I always tell people the day the Latino, African American, Asian, and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning. We have the ability to take over this country and to do what is needed for everyone and to make things fair. But the problem is our communities are divided.
So opined Gene Wu. In a 2024 podcast interview that has recently resurfaced, this Democratic state representative from Houston, but born in Communist China in 1978, broadcast this anti-white racialist appeal (while predicting the end of life as we know it were all illegal immigrants in the U.S. repatriated).
Candidate for Texas Attorney General Aaron Reitz thinks that’s enough not only to disqualify Wu for the office he holds, but also to put the truthfulness of his naturalization process in doubt and thereby schedule him for denaturalization and deportation:
He likely concealed his anti-American sentiment throughout his citizenship application process—the details of which are conspicuously absent from the public record. Wu is a subversive whose citizenship should be revoked.
But where and when did I first catch wind of this rhetoric?
In the early ‘70s, as a Communist Party member working for Herbert Aptheker on his Du Bois projects, this Bronx native had reason to walk along 125th Street in Harlem from time to time, past the Apollo Theater, and, a few feet further east, an eye-catching mural.
This billboard broadcast to passersby the National Memorial African Bookstore, which shuttered in 1974 after 38 years on that spot. Being the class-conscious commie I then was, I laughed at the crude racialist appeal of the mural’s implicit “argument” (whose subscribers rarely think it through): “We outnumber you!”
To which a sensible person, regardless of race, will respond: So what?
By 1974, the world’s population was about four billion. Four years earlier, it had been about 3.7 billion. In 1967, the year the mural was created, Europeans and their diasporas could be only a smaller demographic minority globally. This has remained true. But if they are ever subtracted from humanity’s mix, the fantasized “coalition” will fall apart faster than a majority that’s defined only by subtraction, probably faster than Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Who even entertains such notions? Apparently, “progressive” chaps like Wu.
Still, the mural is fascinating, as is the perennial appeal of its unapologetic “Black nationalist” message, even in the third decade of this century. Let’s take a moment this Black History Month to remember a temple of history, its writing and its promulgation, an oasis of books that also served as a gathering place for the Black intelligentsia, literati, and cognoscenti. (Three non-African linguistic borrowings in one sentence!)
Founded by Lewis H. Michaux (1885-1976) in 1932 on 7th Avenue, the “House of Common Sense and the Home of Proper Propaganda” carried hundreds of thousands of books by and about Africans, African Americans, and non-white writers from around the world, a bookworm’s utopia you couldn’t find anywhere else. Its patrons were all indebted to the unambiguously Western Johannes Gutenberg.
You might also have been there when Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and so many others stopped by to browse, chat, or lecture.[1] (I was historically too late for that.)
The Apollo escaping demolition by a whisker, Michaux’s, as it was known in the nabe, was demolished to make way for the Harlem State Office Building, the first step on the long road to displacement, sterilization, and gentrification. Soon named to honor Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Harlem’s congressman and a champion of Black power, it displaced one of the neighborhood’s most visible centers of political conversation.
In other words, a government building meant to symbolize Black advancement displaced a literary mecca that had been nurturing Black intellectual consciousness for decades.
At least it affords the Clinton Foundation, bearing the name of Toni Morrison’s “first Black President,” office space in that storied neighborhood.
Note
[1] According to the New York Times’s August 27, 1976, obituary for Mr. Michaux, hereunder paraphrased, the National Memorial African Bookstore drew an extraordinary cross-section of Black political and cultural life. Among those who browsed its shelves were Kwame Nkrumah, later Ghana’s first president; Malcolm X; and W. E. B. Du Bois, who met the woman who would become his wife, Shirley Graham, there. Autograph parties brought figures such as Joe Louis, Eartha Kitt, Louis Armstrong, and Langston Hughes into the store.
Outside, on the corner that Michaux christened “Harlem Square,” speakers climbed stepladders to hold forth on Black nationalism. Michaux himself was involved in nationalist politics from the 1930s through the 1960s. He supported Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement, organized pickets along 125th Street to promote Black-owned businesses and demonstrated at the United Nations over events in Zaire and the murder of Patrice Lumumba. He led African Nationalists in America and served on the advisory board of Liberator, the magazine founded in 1960 that gave early national exposure to many Black writers and critics.
Through his store’s shelves, Michaux sought to give Black readers a vivid sense of their heritage and their contribution to world civilization. He liked to insist that he had never worked a day for anyone else—though as a young man he picked peas, washed windows, and later served as a church deacon. His brother, Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux, became a well-known evangelist. Lewis eventually left the church, explaining, “I don’t want any religion that takes away my individuality.”
He began selling books from a wagon before opening a storefront on Seventh Avenue (now Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard). He slept in the back of the shop. “You couldn’t find fifteen or twenty books by Black people.” Sales sometimes amounted to only seventy-five cents or a dollar a day; decades later, they could reach $1,500. By the time the store closed—after relocating in 1968 to West 125th Street to make way for the Harlem State Office Building—he had amassed some 200,000 volumes by and about Black people, the largest such collection for sale in Harlem.
Jean Blackwell Hutson of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture observed that the bookstore complemented the Schomburg by offering books that could be purchased and owned rather than merely consulted.
Michaux’s wit was as famous as his inventory. “Negro is a thing,” he would say. “Use it, abuse it, accuse it, refuse it.” “The only lord I know is the landlord,” he quipped. “I don’t have to pray to him—he comes every month for the rent.” Explaining his shift from ministry to bookselling, he remarked, “I left the pulpit for the snake pit.” As Black consciousness surged in the 1960s, he declared, “The white man’s dream of being supreme has turned to sour cream.”
Above the 125th Street storefront hung his credo: “Knowledge is power; you need it every hour. Read a book.” He liked to tell of a father who asked what his son should become. “A doctor,” Michaux replied, pressing into his hands The Negro in Medicine. Twenty-six years later, he said, he met the son again—now a physician.