Interviews from the NY BAsics Bus Tour Nicky: A Life of Abuse and Pain Connects with the Revolution
Reposted from Revolution #278, August 19, 2012
by Michael Slate
Michael Slate is a revolutionary communist and host of The Michael Slate Show which airs weekly on KPFA every Friday at 10am Pacific time and is rebroadcast on a number of stations around the country at different times throughout the week. Here’s a transcript from his August 3, 2012 show. You can listen to his show online.
I first met Nicky in a Harlem park where the BAsics Bus Tour volunteers were having a send-off breakfast on the first day of the “New York and Beyond” leg of the tour. We all chowed down on food and drink donated by people in the projects in Harlem and other parts of the city. A supporter who had helped organize people in the ‘hood to support the tour talked movingly about how street corner tables were set and that as people learned about the tour and what it’s doing, they gave with all their heart. Now these are people who don’t generally have a whole lot of anything extra hanging loosely and pockets that have little more than holes in them. But they gave with their hearts and their brains. They dug deep and gave what they could and went to their neighbors and friends, to their churches, tenants’ associations, schools and buildings, to do the same. All told, $450 and a whole lot of food was contributed to the tour in a neighborhood where people often have to choose which meals they need to skip in order to stretch the food out to the end of the month. These were people who were eager to be part of this movement for revolution in whatever way they could.
An interview with a Black woman in the Bronx who has become an ardent supporter of the BAsics Bus Tour and has some very important things to say about BAsics and Bob Avakian.
Source: SoundCloud / BAeverywhere
“Getting Down to BAsics With the People of Sanford: Virginia,” the first installment. In May, Michael Slate joined the BAsics Bus Tour in Sanford, Florida, where Trayvon Martin was murdered, taking the vision and works of Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, to the people of Sanford, and building a movement for revolution. This is the first in a series based on the interviews he did with people there—this is his interview with Virginia.
Michael Slate is a revolutionary communist and host of The Michael Slate Show which airs weekly on KPFA every Friday at 10am Pacific time and is rebroadcast on a number of stations around the country at different times throughout the week.
This is Michael Slate’s show from Thursday, June 21. The piece on Sanford and the BAsics Bus Tour is 34 minutes in. We are reposting this for easy access and building for the next leg of the Tour.
“Getting Down to BAsics With the People of Sanford: Virginia,” the first installment. Michael Slate recently joined the BAsics Bus Tour in Sanford, Florida, where Trayvon Martin was murdered, taking the vision and works of Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, to the people of Sanford, and building a movement for revolution. This is the first in a series based on the interviews he did with people there—-this is his interview with Virginia. Michael Slate is a revolutionary communist and host of The Michael Slate Show which airs weekly on KPFA every Friday at 10am Pacific time and is rebroadcast on a number of stations around the country at different times throughout the week. Slate has hosted this show since 2002.
This is Michael Slate’s show from Thursday, June 21Ann Wright recently co-authored an article on “Amnesty International: Shameless Shill for US Wars,” detailing the organization’s support of NATO’s war in Afghanistan. Ann Wright a former US diplomat who resigned in March, 2003, in opposition to the war on Iraq. She is the co-author of the book Dissent: Voices of Conscience. Read the article here. And check out Ann Wright’s website.
Glen Ford on how the Obama administration is turning Africa into a battleground, escalating its military penetration of the continent. Glen Ford is executive editor of Black Agenda Report.
Getting Down to BAsics With the People of Sanford — Strange Fruit
from Revolution #273, June 24, 2012
In late May I joined the BAsics Bus Tour as it rolled into Sanford, Florida, the town where Trayvon Martin was killed. The tour brought the work and vision of Bob Avakian and his book BAsics into Sanford and I spent my time in the Black neighborhood of Goldsboro talking with the people about their lives and digging into the deep questions of how to change things. This series is dedicated to the people of Sanford and to the crew of volunteers on the tour, whose enthusiasm for spreading the work and leadership of Bob Avakian and for fighting to build the movement for revolution inspired everyone they encountered. SeeRevolution #272 for “I Couldn’t Put It Down.”
For more on the BAsics Bus Tour, go to basicsbustour.tumblr.com.
Trees! That’s what s
truck me the most about the look and the feel of Central Florida. After living in L.A. for a long time I’m like a kid in a candy store when I come up on a whole lot of big, full on Oak and Cypress trees, their branches and leaves throwing up a natural canopy to help you get through the humid and way too damn hot days. And then there’s the Spanish moss hanging down off of the branches of these trees like silver grey beards. And when tiny flowers start to bloom on the moss, little red specks in all that grey—kind of like…blood… that’s when it hits me. Trees carry with them a whole different meaning for Black people in Sanford and other parts of Central Florida. When a soft wind passes through these trees it’s not the soothing whooooshhhh sound of the surface of leaves gently passing over one another they hear. Instead, it’s more like a brittle clacking, the sound of dried bones that have been hanging there for centuries banging into one another. After all, as Bob Avakian has so sharply pointed out, “The ‘Bible Belt’ in the U.S. is also the Lynching Belt.” And all these great beautiful trees, draped in Spanish moss, are also lynching trees.
In the Goldsboro neighborhood of Sanford, one of the historic Black neighborhoods, it’s striking how many people have a lynching story. Samuel is a middle-aged, middle class Black man living with his family in a well-kept little house, with a well-kept lawn in Goldsboro. Samuel teaches in a local school. He’s a striver in a terribly downpressed town. He has a rock-bottom belief that the system works—or at least it works for those who know how to work the system. Samuel believes that things will get better once Black people get into the system and learn how to work it.
Getting Down to BAsics With the People of Sanford, part 1
This is reprinted from Revolution newspaper, http://revcom.us:
Part 1: “I Couldn’t Put It Down”
by Michael Slate
In late May I joined the BAsics Bus Tour as it rolled into Sanford, Florida, the town where Trayvon Martin was killed. The tour brought the work and vision of Bob Avakian and his book BAsics into Sanford and I spent my time in the Black neighborhood of Goldsboro talking with the people about their lives and digging into the deep questions of how to change things. This series is dedicated to the people of Sanford and to the crew of volunteers on the tour, whose enthusiasm for spreading the work and leadership of Bob Avakian and for fighting to build the movement for revolution inspired everyone they encountered.
