Do books have a future? Do we have a future without them? A conversation with radical publisher Paul Coates

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you all so much for being here. I am Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief and co-executive director of the Real News Network and on behalf of our whole team, many of which are here over there in the back room or the back table. We just wanted to welcome you all here to the Real News Network Studio. Thank you so much for being here. Nuestra Casa Esu Casa. And we are really, really excited and honored to be hosting tonight’s event, which was organized by Tubman House and Eddie’s Front Porch, an evening with legendary activist and publisher, Paul Coates, in conversation with comrade Erica Woodland on Black literary production and the essential unsung work of producing great works of literature and keeping the written word alive in a world that just bombards us with dead images and images of dead things and dead people. And I say it’s essential and I know it because both of us here are living testaments to how much literature can change a person’s life.

And I’m going to toss it to Comrade and my colleague, Brother Mansa Musa, to introduce himself and say a little more about that.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. My name is Mansa Musa. I’m the host of Rattling the Bars at the Real News Network. Thank you. Thank you. And to Max’s point, when we talk about literature, James Brown said, “Say it loud. I’m black and I’m proud.” And then the question becomes like, why? Why are you proud? You proud because what? And then you have literature to tell you why you proud. You have Richard Wright to tell you why you proud. You have notes of native sons tell you why you proud. You have black literary artists that come out during a period to start defining social conditions to give people, raise people’s consciousness. I’m proud because I know my people made a contribution to civilization. That’s why I’m proud. I’m proud because I recognize now who I am. But then you have someone come along and say like, “What happens if this information ceased to exist?” These classics, what happened when this information no longer exists?

What do you say, “Say it loud, I got jury curls. Say it loud, I got platform shoes.” You become a curator. So you have someone like Paul Coates who say, “No, I’m going to position myself and position our people to be able to say when you say something about yourself, you’ll be able to relate it to a classical literature that gives you identity.” And that’s important because that’s our history. And if you don’t have that, and then that give birth to other writers, that give birth to Huey Newton, that give birth to other writers. That give birth to Malcolm X autobiography. That give birth to these things. So when you say Black classic press or literature, it’s very important that we find ourselves in this space this day to give recognition to Paul Coates and his contribution to maintaining the narrative that we are great people and our value is in who we are as a people and not let nobody define us.

We define ourselves through our literature. And I’m proud and honored to be able to be able to participate in this particular activity. And to Max’s point, the real news and rattling bars, our model has become, we don’t give you a voice, we just turn the volume up on your voice. So we amplify what you have to say.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. I love working with Mansa.

Well, and Mansa and I’ve had conversations on rattling the bars about books that kept you alive and developed you as a person while you were spending 48 years locked up, including many with our brother and departed comrade Eddie Conway. I mean, you never know whose hands those works are going to fall into. It could be persecuted Black Panthers locked away in a prison. It could be a Mexican-American kid in Southern California who’s reading on his break at a warehouse during the Great Recession. And I always tell people, I was working there during Occupy, during St. Louis and the uprisings that would follow. A lot of that passed me by, but my political consciousness developed through literature because that was what kept me alive. I was always a literature nerd. I have a bunch of useless degrees in Russian literature, but I loved it so much.

And it taught me so much about myself and taught me to see the world outside of myself in a way that I never had before, to the point that I could connect so deeply with Dostoevsky’s crime and punishment in St. Petersburg and then love Richard Wright’s native son because I can see and hear all the references and influences to Dostoevsky, but it’s told in such a different way and authentic way in Chicago. And that taught me that I too could connect to these great works. And the last thing I’ll say is just that what literature always gave me was a sense of solidarity with the human race because when I read something that’s like, “Oh my God, I had that thought.” Or it feels like it’s a thought that feels so much like it at home in my own brain that I respond to it like, “Oh my God, what a beautiful thing that people I’ve never met who lived in times I’ll never see felt the same thing that I’m feeling and articulated it in a way that I could understand centuries later.” That connected me always and still does to my fellow man.

And anyway, we’re going to shut up because we can go on forever. The whole point is that we are both living testaments to the change that comes from the work that Brother Paul Coates has been doing his whole life. And I’m sure all of us have similar stories about books that changed us, people, words that changed us. And we’re going to talk a bit more about that and I couldn’t be more excited for tonight’s conversation. With all that, let’s give it up for Erica Woodland in conversation with Paul Coates.

Erica Woodland:

I’m really, really honored to sit on the stage and to be able to be in conversation with Paul Coates. And before I do my introduction, I just want to say a few words about who I am and how I arrived here today. So I’m an organizer. I’m a healing justice practitioner. I’m a longtime comrade and mentee of Dominique N. Eddie Conway. And I have known the two of them probably as long as I’ve known you, Paul. And it’s no small thing to think about being able to be in the presence of someone like you and the work that you’ve done in the world for our people as a young person and to see your lifelong commitment to Black liberation and to the liberation of all people. And so tonight is really going to be an opportunity to hear the story of how you got into publishing and all the ways that Black Classic Press has helped to preserve the recipes of our revolutionaries.

We are in a political moment where they’re literally trying to delete us from the planet. And it means something really important that we still have access to books in physical form. And so I want to thank you. I’m going to say thank you many times tonight for your perseverance and also for your generosity.

Paul Coates:

Thank you. Can I just say something?

Erica Woodland:

Yes.

Paul Coates:

So like most of the people in this room know me. This is going to be an interesting conversation in the sense that I can’t tell too many lies. I can’t stretch the truth because y’all beat and called me out on it. Not that I ever do those things anyway, but it’s interesting having a discussion like this in a room with people who were there in the events that we’re going to discuss. This is just interesting. And it’s also interesting even being acknowledged for them because most of the people who I know in this room have been struggling all the time. I’ve known them. And so it’s really, really interesting, including yourself. I think I met you Erica after Dominique and Eddie, and I think that’s so because I used to always hear of this young sister, Erica, Erica would do this and Erica would do that.

She’d be here, she’d be there, and what have you. So when I first met you, I was so pleased because yeah, you delivered and you continued to live. So thank you very much. I’m honored to be in discussion with you. Okay?

Erica Woodland:

Thank you so much, Paul.

Paul Coates:

Because you’ve been consistent.

Erica Woodland:

Well, and we need that consistency, right? I think it’s part of our survival strategies as oppressed peoples. So since everybody here knows you, most people know you, but if you do not know Paul Coates, Paul is the founder of Black Classic Press and BCP Digital Printing, longtime revolutionary organizer, comrade of Eddie Conway, and also a former member of the Black Panther Party. And we’re just going to get right into this first question because I know that you have a lot of history to share, but I really want to know how you got into publishing. What was that journey like? And then how did you see the work of publishing in relationship to Black liberation?

Paul Coates:

So I always tell people, I came into publishing not really backwards, but not as a publisher. And even today, it’s kind of hard to think of myself as a publisher, even though that’s what I have done. I got into publishing because I was in the Black Panther Party and we had people in jail. And Eddie was one of those people, there was Jack Johnson and it was Jackie Powell. Those three people were still in jail. There was a time we had about 15 or 20 people in jail, but by the time I left the party, we still had three people in jail. I had gone to California in hopes of getting support for Eddie and the other folks in jail, and that wasn’t happening. So I left, I came back.

I didn’t have a lot to contribute, and it really bothered me because I had children. I think I had four children and one more on the way at that time and didn’t know how I was going to take care of them and didn’t know how I could support Eddie and them. And I got with some other comrades we put together a … We used to argue all the time. These were ex- socialists, ex- Marxists, ex- black workers union. And we used to argue, literally were supposed to be meeting to build an organization, but we ended up arguing all the time. And so I pulled together, for one of the meetings, I pulled together a platform for the George Jackson Prison Movement and everybody agreed on that platform. And that platform really was that we would build an organization and that organization would open up a bookstore and sell books in the community.

And while we were doing that, we would build a collective inside the jail and that collective inside the jail would educate people inside the jail with the books we were raising and what have you. And then we would build a publishing company that would publish books for that bookstore and other bookstore. And then we would build a printing company. And there may have been about six or seven of us, I can’t really remember, but everybody loved the program and we all agreed that we were going to work on that program and then everybody disappeared.

That left me and Reginald Howard to work on the program. But by this time, Eddie and I had been coordinating. When I got back from California, actually, I went to see him and the other brothers and told Eddie that there wasn’t support there. Eddie and Jackie Powell, as I recall it, who both said they were going to stick with me, even though in sticking with me, it meant they would possibly get thrown out of the Panthers.

So Eddie and I were in more conversation than Jackie and I, I shared the program with them. Eddie loved the program. He was already building collectives. He had a Panther collective in the jail where he was politicizing people or raising their consciousness in the jail and trying to get unity in the jail, which of course I always admired that brother. He spent all that time in jail. I don’t know that I would’ve been that good, but he did. And that was from the beginning. And you have to understand that Eddie went to jail. When he walks into the jail, here’s this big, bad panther coming into jail and you got two expectations. You got one expectation on the one side of the inmates, the people who are incarcerated. They’re looking at this leader coming in and they’re looking at something happening with him. And then you got the correction folks waiting for him to come in because they’re going to bust him down because of trouble.

He had problems going in the door, he and Jackie Powell, but he lived through that and lived with that and continued to organize people in the jail. My job was outside. I know this is a little long, but this really is how it happened. So we were able to put together the bookstore. And some people remember it, it was on Pennsylvania Avenue

Called The Black Book. Later, when that did not really work out and when the program that we put together to get books into the jail to educate people, to bring people out of the jail didn’t work out, we changed the name and it became … I’m sorry, we changed the name from the George Jackson Prison Movement to the Black Book. And then later we went into the Building of Publishing Company. That would’ve been about 1978. All the time though, the effort was to build an organization that could provide support to Eddie and provide support to Jackie and Jack Johnson at this point. So that’s how we got into publishing. That was in 1978. It wasn’t to build a commercial publishing house though.

Erica Woodland:

Right. So I want to actually to go there next because the publishing landscape is wild, right? Publishing. Landscape is wild, right? When you think about the marginalization of the kinds of voices that Black Classic Press uplifts, when you think about the ways capitalism is moving through that industry, I’m curious about how you noticed the landscape of publishing, how has it changed, and how have you been able to sustain the work of Black Plastic Press throughout all those transitions?

Paul Coates:

Again, I don’t consider myself like a regular publisher publisher, so I don’t follow the trends. I mean, I’m aware of them and things like that, and probably could talk on whatever you want to talk on, but they don’t … I went into publishing as a mission, and you’ll find some publishers who are mission-oriented publishers, like my good friend there, and who’s sitting in the back, mission-oriented publishers are not concerned about the ups and downs of publishing, the changes in publishing. They’re concerned with the voice that speaks to our community, that’s got to be published, or that’s got to be preserved in my case, and that’s what I focused on. So even today, people talk about how illiteracy is expanding and things like that. I don’t even hear those conversations because for me, I don’t think we publish enough books. I don’t think all of us put together can publish enough books to deal with the population.

We’re going to publish enough books to deal with people who actually read, people who want those books, people who are interested in those books. And so it’s like the books are there and people will come to get them. And our job is to make sure that we keep them going. Now, how we do that is a whole nother question. I’ve done it because I’ve always had support in my community.

I’ve done it because I’ve always had support in my family that I could go to and borrow the money that would get me to the next day.

When you’re on a mission, you’re on a mission, and that’s what I have been on. Initially, it was a mission in support of Eddie Conway. It then became … Well, part of that mission was expanding out into our community, and it was a smaller community, and then the recognition that it was a larger community that actually needed this particular service, but it’s always mission, and it’s not about the trends. You worry about the trends when you have a corporate boss that says, “You got to meet X, X goal or else we’re cutting you out. ” Mission-oriented publishers are not there.

Erica Woodland:

Right.

I think this goes back to what I was saying before about your consistency and the tenacity, because we’re in a moment where people are really deviating away from even holding physical books in their hands with the proliferation of technology. And when I think about the range of works that Black Classic Press has been able to publish and print for folks who are self-publishing, there’s a wide range from prominent authors like Walter Mosley and to supporting the printing of self-published works of prisoners. So I’m really curious about how were you able to build and sustain those relationships with authors in prison and the significance of partnering with people behind the walls?

Paul Coates:

We publish a lot of books that are public domain, a lot of books. One of the things I found, I think I was telling you guys, we were doing the bookstore, how we got into public domain books and how I got into the authors that really are obscure and how I began to love those authors is because it would be brothers in jail who would be sending notes out and they would say, “Do you know about this book here? Can you find that book for me? Because the white man don’t want us to read the book.” I mean, that’s how they would come out and I didn’t know anything about the books. The more I spent time searching for those books, the more books I’ve found.

And as I found the books, I began to see a path. There was an ancestral path and that ancestral path is like, we know about how Black folks have struggled. We know that Black folks enslaved struggle. We know that Black folks, once they reenter, they struggle and we’ve seen them demonstrate. We’ve seen all of that. But what the Brothers in Jail pointed me to is there’s a literature of resistance, an ancestral literature resistance that Black folks spent a lot of time writing and often those two paths came together. What the resistance that Black folks were writing about and the resistance that Black folks acted out in the street, it’s just that the connections between the literature was not clear. How that literature inspired people and moved our grandparents, our great-grandparents, how it moved them was not clear because it wasn’t available. The more I did the research, and again, it was because the brothers sent me from the jail books to look for.

The more I did the research, I could see the clear connection. This is why one of the things, and in seeing those clear connections, one of the things that I learned, Erica, was that my voice should not be a part of the ancestral voice. Most of the books you find from Black Classic Press, I will say little about the books. The books themselves speak for it. And if you spend the time looking at them, you can see how the books connect. I mean, it’s there. It’s clear. They’re very, very connected. The ancestors did that, and I don’t need to be the interpreter of it. What I’ve found over the years is I’m useful as a curator. I’m useful as a collector of bringing it together, and then other people will talk about what it is. And I hope I got most of your question in there.

If I didn’t, we’ll go

Erica Woodland:

Back. And then some. And then some. I actually want to go back to this piece around Black resistance. And I think a lot about the books that shaped me when I was coming into my political consciousness, so books like Solidad Brother, Revolutionary Suicide, Sister Outsider, and that we actually have to continue to create structures and systems to transmit generational knowledge. So I’m curious about what are some of the books for you that help you connect to your political consciousness and help bring you into being a revolutionary?

Paul Coates:

And I’m going to back up off of that revolutionary thing. Eddie and I used to go back and forth on it, like he would claim it. There’s a piece in … Dominique was probably in that session, so I got to be consistent on this, because he always saw himself as a revolutionary. I told him I gave that stuff up. Not that I gave being connected with people, not that I gave up being opposed to folks who oppress us. Not that I gave up trying to make a change in the world, it’s the declaration of that space as a revolutionary. If somebody else wants to define me, I’m cool with that. But at the time, I was with so many people. When I used to call myself that, I was with so many people who called themselves revolutionary and all of them, not all of them, but most of them just folded.

One of the sad things is how many people called themselves revolutionaries. Even when we were in the Black Panther Party, I am a revolutionary. It didn’t mean a damn thing because those people left Eddie in jail. I could not, and I still don’t claim that space because what I want to do is I want to see what you do. You know what I mean? I want to see how you live your life. If you live your life that way, then I may just call you that, but it’s hard for me to call myself and declare that because it gets lost in that maze. And I don’t know if everyone understands that, but that’s the ground I stand on. So look, the thing, I understand your question and so many books informed me politically. I won’t say starting, but including the autobiography of Malcolm X, but then there were books that weren’t supposedly political that informed me.

But in terms of Black Classic Press now, the book that really convinced me that there was this ancestral legacy, this ancestral trail of books, that when you look at them, if you saw them on the shelf by themselves, they disconnected. But when you look at them collectively, you can see a path. You can see that black folks actually, while they were struggling in the streets, there was a whole group of black folks that says, “Look, the reason why we’re struggling in the street is because you want to relegate us to a space in which you want to say we don’t have any history.” You want to equate us with animals. And that’s what happens. That’s what the whole piece on history is. If you don’t have a history, if you have no presence, you’re just like an animal. And so one of the things that happened is there’s this whole line of ancestors that go over hundreds of years and all of them have this idea.

It’s amazing because they never met each other, but they all had this idea if they could just document our history, then the world would see how great we were. And that’s what they did.

One of the greatest writers in that tradition, and people call them or refer to them as propagandist. And so they’ll say propagandas history because they oppose the narrative that was presented by those people who would oppress us. I don’t deal with that as a term. One of the greatest writers though in that tradition affected me … Actually, it was two people, and I think the person who affected me most and first was a black woman who in 1926, a hundred years ago, wrote the book One of Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire. And she wrote this book and it was about ancient Black history. And every page, I would read a page and I’d put it down. I’d read a page and I put them. I didn’t know it was a Black woman. I didn’t know it was a woman. I didn’t know what the name Drucilla meant at the time.

And I talked with people about it. I asked people about the book and people didn’t know anything about the book. It was because this woman had written this book out in Oklahoma in 1926. She didn’t have any money, but she was committed. I’ll tell you, she sent this book and she wasn’t the most educated woman, but her narrative was, she understood that Black people existed long before enslavement. And so she wrote this book and one of them was, the oldest one was Ancient Cushite. She wrote the book and sent it to W. Du Bois who had inspired her in 1915 when he wrote The Negro. Again, the Boys was not even close to being on point compared to her. In 26, she wrote and sent it to him. And the boys wrote it back and said, “Well, I can see that this book is okay and stuff like that, but you probably should do the correspondence

School.” And the boys was a friend of her brother, so he was being nice to her. She wrote him back, and I put this on the back of the book. She wrote him back because this says everything. She said, “Look,” I said, “I could have done the corresponding school. I could have done that. I could have went here and I could have went there. I didn’t want to do it because they would’ve changed what I had to say about black people. ” So there she’s asserting herself in a way, and it’s that assertion that connects all of these books. These people are asserting themselves short. Someone asked me years ago, “Well, didn’t she make mistakes?” Hell yeah, she made a mistake. Y’all showed me a book that don’t have mistakes in it even now. So in 1926, she didn’t have the full history, but the white folks that was publishing your history didn’t have the full history either.

It was one of those things. She was doing it on purpose. She stands, and I’ll stay off of the other book. No, let me put it up. The other book is George Wells Parker who wrote in 1917, the Greeks are not … Oh gosh, his book is Children of the Son, but basically he was saying the story you’re reading about the Greeks. Actually, you can find the arts of that story in Africa. This is a 32-page book, Children of the Son. And Opened up the path and made it clear that these people were asserting themselves, they were telling their own history, and they didn’t give a damn what other people said about them.

Erica Woodland:

And that ability to stay that close to the truth over generations is so important. And when we think about this moment of how we actually need to be documenting our resistance strategies, how we need to be reading about the past, but also thinking about how we’re documenting and writing ourselves into the future, I’m curious, how do you see the future of Black literary production in this political moment with everything that’s happening with the rise of fascism, imperialism, and all the other horrors in the world?

Paul Coates:

Actually, I’m excited. I’m excited. And we need to be clear. I’m not excited so much because there are so many presses coming up, but there are. The technology is such that we do a lot of book printing. We do a lot of book printing. And the technology is such that people can … I mean, they can print and write on any subject. It’s not like … I told y’all about Drew Silly Dungeon Houston. The part I didn’t tell y’all is she was a printer too. Her brother was a printer. She set type, she did all the stuff. Not today. I mean, people just sit down at a computer and they can go and then they can get it printed. That’s not what excites me. What excites me is that there are so many young people that are grounded in the history and are eager for the history and want the history.

So what that says to me is that they are already connected and they will not be silenced. Publishing to get the word out is to tell your story. I don’t care whether it’s the type of publishing I do or fiction or poetry or whatever it is. And I just crossed so many young people who have an awareness of the world and are not being turned around. That’s exciting. And I believe it’s a good path to be able to assert and speak for ourselves. That’s exciting to me.

Speaker 5:

Yeah.

Paul Coates:

Regardless of the technology, we’re not talking about … The technology ain’t got nothing to do with nothing here. Our reading is not going to go away. We’re going to read in some capacity, some form or the other, or we’re going to listen to books. It’s the narrative. It’s the control of the narrative and understanding who the narrative belongs to and not letting people take your shit. You know what I mean? That’s the joint. Yeah. Controlling it.

Erica Woodland:

Yeah. And protecting it.

Paul Coates:

That’s it. That’s it. You have to.

Erica Woodland:

Yeah. I think that you’re really just laying out how sacred this work is and how it goes well beyond us, well beyond us. Just even how much you’ve named the role of the ancestors in this conversation and thinking about what we leave for our descendants. I think it’s a really powerful time. And so one of the things that I feel excited about too in this moment is that we actually have a lot of information and wisdom available to us, and now’s the time we actually get to do something with it. And that hunger that you’re describing, people who really want to go back to the rigor and discipline of study and reading and reading together and being in community, those are the kinds of interactions that are going to get us not just to a place of surviving what we’re inside of, but actually building the world that our people deserve.

Paul Coates:

It’s true. I agree.

Erica Woodland:

So I know that you recently just returned from a trip to Cuba, and I wanted to actually open up some space to hear about some of your insights and how some of your experiences there really fold into this conversation around how we’re archiving and lifting up our people’s revolutionary traditions.

Paul Coates:

So thank you for opening that up. Mark and I was just talking. I was telling him, I went to Cuba middle of last month. I came back at the end of the month, I think it was. The bottom line was probably for the first five or six days back, I cried every day. And I cried every day. It wasn’t my first trip to Cuba. I’ve been several times. But this time to see the suffering that this country,

Your president, and his gang is subjecting a whole country too. It’s just criminal. And I know that I will resist. I know that there are ways that I’ve figured out to resist and I will resist, but I still feel those ways are powerless. I still don’t feel a lot of power. And that’s why the emotion comes and I’m not alone in feeling that. And I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing this, but I’m going to share it anyway. I was home and I was really feeling bad and crying, thinking about Cuba and thinking about the things I had to do to resist. What do I have to do? And I got a call … Yeah, I don’t name his name. I got a call from another publisher who is my elder.

And he just said hi Paul and he said, “They’re killing him. They’re killing us in Cuba. They’re killing us in Cuba.” And he was crying as he was saying that. And so you had these two old guys sitting on their heads in different cities crying and pledging that we had to do something. We had to do something. And I encourage people in this room to understand that we’ve got to do something because everything, this is like they’re doing it all over the world. Cuba’s not alone. It’s not isolated all over the world. They’re doing it in our name. All of those bombs that are dropping, all the bombs that dropped in Gaza, those American made mobs, American made planes, the ones that are dropping in Iran, American made bombs, American made planes. In Cuba, they’re not bombing, but they’re really destroying the people. They’re really killing people.

They’re killing infants. They’re killing people who go to the hospital with infections. It’s wrong. It’s absolutely wrong. And the thing that we have to understand is, especially for black folks, Cuba is the closest … We only have to go like 40 minutes and we’re in Africa. It’s like one of them things. It’s like 40 minutes and you’re in Africa. And I’ve felt more at home in Cuba than I have in Africa. Part of it is because so much of the tradition is preserved and you’re looking at that tradition and when you’re looking at that tradition, you’re seeing your history, you’re seeing how we got here and you see that one boat stopped there in Cuba and they dropped them off with the Spanish and another boat stopped in Virginia or Annapolis and they dropped us off. But we’re the same people and they’ve been able to retain.

But now they’re being punished because the gangsters, Trump and his gangsters want that island, which is one of the most beautiful spaces in this hemisphere. They want it and they’re taking it. So I don’t even know where we started, where I started with this. The point is what I’m trying to say, and for now and for the record, we have a moral responsibility to join the Cuban people. And this is people of conscious around the world, but especially Black people and especially people of African descent because when Cuba called Africa came, they went into Africa and they sent 350 some odd thousand people to fight for our freedom and to fight for Nelson Mandela’s freedom. And that’s why Nelson Mandela went there first. We owe a great debt. They protected our freedom fighters. All of our freedom fighters, whether it’s Robert Williams or whether it’s down to Asada Shakur, we owe a debt and we have to pay that debt.

We have to pay it back to the Cuban when Obama wanted to exchange. Y’all remember people in this room remember this? He wanted to exchange. He wanted to exchange a side of Shakur for more liberal trade in Cuba. And the Cuba said, no, we ain’t doing that.

We’ll do something else, but we ain’t doing that. We not doing that. And even today, these moral people, these people are insistent. They don’t know how they’re going to survive, but they will survive.

They’re committed to get through it. And we have a responsibility. I feel I have a responsibility. One of the things I’m doing is trying to encourage people to go down with delegations, to take people down to Cuba, because yes, it is still legal and because we can take humanitarian aid down, but more importantly, we can go there and show that we support our brothers and sisters in Cuba, that we’re there to pay the debt. And there was a hard thing going down. You know how hard things aren’t Cuban people? A lot of people don’t have food, they don’t have this, they don’t have that. But here’s the deal. It was explained to me by the people who were there. It is better for us to go in solidarity and be in Cuba than it is for us to stay here. Like the group I went down, we were concerned.

Were we going to eat the food? No. What you end up doing is when you go down, you provide employment for people because you know the tourist industry is so vital and that’s where they’re getting hit at. So you provide jobs, you provide work. While we were there, those people were employed. When we left, they were unemployed. So the people are happy to see you come down in support. The people are happy to see the solidarity that you have, and it becomes a way of resisting. And this is the part that I love. It’s a way of resisting and it’s totally legal To resist. So the Cuba thing ties in, I won’t even go with the literature and the history and all of that. The point is, for me, we owe a debt and it’s got to be paid or else I don’t know how you sleep at night without paying that kind of debt, that those people would suffer like that.

Erica Woodland:

And really you’re just mapping out how interconnected everything is. So there’s literally no world where we can be free with what’s happening in Cuba, right?

Paul Coates:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Erica Woodland:

As people who live and benefit inside the Imperial Core, even as Black people, we have to reckon with that. That’s

Speaker 5:

Right.

Erica Woodland:

And so your clarity I think is important because there are people who say things like, “That’s not my fight. That’s none of my business.” But Cuba is our business.

Paul Coates:

Cuba is our business. Cuba’s our business. And all of these places, like Gaza is our business, Iran is our business, all of the Congo is our business, all these places where these folks are exerting themselves and expanding and really bringing together white supremacy and white domination in a new wave of that whole thing of Make America Great. Again, everyone here in this room understands what that is. And the question is, I think most of the people in this room certainly are up for resisting. And we have, many people I was talking with Dick Oaks over there, and Dick is saying he’s standing on a bridge, he’s standing on a bridge and got frostbite, protested it as well. So there are fighters in this room. There are people who have long histories in this room. So yeah, we all got that debt. We all got that thing.

And the thing is, we’ve got to explore ways to energize the networks that are around us, the people who are around us so that our energy multiplies. So it’s not just Dick standing on that bridge, it’s his neighbor, it’s our neighbors or what have you. We’ve got to do that. If we do it in Cuba, we affect what’s happening in Iran. We affect what’s happening in Venezuela. We affect because we’re resistant. And any form of resistance, any form of resistance is resistance to the whole thing. They can’t tolerate resistance. Yeah.

Erica Woodland:

Wow. Paul, thank you so much. This has been incredible. I want to make sure we actually have space to have some conversation and Q&A, but I did want to just really drive home this piece around our responsibility in this moment. And here’s the thing, because so much is on fire, there’s actually a lot of work to do. So you can’t say you don’t know what to do, do something. And some of that is about bringing people together. I know some of the work that Eddie’s front porch is going to be up to is political education. How do we start to build the kinds of relationships that help us survive this and get us free and not only pay those debts, but actually start to rewrite some of the history that our people have been oppressed by.

Paul Coates:

Yeah. Oh, you were asking me the question?

Erica Woodland:

No.

Paul Coates:

Thank you, Ryan.

Erica Woodland:

But I want to hear everything you have to say.

Paul Coates:

Well, I’d say we should raise the Eddie Conway Brigade and go to Cuba. And so it is. Yes. I think we do a brigade and we go down to Cuba

And we go down to Cuba in support and we take supplies down, but we also encourage other people to supply. There are several groups that are coming through here. There’s a major effort of people who are going to meet in Cuba in March. What is it? The 21st? I’m not sure. You guys look online for this stuff, but there’s a flotilla that folks are doing to go against the blockade. There are other folks that are going to meet in Cuba in mid-March. There are so many things that are happening, so many things for us to support. Everybody in this room literally could become a support hub in some way or the other. And the thing you have to understand is I’m not asking you to stop doing anything that you’re doing here. You got to keep doing what you’re doing here. You got to multiply what you’re doing here, but we have capacity beyond this in terms of stretching out our solidarity.

And it has nothing whatsoever to do with politics. I’m not asking you to change your politics. Even in Cuba, people are up for change in Cuba. They want a better life. They don’t want to keep suffering. The system is broken, but they don’t want capitalism. The Donald Trump brand imposed on them. We have capacity and we have capacity as individuals to change the world around us and we need to do that. We need to engage in that. So I’m up for Eddie Conway Brigade.

Erica Woodland:

All right, let’s go. All right. I’m going to invite Manta up to facilitate our Q&A and discussion. I know I have lots more questions for Paul, but I know I’ve been hogging the mic. All

Mansa Musa:

Right. So we got any questions for Paul?

Speaker 6:

What literature affected your lives the most?

Mansa Musa:

Anybody want to dive on that?

Paul Coates:

So I don’t know. Can you guys, before you do that, I just want to make a note, the person who just asked that question did not introduce himself. So I encourage you to introduce yourself. However, I do want to say, I’ll talk about the person first, okay? And then you can … So Dick Oaks is someone who I probably have known for the last 50, 55 years or so. He’s the cat that was standing on the bridge that got frostbite. Okay? And the thing I want to say about Dick, and I want to say this so that folks, if you don’t know it, Dick was part of the National Committee to Combat Fascism, which was a group, the Panthers Organized. He actually, and I don’t know if I should say you taught Benny, but he literally taught the Panthers how to print. Okay? So these guys had taken a whole townhouse over in Washington DC and Dick and Benny, and again, I hate to say, because I think Benny was pretty well adapted.

I don’t know if you trained him or … I think he was pretty well adapt when he came in. You two guys ran the whole effort to produce much of the material that the Panther Party used. It was being produced over in DC. And thank you for Dick getting that done. So I just want to make sure I acknowledge him.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, great contribution. Who? Literature. Somebody asked some hands of Max.

Paul Coates:

He had asked the question. I’m sorry. I cut accordingly, sir.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Introduce yourself and then … Yeah.

Speaker 7:

Hi, my name is Khadija George, Dija George to say I’m from London. And this question of having one book, sorry, it can’t be one. It has to be two. It has to be for me, and it wasn’t immediate. It was after I’d done more research and reading was Groundings with My Brothers by Walter Rodney, along with the companion of it, how Europe underdeveloped Africa that really helped affirm what I could understand and believed in as Pan-Africanism and live my life as a Pan-Africanist. And just on top of that, Shegu by Maurice Conde, the novel, because it made me so proud to be an African woman just reading that book and a writer. She is fantastic as a writer and just showing what Ashka, the African history in that book was fantastic. Thank you.

Paul Coates:

Ray, great, great. So Manson Buster, I’m also curious if the brother speaks, can you talk about what literature you did in the joint and what impacted you? How did you survive? And I know brother’s going next. Yeah, you know- His brother here. Come on.

Speaker 8:

Okay. Peace everybody. My name is S. Devine Sankofa and the books that are the authors that really influenced me were Nayee Machbar. When I was a college student studying elementary education, I was doing identity work as well. So a lot of his books, Visions for Black Man, Community Himself, they were levers for me to really begin to understand my identity as a Black male.

Mansa Musa:

Right. And to your question, Paul, when I came in system, former drug addict, got in that space. So reading and writing, all that stuff went out the window, got monolithic thinking, getting drugs, using drugs, getting drugs using drugs. So I got in prison, that’s when I started changing. I had to change my thinking. So I had to get literature that was simple. One thing that influenced me the most was Malcolm X, not autobiography, but African American history. And Paul talked about how … It was a little book. That’s why I got my name from. That’s why I seen … You know how Malcolm was? “Oh, you got a white man’s name, you slave, you was that. ” I’m turning the page, let me find me a name. Oh, Master Muppet, that’s a good name, but that and Dick Gregory No More Lies, Richard Wright, native son, Bigger Thomas, Invisible Man, and then somebody turned me on to Jay Rogers from Superman to Man and Dixon, the principle person in that book, how he maintained his principle character as he refuted racism that was being spewed at him and all the misinformation that was being spewed at him.

He wasn’t like, “Oh no, y’all was in cave.” No, he was actually, “Well, I take acceptance to what you saying.” And when Paul talked about Greeks and he went through that whole thing. So these are the things that influenced me that ultimately led me to find myself when I went in the penitentiary in 73, sitting on the bench in the bleaches with Eddie Conway with the Red Book. And them things influenced me and them things got me in a space where I started becoming more analytical and unlike Paul, I claim, unlike Paul, I claim, unlike Paul, I claim I am a revolutionary. And I say that because I do the work. I don’t back up from the work. When Dominique’s called me, we got something we need to be done. I’m there. I’m doing it and I’m not doing it because I’m looking for something in return.

I’m doing it because that’s what needs to be done. So yeah. Anybody else got any questions for Paul? Anybody got any comments? Come on, come on, Taya. And then the brother right here.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. We can do both and then have you answer response.

Speaker 9:

Hi, I’m Taya. And first, I would just like to say I would like to be the first one to sign up for the Eddie Conway brigade. Cuba, please sign me up.

I have noticed on social media in particular that there has been an effort to separate Black Americans from Latino Americans, that there has been an undue amount of blame on Latino Americans for Trump’s election. So I feel like there is a division that is being stoked between our communities. It is very terrible and very obvious, and there are a lot of online fights that are unfortunately causing division. I wanted to know if you saw a pathway towards healing here in the Americas between the African-American and Latino community, and perhaps what we could do to foster that.

Paul Coates:

I have to tell you, the one thing I learned, and the one thing I’ve learned in life is when you don’t know, you better say you don’t know quick. And I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know how to work with that. There’s obviously room. Here’s the thing I do know.

I know that black people have to find out about themselves first. They’ve got to find out about themselves first. I think every people has to do that. And I think in doing that, there’s a commonality that surface. There’s a relatedness that surfaces. So if you ask me practically how to go about it, I don’t know that, but I would say everything begins with knowing yourself. And if you and I were grounded in knowing ourselves, I really believe those commonalities are going to come and we’re going to do much, much better together. So other than that, I don’t know. And look, when you don’t know something, say you don’t know it and don’t feel bad about it. You know what I mean? I don’t got that one.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. Come

Speaker 6:

On. Hi, my name’s Gary. I’m a mentee and a coworker with Eddie at Tubman House. I’m a retired firefighter. And I just wanted to ask you, Paul, because one of my fourth grade classmates went down to Cuba with you, Vivian and Jerry Fisher. And my youngest son, Biko, was down there about 15 years ago for a couple of weeks. And I was just getting ready to ask about Cuba when Erica asked you about Cuba, but I just wanted you to just pick out one of the personal stories that you experienced while you were down in Cuba this last time, which would kind of encapsulate everything else, if you got one of those.

Paul Coates:

Gary, I don’t know. What I do know is that on this trip, the times I’ve gone down before and even this trip was planned to go down to the Cuban Havana International Book Festival, which is one of those things, if you love books, you should just put it on your bucket list. Okay? Now, don’t wait for it to come around again because we don’t know what the fuel thing is going to be, but that book festival, this was the 34th annual one, I think, something like that. They canceled it because … Or postponed it. Cuban people don’t say they canceled. The Cuban people say they postponed it. And they say they postponed it because with the fuel shortages, they could not bring people in from the countryside to go to that book festival.

That book festival generates, it goes to three cities in Cuba usually. They change them around, but it’s definitely going to be in Havana. That book festival brings together a million people, a million people. And these are poor people. When I say poor, I’m saying poor in the sense that they don’t have the money that anybody in this room has, but they have a tremendous love of books. And y’all know that one of the things, Gary, that went into this is y’all know when Castro came to power, the Cuban people, the literacy rate was very low. It wasn’t the lowest in the world, but it was very low. And one of the things that Castro insisted on was that in order to maintain your freedom, you had to be able to read, because if you weren’t able to read, people would tell you anything. So that festival is a testimony to the will of Cuban people and their love of books and their love of literature.

The Cuban people have postponed it and what they’re doing with the book festival, because they don’t have the fuel to bring people into the city and change the system around, they’re going to take the book festival to the countryside and they’ll take it into small villages. And they’ve done this stuff before. That’s how they learn. That’s how they were able to read, learn how to read. They raised the literacy rate by going into the countryside and reaching people there. The large thing, so we didn’t do the book festival. We spent a lot more time dealing with Afro-Cubans and that history. And the thing that I guess was shocking to me was how ignorant I was because one of our heroes here is Antonio Maciel. And I mean, I’ve been on this forever, 50 years, 60 years, whatever it is. I knew about him and I knew how strong he was as a Cuban liberator and all like that, but I didn’t realize that he had … There were seven of them, seven brothers, and I knew nothing about his mother.

It was his mother who sent him into battle, and his mother was a black woman. His father was Venezuelan, but his mother was a black woman, and she’s the one who sent those sons in the battle. So all of them are Cuban heroes, and she is the hero. One of the national heroes, but there’s another black woman who’s a national hero who I didn’t know anything about either. And the troops that went into Africa actually went into Africa under her name, and that’s Carlata. She was the … I can’t remember the year, 1870 something. Cuban, slavery in Cuba was abolished after it was abolished years. So I can’t remember the year, forgive me guys, but this sister led, like we think about Nat Turner, she led one of them things, but she was leading the brothers, and there’s a whole monument on the concentration camp That she was in there as a monument to her, beautiful, beautiful monument to her and the brothers who went in to struggle with her.

She was captured, she was quartered, she was killed and they dealt with her, but they didn’t deal with her memory. So those troops that went into Africa actually went in as the Carlata Brigade. They went under her name. And one of my sons was with me and he said, “Well, dad, do we have anything like this in the states?” And it only took me a minute to think about it, to tell him, no, we don’t have a monument to someone who raised a machete to kill the oppressor. We don’t have a national monument like that. And you guys think about it. There are no monuments of the enslaved to those who raise … Like you don’t have a national net Turner monument. They’re not celebrating that. They’ll celebrate other things and other Black folks who were nice. But when it comes to really resisting, Cuba does that.

That was really surprised. Well, it was revealing to me and my ignorance.

Mansa Musa:

And a book that if you want to know about the literacy in Cuba, a book that we read was called Vincent Ramos. And that book talks about what Paul talked about how when they came into power, they sent everybody that had literacy and high literature, they sent them to the countryside to teach people how to read. Max, this brother right here got a question.

Speaker 5:

I have two questions. The first one has to do with whether, for both of you, both questions are for if you have any comments on the primary elections in Dallas, Texas, or in Texas period for the senatorial race and whether we can learn any lessons from that. And since we’re talking about Black consciousness and back in the day when the Black Panthers were very vocal, there’s a certain amount of apathy I think that’s running through the country as far as this consciousness is being exhibited. What do you think about the fact that the White House refused to fly the flag at half mast for Jesse Jackson? Yet before that, the moment came up, the president said he was a good man.

Paul Coates:

So again, like the election thing, ain’t my lane. I’m going to stay out of that. Okay. I don’t really have comments about it. I got words, but they don’t mean anything. Yeah, they don’t mean anything. I ain’t good there, man. In terms of, I can speak on the Jesse Jackson thing, which from my perspective, I don’t really care whether he flies the flag, whether he don’t fly the flag. He don’t respect black people. So even if he did it, what would it mean to me? It don’t mean anything to me. That we honor our own is the greatest tribute that can be, but not for them. I wouldn’t have anything to do with him. That’s what I would think on him. I know how Mansa Musa sits on it. Hey, I look at it from this

Mansa Musa:

Perspective. Let me think. Yeah. Democrats control the house at one time. They passed a bill. They increased the prison population. Okay. So that give me opinion on that. In terms of Jesse Jackson flying a hat, I don’t care what they do for us. I’m not going to let you validate who I respect and who I look at as a leader. You flying the flag half mass or you not putting him in the capital. That don’t mean nothing to me. What means something to me is the contribution that the man made. He did. He made a great contribution. I think that we should be more concerned with replicating that and being more applicable. Putting his works into practice as opposed to whether or not Donald Trump that by the way molested a 12 year old. Not with that.

Paul Coates:

See, Trump and his gang, they don’t care about black people. They don’t care about people, period. Unless they’re that particular class, but especially melanated people. Let’s be clear. You’re not hearing passivity. You’re hearing choice and where we choose to apply our energy. I would not spend one moment in front of the White House protesting about Jesse Jackson. It’s like a wasted effort. The man who controls that flag does not respect you. If you want to deal with that, then we should deal with that. But not his actions. He’s already displayed his actions. So nothing he’s going to do, nothing he’s going to do is going to reflect good for you. And I’m saying you, I’m talking about for us. There’s no way you can respond to every action. You have to select and you have to direct your energy where it can be most effective at, as opposed to responding to the energy that he has.

That’s what you’re hearing from us. It isn’t passivity at all. It’s selectivity.

Mansa Musa:

Dominique.

Paul Coates:

It’s selectivity. And I don’t know whether you get that, but that’s what it is. I ain’t passive about much at all, brother. Trust me. I may look like I’m passive. And it may even appear that I’m passing. But the rage that I feel inside for him, for his class of people, and for the people who’ve oppressed black people has kept me running for the last 60 years or more. I’ll go to my grave with that rage. But I’m going to choose just how I apply it and what I put on as people

Mansa Musa:

Dynamic.

Speaker 10:

Yeah. You kind of said what I was going to say, which is we live in a time … We live in really reactionary times. And so a lot of what Trump does, a lot of what they do is intended to get reaction. We need to be more concerned with how we’re going to respond to fascism. We can’t react to every single thing. Also, leadership, I don’t consider Trump leadership. I don’t consider that leadership that young people should look to. That’s the counter to leadership as far as I’m concerned. So his bad behavior basically just suggests what he is, but also they’re doing a lot of things that are intended to get reactions, particularly emotional reactions. And we can’t keep responding to that kind of stuff. It’s not getting us anywhere because every time Trump does something, we supposed to get mad about that.

Mansa Musa:

Anybody else got any comments, questions? Come on, Lauren.

Speaker 11:

Got one more here. Appreciate you, Brother Paul. So it’s something that I’m seeing more in the discourse, and I can see it both ways, so I want to get your opinion. There’s some people who really value the printed word and the act of reading in and of itself. It does something to the brain. Studies have shown it, but we’re also all people. So there’s this rise of audiobooks. I have dyslexia. Audiobooks have been really big for me, but some people feel like there’s a trade-off there. We should really push physical books in the printed word. And some people it’s like, “Hey, we should get into podcasts and embrace the audio books more.” Do you see them as trading off or complimentary? Just do you have any thoughts

Paul Coates:

About that? Yeah, they’re all complimentary. I don’t see a trade-off and I don’t know anyone, fortunately, that sees them in conflict with each other. The thing that I think we always have to remember is that what we’re after is the narrative and we have to control the narrative. We have to be in control of it. We can project that narrative graphically. We can project it audibly. We can project it with print, with words, but it’s got to be our narrative. It has to be our story that we’re dealing with. And that’s the most important thing. I think anybody that wanted to discuss the merits of either one, look, I’m a kid who began with comic books. That’s how I began. That’s how I raised my children with comic books as a means of going up. So I think they’re all complimentary. The important thing for us, I think to remember, especially with young people and with young kids, we have to make reading irresistant.

When I’m saying reading, I’m talking about engaging with that narrative as a way. We have to make that path irresistible. It has to be something that they grow to love in their heart because once it’s in your heart, then you never, never, never give it up. And you transfer it to other people. You see, it’s like one of those things. So that becomes the large job as opposed to format, as far as I’m concerned.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. And I want to give you a literary story. So they had any of them create this program to save their own words. And I was in another institution. I heard them talking about it on NPR radio and they had interviewed already. So I wound up back up in the penitentiary. And when I left the penitentiary, the literacy rate might’ve been like the average highest literature might be 6.0, 6th grade reading level. I come in, I’m walking down the tier like, “Hey, in France, right?.

Chancellor Williams, J. Rogers. I’m seeing all these books in these cells and I’m going to do … I’m seeing all this literature.” So I asked Eddie, I said, Eddie, I said, “Man, in the library, all the shelves were stacked. All the books that we was like had in our library, our collective library, because Paul talked about him establishing the Panther Collective, and I was a part of that. ” And what happened was they had put this program together to say their own words. They had got a grant. And the intent of the program was to bring people in to talk and educate prisoners. But the main thing that we did, Eddie and them did on our end, they brought literature and you had to read. So your discussion when somebody came in, the discussion would be about the book. So it wouldn’t be a matter of my opinion.

It’d be like, “What do you think about this particular book? And what did you think about this particular perspective? And what’s your views on it? ” It changed the whole complex of the population because now everybody reading and now the person I used to look at that was like, might have been a drunk, drink a lot of homemade wine, selling, had a black market, little thing going on. Now that person was in college and that person was reading. So to Paul’s point, as far as the narrative and controlling, that’s a narrative that need to be understood that when we talk about prison and education and literature, we look at it from the perspective. When I look at it from the perspective, what it did for the population that I was in, how it changed that whole population that people started looking at themselves differently. And a lot of them guys are out right now in the Baltimore City right now.

A lot of them guys that was influenced by that, in Baltimore City right now got out under a case called Unger, and they’re doing remarkable things in the community because of the impact of literature that Eddie Conway had created this mechanism, but it was the literature that got them in that space.

Thank you guys. And I want to say in closing to Paul, right, Paul talked about how what they did in terms of the information. And there’s another Eddie Conway story. Eddie always had a book. Every way he went, and you asked anybody that knew him, said, “What’s one thing you remember about Eddie?” They said he always had a book. And I realized Paul was the one that was getting them all them books in there.

Paul Coates:

So this goes to your point too. It was not always a political book. Eddie loved science fiction. So he said to have Star Trek or something else. He loved it. And then on the other side, he would have a political book, you know what I mean? So it’s like how you get them. Well,

Mansa Musa:

We like to thank everybody for coming and we really appreciate y’all’s support.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s give it up one more time, gang.

Mansa Musa:

Thank everybody.