From the Deep Place

Muhammad Ali and his younger brother Rahman Ali, with their grandmother provokes the thought of the loss in American life: the proper respect for the old, the wise old people, and the prospect of dying. It is embedded within Life to live, to die, and to profit from the benefits of Life, as a man, as a woman. What is wrong in the ideology of American life is the inherited disrespect for Life Europe peed into the souls of the Africans, and the First Nation's peoples! Undoing this is Sacred Work, and terrifying because it goes against what replaced who we are and were meant to become before 'they' came to kill, and take! - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 2/20/19

Muhammad Ali and his younger brother Rahman Ali, with their grandmother...

The Community of Greatness

Cassius Clay at just 12 yrs old, 1954 

 A young Cassius Clay, later to be known as Muhammad Ali, poses for a picture at just 12 years old. After having his bike stolen he tell the police office that was taking the report that he was going to ” whup whoever stole it”. The Policeman decided to take the young boy under his wing and teach him how to channel that aggression out in the boxing ring. He then introduced Cassius to boxing trainer Fred Stoner.  


 

A conversation between men...



flags of division

"I ain't going no 10,000 miles to help murder and kill other poor people. If i die, I'l die right here, fightin'! You my enemy, not no Chinese, no Viet Cong, no Japanese. You my opposer when I want freedom! You my opposer when I want justice! You my opposer when I want equality !!!" Muhammad Ali said in the late 1960's.

He was facing 5 years in prison and loss of this title, but it was not enough to make him small, or shy from his commitments to high principles, his family structure or his people.

It is important to reapply his words into the core of a man's manhood as a stance of power. Ali's manhood shook the pillars of the country and supported the freedom fights and fighters in Africa fighting against Colonial powers. Today, the illusion of freedom is expressed and popular in the mouths of white Americans saying simple minded phrases like, "Freedom ain't free" in efforts to justify invasions and costly bloodletting without a moral base. Afraid to develop one's manhood fails the women, disappoints the children and supports the oppression so keenly felt by one's own people in this system of government... - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories  [March 30, 2016] 

water spring to life is the healing journey avoided, but needed by men of war.
the principal element is the 'she' of womanhood the 'he' came from and needs to balance the
ache to war against other men. without the 'she of the water element men will engulf themselves in the
flames of war.

dawn wolf, keeper of stories 6.19.16
Luxuria Girls and Heels 

I continue to be amazed in this day and age, than many of us (Africans, Blacks, Nubians, the Original People or however we refer to ourselves) still don't get the point: "If you're not seated at the table, then you're on the menu".

Muhammad Ali took a principled stand when he refused to go to Vietnam to fight; it was a stand protected by our Constitution, and for which he was ultimately vindicated. It was his Constitutionally protected right. However, it is equally the right of those that choose to, to serve in the armed forces. In many regards, Africans all around the globe are still fighting the battle fought in America's Revolutionary War: "No government without representation." How much injustice would occur if Africans didn't have representation in government; medicine; law and law enforcement; media and entertainment; corrections; science and technology; education; sports, and the list goes on. How can we even begin to think of ourselves as having global significance when we want to limit our scope of development and influence?

We have become too fascinated with the most outspoken; the most articulate; the most glamorous and charismatic, so much so that we erroneously believe that they alone write history. For every Ali that refused to go fight, there were hundreds of thousands that did, that fought against racism within the armed forces and made it better for other Africans at home and abroad whose names and deeds remain unknown; I know because I was one of them. Don't fight just for one right for people: fight for them ALL. - Bruce Cox 3.30.16




gun carried by a Marine we imagined as a woman in the Armed Services. I said that because when the thought of white women in the military began to take hold on the country's disbelief in the notion the first and only image that any of us could envision was a scantly clad woman with a gun on the front line having her period! There were so many jokes around that visual to the point it initially defeated the idea. It couldn't be taken seriously. The thing was it was white women pushing this and if there was any group unqualified it was white women! That was the estimation of those women among Black folks, who ridiculed the idea. White women were not taken seriously by Blacks because they came across as weak, and the idea of a super hero type woman was more likely than not going to be a Black woman, or an African one; not some weak kneed blond with a perm and a tendency to feign helplessness! - Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories 1/23/17

I remember the impact upon the country when Ali made that stance. Black people were different back then. There was a shared sense of challenge to what enslaved the thought process. Unlike today fear was overcome as a collective and individually. Today, fear is embraced and passed off in an indifference to what is important: redefinition of the meaning of being free! - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 3.30.16




gun carried by Angie Vu Ha in a jungle (2010)

Hidden from Today: our stories



Lola Falana greeted by Muhammad Ali



Leslie Uggams had the first variety show headed by a Colored person
since Nat King Cole's show in the 1950's



Cartoonist, Zelda "Jackie" Ormes was a first. Here with her creation Patty-Jo doll!!
But, fellas! Fellas can we first stop and talk about how fine she was?

OK. Now we got that out the way... Her legacy. Would she be proud of her innovation, her achievement and would she be deeply moved by how her vision altered Blacks from the practice of measuring themselves against white standards? What would she feel looking into how we see ourselves today? Would it have been in vain? Is it vanity to have a vision of a people better than how the people see themselves? - Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories 6.26.16 

Altovise Davis (August 30, 1943 – March 14, 2009) was an American entertainer, best known as Mrs. Sammy Davis, Jr.
 

The GREATEST is GONE!



Muhammad Ali loved and adored by his wife.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA said,


"Muhammad Ali was The Greatest. Period.

If you just asked him, he’d tell you. He’d tell you he was the double greatest; that he’d “handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder into jail.” But what made The Champ the greatest – what truly separated him from everyone else – is that everyone else would tell you pretty much the same thing.

Like everyone else on the planet, Michelle and I mourn his passing. But we’re also grateful to God for how fortunate we are to have known him, if just for a while; for how fortunate we all are that The Greatest chose to grace our time.

In my private study, just off the Oval Office, I keep a pair of his gloves on display, just under that iconic photograph of him – the young champ, just 22 years old, roaring like a lion over a fallen Sonny Liston. I was too young when it was taken to understand who he was – still Cassius Clay, already an Olympic Gold Medal winner, yet to set out on a spiritual journey that would lead him to his Muslim faith, exile him at the peak of his power, and set the stage for his return to greatness with a name as familiar to the downtrodden in the slums of Southeast Asia and the villages of Africa as it was to cheering crowds in Madison Square Garden.

“I am America,” he once declared. “I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me – black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me.”

That’s the Ali I came to know as I came of age – not just as skilled a poet on the mic as he was a fighter in the ring, but a man who fought for what was right. A man who fought for us. He stood with King and Mandela; stood up when it was hard; spoke out when others wouldn’t. His fight outside the ring would cost him his title and his public standing. It would earn him enemies on the left and the right, make him reviled, and nearly send him to jail. But Ali stood his ground. And his victory helped us get used to the America we recognize today.

He wasn’t perfect, of course. For all his magic in the ring, he could be careless with his words, and full of contradictions as his faith evolved. But his wonderful, infectious, even innocent spirit ultimately won him more fans than foes – maybe because in him, we hoped to see something of ourselves. Later, as his physical powers ebbed, he became an even more powerful force for peace and reconciliation around the world. We saw a man who said he was so mean he’d make medicine sick reveal a soft spot, visiting children with illness and disability around the world, telling them they, too, could become the greatest. We watched a hero light a torch, and fight his greatest fight of all on the world stage once again; a battle against the disease that ravaged his body, but couldn’t take the spark from his eyes.

Muhammad Ali shook up the world. And the world is better for it. We are all better for it. Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to his family, and we pray that the greatest fighter of them all finally rests in peace." (June 4, 2016)





Malcom X & Muhammad Ali in 1963



Muhammad Ali and Fidel Castro embracing each other.

 

Black Negro & Colored Men set against Niggers

MUHAMMAD ALI

"The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up." —Muhammad Ali

“Growing up in his era impacted the approach to life of every colored and Negro man. It affected how the white man, Mr. Charlie, was dealt with. Ali's distain for the boundaries Mr. Charlie set was in a style similar to the old folks' hero, Jack Johnson. These things meant a great deal. It meant life or death because white folks took it personal about a 'nigga' outa his place, and many a colored lost his job, home (sometimes) or his life over the fights between Ali and Frazier, or some white fighter and another Black fighter who like Ali defied the social construct of the times.

There was a thing white men used to say to each other in the South. “A man ain't a man ‘til he’s had himself a nigger!”

Often times them good ol’ boys used to rape Black men before they killed them. That was some sick shit, but that happened. It was terrifying; numbing. It numbed the senses the vulgarities of white racial superiority. Muhammad Ali was bold. He stood up against that sick shit. We took stock and many of us mimicked him in our daily lives. It gave us bold courage and clarity that politeness and manners could not wrestle from the larger and menacing white society. Whites understood one thing and one thing only: war, strength, blood, and power as they defined power. It took high intelligence to be a Negro, and build a life for yourself and your family.

Today there is an odd weak almost sissy like quality in the definition of manhood in the decades after the greatness of Ali's glory days in too many Black communities. I understand why, but it shouldn't be. Ali, James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, Marcus Garvey, Stokley Carmichael, Miriam Makeba, Pharaoh Sanders, Chuck Brown, Nancy Wilson, Adam Clayton Powell, Dr. Carver, Miles Davis, Jesse Owens, Dennis Banks, Ethel Waters, Ma Rainey, Ossie Davis, my father Herbert L. Woods, Benjamin Mays, Joan Baez, Peter Paul & Mary, even Captain Kangaroo had a hand in developing the colored into the Negro into the Black into the African-American. Those stories have not been properly handed down, and as a consequence we have the remnants of broken shards of fine pottery crying for validation instead of boys becoming men who can, unlike their grandparents, protect their manhood and their families legally. They don’t know from being told that it was against the law for a Black man to have the power to protect his family until recently, and Muhammad Ali’s boastings were not grandstanding. It was a political and spiritual act of power, of defiance, and mostly importantly an act of war against an idea of Self that did not come from Self!

It is the responsibility of every generation to validate the actions and lives of their fore parents and their champions and heroes into the lives of their children, and grandchildren in such a way the legacy of lives lived in service are honored and the momentum of change moves ever on and forward. That sums up Muhammad Ali to some degree for a soul that knows not who he or she is and where they come from. Muhammad Ali is heralded by the world, but he was foremost the mouth with the voice of his people before white America embraced him as they do now. He was pretty. His body was made not into a sacrifice, but a living testament of beauty, lethal power, rage, dance, fortitude, and raw Black masculine energy.

My word to my people Red and Black; “Conjure up the spirits of your people’s great ones in your thoughts and in your living let them live animated lives.”

These are my words, my thoughts and feelings. I am Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories.”

© Gregory E. Woods

May 30, 2012

LAST SESSION

Marilyn Monroe behind the camera by Bert Stern
in the last session he did with the actress.

Doll Deluxe

COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert, and at times illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveying, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations.

The FBI has used covert operations against domestic political groups since its inception; however, covert operations under the official COINTELPRO label took place between 1956 and 1971. COINTELPRO tactics have been alleged to include discrediting targets through psychological warfare; smearing individuals and groups using forged documents and by planting false reports in the media; harassment; wrongful imprisonment; and illegal violence, including assassination...PERIOD. To stop the birth of a Black Messiah, who will give birth to this "black" messiah...A BLACK WOMAN...! - La Dessalinienne Jean-Jacque

Doll Deluxe
March 6, 2013

"There is a spirit within the context of the projection of the idea of a Black woman's Messianic energies I understand, and recognize as the ascension of conscious awareness and development of the Sacred Feminine. It is a spiritual work, and an awakening that does not lull one into the stupor of waiting for a Messiah, but pulls one deep into the spiritual work of recapitulation, and unlearning. It is a frightening task for women, and men, but for men the terror of such an undertaking keeps the lot of us within the confines of the churches, and mosques where reigns high the fundamental flaws, and sources of our tragedies. From those 'houses' precious few venture from."- Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 5.4.13

Muhammad Ali walking the streets as a young man.

Philosophical Musings

"Modern colonialism won its great victories not so much through its military and technological prowess as through its ability to create secular hierarchies incompatible with the traditional order. These hierarchies opened up new vistas for many, particularly for those exploited or cornered within the traditional order. To them the new order looked like (and here lay its psychological pull) the first step towards a more just and equal world. That was why some of the finest critical minds in Europe (and in the East) were to feel that colonialism, by introducing modern structures into the barbaric world, would open up the non-West to the modern critic-analytic spirit.

Like the 'hideous heathen god who refused to drink nectar except from the skulls of murdered men', Karl Marx felt, history would produce out of oppression, violence and cultural dislocation not merely new technological and social forces but also a new social consciousness in Asia and Africa. It would be critical in the sense in which the Western tradition of social criticism-from Vico to Marx had been critical and it would be rational in the sense in which post Cartesian Europe had been rational. It is thus that the a historical primitives would one day, (the expectation went) learn to see themselves as masters of nature and, hence, as masters of their own fate.

Muhammad Ali & Kwame Nkrumah in 1964

"A world view which believes in the absolute superiority of the human over the nonhuman and the subhuman, the masculine over the feminine, the adult over the child, the historical over the ahistorical, and the modern or progressive over the traditional or the savage. It has become more and more apparent that genocides, eco-disasters and ethnocides are but the underside of corrupt sciences and psychopathic technologies wedded to new secular hierarchies, which have reduced major civilizations to the status of a set of empty rituals. The ancient forces of human greed and violence (one recognizes) have merely found a new legitimacy in anthropocentric doctrines of secular salvation, in the ideologies of progress, normality and hyper-masculinity, and in theories of cumulative growth of science and technology!" - Mereana Taki 8.8.14

conceptual idea of Miho Yoshioka, actress

The CLAYS

The Clays crossing the threshold.
Yesterday 

"As time goes on I forget how fine the women were in those days. One can get bogged down with issues and emotions of and from a time and not remember the small things that made those eras special and dynamic..." - Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories 7.2.14

Sonji Clay and her husband Cassius Clay when they were married.
Yesterday 

C H A M P I O N ! ! ! !

He Walked The Earth As A Man! 

Muhammad Ali walking the streets as a young man in the 1960's was the epitome of a champion walking with American Black men of the time in step with what resonated within the fiber and the soul of the bones of Africans back on the continent, and throughout the African Diaspora needing the affirmation, and the knowledge of how to walk like a man in a world drawn and quartered by white men. Even little colored boys and their Mommas sensed this intelligence.- Gregory E.Woods, Keeper of Stories 12.15.13 

Muhammad Ali talking to a little boy. 

A Father's Distance A Son's Angst

As an adult no matter how good or how bad you were parented you have to unravel some kind of mess your parents left tangled within you. On the other hand parents are responsible for leveling the angst of it all and owning up to their good and their hand in the damage done parenting their child, or children. Mistakes are always made by parents. But, to exclude parents, if they are alive, from the inner work is not wise. Their perspective is indispensable to understanding the elements living within you, and the circumstances you find yourself living in. 

I know Muhammad Ali is out of the picture, but I cannot, and none of us can fathom the deep feelings of his son. If Ali Jr. can't reconcile with his father in this realm he should, if he knows how, go into the realm of spirits to talk, bitch, and commune with his father's spirit. Or he can do this simple, but effective practice of word song. 

From the Hawaiian tradition is a prayer, Ho'oponopono, and it has four things Ali Jr, or anyone needs to say daily and directed towards the person(s) whose relationship is damaged between the two of you. 

I'm sorry.

Thank you.

Forgive me (you).

I love you.

Said daily it proves effective in ways you don't explain. You can't. You need live this, and observe how it works in relationships and personally.  I know there are three stages of forgiveness, but one needs tools and if someone like Ali Jr. ain't got 'em, if it hurts enough, he'll find a way to get them. The question to his manhood is when is enough enough? 

- Gregory E. Woods, 2.1.14



One man wrote: "This is an old story. Several years ago, Junior was working as a handyman at a Virginia Theme Park. (He grew up in Chicago in the home of his maternal grandparents who could barely make ends meet while his mother, Khalila lived with her new husband in the Florida area) He has always sought financial support from his father but Lonnie kept Ali Sr. at a distance, no doubt to protect him from leeching friends and relatives, like Ali Sr's brother Rahman, whom Ali was paying alimony and child support for. As he is now past the age of forty, Junior has long had the opportunity to stand on his own two feet, much like the son of Drew "Bundini" Brown (Ali's cornerman) who didn't have a relationship with his father as well and yet became a commercial airline pilot. - Teddy Parker 

DARKER THAN BLUE

“Se uma mulher tem brilho nos olhos, nenhum homem irá reparar se ela tem rugas em volta deles.”
Dolores Del Rio 
by Celina Coelho

Malcom X, his children and Muhammad Ali

in 1968 Change came...

James Brown & Muhammad Ali in 1968
by Robert Stegstacke

1968 was the year Black Americans were given full citizenship. Because of an inability to properly negotiate for Power with Power, or the ability, the willingness to ask the right questions of self, first; our freedom was given piecemeal and the option to keep slavery intact was not challenged. Every 25 years our citizenship is up for a vote. Are a people free whose freedom was given to them? - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories