Avant-Garde Journal, Philadelphia, PA (2025)

07/31/2025

The Soul of John Brown — by Blaise Laramee

"The martyr’s spirit widens after death. Given to a great cause, offered in sacrifice for a principle, their life spins out and upward, toward the infinite and into the living history of men’s consciousness. Such a man was John Brown. And yet as the years march on, the wide lesson of his life has been flattened. Some know the song, and can sing, 'His soul goes marching on,' but of what quality was the soul, and what moved it? What was the height and depth and breadth of his life? What forged that spirit, so unyielding and yet so tender, so moved by the suffering of the enslaved that he would die to see them free? What could the soul of John Brown mean to the American people today, and especially to the masses of white poor? And could we, in our time of great confusion and moral crisis, see such a spirit live again?

John Brown is an enduring symbol of American history, and for good reason. He holds a special place of honor in the heart of Black folk. But we must be clear on the reason his life holds an eternal lesson, or risk losing a potent weapon for the people. For many today, Brown’s life is shortened to just the three days of his attack on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859, and thus a two-dimensional John Brown is produced and reproduced.

He is claimed by elements of the white left and by those whose conception of revolution begins and ends with armed struggle and guerrilla warfare, who romanticize the gun and the individual act of violence. For them, John Brown is exemplar of the anarchist propaganda of the deed, a Luigi Mangione hoping to incite wider violence and popular revolt with a brave but doomed act. Brown is sometimes claimed by Marxist theorists and his life squashed into a limiting framework of pure class consciousness.

It is John Brown’s moral choice to reject whiteness and struggle to defend the humanity of Black folk that, more than the shock of his attack on Harper’s Ferry, or even the attack itself, makes him a man for today. He saw the anti-slavery struggle as the struggle of his time which held in its great and terrible circumference all others. In the midst of a stifling white supremacist social system, and against all social laws of the day, Brown made a choice — and it is this capacity to make the moral choice which makes every ordinary human being an extraordinary force for change. The moral imperative is the revolutionary imperative, and the choice before us today, as it was for Brown then, is the moral choice."

Read the full essay: https://avantjournal.com/2025/07/03/the-soul-of-john-brown/

07/28/2025

Three Black Kings: Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Sun Ra (Part One) — by Michelle Lyu

"In 1974, Duke Ellington writes his final composition Three Black Kings (Ballet for Orchestra). This tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. grieves King’s 1968 assassination, and eulogizes him alongside Black Kings Balthazar and Solomon. Ellington described the Bible as containing 'all the other books' and in his vision, Martin King is lifted up among the guiding stars of humanity’s sky. Ellington is discovering Truth, and modernizing it.

Just as we received the gift of one King, we received a single Duke. Or as he was affectionately called, The Duke of Ellington. Such men are the royals of our civilization; those who are instruments of all that is pure and futuristic in our young yet weary nation that struggles to be reimagined. Of the disparate sounds and strivings of the enslaved African, Duke articulated a new language, orchestrated the letters of America’s musical alphabet. All modern music to emerge from this country that can move the hearts and souls of men, women and children, has been shaped by the creative, intellectual efforts of Duke Ellington and the Ellington Orchestra.

The revolutionary music created by Black folk has not just been forgotten today, it has been deliberately lost and misunderstood. The cultural landscape today is so commercial, so produced and lonely that it has shattered people’s imaginations of what is possible. That this music is not broadly known, and especially by youth, can only be explained by the decisions of an elite who have decided what parameters of culture and art are permitted. But in America, Black geniuses created great music, so that we may have, renew and create great music again."

Read the full essay: https://avantjournal.com/2025/07/03/three-black-kings-ellington-mingus-part-one/

07/20/2025

China and America: For Men to Know Men — by Alice Li

"The modern history of the Chinese people is part of the world history of the previous century that has been marred by the development of the few at the cost of the many, by wars and the loss of human lives, and by dominance and immorality. Yet, it is also part of that wonderful history that has seen the greatest peoples’ struggles for freedom, the cooperation of once colonized nations, and the development of new principled relationships between men. To understand the current changes in the world now coming out of Asia and Africa, we need to understand the tasks and what remained unfinished of that revolutionary history. And in doing so, we are faced with the duty to know our revolutionary legacy so that we may join China and the world not in war, but in peace and brotherhood and answer the shared questions of modernity.

The world is forging new relationships and the American ruling elite faces a crisis of rule as it meets the distrust and contempt of its people. Yet the dying order and its elaborate network of media reporting, universities, and celebrities still continues to be able to stoke disunity and provoke war. What will the American people turn to in this transitional moment in history? Will we follow the narratives of the ruling elite and face the changes in the darker world with hostility? Or will we turn to a different set of relations and take up our responsibility to bring about peace and a new world in becoming? The revolutionary history and example of the Black Freedom Struggle in this country point to a path towards the latter.

In the 20th century, the American ruling elite suppressed not only the freedom struggles of Asia and Africa — in Korea, Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, the list goes on — but also the sympathies of the American people through the 'Red' scare. Yet despite the cost and dominant anti-human ideology, Black America has consistently sought to know and express solidarity with the darker world. In the 1950s, W.E.B. Du Bois was arrested and tried by the state for being a 'foreign agent' for his peace activities towards disarmament and abolishment of the atomic bomb. Yet he continued to visit, learn, and write of the democratic experiments of the Soviet Union and China, stating that the great tragedy of the age was that 'men know so little of men.' Paul Robeson advocated for the freedom of Black America and the unity of Africa. He sang the liberation songs of the Soviet Union and of China. For those activities, the state confiscated his passport for nearly eight years (which prevented him from attending Bandung in 1955). In spite of the persistent demonization of the North Vietnamese and glorification of war as patriotism, Muhammad Ali refused induction into the U.S. Armed Forces — 'my conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America… and shoot them for what?' As a result, he was convicted, fined, stripped of his Heavyweight Title, and suspended from boxing.

Du Bois, Robeson, and Ali were able to see through the fog of the American consensus for war because Black folk in America have seen both the facade and the truth of America. From the days of slavery through the promise of Reconstruction to the Third American Revolution, they have both heard and felt what America said about them — that Black folk are backwards and have no history — and known and strove for who they are — a people capable of building civilization. Through their religion, art, music, literature, and revolutionary history, Black Americans have sought to answer the question of 'What is the human and its relationship to others?' I argue that this profound endeavor and world view has created a new human being, able to see the downtrodden people of the world wherever they are in their struggle for peace and uplift."

Read the full essay: https://avantjournal.com/2025/07/03/china-and-america-for-men-to-know-men/

07/16/2025

'Freedom Can’t Wait — The Awaited Darker Humanity' by Serafina Harris

For Issue 4 of Avant-Garde.

See the full issue at avantjournal.com

07/13/2025

W.E.B. Du Bois, A Black Swan for This Historic Moment — by Anthony Monteiro

"W.E.B. Du Bois is a Black Swan. Black Swans are metaphorically and scientifically unexpected events which have huge and unusual consequences. Du Bois is that event in the intellectual and scientific history of modernity.

At the dawn of the 20th century, he began to see the world differently from almost all established philosophers and social scientists. In 1900 he declared the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the color line. He was insisting, in essence, that the problem of modernity was racial oppression and colonialism. He was also saying the crisis for modernity, democracy and social progress was the color line. He devoted his scientific and activist career to proving this and to scientifically showing the implications of this problem for the future and how to resolve it.

His thinking in its most expansive sense constituted an epistemic and ideological break with the intellectual and scientific consensus concerning race and society. Looking at things from the vantage point of the 21st century Du Bois’s vision was the beginning of a new world movement of thought, which went beyond the West’s scientific, ideological and philosophical worldviews.

The history of modernity shifted, in the Du Boisian view, to the formerly enslaved and colonized peoples. Hence, the history of humanity going forward would be determined by the darker races. He saw the crisis of modernity increasingly in civilizational terms. The first 500 years of modernity concluded in a comprehensive crisis of Western Civilization and the beginning of the civilizational reconfiguration of the world in Afro-Asiatic terms. The Du Boisian regrounding of thought established a new way of seeing the 20th and now the 21st centuries.

The unprecedented crisis of Western Civilization is of such depth and magnitude that it makes Du Bois more relevant now than at the start of the 20th century. In essence, Du Bois is a prequel to the future."

Read the full essay: https://avantjournal.com/2025/07/03/du-bois-black-swan/

07/09/2025

Muhammad Ali: World Champion for Peace and the Truth

Few experts believed that the brash young Cassius Clay could defeat the fearsome champion Sonny Liston. What they did not know is that he fought not just for himself alone but for a greater cause, taught to him by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. He shocked the world by defeating Liston for the heavyweight crown, but even more so by publicly announcing his joining the NOI the following day. No longer the brash, entertaining Cassius Clay, he arose as a world champion: embracing a liberation theology that refused to bend to the standards of white America. After winning the title, Elijah Muhammad’s student Ali did not tour European capitals; he toured West Asia and the African continent where he sought the company of the global anti-colonial struggle, leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser and Kwame Nkrumah. These leaders saw in the NOI and the broad Black movement, a sister force in the Bandung Spirit.

The War in Vietnam, was his tryst with destiny. He saw photographs of dead Vietnamese children and read about the genocidal war in Muhammad Speaks, the newspaper of the NOI, which served as a key platform for the global anti-colonial struggle. After his stance against the draft, the government took away his passport like they did with Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois before him. Ali said this was because the government knew that the masses of the world gave him strength. His travails made him beloved by the darker peoples of the world — the villagers of Bangladesh and Zaire and the Philippines.

The Black Freedom Movement produced a champion. At a time when boxing was the most popular sport in the world, Ali as heavyweight champion became the most famous man on the planet; a level of fame we cannot fathom. Nearly half the world watched his fights. Revolutionaries from South Africa to Vietnam to the U.S. cheered for him as a symbol of the fight against imperialism and white supremacy. The biggest celebrity in the world was a symbol of peace. Coretta Scott King called him a champion of peace and human rights; Ralph Abernathy called him “the March on Washington with a left hook.” Huey P. Newton wrote an open letter telling Ali he was a Black man who fought against the whole system of imperialism.

If there is one thing that made Ali beloved, it was his willingness to sacrifice for the oppressed. Solidarity, a subset of love, is something scarce today. We cling to material things and see our lives and worth as tied to them. In a time in which superpowers genocide children, at most we utter cautious words of sympathy. Yet, Ali shows us that to live one’s principles means to be willing to sacrifice everything — wealth, titles, even exposing one’s life to racist attacks.

Ali represents the Black Worker striving for a new modernity. He is a representative of a civilization of peace. Ali is one of Black America’s greatest gifts to humanity. The footage that remains of him, viewed billions of times over the decades, shows world humanity’s love for Black America. What would he have been without the moral choice? Cassius Clay, another prizefighter. Yet the impact of the people, their zeitgeist, and a liberation theology turned him into Muhammad Ali, a champion for world peace, truth, and humanity; a man for the future; a sign of the world to come.

The American people and world humanity have been changed through their love for Muhammad Ali. He is an icon of truth and world peace who lives in them. They see him as an example of what they can become with moral courage and strength. He was a man of the Third American Revolution, who embodied the freedom movement’s challenge to rethink notions of art, beauty, science, and democracy. He was a fierce, but gentle, Black embodiment of the truth, in his clinical pugilism, his poetry, his approach to the poor, children, and the oppressed.

The spirit of Ali, which is an embodiment of the Black Freedom Struggle, lives in the hearts of the people. It can be ignited when they revolt against warmongers and oppressors. When they strive to be people who cannot fit into a system of warmongering and oppression. When they see that the uphill battles of their day to day lives are for an eternal cause greater than themselves. When they see that art and beauty are not defined by the elites but something for everyone. When they begin to think about the world in their own terms and not those of elite intellectuals; it is this that still holds the potential to free humanity.

From the Editorial for Issue 4 of Avant-Garde Journal. Read the full Editorial here: https://avantjournal.com/2025/07/03/muhammad-ali-peace-truth-editorial/

07/06/2025

Man is Divine: A Conversation with Minister Ishmael Muhammad

"As the Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us, the Black man is the first and the last. And then he said if there even is a last, Alpha and Omega. He said there is no end to the Black man because he has no birth record. Every day that has a beginning has an end. You can’t put a date on the beginning of the original man, the Asiatic Black man.

What makes the Black man in America so special? And what puts him at the very center of what we are talking about? It is because, as we spoke yesterday, it is written that in the end God would choose a people who are considered no people at all. He would take the despised and the rejected. He would take the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the dead. Not dead people in cemeteries, but a people who have been destroyed. This is how God proves himself.

God chooses a people from the furnace of affliction. He takes the tail and he makes it the head. He takes the despised and the rejected and he makes them the new rulers on our planet. Then the scripture says, 'And this is marvelous in our sight.' See? But that is the power of God, and that is what the Nation of Islam represents. It’s something totally new.

And the future of the Black man in America is to serve God in the establishment of His kingdom and the establishment of the universal government — where all of us, regardless to your race, your color, your ethnicity, your class, your creed — all of us will live together in peace. Where’s the proof of it? The heart of the Black man.

It’s a heart made through suffering and pain, but a heart that is made to give justice to all people. No other heart on this planet is like ours.”

We are honored to present our interview with Student National Assistant Minister Ishmael Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, for Issue 4 of Avant-Garde Journal.

You can read the interview online here: https://avantjournal.com/2025/07/03/man-is-divine-interview-ishmael-muhammad/

Interview by Meghna Chandra, Jahan Choudhry, Neha Chivukula, Anthony Monteiro. Photographs by Michelle Lyu.

07/06/2025

"Great be the battle of life, Truth in the end shall win." — Muhammad Ali

We are proud to present Issue 4 of Avant-Garde, which we dedicate to Muhammad Ali, World Champion for Peace and the Truth.

Available online at avantjournal.com

06/26/2025

We are excited to launch Issue 4 of our journal Avant-Garde in a few days, dedicated to the great Muhammad Ali.

This issue will feature a special interview with Student National Assistant Minister Ishmael Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, along with essays, art, and poetry.

To get a print copy of the issue, join us in-person at our symposium this weekend at the Church of the Crucifixion (June 28-29; 807 Bainbridge St). We'll do the official launch on Sunday, with a presentation about our interview with Min. Ishmael.

Full issue will be available at avantjournal.com

04/29/2025

We are publishing the vision statement for our symposium “Seizing Our Future: The Revolutionary Music of Ellington, Mingus, Sun Ra and Bootsy,” May 10-11th, 2025 in Philadelphia. “The m…

03/10/2025

On April 27th, 1968, barely three weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King delivered a speech to an audience of peace activists. It was entitled “Ten Commandments on Vietnam” and drew from the notes enfolded in King’s pockets when he was murdered. These commandments commanded the people to reject the ideological consensus of the ruling elite for a War Economy, and to see the world from the perspective of humanity and children who long for peace and self-determination. Coretta Scott King explained how her husband saw the problem of racism and poverty at home and militarism abroad as two sides of the same coin: “The bombs we drop on the people of Vietnam continue to explode at home with all of their devastating potential.” Scott King was one of a long tradition in the Black Freedom Struggle who saw freedom, full employment, and peace as inseparable. They fought for a Peace Industrial Economy of the welfare state, rather than the warfare state.

Despite their tireless efforts, the vision of Coretta Scott King and the Black Freedom Struggle did not come to be. The War Economy elite extended their influence over Congress, labor unions, universities, and large swathes of the American people. They took over the American government apparatus and turned it into a warfare state, a form of state capitalism that directed America’s natural, economic, and human resources towards never ending wars. They successfully sold the lie that a permanent War Economy would bring prosperity to all Americans. The result was disinvestment in American cities and infrastructure, human potential squandered in crime and violence, and the deindustrialization and devastation of the American working class.

Today, the war consensus is breaking after decades of tacit approval. The deindustrialized masses register their anger in populist movements which reject the ruling elite and its institutions. Students march for Gaza, rejecting their war-beholden university leadership. America teeters between two choices: a continuation of racism, poverty, and war, versus a revolution of democracy, economic justice, and peace. In this context of mass disillusionment, a crisis of legitimacy unforeseen in the American body politic, we must return to the tradition of Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Ron Dellums, and others who fought to educate the people about the reality behind the War Economy and the possibility of an American renewal via a Peace Industrial Economy.

In her profound grief, Coretta Scott King spoke to the peace movement as the heirs of her husband’s legacy. As she said in that 1968 speech,

“You who have worked with and loved my husband so much, you who have kept alive the burning issue of war in the American conscience, you who will not be deluded by talk of peace, but who press on in the knowledge that the work of peacemaking must continue until the last gun is silent.

I come to you in my grief only because you keep alive the work and dreams for which my husband gave his life. My husband arrived somewhere to his strength and inspiration from the love of all people who shared his dream, that I too now come hoping you might strengthen me for the lonely road ahead.”

That road is no longer so lonely. Millions of Americans reject the War Economy and seek an alternative. The alternative lies in education for the truth about the stolen potential of the American people and the American renaissance that lies in the wings. The Black Freedom Struggle can lead us there, if we can believe in our capacity to build a Peace Industrial Economy through investment in humanity, most especially the children.

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