TYPED MANUSCRIPT: SPEECH AT TESTIMONIAL NOV 7 (ANNA LOIS RUSS) MAMA by BARAKA, Amiri (LeRoi JONES) - n.d.

n.d.. Manuscript. Some edgewear with a large segment of the bottom blank margin of the last page missing. Very Good. TYPED MANUSCRIPT (5 pages) of a speech given by Baraka about his mother and his upbringing. Titled and numbered by hand with several ink corrections, Baraka talks about the influence his mother had on his life. In part: "I have learned a great deal of what I do know in Newark, or with Nwk as a base. I was born here, the first generation in the north, after my grand parents and parents settled here, after being driven and called out of the black belt south, which is the homeland of the afroamerican nation in the usa.... I remember she came to school to fight for me, against the bigots & chauvinists once against a teacher who thought there was something too strange about this little boy who talked constantly, and had these enormous eyes.... She had not only told me about racism, but on several occasions I had seen her do battle with racists. One day we went into a fanny farmer candy store, on Washington St or Halsey St, and the woman in there wanted to call Brazil Nuts, Nigger Toes. I remember the confrontation vividly. Those are Brazil Nuts, Lady, my mother said, turning on her heel, and dragging me out of the place.... When I came back to Newark to live, after College, The AirForce and living in New York, we came talking black power, and my mother did not oppose this line. When the police tried to kill me in 1967 when they succeeded in killing 26 other black people, trying to make newark safe for imperialism, my entire family, was solid behind me -- and I think that event changed us all, and made us all hate injustice and racism a little more intensely." Much more. As far as we know, this was never published.