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/literature 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."
Email Grace Boggs Center,