On a quiet day … Reflections AMC 07

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The Allied Media Conference took place last weekend in Detroit. It was great to come home (I moved out to Brooklyn on June 2nd) to my community and be a part of such an amazing event. Crazy personal emergencies I had to deal with and all (I burned off some mad karma last weekend for real), the AMC was the most important couple of days that I’ve experienced in a long time.

They were important for many reasons. One, it gave me a huge burst of energy and hope. The folks that make up the Allied Media Conference are some of the most intelligent, creative, and forward-thinking people in this country (shit, the world). To share that space with them and hear about the work they’ve been doing, the motivations behind it, and the way it’s pushing things forward was incredible. The work represented in the room got me thinking about one of my favorite quotes by Arundhati Roy: “Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” Last weekend, I could hear more than just breathing. She came through in conversations, music, poetry, rap, books, films, radio, newspapers, hugs, laughter, and hot dance moves. Everybody was feeling it by the time they left—I was definitely not the only one leaving with mad amounts of inspiration.

Two, it solidified the importance of media work in my own mind. Media has been my main outlet for action and movement for the last few years. I saw what a positive effect it had in my part of the world, and I had talked to many folks from all over that relayed the same message about their experiences, but being in the room with them—seeing their faces, bouncing ideas off each other, seeing the connections made between others and the strength people gained from them—really affirmed to me that this is where I’m most useful. This is where so many things are happening, and this is where our stories will not only be told, but by telling them they will be used to mobilize, connect, and inspire. How fucking powerful is that??

Three, Detroit was IN THE HOUSE. Detroiters represented last weekend with grace and style. From the opening ceremony with local activists Grace Lee Boggs, Elena Herrada, and Charles Simmons, and local poets Will Copeland, Versiz, Angela Jones and D. Blair (who all brought me to tears multiple times with their powerful presence), to the many workshops and plenary sessions, to the Saturday night music show (it was off the hook! If you missed it …damn, I’m sorry), Detroit was showing her soul to the rest of the country and people were feeling it. This was an important exchange for both local and non-local folks. Elena called Detroit “the promised land” because she sees it as the birth place of a new paradigm for organizing our cities and communities, forever shifting the world. These are some powerful words. Something I do know for sure, people have a lot to gain by paying attention to what’s going on in Detroit, and Detroit has a lot to gain by people coming through to share their strategies with the folks living here.

Four, five, six, seven—I could keep going on. For now, those are my immediate personal reflections. It was exciting to see something that myself and the rest of the AMC organizing crew had worked so hard on and put so much of ourselves into come to fruition and be a huge success. Such a success, in fact, that Grace Lee Boggs said it was the most exciting conference she had been to since the 1963 Grassroots Leadership Conference. If that’s not high praise, then I don’t know what is. See her column below in the Michigan Citizen below.

I’m already looking forward to AMC 2008 (10th year of the conference, very cool). We got a lot of feedback about what was good and what needs to be changed (access to food was a big one. There will have to be some creative solutions to address that problem), so expect it to be even better next year. Thanks to all who came through and made it an unforgettable weekend.

9th AMC – A Movement Milestone
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, July 1-7, 2007

Last weekend’s 9th Annual Allied Media Conference (AMC) at Wayne
State University was the most exciting conference I’ve participated
in since the 1963 Grassroots Leadership Conference.

The 1963 conference was a milestone in the struggle for black power
because Malcolm used the occasion to link the black revolution in the
U.S. to the Cuban and other revolutions and to distinguish between
house Negroes and field Negroes. Two weeks later Nation of Islam
leader Elijah Muhammed suspended Malcolm for his “chickens come home to
roost” comment on JFK’s assassination. Jimmy was the chair of that
conference and I was the secretary.

At this conference a new generation of youthful movement builders came
out of obscurity. Emerging in a special time in which there is an
explosion of activity in the fields of alternative media, alternative
education and alternatives ways of doing politics, they have accepted
the challenge to direct this explosion towards a new movement to
transform society.

To begin with, the conference organizers, most of them members of the
Detroit Summer Collective, are Generation X activists, in their
mid-20s. Using cellphones, emails, the Net, and their imaginations,
they created more than 60 workshops, ceremonies and plenaries,
convened 150 presenters and 500 participants; found volunteers to
transport presenters and staff the registration tables, provided
housing/entertainment/literatu

re tables. The 42 page program booklet
gives a sense of the magnitude of their achievement,

At the conference young people in their teens and early 20s spoke
their minds and hearts freely in raps, workshops, plenary sessions,
without arrogance or anger but with the confidence of “works in
progress.” As Walter Lacey put it in a workshop attended by
professional media makers, “Detroit in the 20th century was the
birthplace of the military-industrial complex; today we are birthing
the new relationships between people that will change all that,”

Participants in earlier AMCs (the first eight met at Bowling Green
State University in Ohio) recognized that youth energies and the
Detroit setting made this year’s conference unique.

Friday’s all day Symposium on Popular Education began with my talk on
“A Paradigm Shift in Our Concept of Education” and continued with
packed workshops. I attended one on “Developing Popular Education
Curriculum” facilitated by Ora Wise. A teacher herself, Ora guided
participants, which included many teachers, step by step in developing
a curriculum using HipHop and other art forms to link the struggles
of high school youth in New York City’s multi-ethnic communities to the
struggles of the Palestinians and other marginalized peoples.

I especially appreciated Ora’s sensitivity to the needs of both
students and teachers because I have never forgotten the 1968 Ocean
Hill Brownsville struggle in which the mostly black community and
mostly Jewish teachers nearly came to blows over who should control the
schools

The participation of women also demonstrated the progress we’ve made
since the 60s.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons showed NO, her film on rape, which took a lot
of courage and struggle to make because the black movement for so long
insisted that breaking silence on this pain-filled issue would
jeopardize community unity.

Habibah Ahmad, who empowers youth through public access TV, showed
clips from her film on growing up in an African American Muslim family
in New York.

The workshop on Hip Hop and Cooperative Economics, facilitated by Ilana
Invincible, also broke new ground. After Hip Hop artists shared their
experiences in producing and distributing their own work, participants
were challenged to think seriously about how we can begin working
cooperatively both to sustain ourselves and to provide models so that
in the difficult days ahead cooperation and mutual support, instead of
depending on multinational corporations, become the norm in our
communities. Breakout groups brainstormed production, distribution and
promotion, and plans were made for follow-up.

At the opening ceremony on Friday night, New Yorker Sydette Harry
voiced the main lesson of the gathering. “We must start relating to
young people as people and not as children because they are the ones
who will be deciding our futures.”

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