Someone asked me the other day for advice on collecting the best essays of the past 20 years. I recommended the new collection of Glen Ford’s called The Black Agenda. I recommend it to everyone — including people who are not black. I’m not black. Glen Ford was my friend and an ally in the struggles for peace and justice. He was a leader and a brilliant and an always reliable speaker, writer, and organizer on anti-racism, anti-oligarchy, anti-poverty, and anti-war work. He was a key part of efforts to impeach George W. Bush (whose record we should all read Glen’s book to be reminded of it seems). This book is worthwhile just for the preface by Margaret Kimberley and the autobiographical introduction by Glen. I’ve considered Glen central to U.S. activism since about 2000, which seems a long time to me, yet his incredible saga, recounted in his introduction, actually breaks off just about when I met him. The essays, however, are from the past 20 years Glen Ford died in July 2021. He was executive director of Black Agenda Report and was previously co-founder of BlackCommentator.com. He had decades of experience in written media, radio, and television. He launched influential programming such as America’s Black Forum, the first nationally syndicated Black news interview program on commercial television, and Rap It Up. Black Lives Matter drew on what Glen had been saying and writing for decades — even if leaders of Black Lives Matter could receive his powerful criticism when they eliminated foreign policy from U.S. politics. Prison abolitionists have learned and will go on learning from Glen. You shouldn’t read these essays because Glen was a great friend and ally. But you should understand that his acerbic denunciations of some relatively good people came from someone who was a great organizer at the same time as being a fearlessly honest truthteller. I don’t think I ever quarreled with Glen. I think I probably offended him by suggesting that we’d have been better off without the U.S. Civil War if the very same thing could have been done nonviolently (as it was in much of the world). But Glen didn’t have time to take offense. He just changed the subject. Of course the big sticking point for millions of people (albeit a shrinking crowd) will be that Glen goes after both Republicans and Democrats. That ought to go without saying, given that I’ve already indicated his honesty. That it doesn’t go without saying is one reason we need to read Glen. His book opens with an unmatched takedown of the holiday of Thanksgiving, and rolls right through every culturally monumentalized bit of white supremacy. Yet, Glen saves a great deal of his analysis for the damage done by the Black Misleadership Class, by the Congressional Black Caucus, and by that More Effective Evil Barack Obama (I’m using Glen’s vocabulary). Glen actually rejected harm he’d done to Cory Booker’s political campaigns when he saw how much slicker and more destructive Obama was capable of being. In this collection we have Bush, Cheney, Iraq, Katrina, and all the now-rehabilitated evil of the gangs that Glen Ford compared to Pirates. And we have the Obama years, during which Glen lamented that black voters had become more in favor of foreign wars and civil liberties abuses and secret agencies than white voters for the first time ever. We even have Trump and Biden in this feast of Ford essays. Glen wrote with unmatched erudition and knowledge of mass media, at least unmatched among those willing to look as directly at the horrors before us as he was. He goes after those who would vote against Bernie. He goes after the outrageous shortcomings of Bernie. He goes after Facebook. Now outrage was safe. From here on out there will be no new injustice that I won’t wish I had a Glen Ford article about. Let’s make the most use possible of those we have.
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and was awarded the 2018 Peace Prize by the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation. Longer bio and photos and videos here. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook, and sign up for:
The Black Agenda
Foreword by Margaret Kimberley
“A talented and brilliant writer, gifted with an acerbic sense of humor and uncompromising in his integrity and courage, he will be very hard to replace.” —Chris Hedges
“Glen Ford was the most brilliant, courageous and consistent writer and journalist in the Black radical and independent tradition, of his generation—from the Sixties until now.” —Cornel West
“Glen Ford was the consummate journalist, a man who demanded rigorous analysis of himself and others, and who lived by the dictum of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.” —Margaret Kimberley, co-founder, Black Agenda Report
Black politics are key to recognizing the most important social dynamics of the United States. Over the past forty years, no commentator has been as deeply insightful about the paradoxes and personalities of Black American public life as the journalist and radio host Glen Ford.
In this stunning overview, Ford draws from his work for Black Agenda Report, one of the most incisive and perceptive publications of the progressive left, to examine competing struggles for class power and identity in the Black movement. In a survey stretching from the violent gentrification of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, through the engineered bankruptcy of Detroit, to the “more effective evil” of the Obama presidency, Ford casts a caustic eye on the empty posturing and corruption of the Democratic Party. This, he insists, depends on a Black constituency for electoral success, while using a co-opted “Black misleadership class” to sell out working people’s interests.
Profiling along the way storied Black leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Brown (for whom Ford once worked), The Black Agenda looks, too, beyond American shores, at US intervention in Libya, the Congo and the Middle East, showing how these are imbricated with racism at home. Ford concludes with a discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement, setting out both its pitfalls and potentialities.
344 pages • Paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-317-4 • E-book ISBN 978-1-68219-318-1
Foreword by Margaret Kimberley
“A talented and brilliant writer, gifted with an acerbic sense of humor and uncompromising in his integrity and courage, he will be very hard to replace.” —Chris Hedges
“Glen Ford was the most brilliant, courageous and consistent writer and journalist in the Black radical and independent tradition, of his generation—from the Sixties until now.” —Cornel West
“Glen Ford was the consummate journalist, a man who demanded rigorous analysis of himself and others, and who lived by the dictum of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.” —Margaret Kimberley, co-founder, Black Agenda Report
The Black Radical Tradition is real and enduring, but it is not expressed through participation in the Democratic Party. Rather, entrapment in the Democratic Party enclosure (within the larger Rich Man’s duopoly) grotesquely warps Black political behavior. This distortion profoundly diminishes the prospects for progressive electoral activity in the United States. More directly, the Black electoral imperative to seek protection from the Republican/White Man’s Party reduces African Americans to an appendage of the Democratic Party apparatus and, thus, of the capitalists that fund and control the Party. It subverts the essentially progressive nature of the Black polity, objectively enfeebling Black America, even as rich white Democrats pander to Black voters as the ‘soul’ of the party. It is true that the Democrats would collapse were it not for the Black core of the party. It is also probable that that would be a good thing. What is certain is that the Democratic Party oozes out of every orifice of Black civic society like a stinking pus, sapping the self-determinist vitality of the people and transforming every Black social structure and project into a Democratic Party asset. Black people—massed, organized, and fearless—shook this nation to its bones in the 1960s, before the Democratic Party achieved political hegemony in Black America, when there were less than two handfuls of Black congressional representatives and only some hundreds of Black Democratic officeholders to hold us back. Today, Democratic operatives attempt to smother the incipient Black grassroots movement in their lethal embrace—and some elements of that movement have eagerly hugged them back. The task of Black activists and their allies is to ensure that our first and last hope—movement politics—once again becomes central to the struggle, so that we can, as Dr. Cornel West puts it, “break the back of fear.” This will require the most intense internal struggle among Black Americans to break the chains that bind us to that vector of fear, the Democratic Party.
“One of the country’s most insightful political commentators and radical journalists” — Ajamu Baraka interviewed about Glen Ford’s THE BLACK AGENDA on On Contact (12/10/2021)
“Glen Ford Carves Up the American Empire” — THE BLACK AGENDA reviewed by CounterPunch (11/25/2021)
“Fiercely progressive and independent” — The New York Times publishes an obituary for THE BLACK AGENDA author Glen Ford (8/23/2021)
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