The Black Study Group That Transformed a Generation: The Afro-American Association

Posted on January 26, 2026 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

The photo below of Don Warden is from the archives of Khalid and Jamila al Mansour. Don Warden was one of the founders of the Afro-American Association at the University of California at Berkeley. The other founding members were Donald Hopkins, Otho Green, and Henry Ramsey.

This organization formed in late 1961 and began as a student study group in 1962 at the University of California at Berkeley when there were literally no identifiable Afro-American and African Studies programs on any U. S. college and university campus. The group devoured works by Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. DuBois and other Black scholars that were left out of many colleges curricula. Study meetings of its members initially began at the off-campus home of a UC Berkeley student, and grew from there. In fact, chapters of this organization appeared on hundreds of college campuses in the United States with members numbering in the thousands by the mid-1960s.

The objective of the group was to read and study about the Afro-American, African, and Afro-Diasporic past in order to confront the institutional racism, colonialism and bigotry found in the United States and throughout the world.

Warden, a UC Berkeley law student, regularly went into Black neighborhoods and literally spoke to young Black citizens directly on street corners or wherever they were. He encouraged them to study about Afro-American and African history in order to fight against their feelings of worthlessness that often accompanied experiencing chronic racism.

He listened to them tell him about their problems of unemployment, poor housing, you name it. He, like most of his members, espoused that in order to change all systems of oppression, one needed to study about the past in order to do so. Warden eventually became a lawyer for the Black Panther Party of Self-Defense as well as granting legal assistance to the Nation of Islam when Malcolm X was still a member of the group.

The Afro-American Association was heavily influenced by the ideologies of Black American activists Robert F. Williams and Malcolm X. The AAA understood that only sustained study of Black people/s would foster the kind of thinking and strategies for combating systems that sought to suppress and control Black and Brown communities all over the world. Only deep research would correct the far-too-often feelings of inadequacy that came with being Black and oppressed.

In 1962 when this study group, that was soon named the Afro-American Association, began its study group meetings at UC Berkeley there were roughly only about 100 Black students out of 20,000 white students. And in 1962 there were only two members of the group that were not born in the United States. One was from Jamaica; the other was from India.

In 1962 this tall, skinny, young Black man from Orange Hill, Jamaica and this petite and short, very brown young woman from Chennai, Tamil Nadu (in Southern India) dressed in her Sari and sandals met in an AAA group meeting.

The young man from Jamaica gave a pristine evaluation of how Great Britain had created a rather stiff and proper group of elite Black Jamaicans that often mimicked the mores and habits of British society. It was done, he said, to shield the world from knowing how racist the British empire actually was. The young man was calm, studious with very edgy ideas about the colonization of Black people/s around the world.

The young brown woman in her Sari and sandals was intrigued. She too had been a British subject in her native state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. She knew something about what this young man spoke of, but not all of it. Back then, the typical path for academically talented Indian and Jamaican students was to study in England, that is if they could secure a path to graduate school.

She rejected that path because there was no major in Biochemistry in India or in the UK that would have been available to a female. The skinny guy from Jamaica also rejected the educational path to the UK. His decision was so unusual that the approval for his exit from Jamaica took so long that he arrived at UC Berkeley two weeks after the Fall 1961 semester begun.

He, Dr. Donald Harris became a leading economist and she, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan-Harris became a leading biomedical scientist, a contributor to the identification of the function of rMNA, which greatly improved treatments for breast cancer.

The early members of the Afro-American Association described her as warm, funny, “down for the cause” of Civil Rights and an end to colonialism, and also a fiery debater. At first one member of the AAA noted that some of them thought she was royalty because of the way she carried herself. Yet, she fit right in, several members noted. He was described as professorial even though he was in his early 20s. While their eventual marriage didn’t last (they married roughly 10 months after meeting), their firstborn daughter Kamala noted that she knew they loved each other and felt that if they had been a bit older and a bit more emotionally mature they might have made it.

She cited them both as activists, and remembers going to protest marches with her parents in a stroller. The blueprint for their activism and for the creation of Afro-American and African Studies as disciplines were rooted in the activities in the Afro-American Association. While at UC Berkeley, Shyamala met and influenced arguably, one of Afro-America’s most important philosophers, Cedric Robinson.

Robinson’s book Black Marxism, first published in 1983, remains one of the most brilliant critiques and reassessments of the Eurocentric theories of Marxism. It has become a must-read in the literary canons of both Afro-American and African Studies.

It was Robinson who coined the phrase “Racial Capitalism.” He argued that capitalism was always based on race and race came before capitalism. Importantly there never was a clean break from European feudalism. He was one of the first Black scholars to identify “race,” as a component that European empires used when feudalism morphed into capitalism.

Any study he maintained had to be central to Black people/s’ lived experiences wherever they were in the world. When I first read him, it became apparent that European Marxist scholars either forgot or tried to ignore that the peoples of Europe were once considered “races,” races and national identities that were eventually erased in exchange for their being identified as “white” which served the interests of European countries in their quest to colonize and dominate large portions of the world.

In 1959, Shyamala Gopalan was standing in line behind Cedric Robinson while they were both registering for classes. Both became members of the Afro-American Association. In the first edition of Black Marxism, there was only one person who was not a Black American listed in his group of early friends that Robinson acknowledged as influential on the development of his ideas. That person was Dr. Shyamala Gopalan-Harris.

So here’s a brief mini-history of the continuing of the Afro-American Association of University of California at Berkeley. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale who founded the Black Panther Party became members. Huey dared to show up at a meeting of AAA without having read the book assigned for that session. The members sent him home. He never showed up again unprepared.

Future Congressman Ron Dellums was a member of the AAA at one time as was Kenny Freeman, a contributor to the Black Panthers 10-Point Plan. The AAA literally laid the academic groundwork for Afro-American and African Studies programs throughout the nation as underscored by historian and author Donna Jean Murch who traced the evolution and development of the Black Panther Party from its roots in the Afro-American Association. None of it began without the required reading and research and the on-the-ground grassroots activism that met Black communities in the Oakland area where they were.

I could go on about how police monitored the group’s members particularly when they spoke on street corners, or visited high schools to encourage reading and research among members of the Black community. Yet, I will not do that mainly because well-meaning, good people have started to use the internet like an online set of Cliffnotes.

If you’re old enough to remember Cliffnotes you also remember that occasionally they were used instead of reading the actual book or doing the actual research. Yet, your ass was grass when a teacher or professor asked you a highly specific question that Cliffnotes did not cover and you hadn’t bothered to read the whole book.

So there’s a small bibliography below with a list of books that are worth your time. The message is clear: Either you put in the time and read or you remain a dilettante on matters that you need to know both for your safety and your sanity.

This essay was previously posted on Substack on January 22, 2026.

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work and research with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp or become a paid subscriber to me on Substack to help me sustain my research.

Recommended Readings:

Living For the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California by Donna Jean Murch

Fanon for Beginners by Deborah Baker Wyrick

Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era by Ashley D. Farmer

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric Robinson

Oregon Police Department Surveillance Files on Donald Warden and the Afro-American Association which kept surveillance documents on Donald Warden when he visited Oregon to encourage students to read and research.

The Afro-American Association: Forerunner to the Panthers

“How Kamala Harris’ Immigrant Parents Found a Home, and Each Other, in a Black Study Group” by Ellen Barry, September 13, 2020, New York Times.

The Truths We Hold: An American Journey by Kamala Harris

Remembering Cedric Robinson: Humanistic Imaginaries and the Black Radical Tradition

All blogs written by Leslye Joy Allen are protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: https://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author. Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers. All Rights Reserved.

Baldwin, Gaza, and Venezuela: “Open Letter to the Born Again,” 1979

Posted on September 6, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by © Leslye Joy Allen

“The people who call themselves “born again” today have simply become members of the richest, most exclusive private club in the world, a club that the man from Galilee could not possibly hope—or wish—to enter.” — James Baldwin, 1979

The passage above is from “Open Letter to the Born Again” by writer, philosopher, and activist James Baldwin. It was written in September of 1979 and first published in The Nation.

Here’s another quote from the same letter:

“But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests…Finally: there is absolutely—repeat: absolutely—no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East (how in the world would Europe know? having so dismally failed to find a passage to India) without dealing with the Palestinians.”—James Baldwin

His words are 46 years old as of September 2025. And for your edification, the terms “Middle East” and “Far East” were/are geographic names created by and assigned to these areas by Great Britain based on these areas’ geographic proximity to Great Britain. I bring this up for two reasons.

First, there are people out there that think what is happening in Gaza is relatively new. While the genocide happening in Gaza now is far more horrific than in the past, Palestinians have been battling abuse and state-sponsored murder for decades.

The second reason I quoted Baldwin is because I met a 50-year-old white man some weeks ago who was a college graduate but who said he had not heard of James Baldwin until a couple of years ago. He was embarrassed by that. He told me so. He could not, for the life of him, explain why he had never heard of Baldwin. I knew why.

His identity as a white man did not require him to look any further than his whiteness for validation. It is one thing to have never read a particular author; after all, we cannot read everything. Yet, it is quite another thing to not even be able to identify an author that was an activist who was so public with his opinions for decades.

(James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) reads a book with a group of children, Durham, North Carolina, 1963. Photo by Steve Schapiro/Corbis via Getty Images)

I have listened to so many white co-workers who describe their families as in complete disarray and disagreement about Felon 47 and his many renewed atrocities. It is not that every white American wishes harm and abuse on peoples of color, but rather, as Christopher Ortiz so brilliantly noted in his essay The Empty Trauma of Whiteness: How Colonialism Stole Europe’s Soul, that, “People racialized as white aren’t the colonizer. They too have been colonized, and we’ve got to talk about it.” I strongly, strongly urge you to read Ortiz’s analysis.

People classifiable as “white” rarely identify themselves collectively as victims unless they can rationalize that their victimization is coming from or due to a person or a group of people that are not typically categorized as “white.” And if their victimizers are indeed classifiable as “white,” then the victimizers are defined by something other than race. If said victimizer has a different religion, then that difference often works in these instances.

Every white person, from the Neo-Nazi to the bleeding-hearted white liberal, to all those folks in between, know one fact that they typically cannot say out loud: The hatred and virulence of white racists and the white liberal guilt (and embarrassment) about those white racists are all rooted in a single foundation, a foundation that is no more than a sand castle on a beach. Any forceful wave will destroy it.

Many white folks are stumbling in the dark because they cannot (or will not) pinpoint the source of their betrayal. They and their ancestors have spent generations and entire lifetimes believing several sets of assumptions that were never true, and in this current political climate, those assumptions are now on life support.

The “colored” peoples of this world that whites see as “other,” never entirely believed in these same assumptions even when we pretended to believe. For peoples of color, the requirement of our assimilation into the “mainstream” (code for “white”) is/was, to mimic, at least on the surface, the ideas and values of whatever dominant group that is/was oppressing us in order to be accepted by the dominant group. Assimilation never works because inequity is built into the entire process.

Baldwin told everyone back in the mid-1980s that “the world is not white.” It never has been. Not unlike the character “Dorothy” in the film “The Wizard of Oz,” the captains of industry never told white folks that they could go home and join the rest of humanity if they clicked those Ruby slippers together.

The oligarchs have counted on you white folks to believe (and you have believed) in the Wizard of Oz who hides behind a curtain and who is no more than a snake oil salesman whose purpose is to sell you his wares, empty your pockets, and convince you of his omnipotence (that he never had) rather than of your shared humanity with the rest of the world.

Baldwin’s critique of white Christians in 1979 is no different than current critiques of white evangelicals who believe/d they are chosen by the Creator to plunder and control land and resources and people wherever they see fit.

If still alive, Baldwin would know that Western interests are after that 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves in Gaza that would make Palestine energy independent. That road to energy independence for Palestine was interrupted when Hamas struck Israel in a surprise attack in October of 2023; an attack that Israel uses to justify its deliberate and coordinated genocide of the people of Gaza.

When Baldwin wrote his Open Letter to the Born Again, Israel was then selling oil to Apartheid white-controlled South Africa; Nelson Mandela was still in prison and would remain there for another 11 years. And none of the above kept Jews safe anywhere in the world.

Now we have the savage-in-chief ordering the strike of a Venezuelan ship that was allegedly carrying narcotics when what Felon 47 and his empire-addicted crew wants is access to and control of Venezuela’s oil. Venezuela’s fighter jets flew over America’s Naval ships as a show of military strength. The stoking of fear is deliberate, the villainizing and “othering” of people who are not white is deliberate.

So, consider this. Latin America is mineral and resource rich. Gaza is mineral and resource rich. Venezuela’s allies are China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, Turkey, with additional allies on islands in the Caribbean that receive Venezuela’s subsidized oil. What you have been taught to assume/believe about being classified as “white” will lead you down a dark alley that neither you nor the entire nation of America will walk out of. You and many soldiers, however, might exit in body bags.

What so many white people fear is that other people they have never fully trusted might be correct in their analyses; the “others” might know something that they don’t know after having lived their entire lives believing that there was nothing they could not know or access. The captains of industry have always used you and made you their accomplices. This did not start with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. It started well before the pilgrims on the ship called the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock.

Baldwin once wrote that, “You must embrace what you fear.” I will add that you cannot embrace what you fear if you are unwilling to name it. Without claiming it or acknowledging it, you remain bound to a script that you believe you wrote knowing in your subconscious that something or someone else wrote it for you.

©️ Leslye Joy Allen

Privilege Can Make You Really Dumb

Posted on July 28, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

A few years ago, I received an email from a Black male performance artist that I know who is now retired. He dogged out another Black male performance artist after having attended a function. Don’t ask. I am not naming any names.

In this particular email he had nothing but vitriol for the other artist. I read his jealousy in every line because there was a time when the writer of this email was a hot topic of conversations. Yet, that ship had long since passed.

The performance artist that criticized the other performance artist did not know that who he was criticizing was loved by one of my most beloved and righteous late cousins. She was a cousin who helped damned near every Black performer who ever entered her orbit. You have seen her acting mentees, because they are everywhere. My cousin was one of the founders of The League of Professional Theatre Women.

The man doing all of this unnecessary critiquing did not know that the artist he criticized spoke at my cousin’s memorial services. For him to not know that simple fact basically meant he never listened to me. Men do that quite often. He never realized how completely offensive he was because I never bothered to respond to his unnecessary email. He never did any research before he opened his mouth. Or maybe he did know everything and just didn’t care.

An intelligent, well-educated Black woman not only does her background work but she also assesses what is best left unsaid as well as said. If she is in the process of cutting a good business deal with your Uncle, and she knows that you are on the outs with your Uncle, she will never mention you in any conversation with him.

Male privilege in any man of any color or race or ethnicity teaches men that they don’t really have to be all that concerned with the ideas or issues that women are interested in. Male privilege teaches that it is not really necessary for men to pay that much attention to the ideas or issues important to women in order to function. One of the men who did not succumb to the effects of male-centricity was the late tennis champion Arthur Ashe.

Ashe (above) was the only Black male athlete I ever heard who said things like, “The average man who talks about how many women he has bedded can’t even explain the hormonal changes that occur when a woman is menstruating.” I never forgot that because when he said it I knew that he could explain a woman’s menstrual cycle. He was a scholar, and an athlete that thought further than the head of his dick or the size of it.

Well, white privilege operates the same way as male privilege. Many white people assumed that they knew/know all they needed to know about Black folks, Latinos, Native Americans, and other peoples of color. Yet, now many of the most honorable among them are groping in the dark as to how they arrived at this moment in time in the United States where democracy and their liberties are at stake.

Have you ever wondered why school shooters in the United States are 95 percent male (and roughly 52 percent white males) and damned near no one raises the question “Is there something wrong with young males?”? You hear or read the occasional commentary or the occasional essay raising this point, but the obvious problems affecting boys and young men are swept under the rug for the sake of the illusion of male supremacy while the malevolence these crazy bastards inflict on children and adolescents are treated like isolated incidents.

If you do a quick Google search about the American population you will learn that Americans of every color, race, gender, and ethnicity only make up roughly 4.2 to 5 percent of the world’s population.

Let me repeat it another way. Roughly 95 percent of the population of the entire world exists outside of US borders; and 85 percent of the world’s population are people of color. There’s a little chart in Consumption by the United States that compares our consumption to other countries. Although this analysis was conducted in 2008, it does paint a disturbing picture of American excess.

There is a severe penalty for not paying any real attention to the thoughts and circumstances of people of color, and of people who are not Americans. There’s a penalty for not paying attention to the thoughts and circumstances of women, and particularly of women of color. I have written about American-centricity before; and the perils that go along with it.

As I write this, Felon 47 is in Scotland trying to fend off every question from Scottish journalists who want to know why he will not release the Epstein Files. Americans of all stripes need not think this will not reflect badly on all of us.

News is not always reported American-style everywhere in the world. What is important to us here in the United States is not always a headline somewhere else. Add the fact that Americans are primarily unilingual, and you can be sure there will be those moments when we just don’t know how damaged and inept we appear to the rest of the world because for most of us, all we speak is English.

The penalty is that we automatically know less than the people who we believe are less important than us; and we don’t find out how in the dark we are until we’re all in trouble. It is not Felon 47 that we need to worry about, but rather the future he is designing for us long after he is gone.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

You can also subscribe to my writings on Substack and stay in the loop with the best new research, history, journalism, prose, poetry, and etcetera.

The Steps Called Books

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

For people who have been reading my posts, you may have noticed that I have written about the United States’ severe literacy crisis twice on this platform. If not, you can read them here: The USA Literacy Crisis & This Election and Literacy Crisis, Part II.

This essay is Part III. Let me point out a few things first. Some 65 years ago in 1960, the United States was one of the most literate nations in the world. In 1960, only a handful of states in this country had an illiteracy rate of 10% for people aged 14 and over. The rest of the states registered only about 3% illiteracy. Now we rank 36th in the world for literacy among industrialized nations. There are other sources that place the USA at a literacy rate much lower.

In 2025, 21% of American adults are completely illiterate while 54% of adults read below the 6th grade level. I want to share with you in this essay, however, what poor reading and writing skills look like when these circumstances are also combined with educational red tape.

I taught College History courses for roughly 7+ years, from 2007 to early 2015. My first 2 years, I taught at a Junior College that had several campuses outside the city limits of Atlanta in the outlying metropolitan areas. My last 5 years I taught at large state universities. Junior Colleges are structured for students who have some academic deficits. Students often attend Junior Colleges to fix a deficit in some academic discipline so that they can eventually qualify to attend a four-year institution to earn a Bachelor’s degree.

When I started teaching, I taught year round. After I taught on this particular campus for about two semesters, I noticed that this campus was slowly being converted into a cash cow. The school started accepting anyone who could pay tuition and occasionally referred to students as “customers.” That did not go down well with me and a lot of other Instructors and Professors.

Most of my History students had some problems with reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. I usually spent the first 3 weeks of every semester correcting grammar and insisting that they trust their answers and their own instincts.

When I asked a simple question, initially none of them could state the obvious answer. I demanded that my students give complete and well-thought out answers and opinions in class discussions instead of the abbreviated and one-word answers that chronic text messaging had fostered.

The majority of my students rose to the occasion. They did the work, read my comments, listened to my instructions and suggestions, and put in the extra time needed to get up to speed in writing and having in-depth discussions about History. I did have one student, whose identity I never knew, who complained about having to write 3 five-page long History papers. Imagine having to write 3 papers in a 16-week long semester in college.

I learned later through the grapevine that this student allegedly had an inappropriate relationship with some man in the Junior College’s administration to who that student complained. One day I was informed that I would have to attend a meeting with my Department Chair and the Ombudsman of the School.

During the meeting, both my Department Chair and the Ombudsman kept telling me things like “Many of these students might not know how to interpret what you tell them. They might not understand what you say to them or write on their papers. One student said you told him or her that they could not write!”

I was confused and raised these points: “I have NEVER told a student that they cannot write. I have told or wrote to many of them, however, that they needed to take a good writing course so that they can improve their writing skills and get more practice writing cogent papers. Also, I speak grammatically correct English in the classroom. How can I know when a student cannot understand grammatically correct English? What type of language or techniques are you asking me to use?”

They both stopped talking for about 30 seconds. I interrupted their silence. “Are you asking me to water down my curriculum?!” No one answered my question. They both began to reiterate how much the students might not understand what I asked students to do. I repeated the question FOUR more times. They NEVER answered my question.

When they suggested that I attend a seminar on Customer Service Skills, it was all I could do to hold my tongue. Then my Department Chair finally ruptured this charade of a meeting and asked me, “Do you want this job?”

I swallowed hard and paused for a good 20 seconds and responded, “That’s a rather loaded question, don’t you think? Obviously, when I applied for this job, I wanted and needed a job. I still do. However, anyone who might be offered a better job somewhere else would probably take the better job. That includes me too.”

When I walked out of that office, I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. The Department Chair’s secretary looked at me as I exited and said “Leslye, what did they do to you in there?! Please, please don’t look like that.” I told her I would come back later and fill her in on the details after the Department Chair went to lunch.

So, here was the dilemma. That handful of students that never had any intention of studying and improving their literacy and writing abilities were now expecting to receive passing grades when they were just as inept at the end of the semester as they were at the beginning of it. That meeting, however, was not my worst moment on that campus.

A young Black woman student emailed me and asked me, when the time came, to write her recommendation letter to Spelman College. She had sent in an application to Spelman and assumed that she would be accepted. When I checked her records, she only had a GPA of about 2.0.

Spelman College is a Historically Black College for women that has always teemed with academic brilliance. No girl graduating high school will even be considered for admission with a GPA less than a 3.5. The average GPA of students who are admitted is a 3.8. It is a highly competitive school with an admission rate of only about 34% of applicants.

I very delicately wrote to this young woman that she would need to pull her grades up in order to get into Spelman. I wrote that she should not be discouraged because, “I know you can do it if you work hard and apply yourself by taking some additional classes.” This was my attempt to tell her the hard truth without crushing her dreams or suggesting that she give up. I signed my name to the email, pressed the “Send” button, and sat and cried for about 15 minutes.

It took me years to understand that people who don’t read well or who rarely read at all constantly misinterpret the meanings in spoken and written language. They also assign their own meanings to what people say and write with little to no comprehension. They make decisions based on what they think or feel about something a person said or wrote.

That is where we are in the United States right now. We have a majority adult population that responds to most political propaganda with their emotions and assumptions, never exactly or entirely based on actual facts. Moreover, many don’t even know where or how to look for the facts.

If the Democrats do not figure out how to reach out to semi-literate people stumbling in the dark with information they can barely decipher, then the Democrats are in danger of losing elections for the next several decades. The Political Left is also doomed to be reduced to little more than a group of well-read, but also self-righteous, ideologues that do not know how to reach the people they need to reach who don’t fit the definition of “well-read.”

One of the things that made my home boy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. so effective was that he was a young man with a doctorate degree who could go hang out in a pool room and shoot pool and talk trash with the men who hung out there as easily as he could address heads-of-state. He could render presidents and prime ministers speechless because he was better educated and more in-tune with what people needed than the vast majority of them.

He could talk with ease to the poorly educated and to the best educated. For those who don’t know, Martin Luther King Jr. was an exceptional scholar who entered college at age 14 and who graduated Morehouse College at the age of 18 and had earned his doctorate by the time he was 25 years old. Kamala Harris’ Mama also had her doctorate degree by the age of 25. She was working in a laboratory when her water broke with her then soon-to-be-born first child that she named “Kamala.”

(Photo of M.L. shooting pool in Atlanta in 1966. The tall guy on the far right in the cap and glasses was then a Morehouse College Freshman named Samuel Leroy Jackson.)

What is my point? Education and literacy matters; and its singular purpose is to help people focus on what they need to be focused on. In 1960, a man or woman in the United States with little resources knew that the public library was still free and they made good use of it. Today, our semi-literate majority adult population that cannot stay still long enough to read a 5-minute article because they are always ready to look at something that is “trending,” is what we are confronted with now.

Long after I left the classroom, I ran into one of my former students from the Junior College where I once taught. He was attending Georgia State University and was about to graduate. Excited to run into me, he said, “I hated you back then. But you pushed me and demanded that I get the work done. Now, I can’t stop reading and doing research. I cannot read enough BOOKS!”

Hugging his neck I said, “Don’t ever stop. The more you dig the more you will know.

So, in the names of your favorite teachers, instructors and professors, please keep talking about the truths and the dangers of a largely illiterate and poor reading nation. Our welfare as a nation and as human beings depend on it.

I was am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

You can also subscribe to my writings on Substack and stay in the loop with the best new research, history, journalism, prose, poetry, and etcetera.

The Loophole, the Farmer and the Lobbyist

Posted on May 13, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

When I read comments by many people who express their shock and disgust at Felon 47, I share their pain. Yet, I am reminded of what they have not paid much attention to.

(In the year 2000, prisoners pick cotton at the Ferguson Unit in Texas in the prison’s cotton fields, Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein, Getty Images)

I taught my History students to think outside the box, and connect the dots. After establishing that American Chattel Slavery was an enormous agricultural enterprise that literally funded and built the United States, I would have my students read the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution which allegedly ended slavery in the United States:

“Section 1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

First, it was always possible to abolish slavery without it ever being justified as a punishment for a crime. The loophole stands out because it was deliberately placed there.

Second, Congress had the power to enforce the 13th amendment through further legislation. So, if Congress was silent about abuses of this amendment, one might get away with imprisoning and/or forcing the labor of just about anyone. Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th brilliantly examines the loophole in the amendment, but I want to go just a bit further.

Now, how many of you on the Left have recently complained about Democrats in Congress not fighting hard enough against the policies of Felon 47? We can cherrypick the most vocal Democrats, can’t we?

That leads me to something writer Carlyn Beccia wrote in her brilliant investigative essay “Don’t Tell MAGA, But Trump Plans to Increase Immigrant Labor.” (I highly, highly recommend reading this “free” essay ASAP.)

(Field of mid-growth grain Corn plants near England, Arkansas. Stock photo at Alamy)

Beccia noted that these days I.C.E. rarely shows up at American farms even though “six in ten agricultural workers are noncitizen immigrants.” She argued that Felon 47 is deporting Brown immigrants as a ruse to throw raw meat to his racist, stupid ass base.

He pretends that he is cleaning up the country by putting alleged criminal riff-raff out of the country, while he capitalizes on a different type of immigrant status, namely H-2A visas that have been in use for years.

Here’s the rub as Beccia points out— Felon 47 did not start any of this. Mega agribusinesses like BayerAg, Syngenta, AcreTrader, Archer Daniels Midland Co., CHS, Inc., Freight Farmers, Heinz Seeds, Seedo Corporation, Sakata Seed Corporation, DOW, Rijk Zwaan and many others will reap in the profits while American farmers (many of whom are MAGA supporters) will still struggle financially.

By using immigrants with H-2A visas, there is less money to be paid out, no pressure to guarantee permanent employment, and no negotiations to be made for poor immigrant workers if they are mistreated.

Unless you have your own garden and grow your own food, the French Fries you ordered at McDonald’s (made from a corn product, not a potato), and the food that sits on your table was produced by slave labor. Sidebar: H-2A visas allow businesses to hire foreign workers on a temporary basis when there are not enough American workers to fill the jobs.

(Salinas, CA, USA—June 19, 2015: Seasonal farm workers pick and package strawberries)

Agribusinesses are so brutally profit-driven that the countries of Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have made it illegal for native and neighboring farmers to trade seeds with each other.

Under pressure from agribusinesses to insure that the “intellectual property rights” of their seeds are not violated, agribusinesses pressured various African governments to eliminate farmers’ traditional farming methods in order to force farmers to purchase seeds rather than allowing them to trade their own. Their lobbyists threaten, cajole, and promise money to political parties and politicians in order to ensure these companies make a profit.

So, students/readers as we think about all of this on our way out the door of my classroom, let’s consider the following. It would be fair to say that the average civic-minded American citizen would do well to contact their representatives to make their grievances and requests known. Many of us can and often do lobby our representatives to encourage them to represent our interests.

At the same time, multi-billion dollar businesses employ and pay lobbyists. The average citizen does not have that kind of wealth. So, here’s a few questions students/readers: Why is lobbying even legal? Have you figured out yet why some Democrats are just going along with the program as if nothing is happening?

Class dismissed.

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

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Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

Category Archives: Political Commentary