in Wheeler County. I forgot the name of the little town. It was the Wheeler County Courthouse.

QUEST: OK. So, --

KADALIE: That was one of the things that we did as time went on.

QUEST: Now, you were continuing to do African Liberation Support Committee work, 01:57:00which is an independent project from the Sixth Pan-African Congress, but it overlaps, too.

KADALIE: It does.

QUEST: The Sixth Pan-African Congress happens in June of '74, but the spring of --

KADALIE: It was supposed to be the previous year.

QUEST: Yes, it was postponed.

KADALIE: It was postponed one year.

QUEST: Right. But spring of '74 -- oh, I'm sorry. When was it that you had this dispute -- the African Liberation Support Committee had this dispute with Ralph Abernathy of SCLC, around a donation he received?

KADALIE: '74, '74.

QUEST: '74. He had a donation that he had received from Gulf Oil. Now Gulf & Western -- I don't know if they have Gulf Oil any more -- but Gulf & Western Oil Company --

KADALIE: Were in the province of Angola. And then we had begun a Gulf Oil boycott, and in the middle of the boycott, Andrew Young and all these people, 01:58:00who later became, I don't know, saviors of Africa... But I remember Andrew Young came to one of our African Liberation Support Committee, and he was campaigning for Congress at the time. He came there to get support for his campaign.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: But in the meantime, he started lecturing us about how we were barking up the wrong tree, that we should boycott Gulf, or if you do sanctions against South Africa, that that would cause loss of jobs. And I remember, man, it was a contentious debate, right there on Mason Turner Road, where they had that little nightclub back then. Them guys wanted to jump on Andrew Young, and they called him petty bourgeoisie and told him to get out of the place. (laughs) I wasn't as vociferous as some, because I didn't think it would, you know -- it would matter.

QUEST: So you're saying Andrew Young was defending Abernathy and SCLC's reception of this money from Gulf Oil.

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah. Abernathy, Andrew Young. We picketed Abernathy's church, 01:59:00you know -- telling people not to go to the church. The ALSC down here did that, and so between Abernathy and Andrew Young and all of them, they were in cohesion with the Portuguese, on the one hand, and, of course, the South African apartheid regime. And to our amazement some years later, these guys get to be champions of --

QUEST: For anti-apartheid.

KADALIE: Yeah, anti-apartheid. So really, somebody needs to -- that should be told. That really should be, because there's a million stories. Just like, I even had an experience with Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King was banned from Morehouse, you know that, don't you? Early on. And after the sit-ins, I had a little girlfriend. She introduced me to Martin Luther King one night, in front of the study hall, and he said to me -- Martin Luther King said, out of his own mouth -- he said that, "I'd better be getting out of here, because they don't want to catch me up here." And then a little later, Benjamin Elijah Mays 02:00:00eulogized him. That's the way the petty bourgeoisie operates. (laughs)

QUEST: So OK, there's a bunch of things going on between 1977 and 1979.

KADALIE: A lot of things.

QUEST: Now, --

KADALIE: Now in the meantime, I've taken a job. I haven't finished my PhD, yet, but I got my master's. I got two master's degrees, so I take a job at the new Atlanta Junior College. It's brand new.

QUEST: OK. And then there begins to be some student strikes from '77 to '79 at Atlanta Junior College, around a confrontation with the Georgia Board of Regents.

KADALIE: Georgia Board of Regents.

QUEST: So, we'll talk about that, but there's also other things, so let's just get them out there. There's the 1977 -- the African Liberation Support Committee is actively supporting the Atlanta sanitation workers strike.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: And in '78, also the strike of the Atlanta City Housing Authority workers.

KADALIE: Which one do you want to start with?

QUEST: Why don't we start off -- why don't we do Atlanta Junior College strikes last. But you do take that job at Atlanta Junior College.

KADALIE: I was there. I worked at Atlanta Junior College for four years plus.

QUEST: OK, but let's talk first about the sanitation workers strike of '77. What's the significance of the Atlanta sanitation workers strike?

KADALIE: Keep in mind that the Black Issues Community Forum is now meeting, and Hosea don't want to touch this.

QUEST: He doesn't want to touch that.

KADALIE: He don't want to touch this, because the petty bourgeoisie had come out -- I keep saying the petty bourgeoisie.

QUEST: The black middle class.

KADALIE: The middle class black people had come out in support of Maynard Jackson firing these people.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: OK, now we were looking in the newspaper the whole time, but that story was not even making it. There was no dent nowhere.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: So we decided to use some kind of guerilla something. And so the students at Atlanta Junior College -- by that time, they had done a similar 02:02:00thing with Larry Simmons, by taking over the student council. So Omar Ujama, my man, he was the president of the student council. Chimurenga Jenga was named Arthur Collins. Let me just get this guy's name. Omar Ujama's name is Mealing, I think his name is Robert Mealing. He's from Alabama. Chimurenga Jenga, his name is Arthur Collins.

QUEST: Mm-hmm. OK.

KADALIE: He went to Washington High School, so he was known in Atlanta. So they were the two most aggressive and active students -- and they were every bit as assertive as the Highland Park Junior College people were. Very assertive. There was -- we didn't mention this, but there was a strike at U of D, and they were in that tradition.

QUEST: U of D?

KADALIE: University of Detroit.

QUEST: Oh, previously. Right.

KADALIE: Previously. OK. I've been active, man. I didn't know I was this active, but I was active, because I got banned from the U of D. We might need to talk about that sometime. But anyway, Arthur Collins and Chimurenga Jenga were very -- they were very knowledgeable. I think they were ex-military guys. They'd come back from the war, and they were older students. And they could read, and they were good students. They were actually good students. They were in my class, and they could understand this issue of the rising junior exam and other kinds of obstacles that were being placed, including the Regents' test. And so, they begin to see that the Board of Regents was trying to keep people from going to school. So when they started talking about desegregating the university system, 02:04:00then they saw it coming. So we started agitating around, mobilizing the students. C.L.R. came in that midst, and Jabari Simama and myself were instrumental in getting him there. The students were amazed to see an old man like that, because they know the petty bourgeoisie in Atlanta. I mean, to see a radical old man like that. That left an impression upon them. Now, these guys, Chimurenga and Omar and all them, they -- we worked together to get some more people. I drove a van, Chimurenga drove a van, several people drove a van; we got vans. And in the middle of this strike, Maynard Jackson had said -- because people started complaining. He said, "Look, take the garbage to a central 02:05:00location, and we'll help you pick it up." So we were sitting around, and we said, "OK, let's take some garbage to a central location." So we went, and -- Omar and I were on one truck, and I'll never forget Omar says, "This garbage here don't stink enough, we need to get this garbage." (laughter) And then he started talking about, "Oh yeah, that's some good garbage there," and it funked up my van so bad. But he was workin' -- And to this day, he's retired from the garbage workers.

QUEST: He became a sanitation worker?

KADALIE: I mean he later became a garbage worker, a sanitation worker, but at this particular time he was a student. So we picked up the garbage, and Chimurenga and them had a couple more vans, and then we were in contact with one another. We met somewhere off the campus, I mean off site from the -- and we waited until rush hour, and then we had to get in there and work fast. We had a 02:06:00spokes -- Vanessa. Vanessa Green was our spokesperson. She had our statement in front of City Hall, while we were working and putting the garbage out in front of City Hall. We were careful not to block the entrance and the egress, but we put about ten tons of garbage up there. It was an intervention and we were, we --

QUEST: You were doing this on behalf of the sanitation workers who were on strike.

KADALIE: Yeah, because we were saying that their story needs to be told, because Mrs. King -- Martin Luther King, Sr. had talked about, "Fire the hell out the workers," and all that, and so it was our intervention. Later, the ASME people asked us to help them in negotiation with the city, but it was a done deal by then. The petty bourgeoisie had mobilized public opinion, and we did what we could. Some of the workers got hired back, but the city effectively broke the strike.

QUEST: What was the relationship between the student and community support for the strike and the workers themselves? Were you guys in dialogue at all?

KADALIE: Yeah, we were in dialogue, but we were in dialogue through ASME. Apparently, ASME was the bureaucratic organization that the workers were --

QUEST: The labor union.

KADALIE: Yeah, the labor union up under them. The workers themselves were supportive, and of course ASME people did, too, but they were able to get some press as a result. Because at one point, man, we -- they were actually asking Maynard what was the garbage workers issues -- asking Maynard. He didn't know; the garbage workers had no independent voice, even through ASME. So later, when that happened, then ASME was able to get some press and to explain what was going on.

QUEST: Now, a year later, there's a major strike among the Atlanta City Housing Authority workers.

KADALIE: Let me explain what we became.

QUEST: When you say we, African Liberation Support Committee?

KADALIE: No. What happened -- what we became was the Black Issues Community Forum.

QUEST: Oh, we is Black Issues Community Forum.

KADALIE: And through the students --

QUEST: AJC students.

KADALIE: We became a cadre of people that people who were organizing and moving would come to. For advice, for support. They knew that we would take them to the edge, and so a lot of them came to us. And the garbage workers, I mean the housing authority workers came to us -- and there was a preacher over here on the east side of town. Hosea wasn't involved in this either. I don't know where Hosea was, but another preacher was involved, and they did a lot of praying and praying around.

QUEST: Praying around what?

KADALIE: Just --

QUEST: I'm losing the thread. You have your nucleus of students and activists and community members, around the Black Issues Community Forum. People come to you for support.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: The transitions. We're trying to figure out how you guys got linked up with the housing authority workers.

KADALIE: They came to us.

QUEST: They came to you.

KADALIE: In the Forum.

QUEST: The Black Issues Committee Forum.

KADALIE: Yeah, and they explained to everybody what their issues were, et cetera, et cetera. And what we did is we took down their demands and tried to figure out how we can help. And we asked them how they want... And so they told us to meet at this church over here, so we went over to the church.

QUEST: So that's where the singing started --

KADALIE: They started singing and the preaching and all that kind of stuff.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: And so you know, Chimurenga was there, Omar -- I mean, Chimurenga and Omar, and there's some more students. There was a core of students, about ten or twelve of them, really. Some of them eventually joined the SWP and all that. But there was Octavius and some more; there was a lot of them. And so we asked the people, we said, "What do you all need for us to do?" They were talking about money. We ain't had no money, so we said, "Well look, what you can do is, since 02:10:00you've got this crowd of people here -- what we can do is go do some nonviolent confrontational action, like we can go -- "

QUEST: The housing authority.

KADALIE: The housing authority. "We can go to the housing authority building," which was over there by where Tech-Wood used to be. "And we can just stand out in front or we can take -- make sure --" Omar he -- Omar loved doing the garbage thing. He said, "What we need to do is go over there and jam up the place with some garbage." (laughs) So we did that, and then they started chasing us around; and I had to run here and run there, me and Omar. And they charged him with stuff. We tried to support in any way we could. We would picket. We would fill the place up, the authority with garbage. We would -- and workers, workers told us that, at certain times in their work schedule, they would do certain things. 02:11:00So our actions would be here, and it would be there, depending on where the workers were telling us where to go.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: They didn't win, but they didn't lose. They did all right.

QUEST: So, --

KADALIE: And I got convicted of littering, and I had to do some community service. (laughs)

QUEST: Cleaning up litter?

KADALIE: No, they had me working in the screen place over there.

QUEST: So from '77 to '79, you're over there at Atlanta Junior College. You build this nucleus that links up the Black Issues Community Forum, but they're struggling around the Georgia Board of Regents, and this culminates into a big student strike in '79.

KADALIE: Yeah. It takes a while to get there though. There was confrontation in the board. See what happened is we first went down to the Board of Regents and said that we had some problems with the way in which they were orchestrating the desegregation plan.

QUEST: What desegregation plan?

KADALIE: Desegregation of the University of Georgia system. They were under a court order as a result of the NAACP suit in the 11th Circuit, asking them to desegregate and come up with a desegregation plan.

QUEST: So their desegregation plan is also attempting to break up a historically black college.

KADALIE: Break up the historically black college and, boy, they turned it around just like the bourgeoisie does. They turned it around to make -- they said, "Well, we're going to talk about the desegregation of Savannah State," but Savannah State never was segregated.

QUEST: So, in that regard, they're trying to undermine the black autonomy.

KADALIE: Yeah, and then they put this ah, these new testing regiments in place, which would have resulted in the maintenance of desegregated schools. And so we went down there questioning all of that.

QUEST: Now you say went down to a meeting...

KADALIE: To the Board of Regents.

QUEST: Which was where?

KADALIE: We got on the agenda down on Washington Street, at the Board of Regents chamber, in their regular meeting, they had us there.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: To present what our case was.

QUEST: When you say we, people from AJC?

KADALIE: AJC, primarily AJC.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And there was faculty members, too. And I remember one time, at this meeting, I remember this particular -- after, you know they was talking about raising the standards. "We have to maintain the standards of the University of Georgia and Georgia State, and we can't have these people coming in that don't measure up." And so the people said, "What do you mean, 'the standards'?" "We want to make sure that they speak standard English, blah blah blah blah blah." And one English professor at the school called all them guys "good old boys" around the table. Said, "Well, sir, you don't speak standard English." He say, "I sure enough do." (laughs) That was funny, that was funny. "I showed up too; I speak good English." Everybody started laughing, and so they said -- none of 02:14:00them had no degrees either. So they said, "Well, if you don't like this plan, why don't you come up with an alternative plan?"

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: So we took the plan, and in the next meeting they had an alternative plan. (laughs)

QUEST: And what was the basis of the alternative plan? What would you propose instead?

KADALIE: We just basically -- we basically critiqued. First what we did is convene a large group of people. I think we called ourselves the Society for Open Education -- the George Committee for Open Education. So we were GOE, Georgia Open Comm... And this was a -- this met one Saturday at Atlanta Junior College. We went through the old Board of Regents plan, we had discussions, and I was charged with drafting up the alternative plan. But what we wanted to do is make sure that education was open to everybody. We even said that education is 02:15:00not even a privilege, but it's a right; and we tried to talk about how these testing -- what the long-term effect of testing would be. So we said we needed to take all of that out and make it so that, you know -- people could be -- it could be used to remediate people. So those were some of the things. We talked about how -- this thing about paying white people to go to Savannah State for... And that's not segregation. I mean the point is these places would never segregate white people.

QUEST: You're saying that they set aside scholarships for white students.

KADALIE: To go to Savannah State.

QUEST: To go to the historically black colleges. They still have those kind of things.

KADALIE: They do, they do.

QUEST: At some HBCUs, I believe.

KADALIE: That's the origin.

QUEST: That's the origin.

KADALIE: And ah, so that's -- those were what the alternative plan did. We're very proud of that plan, well I'm very proud of it; it's some good work. But we presented the plan and then, when we presented the plan, that's when the good 02:16:00old boys around the table -- we didn't know this, but when we were presenting the plan at the regular Board of Regents meeting, they had called in state patrol officers from all over north Georgia, and they were -- they had been assembled in a place where we did not know. When we were trying to explain what our plan was -- our alternative plan was, they listened for a little while, and they said, "We've learned enough, blah blah blah. Y'all have got to disburse." And we said, "Well we didn't -- we haven't finished yet." And they said "No, no, we've got to disburse," I mean, "Y'all got to disburse." Do you know what them guys did? They got up and walked out. And at that point, them policemen came in the Board of Regents' office and started pushing us out the door, and it was pandemonium, because Omar -- I remember they pushed Omar through. I thought Omar had gotten really hurt bad. They pushed him through a glass door. They had me -- 02:17:00it was on TV, too. This guy had my um -- had the Billy club up my crotch, and he was doing this to me, you know what I mean. The women started screaming, and it was really pandemonium in there. I got arrested along with about ten or twelve other people, and they took us to the hospital. I mean they beat us, man, they really whooped us, and that's what that was all about. And of course later, we continued to struggle. I was fired, but later on we continued to struggle, and that's where the long march came from, to save the black schools.

QUEST: So there was a long march from Savannah to Atlanta, in December of '79.

KADALIE: Yes.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: With representatives from Ford Valley, Savannah State, but it was not represented. Atlanta Junior College and some more activists, we walked all the 02:18:00way. Omar and Chimurenga and the rest of the core cadre from Atlanta Metro.

QUEST: Now this same summer of '79, there's also a struggle around the Reidsville Prison.

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah.

QUEST: So, there's a march from Savannah to Reidsville, and you got -- you organize that with Hosea Williams and --

KADALIE: Hosea didn't do much organizing.

QUEST: -- Dick Gregory? They were there.

KADALIE: They were there. What happened was these people -- there was a lockdown at Reidsville State Penitentiary.

QUEST: Which is out -- where is Reidsville?

KADALIE: Near Reidsville, Georgia, in south Georgia, near Savannah.

QUEST: Oh, near Savannah, OK.

KADALIE: So Hosea knew I was from down that way, so he called me and told me that he wanted to -- we need to set the groundwork for a march down there, and he was supposed to pay me $450. He paid me $200. I ain't got the rest of the money yet. (laughs) But he did give us the money to open an office down there. So we opened an office about two --

QUEST: Office of what?

KADALIE: Office to mobilize for the march.

QUEST: It was an SCLC office?

KADALIE: No. It was a coalition for the mobilization of the march.

QUEST: Oh, OK.

KADALIE: It was on West Broad Street at the time.

QUEST: In Savannah?

KADALIE: Yeah. Not Martin Luther King, but it was West Broad Street. And I got down there, and a couple of white radicals -- white people that sent their black cadre with me. They were interested in the anti-death penalty part of it. And those guys stayed, and then I had -- I was a taxi driver, starting to be a taxi driver by then.

QUEST: In Atlanta.

KADALIE: Mm-hmm. So one of my taxi driving buddies came down, and we mobilized some local people there who knew Hosea from the time he was there. We did all right. We put demands out there. Hosea came down, made a speech, and we started 02:20:00walking. Hosea didn't do too much walking either, but we had security for the march. We had guys up front were armed and guys in the back were armed, because we were going through the Ku Klux Klan territory. So we got to Brooklyn. When we got out of town, then we got to Pembroke. We got to Pembroke, we went swimming, and one of the guys drowned. That was a sad thing.

QUEST: You all went swimming along the march?

KADALIE: Yeah. Well at the end of the -- it was hot, man. It was really hot, and so some of the guys wanted to go swimming. So we went to a swimming place, and one of the guys -- he was a student at Morehouse, as a matter of fact -- drowned right there, that day. It was really a sad thing. I had gone down the road, and when I came back, they told me he was down under the thing. I pulled him out of there, and he was dead already, but I pulled him over and tried to resuscitate 02:21:00him, but he was dead. And then we kept on marching. We went down to Claxton, and somehow, I don't know, it seemed like every day, this march keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And when we marched into Claxton, I think about 700 people marched out of Claxton and marched into Reidsville, there was about 1,000 people. Then that day from Reidsville down to the prison, we had to go down and that's about six or seven miles outside of town. We set out with Hosea. We said Hosea, "If these guys arrest us, we cannot go voluntarily." He said, "Yeah, that's all right; we won't go voluntarily." I wish Hosea was here, I would ask him about that. So we went down there to the river, because we were supposed to all go limp. We were supposed to tell all the people to just lay down on the bridge. We get to the bridge, and there were policemen there with their buses. 02:22:00The next thing I know, Hosea's telling everybody to get in the bus. So they arrest us all, and as soon as we get back up to the courthouse in Reidsville, which is Tattnall County Courthouse, they let us all go. Dick Gregory, to his credit, he says, "No, you can't do that." So he and some more people went down -- back down to the bridge, and then they arrested them and charged them. So we asked Hosea, he says, "Look, we can't do this; we have to go down here and march all the way up to the prison, because that's what we told the people in Savannah it was going to be." So that's when they put out the flyer, and we put out the flyer and called for a march from the Tattnall County Courthouse to the Reidsville Penitentiary. Man, we had two thousand, two thousand fifty people there. My father even came. My mother and them, they came.

QUEST: Besides the march against the death penalty, there was --

KADALIE: There were some others.

QUEST: Six persons.

KADALIE: Six people were locked down and accused of all kind of things, you know.

QUEST: One of the things they had been involved in was building some kind of multiracial alliances within the prison.

KADALIE: They were trying to do that.

QUEST: They were trying to do that.

KADALIE: Mm-hmm.

QUEST: And they were trying to undermine them.

KADALIE: Yeah. What they did, when they saw that these people were effectively organizing, they started accusing them of things.

QUEST: Yeah. And one was also openly gay.

KADALIE: Yeah, one of them was gay.

QUEST: And they tried to accuse him of all kinds of --

KADALIE: Called him all -- accused him of doing all kinds of things. And then they eventually took those guys.

QUEST: These are all black men.

KADALIE: All black men. They took those guys and scattered them out from the population, but they didn't hurt them. What we were afraid of -- we were afraid that they were going to lock them down, and, you know, Attica had occurred. So we were afraid that they were going to lock them down and do what they did at Attica. So that's why we had to get some pressure involved, and that's why the parents and stuff for those guys came to Hosea, and that's when Hosea called me.

QUEST: So from '79 to '81, another thing is developing, or '80, '81, there's the famous incidents with the Atlanta Child Murders.

KADALIE: Oh yeah, mm-hmm.

QUEST: Atlanta Child Murders is '80/'81?

KADALIE: Yeah, '80/'81. I'm already a taxi driver now.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: And Chimurenga and Omar, they had graduated from the two-year school.

QUEST: AJC. And one became a sanitation worker.

KADALIE: One became a sanitation worker, the other became a cab driver for a while.

QUEST: OK. So, how did you come to be involved in armed self-defense with the Tech Wood -- in the Tech Wood Housing Projects? I mean that was widely talked about in the news, not just the Atlanta murders, but you was -- they reported in the New York Times that you was causing trouble in the Tech Wood.

KADALIE: What happened was -- just that same cadre of people. We had the forum 02:25:00still, and the cadre of people. So Mr. and Mrs. Green were president of the Techwood Tenants Association, and Techwood was over there where the Olympic village is now. It was a sprawling, good-sized --

QUEST: The Olympic village, where the dorms for Georgia Tech were.

KADALIE: Yeah, Georgia Tech. Or Georgia State? Wasn't it Georgia State dorms?

QUEST: No, those dorms are Georgia Tech.

KADALIE: OK, good, fine. Anyway, that used to be a housing project.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: And Mr. Green and his wife were concerned that the kids in the housing project would be snatched by whoever it was, they didn't know.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: So there was a lot of speculation.

QUEST: Were some of those kids that were snatched snatched from their immediate area?

KADALIE: In the general area, yeah.

QUEST: The general area.

KADALIE: And so he -- Willie -- Mr. Green -- was a vet and Chimurenga was a vet and Omar was a vet, so what they did is they all got together, and they called 02:26:00me and said, "We need to do the Second Amendment on them." (laughs) So they called a press conference. This is an amazing thing. I was there. I didn't hardly say too much, but Chimurenga, he invited Mr. Green, Mrs. Green, the Tenant Association, Chimurenga and Omar, and I was sitting there. You know me; I wasn't causing -- I was just sitting there, but I was supporting the fact that they had the right to arm themselves to defend their kids. And they said that they didn't trust the police any more, that this was a situation that we needed to correct for ourselves, and we're going to do it. I'll never forget Mr. Green. Mr. Green said, "We're going to do it ourselves, because we can't trust nobody else but ourselves." He made a hell of a speech, man, and I started -- you read about that. So we had all of the weaponry. We had the handguns, we had the carbines. We had the guys that were supposed to patrol the community. OK now, 02:27:00Mr. Green said, "I don't know how to..." -- Mr. Green grabbed a baseball bat, and he said, "These are the bats that we're going to use, too." And so he had got some people with some baseball bats laid out there, too. And so the next day man, they called us vigilantes, and we were the bat patrol. We did -- I remember the attorney for the city was there, the police was there, and we said, "We have the right, under the Constitution." We put the Constitution out there -- to arm ourselves.

QUEST: Who was the police chief then?

KADALIE: I think it was Eldrin Bell by then, I'm not sure.

QUEST: Elgin?

KADALIE: Eldrin, Eldrin Bell.

QUEST: Eldrin Bell.

KADALIE: I'm not sure.

QUEST: He's an African American.

KADALIE: Yeah, and he was a relative of Maynard Jackson.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: The police was black, the mayor was black, everybody was black.

QUEST: And they were scared of --

KADALIE: They were scared of people organizing themselves.

QUEST: -- people organizing their own selves.

KADALIE: And they were going to break it. They were going to break it. And what they did is after the meeting was over -- and Mr. and Mrs. Green lived there, and Chimurenga and Omar had moved into the project. But I was still working my cab.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: And they had a rally that they were going to organize people. The night before, they had a scuffle. I wasn't there, but they had a scuffle with the police on University Avenue, I think that's where the street was. They said that we have the right. Everybody knows that we're doing this legally and above board. So I was supposed to come and address the rally, and they pulled me over. The guy started writing, talking on his thing, writing and writing, and I said, "What are you arresting me for?" He says, "Wait a minute, wait a minute; let me see." (laughs) And whoever it was on the phone, I said, "Who's on the phone? Can 02:29:00I ask?" He says... Can I, can I say -- he says, "I can't tell you." I said, "Well, is Eldrin Bell on the phone?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "Is the Mayor on the phone?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "That's fine," and then he wrote me up for all kinds of things. Then he took me in, and they booked me, and then they released me. And by the time I went over to Tech Wood, the rally was over, and Chimurenga was patrolling. It was on; they was patrolling.

QUEST: So they arrested other people, too.

KADALIE: They did, but they didn't arrest everybody at the same time.

QUEST: Right. So they systematically put you all under surveillance and preventively detained you all on trumped up charges.

KADALIE: Oh yeah, it was systematic. Yeah, it was a trumped up charge on the part of the city administration, which was black, to disrupt what we were trying to do to protect these kids. But it was because the people at Tech Wood had lost 02:30:00all confidence in this administration, in this police department. They actually thought the way that the kids were being snatched -- they thought it had to be a policeman or a fireman, or some official person, you know. And so we conceived of it as protecting ourselves against whoever it was.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: And I noticed they made a film, and they depict Chimurenga as some wild, crazy guy, you know, but it was a logical thing to do. It was in the tradition of American justice really.

QUEST: So, in this same time period, beginning in '79 but it carries through the 80s, you kind of build an independent taxi union.

KADALIE: Yeah, yeah.

QUEST: So you're driving a cab.

KADALIE: Man, at one point, I could have run for mayor and won. Really, it was just like that. But I didn't want to do that.

QUEST: Were there people asking you to?

KADALIE: Yeah, there were people saying, "Man, you need to go be the mayor, blah blah." I said, "No, no. I can't do that; I'm not interested. I'm not interested in nothing bureaucratic." So the way in which I got to drive a taxi is after we -- after I got fired from Atlanta Junior College --

QUEST: You were still working on your doctorate.

KADALIE: Well yeah, but what happened was we won the suit. We didn't win the suit.

QUEST: What suit?

KADALIE: There was a suit, that the five teachers that got -- included me -- to get the summer contract.

QUEST: At AJC.

KADALIE: At AJC. We alleged that they had discriminated against us because of our action with the Board of Regents, and we won the suit. And they paid us, I think, around $5,000 apiece, which would be the amount of money we would have made if we were teaching. They hired all the others back except me, and Jabari resigned. The rest of them still worked there; they retired from there. OK, but 02:32:00that happened that same summer, too, and so I got a job driving a cab to tide me over for the summer. I applied at a couple of places, because I still was a teacher, and I got some offers out on the west coast. UC Berkeley offered me something, but my father had a heart attack, so I couldn't go out there.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: So this was the time -- it is amazing, but this was the time when desegregation was taking place, and there was a segregated taxi industry from the segregation period. The black guys were not organized in the companies. The black guys had what they called an independent taxi co-op. They called it a car for hire. They had their own independent -- they didn't have -- they wasn't allowed to have meters. Let's stop right here, let's stop.

QUEST: Why aren't they allowed to have meetings?

KADALIE: Because only white drivers had meters, but the white guys were driving 02:33:00for companies.

QUEST: Having meetings as a union?

KADALIE: No, have a meter, a meter in the cab, in the taxi.

QUEST: Meters, meters. Only the white guys were allowed to have meters, because they monopolized all the medallions, all the official from the --

KADALIE: No, there was no medallion.

QUEST: Not yet.

KADALIE: No, not yet. But each one of these car for hire guys had individual cars, and they formed an association.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And there was a car for hire association, which really wasn't co-op, but it was an obtusely done co-op, limiting black people to ride and carry only black passengers. So the taxi -- two things were happening when I came into the taxi industry. Number one, the new help for it was on the drawing board. Number two, the medallion system was just kicking in, and we can stop right there.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: My voice is givin' out on me --

QUEST: OK, we're back with Modibo Kadalie. This is Matthew Quest. We're doing an 02:34:00oral history on behalf of the Southern Labor History Archive, on November 12, 2010, and we're returning to our discussion of Modibo's work in the summer of 1979 through '81, where he was building an independent taxi union, as well as he was involved in the armed self-defense around the Tech Wood Housing Project, during the Atlanta Child Murders. So, you'd like to share something else with us, about the Atlanta Child Murders?

KADALIE: Yeah. Matthew, you can say what you want to say about it, but we did the press conference. And that press conference, we thought, would make what we did legitimate and what they did illegitimate.

QUEST: Who's they? The mayor and the police?

KADALIE: The mayor and the police. Because we were legal; we were legal according to Georgia Law.

QUEST: The Constitution.

KADALIE: Well, the Georgia Law, too. Georgia Law and the city charter, as well as the Constitution. So, when I got arrested and pulled over -- let me tell you what this -- I carry a gun, because I'm a taxi driver at that time, a legally permitted license. So the guy first wrote down, "I'm going to charge you with carrying a gun without a permit." I said, "Well here's my permit," and he said, "Well, show it to the judge," and he said, "Carrying a concealed weapon." It's not concealed, you know? I'm a taxi driver. And so then I realized that what he was doing was charging me with a whole bunch of different stuff, which he did to other people like that. They couldn't charge us -- see, what we thought is that if they chased us around like you said, and they didn't know what we were doing, then their legitimacy would be enhanced in the people's eyes. But then we said this is what we're doing.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: So what they did, we thought would be illegitimate, but to our 02:36:00surprise, even after we called the press conference and everything, they -- their actions -- I'm trying to figure out. I don't know.

QUEST: Was anybody in the community, like Mr. and Mrs. Green, critical of their actions?

KADALIE: Yeah. Mrs. Green and them were, but the people who had access to the media, the petty bourgeoisie, they were wondering what's the matter with those people.

QUEST: These vigilantes, they called you.

KADALIE: Yeah, these vigilantes and everything. But then, it really did strike a note internationally and nationally.

QUEST: And nationally.

KADALIE: Yeah, because people had a right to organize themselves and protect their children, a basic fundamental kind of right. And that's all Green and them -- I mean, we were helping Green and them to do. Green was very adamant about it.

QUEST: What were Mr. and Mrs. Green's first names, do you remember?

KADALIE: I don't remember Mr. and Mrs. Green's, but I know they were a couple, and they were working together, and they were a unit. And shortly thereafter, 02:37:00man, I think about two or three years after that, Mrs. Green died, and then Mr. Green --

QUEST: How old were they around that time?

KADALIE: They were about in their sixties. Fifties, sixties. But when Mrs. Green died, Mr. Green -- the other one didn't last too long, and it was a big loss. It really was a big loss, because those people had a face -- put a face on protecting their children.

QUEST: So they were the embodiment of local people organizing themselves.

KADALIE: They were, they were, and they believed in it, and they knew that we were not going to get in the way. That's why they didn't call Hosea. They called us. And I think we started getting a reputation of legitimately helping people without getting in their way and telling them what to do. See what Hosea would have done is come down there and said -- I don't think Hosea would have touched it. What do you think? I don't think he would have touched it.

QUEST: I don't know, it's your oral history.

KADALIE: Yeah I know, but I don't think he would have touched it.

QUEST: I think with his affiliation with SCLC and the mayor's office --

KADALIE: And the petty bourgeoisie. Yeah, I don't think he would have.

QUEST: If he did, he would have tried to put it in the safest light, cleaned it up as quickly as he could with the police.

KADALIE: Mm-hmm.

QUEST: Maybe he would have turned that into a civilian complaint review board, a local --

KADALIE: Something like that, yeah.

QUEST: Something like that.

KADALIE: But that's not what Mr. and Mrs. Green wanted.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: And by the way, we didn't go down there -- we didn't go down there and tell them they should call a press conference and put these weapons out there. They said, "We want to defend our children; we want y'all to help." They didn't say, "Well, we want you to come, bring us the law on this." Actually that's what they said, "Bring us the law on this and make sure we are within the law, and then we're going to do this." That's what they did.

QUEST: OK. So tell us a little bit more about what you were doing with the taxi co-op.

KADALIE: Well, as I was saying --

QUEST: What year is it before the medallion?

KADALIE: 1979.

QUEST: OK, so you start off, you're a taxi driver, you're building this cooperative.

KADALIE: Well, I'm just trying to eat right then. Then as time goes on, I see what's going on in the bullpen. The bullpen is a taxi assembly area at the old airport.

QUEST: Where was the old airport?

KADALIE: The old airport is in College Park, there on this side of the runway system.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: On, I guess that would be the northeast side of the runway. Even the new runway. I think there's a hotel there, the Omni Hotel or something.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And you know, so I just came out to the bullpen, just as a taxi driver. Got my own little taxi, you know what I mean? Trying to make some money. So as time went on, I began to see that there were the car-for-hire people, who were now being absorbed into new companies. And there was the white drivers, but mostly it was black drivers, but these drivers had their own cars. That's the legacy of segregation. Then the new airport had to have another taxi assembly 02:40:00area. So what they wanted to do, this is what they -- they wanted us to have, I don't know, they gave us some kind of input situation, where we could elect a committee -- a taxi advisory committee -- and we would come up to the airport authority, and we would rubber stamp what they've already done. So I remember the first day... And then any kind of grievance we might have had. So it was like a union committee, but it was just for airport drivers. Now, this bullpen that was at the old airport, had four parallel lanes that stretched -- shoot, about a half a mile, and cabs would come in there left, filling up each one of the lanes. So when a group of cabs would go down to pick up the passengers down 02:41:00at the pickup point, all the other drivers had to pull their cars up. So by the time you got to the point where you got out to go pick up someone, you would have started your car about 15, 20 times, which was terrible on the solenoids.

QUEST: Terrible on the what?

KADALIE: The solenoids.

QUEST: What's a solenoid?

KADALIE: A solenoid is the switching mechanism in the alternator.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: When you started -- on the starter. It's part of the ignition system. So they came, brought us up there and said, "We want to tell you about all -- what plans we have for the new airport." And so they had another bullpen, long just like that one, and then they said -- and we were trying to tell them that that won't work, because it's too much -- it's costing us too much money with the solenoids.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: So they said, just like the Board of Regents said, "If that don't work, why don't you all come up with a plan?" (laughs) You know, the experts, you know.

QUEST: Right, but I think that's a significant trend in your activism, is that, oftentimes, the arrogance of the bureaucratic or administrative forces, are trying to impose a plan on the community, and then they think that the people can't organize their own plan, so they say, "Well if you don't like this plan...

KADALIE: "Why don't you come up with one?"

QUEST: "Why don't you come up with your own?"

KADALIE: "Get your own experts, blah blah."

QUEST: So a big part of your activism is facilitating a counter plan for -- facilitating perspectives and proposals and counter plans from the community, in contrast to the state and management.

KADALIE: Yeah. And let me tell you the truth, now. I was the writer of the alternative plan for the Board of Regents.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: But those were not my ideas.

QUEST: You were just taking them down as you asked people.

KADALIE: Yeah, in discussion.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: And I just you know, put them in a plan, that's all I did.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: It's not "Modibo wrote it." Modibo -- these are not my ideas. The same thing with the new taxi assembly area at the airport now. Sometimes I go by there and look at it, and I marvel at it.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: What we did is figured out -- we got together as drivers, figured out what to do here and there, and came up with a completely new taxi assembly area. It was organized in a circle, with parallel lines. There was 40 lines, so when you go in, you can let your car stay resting until the point came to you, as opposed to pulling up everybody to the point.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: And it's still working out there now. And, boy, don't you know, they fought us tooth and nail on this, and we had to actually have a drive --

QUEST: When you say the point, the line of people?

KADALIE: It's kind of hard to explain, but the way the bullpen -- if you want to 02:44:00go out there and look at it -- the way the bullpen is now organized, it has about 40 lines, parallel. So when you come in -- it's a retrieval system. You unload from the left and load from the right. When the last car unloads from this side, it starts all over again. In other words, you unload from this side and it goes to the next lane and the next lane, unloading. So you don't have to pull up the car but twice, until you get to the point where you pull it out and go on up to the pickup area. In other words your turn comes to you.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: Which is a beautiful thing. It's not my idea; it really isn't.

QUEST: But you put it down on paper.

KADALIE: Well, I put it down on paper.

QUEST: Who came up with the idea?

KADALIE: We all did, we all did.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: Somebody came up -- somebody said, "Well damn, you know we spend all this time wasting gas, going up through here, going up through here. Shoot, man, we're wasting money like this." And somebody said, "Well, you know what, it 02:45:00would be good if we can just come in the bullpen and, you know, and turn our cars off, and after two times, we'd be up there." So that started the discussion. Some people said, "The point should come to us as opposed to us going to the point." It was just the thinking.

QUEST: What's the point though?

KADALIE: The point where you come out of the bullpen, where you're ready to come out of the bullpen and go over to pickup.

QUEST: I see.

KADALIE: See, any time in the bullpen, there's 250 cars in there and if there are five cars needed upstairs, shouldn't everybody have to start up their engine and move up. I'll show it to you.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: But that's a very interesting thing we did. And so when I facilitated that -- and that's all I really did, you know; I came up with some ideas, too, as they prompted me, you know. And it turned out so beautiful -- this is the thing: after it turned out beautifully, now -- the bullpen opens up, the new airport, our day coming over there, they had policemen there (laughs) -- this 02:46:00was funny, this was funny. We had organized the thing so it can load up from the left -- and they had designed it; we helped them design, paint the lanes and everything -- and move from the left to the right. We got there, and the policemen had it moving from the left to the right, and the guys in the committee said, "Man, they're fucking it up, man. Blah blah blah, fucking it up." I said, "No, no, no. They --"

QUEST: You said left to right or right to left?

KADALIE: Well, we had it organized from the left, but it would work either way.

QUEST: But the police had been --

KADALIE: Turned it ass backwards, but lucky for us, it would still work, you know what I mean? So I told Dean, I said, "Don't worry about it, Dean. It will work that way, too." (laughs) That was funny, and the policemen -- they was there thinking they were directing us into this bullpen.

QUEST: But they don't know that you had designed the bullpen.

KADALIE: Yeah, right, they don't know that. (laughs)

QUEST: That's just funny.

KADALIE: It is funny, but at this point -- and then I realized, this is really point of production, organizing work. So what we began to see is that instead of 02:47:00these companies, these car-for-hire guys, that we could organize an independent taxi co-op. So we tried to organize that, and then we had another problem: we didn't control the insurance. So then we organized the independent taxi insurance group; and we had the Constitution, and we organized it so that each driver would have one vote in the selecting of the leadership and all that. Many drivers had more than one medallion. They gave us medallions based upon --

QUEST: What year did they come out, the medallions?

KADALIE: I'm not sure. It must have been about --

QUEST: '82?

KADALIE: '82, something like '81, '82. And everybody who had a car... I know they came out with medallions after the airport opened. Everybody who had a car could buy a medallion for $100. I had five cars, and I bought five medallions for $500.

QUEST: But $100 back then was a lot.

KADALIE: Well you know, it was all right, but I mean the things are worth sixty-five, seventy thousand dollars apiece now.

QUEST: That's it?

KADALIE: That's what they're worth.

QUEST: Here? They're worth sixty-five to seventy-five?

KADALIE: Or more now.

QUEST: Or more. I was thinking like over $100,000.

KADALIE: It might be by now.

QUEST: Oh, OK.

KADALIE: But I had three -- I had five, and then I let Chimurenga drive on one and then I let J.W. Spears, but J.W. Spears sold his to a company. I was disappointed in that, but I maintained three. Anyway, this is the way the co-op was working. We designed the co-op, and we thought they had consciousness to -- 02:49:00we thought that the old car-for-hire, independent driver consciousness was a part of what they were, but we didn't have no idea that they would be faced with these economic pressures. Strangely enough, the Shah of Iran was deposed. When the Shah of Iran was deposed, all kind of Shah family money started coming into Atlanta. This guy named K.E., he started buying up medallions, and he came up with a scheme where you could buy a medallion from a driver, let the driver drive or give the driver $2,000 for the medallion, let the driver drive on the medallion and pocket the $2,000. So the average driver thought that was big money then. So he started buying up medallions, and he ended up forming a cab company with the medallions he had. So then what happened is drivers started 02:50:00buying up more and more medallions. Then some African -- the Africans came in, the guys from Nigeria, with the oil money from Nigeria, they came in and started buying up medallions.

QUEST: Why do you perceive that people from the ruling classes of Iran and Nigeria came into Atlanta? Why?

KADALIE: Because, they could circumvent the immigration thing. They could bring people in as immigrants; they were employed in their business. The same reason that -- the same way that they opened up these little convenience stores.

QUEST: Except the oil money in Nigeria and the Shah of Iran, as the ruling class family in Iran, they're not middle class people.

KADALIE: No they're not, they're not.

QUEST: That's what I'm saying, why do these wealthy, very excessively wealthy people decide to go into cabs?

KADALIE: Because it was an investment, that they saw an opportunity to make -- McKahey bought Tower Place up there, too. This was just a part of scattering the money around and hiding it.

QUEST: OK, so they had way more projects than just this. This was just one.

KADALIE: Oh, all kinds of projects.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: But the taxi business, not just in Atlanta but all around.

QUEST: Oh, all around, all over the country then.

KADALIE: Yeah. They started putting their money in. It was better than putting it in a bank.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: You know? And this guy came in like a big friend of everybody's, and we tried to tell the drivers that. Then, they came into the co-op, and then they changed the constitution where if you have five taxis -- if you have five medallions, then you got five votes. And so after awhile, the company, the co-op was subverted, because they had guys with 15 --

QUEST: Right. Co-ops was one vote each.

KADALIE: Yeah, one vote each, and we couldn't stop them from changing that, man. We couldn't stop it, and the co-op was lost. But then we organized the self-improvement, the Operator Self-Insurance Group, where we insured everybody. We hung on to that for about four or five years, and there was a lot of money 02:52:00coming in. A lot of money.

QUEST: Why was there so much money coming in for this? I mean, you guys created your own insurance group, where you offered insurance to others.

KADALIE: Yeah, we offered insurance originally to the co-op and to others. When the money started coming in, people started accusing people of doing this and that and the other. And there was really no checks and balances in that, and so the guys who had the most medallions began to control that, too. So that was my foray. I ended up owning one taxi company, along with another guy -- a professional cab company, for about three or four years. But I was just driving and holding on. And so that was the end of that. I was very disillusioned with our efforts, but we had our own dispatching station and our dispatch. We had it -- it was going on for a little while. We had our spot right opposite the stadium on what is now Abernathy Drive. There's a filling station there; that 02:53:00used to be our taxi stand.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And we used to park cars for the Braves games and make some money that way. And one of them jackleg preachers came in; it was his turn to supervise the money. Oh man, he took all the money. He was a cab driver, too, but he was a jackleg preacher. That was an experience. But we were active, trying to do something there. So, you know...

QUEST: Would you like to talk about the Savannah State student strike of spring, 1996?

KADALIE: Yeah. Let me just recapitulate all of the student activity that I was engaged in.

QUEST: OK, go ahead.

KADALIE: Notwithstanding the sit-ins and the struggle with the swimming team.

QUEST: At Howard.

KADALIE: No, this was at Morehouse.

QUEST: Forgive me, at Morehouse, an undergrad, has a swim team.

KADALIE: Yeah. So the student movement was something that I was familiar with.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: And then when I came back -- then when I got back into the academic world, and I was at Langston, there were Charles and them and The Grapevine. I was supportive, I wasn't active with the --

QUEST: That's in Oklahoma.

KADALIE: In Oklahoma. I was supportive of them, and they called a strike one time, one day, but it was not properly organized, so they couldn't pull it off. We didn't realize that in order to do a strike, you've got to do much, much more propaganda. Much, much more propaganda, much more preparation. So that was the lesson that we learned. So we had the little defiance thing at commencement and stuff; we'd do Black Power and stuff at the commencement, try to disrupt the commencement and all. Now it wasn't until I got at Highland Park that I realized the need for real thorough preparation for a strike. And the other thing that I realized is that you don't call a strike. What you do is do the preparation, and 02:55:00let them call the strike.

QUEST: And let the students or workers.

KADALIE: Yeah, the students or workers call it, but you just work, work and work and give them the information. And then after you get to a certain point, they will call the strike, and that's what happened at Highland Park. And then in the middle of that strike -- in the middle of that strike, they -- the students didn't move independently, because they didn't know what to do. So what we had to do -- Larry Simmons and myself and some more guys -- we went into the old student union and took the pinball machine game and threw it out on the parking lot. So you'd all be out there; this is a liberated zone. Then we went back into the school and told the people, "Come to the student union." OK, now that continued my understanding of how you work with and move people forward. That continued through U of D. I was employed at the U of D from 1970 to 1971.

QUEST: University of Detroit?

KADALIE: Yeah. A white school, the only white school I ever worked at, only white school I ever went to. But anyway, I was employed there as a Black Studies instructor; and then the Black Studies thing was coming together, but the administration was hedging on it. So the students thought that we needed to put pressure on the administration about this. We couldn't call a strike, because we were a minority. There wasn't no more than two or three hundred students, black students, on the campus, and most of them were from the ghetto. So we started -- this is where this particular tactic, begin with a vote. We knew that they would expel people if they found out who they were, so we held mass meetings and told people to bring sheets with them -- pillowcases, like the Ku Klux Klan. So what we did is put the pillowcases on, so that the administration people wouldn't 02:57:00know who we were, and then we first went over to the library and rearranged the card catalogue opened all the books. We worked for about 25 minutes, hard, just moving books, moving books, and then left. That way, that was pressure. So we had a list of demands and a manifesto, asking for Black Studies, more black teachers, more black students; you know, the same thing. And the administration wouldn't engage us at all, so then we went back and put our pillowcases on the next day, went over to the gym. What we were doing is just doing what we would do if just one of us was doing it; it didn't make no difference. But since we had 200 people, it could disrupt a place. So we just walked over to -- and they didn't know where, you know they didn't know where we were going to go, so they couldn't secure it. So we left there and went to the gym -- and we left the 02:58:00meeting, went to the gym, they didn't know where. Then we just walked through the gym with our rags and stuff and scuffed up the gym and walked out. Then they didn't know where we were going to go. Then we started taking chairs out of the buildings, so that the other students couldn't have class if they wanted to. Now this is where I first --

QUEST: The demands were what? What were they?

KADALIE: The demands were get rid of the ROTC, more Black Studies, more black teachers. Divest -- there was a divestment -- a divest of all military industrial ownership, because the Catholic church had owned some of these aircraft.

QUEST: In other words, Detroit is a catholic university.

KADALIE: Yeah, mm-hmm. And we showed that they were part of the military industrial complex, that they had stock interests in Lockheed, Curtiss-Wright, aircraft companies. So we asked them to divest with all of them. That's the first time I -- what we used to do -- because you know you have to do propaganda 02:59:00work -- so we went to the student union, and we tried to get the white students to join us.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: We got some white students. And there was a guy there, he had a rock and roll band, and his name was Jesus and the Ohio White Crackers. That's what they called the band, the Ohio White Crackers. And the guy looked like Jesus, you know what I mean? So we just called him Jesus. So he came up and said, "What y'all want me to do?" I got my boys with me, and they were working class kind of guys, and we said "Well look, we want you to keep them guys from harassing up while we're talking." So we stood up at the student union, on the desks and on the tables, and started talking about our demands. And so one of the white guys got up on the table over there and started talking right wing kind of stuff. I gave Jesus the nod, and Jesus and his boys went up and grabbed him and took him 03:00:00outside and kicked him in the butt. (laughs) I'll never forget it. I don't know these guys names.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: You know? But they were supportive.

QUEST: That's at University of Detroit.

KADALIE: University of Detroit. They were supportive, and they were down with whatever. And so the last couple of days, they banned me from the campus, but they started -- the students started taking -- with their sheets on, started taking furniture from the student union and clogged up the stairwell in the administration building, along with the --

QUEST: Elevators.

KADALIE: -- elevator shafts. And then the students cordoned off the parking lot near, right adjacent to the administration building. And that same day, I was on the other side of the street with a bullhorn, so more people over there -- because I was off the campus, and so I didn't want to -- but I had the bullhorn, and I was just reading the demands and just reading stuff, just to keep the thing going. And buses started coming in, man, from all over town. I don't know where they came from or who -- it was on the radio. I think it might have been 03:01:00on the black radio station or something, and students were getting out of high school, and they were converging at U of D. They commandeered buses to bring them at the U of D, and they went around and cordoned off that place around the parking lot. And then one white guy, one of the faculty members or administrator, I don't know, got in his car, started it up and tried to ram the crowd. And these two young men -- one was standing on the hood and the other one was, I don't know where he was, but this guy was standing in front of the car, on the hood. The car was going this way. If he fell off there, he would have got killed for sure. And he somehow opened the hood. I don't know how he did that, and he took the distributor. It was amazing, it was amazing, and it just died right there. Now they gave all the demands, but they never reinstated me again. Of course, I didn't really care. I had to go downtown, and they were going -- 03:02:00they tried to arrest me, they subpoenaed me to testify.

QUEST: So we talked about Atlanta Junior College.

KADALIE: Atlanta Junior College.

QUEST: When is the University of Detroit?

KADALIE: '70 to '71, right in there.

QUEST: So you were there at the same time, at Highland Park, right after Highland Park.

KADALIE: The year after Highland Park.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: That one year.

QUEST: So '71.

KADALIE: That's why we forgot it, it was just that one year.

QUEST: '70 to '71, and then --

KADALIE: I think that's the same year.

QUEST: And then you're at AJC from '77 to --

KADALIE: '76.

QUEST: '76 to '79.

KADALIE: I was down here '73/'74, '74/'75, and I was working for a master's degree in --

QUEST: Right, in Atlanta. So now what we want to get -- so we've gotten through that; we did AJC.

KADALIE: Atlanta University. Yeah, we got through all of that.

QUEST: So we want to do how you got involved in Savannah State. There was a student strike.

KADALIE: Well, let me explain how I ended up --

QUEST: In the spring of '96.

KADALIE: It ended up my father died.

QUEST: In '96?

KADALIE: In '91.

QUEST: '91.

KADALIE: So I went home, and my mother was upset, so I just thought I'd stay 03:03:00down there for a while. I was still driving the cab. And my father --

QUEST: You drove a cab in Savannah?

KADALIE: No, in Atlanta.

QUEST: In Atlanta, but you -- but you go down to the Savannah area.

KADALIE: I go there. I didn't even drive my cab then.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And my father was dying, and he made me promise that I would get back into the academic thing, and so I went out to Savannah State. I had a master's in political science and another master's in psychology. So the president of Savannah State had died, and they needed a teacher of psychology, so I taught psychology for two years out there. And then got my PhD and then started teaching political sciences in Hanes Walton's place, because Hanes had gone to the University of Michigan. He had stayed at Savannah State for about 25 years. And he's a part of the black politics. And so I took his job, but during that time, there was a young student by the name of Darryl Simmons.

QUEST: Another Simmons.

KADALIE: That's little Darryl. He was a little-bitty guy, you know what I mean? And he came to my office, I think it was about 1994, '93 or '94, and said, "I don't want you" -- he was very agitated. He said, "I don't..." -- he had written -- I mean he had read DuBois and DuBois stuff about -- he was from Milledgeville, Georgia and he read some Du Bois stuff about David Levin Lewis was the guy's name.

QUEST: David Levering Lewis, a biography of Lewis.

KADALIE: Yeah, the biography. So he had the book there and he said blah blah blah.

QUEST: Was that out already, in '96?

KADALIE: He knew about it.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: Maybe. I don't know where he got it from.

QUEST: Was it on the rack for sale?

KADALIE: I don't know.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: Check it, check it.

QUEST: OK, we'll double check on that yeah, was Levering Lewis' book out in '96, OK.

KADALIE: Mm-hmm. But he had been reading stuff, and he was an activist in 03:05:00Milledgeville. And he came here and he said, "Man, I don't want to get you the wrong idea. I didn't come here to get no damn degree. I came here so I can learn something, so I can be a better activist and go back to Milledgeville." So this boy bothered me and bothered me and bugged me. I started explaining. He knew Kimathi, too. Kimathi had moved back since then.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: He bothered me and kept bothering me about -- every day he had another question about history, and so I tried to explain to him how you do organizing work. You heighten the contradictions by giving people information. And so as time went on, I saw this thing getting ripe. The students, the football players were angry about something. I don't even know what they were angry about. The people were angry about the food in the dorm, people were angry about the 03:06:00housing in the dorm. So I told him, I said, "Wait. Sooner or later, there's going to be some straw that breaks the camel's back; something's going to happen that is going to bring everybody out." And so soon enough, sure enough something happened. The guy who was president of the Student Government Association, he had a girlfriend who was Ms. Savannah State.

QUEST: Homecoming queen.

KADALIE: The homecoming queen.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: And the president of the school decided to cancel the coronation ball, and he made a lot of students, the Greeks and everybody, mad. So Darryl came along and says, "Man, you know..." -- he's being real mad about some reactionary nonsense, blah blah blah blah. I said, "Darryl, what you've got to do is write down whatever their demands are and write down the football player's demands, 03:07:00and the demands from the --"

QUEST: The people unsatisfied with --

KADALIE: With the dorms.

QUEST: With the school lunches.

KADALIE: The school lunches and Darryl said, "Man, I didn't come here to struggle for that kind of stuff." I said, "Well then, Darryl, then put down a Black Studies program and then put getting rid of the president, and put all of that together."

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: He said, "OK, all right, all right." So he went over there and sure enough, when Darryl got up to speak at the thing -- I wasn't there. Darryl said that everybody started acknowledging him and they're asking him what to do. So he said he didn't know what to do. He said, "Well, let's go over and take over the student government, the student administration building." And then it was on and Darryl was the natural leader somehow, of the thing, and he -- you know, he'd always consult with me, and I was trying to tell him. I said, "Look, Darryl, just make sure that the community is involved in this. People going to come, preachers going to come, they're going to ask you, and what you tell them: 03:08:00bring you food." I got that from the Highland Park story, bring you this and bring you that, and tell them, "Keep the demands out front." Don't let them take it off into no religious revival or nothing, just keep the demands out front. And the football players -- Darryl was a little-bitty guy, and the football players used to carry Darryl around. So I went over there one time, you know; I just wanted to see how it was. And so I went into the building and asked a footballer, "Have you seen Darryl?" He said, "Oh yeah, oh yeah, the brother is up under the hill. Let me get him for you." (laughs) So they held out for about four or five, about five days. They won everything. They won everything. The president was dismissed. They brought in some more presidents; they was worse.

QUEST: To suppress them.

KADALIE: Yeah, they was worse, and the guy came in --

QUEST: But they had the first Black Studies program.

KADALIE: Yeah, they had the first Black Studies program in the University System 03:09:00of Georgia; and they had appointed me the initial coordinator, which I lasted for about two years -- iced me from that. But it was. It was --

QUEST: So '96 and '98.

KADALIE: Yeah. It was kind of a throwback from the past, but it was every bit as important as any of those others in the 70s. It was, it was.

QUEST: So then somehow you were at Savannah State for a while, and then you got into this -- or you became the head of the Faculty Senate somehow.

KADALIE: Well, what happened was I was founder of the Faculty Senate, along with some other people.

QUEST: Oh, they didn't have a Faculty Senate.

KADALIE: No, they didn't have one. The faculty didn't have no voice at all.

QUEST: So in a way, you founded a teachers' union.

KADALIE: Well, you can call it that, but myself and about four or five others. And I just wanted to make sure that faculty had a voice. At one of our first meetings, we helped to -- that was trying to get rid of one of the guys, one of 03:10:00the presidents, and while the student strike was going on, we were forming the Faculty Senate and gave them a no confidence vote. And they did remove him. His name was Wolfe. This guy was just like Hale, this guy back in Langston. He reminded me a lot of him.

QUEST: Wolfe, last name was Wolfe?

KADALIE: Last name was Wolfe.

QUEST: He was an African American named Wolfe?

KADALIE: Yeah, Wolfe, with an E on the end. Anyway, this guy was -- this guy, but he had isolated himself. He had done some stuff. He had taken the Savannah State account money out of the local black bank, the Carver State Bank, put it in the Sun Trust Bank, in exchange for an interest free loan on a house that he bought on the island.

QUEST: Tybee Island?

KADALIE: Yeah. Well, Wilmington Island. So the black petty bourgeoisie was angry 03:11:00at him for doing that, so he was isolated. And that's one of the reasons that they never did suspend Darryl or anybody or me for that kind of stuff, because he was just unliked by a broad section of people in Savannah.

QUEST: But the Faculty Senate does get into a conflict with the next president.

KADALIE: Yes, we get into conflict with this president, the next president, and they removed me, and they started -- and I had tenure, too.

QUEST: Well who was the president that removed you at Savannah State?

KADALIE: He's now president of Clark Atlanta University.

QUEST: The same guy?

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: What's his name?

KADALIE: Brown, Carlton Brown.

QUEST: Carlton Brown.

KADALIE: Yeah, and Joseph Silver is his vice president, and so they --

QUEST: So they was down there.

KADALIE: Yeah, they're a wrecking crew. I mean they came in without even a search. They violated it all, the same Board of Regents, violated all the rules that they had and appointed these guys.

QUEST: So they're a wrecking crew that disrupts any kind of democratic community of the university.

KADALIE: That's right, yeah. That's right, especially in the face of the -- see, they want to put forth these little bourgeois institutions of Black Faculty 03:12:00Senates and all that, but in the final analysis, if the faculty senate started acting independently, they crush them. So yeah it is.

QUEST: So when was this confrontation, in 2000, 2001?

KADALIE: 2001/2002. Then I went to Africa, came back in 2003, and I filed a court case. Modibo Kadalie versus University System of Georgia, again. (laughs) But this court case was more significant, because there was --

QUEST: What was the first one?

KADALIE: That was the black -- the five, AJC five.

QUEST: OK, so that was the five.

KADALIE: We won that one. We won that one straight out. It was Modibo Kadalie et al. This was just Modibo Kadalie, period.

QUEST: And this didn't work out, the Savannah case.

KADALIE: No, no. No, it didn't, it didn't. But what they did -- I won the right to appeal, I mean the right to sue. What they were saying is that what they did was protected, because they were state employees, and you can't sue the 03:13:00government. And then my lawyer at the time -- what was his name? He was a civil rights lawyer in Savannah. Anyway, he died, and I wasn't able to win the case, but I won in the 11th Circuit. And if you do some law under the legal name is qualified immunity, and I won that. The Court ruled that I still had a right to sue them, because while they were government employees, they were acting outside of their authority under the policy of the Board of Regents.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

KADALIE: So I sued them for violating my First Amendment, and I lost in Savannah Court.

QUEST: Now, as I understand it, that's the end there as far as chronology, but do you want to share one other -- do you want to share one more story --

KADALIE: Oh yeah.

QUEST: About the League and John Williams. And maybe that's a good -- that's a good way to sum up actually, your own oral history, because it raises certain questions about labor organization. You was in a meeting --

KADALIE: I was in --

QUEST: John Williams and Luke Tripp were there, and what did they say?

KADALIE: It was a central staff meeting at the League of Revolutionary Black Workers --

QUEST: What year?

KADALIE: 1970.

QUEST: 1970, in Detroit.

KADALIE: In Detroit, and Luke Tripp got up and said, "It's about us, and the people in the White House. And we need to get serious, blah blah blah." But they were, they were sensing that the executive committee was losing --

QUEST: Its legitimacy among the ranks.

KADALIE: Among the ranks and file. And, as a matter of fact, that meeting was regarded by them as an illegal meeting, but they came anyway. They came.

QUEST: And so that was actually a meeting of the --

KADALIE: We called it, the meeting. Central staff called the meeting.

QUEST: Central staff, which is below the executive committee.

KADALIE: Yeah, and the executive came. And so in this discourse, John Williams was a member of the Executive Board. He says, "We have to decide what we want to do." He says, "There are some of us who want to organize a vanguard party, there's some of us who want to organize a multinational vanguard party. There are some of us who want to organize an all-black vanguard party, and then there's some of us" -- and this is funny -- "and there's some of us who think we should organize workers councils, or Soviets." "We should organize Soviets," that's what he said. So that was the extent to which he understood what C.L.R. was about I guess.

QUEST: And so all these different ideas and pathways.

KADALIE: Were part of the League.

QUEST: Were part of the League, which represent the highest -- it represents the highest -- I wouldn't say the highest stage of black liberation organization, 03:16:00but the highest stage --

KADALIE: In the Black Power Movement.

QUEST: Within the Black Power generation, the highest recognition of the centrality of black workers.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: And the self-organization of black workers as the embodiment of black autonomy. And so with that in mind, all these different paths came to the crossroads, where there were at least, if not democratically under consideration, they were raised in the steaming caldron of what was the League.

KADALIE: Yeah it was.

QUEST: And uncertain.

KADALIE: And John Williams summed up what he thought were the different paths.

QUEST: Right.

KADALIE: Which included the fact that, alternatively, we should organize workers councils or Soviets.

QUEST: So his perception is that the legacy or the tendency represented by Modibo Kadalie, Kimathi, C.L.R., at their most militant ideals is that the workers should organize them -- directly organize themselves, through 03:17:00self-organization, by popular committees.

KADALIE: I don't think he understood the concept at all.

QUEST: So he heard it.

KADALIE: He heard it.

QUEST: He was summing it up, but he didn't even understand it.

KADALIE: Yeah. He thought that we were saying we should organize Soviets. There's also too, at that point, the book club was in full swing. I think Marty was a part of that.

QUEST: Well, there's a book club that foremen help start.

KADALIE: Mm-hmm, that was it.

QUEST: But you're saying that Marty helped start it. You keep saying Marty, you mean Willie or Marty?

KADALIE: I mean Marty.

QUEST: Marty Glaberman of Facing Reality?

KADALIE: Yeah, I think he was a part of it.

QUEST: There's some perception that the CP is part of that.

KADALIE: They probably was; they was a part, because all the white -- the League was trying to organize support among the old white --

QUEST: Left.

KADALIE: -- left, to get some money to continue their work.

QUEST: OK.

KADALIE: And the book club was a part of that. And so I think John Williams, 03:18:00that must have been a discussion. I'm speculating that that was part of the discussion at the book club.

QUEST: But overall, with those different pathways, if you had to sum-up your experiences of all these struggles, and like you said, John Williams, by summing it up, he seemed to make a reference to your perspective, but you don't believe he understood it in full.

KADALIE: No, no, he didn't understand.

QUEST: But if you had to sum-up what your perspective is, from all these lessons of Atlanta Metro strikes and civil rights and Black Power struggles, what should be -- what is the conception of labor organizing?

KADALIE: Well there are two things. Labor has to be independently organized of the petty bourgeoisie, it can't, it can't --

QUEST: By which you mean the middle classes?

KADALIE: I mean --

QUEST: Electoral parties.

KADALIE: Yeah. It can't be mired down in electoral parties and bureaucrats and all that kind of stuff. You can't be co-opted by any kind of party; Vanguard Party, Bourgeois Party, whatever, Democratic, Republican, whatever. That's a waste of time to start doing that. They must look at the self-organization of workers at the point of induction. Got to be, got to be that. And so the thing 03:19:00-- that doesn't mean the cadre don't have a role to play. The cadre have a role to play in getting the information, getting the understanding to the people who are going to move, and encourage the movement, but not being the drum major out in front directing everything; no, no, no, no. And I'm so sorry that that conception is not understood widely. Yet. But hopefully it will be. I think so.