Every leader is a product of the moment in history they are born. They have a history, but history first has them.  Great leaders arise where and when the conditions ripen for their great actions.  With the table set, we are what we know and do.  What we know and do is a mixture of fact, fiction, fantasy and fraud: preserve the core facts and discard the other three.   Social movements are born of classes, races, genders, generations, or cultures in motion.  Leadership of mass movements is forged to be revolutionary, reformist or reactionary/nazi. In this way leaders are chiseled and steeled in the period they were born into.  Skilled leaders not only have individual qualities adaptive to their own unique experiences, they also must be educated, trained, apprenticed, and nurtured.  In the past, grandparents/seniors/elders passed their wisdom through generations of extended Black families. This was an oral tradition.  Today, we must utilize modern means to preserve and pass on the wisdom of ages---the wisdom of our ancients.   

Our past scattered movements (maroons, abolition, anti-lynching, back to Africa, civil rights, women's rights, African centered, or African renaissance) desperately needed spokespersons---leaders who were unafraid, who had heart, who were tough-minded and yet fair, who grew in strength with each blow, who were smart and determined not to be defeated.  We remember them today because today we sorely need young leaders who are the heartbeat of the best of our humanity. Above all, we need leaders who will instill in generations a sense of purpose, passion and preparation so badly distorted by centuries of slavery, colonization, and new-colonization.

Possessing the characteristics demanded by the moment, the mantel of leadership will fall upon the broad and capable shoulders of this generation--the Black youth of today.  You as elders must prepare them by illustrating all of the knots and peripeteia (from cell to system) of how we got in this miserable condition and then expound learned lessons of how they should redeem, resurrect, and restore African civilization in this lifetime.  This is your responsibility.  Organize yourselves, set up your study cooperatives and publishing collectives, bring your ideas together, research facts and draw inferences, publish your independent guiding principles of wisdom (no religious mess of the oppressors).  Our children need your intimate understanding and wisdom, your own "gospels', your own "lessons" and "instructions" independent of outsiders.  This will require free minds, hearts, and the courage to do justice by our children, even if it requires fundamental inner change in you. You must be free of philistine fetters, the enslaver's religious dogma, superstitions, mysticism, speculation, fictions and illusion. Our children need master teachers (seba) who are not running scared of the results of their own free thought, people who put thoughts to paper then into action as planned activity, people for whom fidelity to learning and devotion to the causes of Africans worldwide are twin loyalties.

For those who have lived and struggled while being persecuted and ostracized, it is heart-warming to think of the honorable Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells, Marcus Garvey, Patrice Lumumba, Dr. Nkrumah, Paul Robeson, Dr. Dubois, Malcolm X, Steve Biko, Dr. Diop, Dr. Clarke, and Sonny Carson, and recently Dr. Hilliard.  They measured up and in the process towered high above their times and circumstances.  We know from history, that when an epoch ends, there is a tendency to forget stand-up Black leaders who whites and Arabs want forgotten.  In their place we are bombarded with the soft, confused, collaborating, head-scratching, shuffling mis-leaders they created---whites (in mind) passing as blacks (in body).  So, today, we must diligently honor and learn the lessons of our leaders of yesteryear who kept their revolutionary vitals in tact.  Justly honoring Black fighters demands preserving their progressive spirit, summing up their guiding principles, documenting their successes and failures, and publishing lessons learned.  Our children, our future leaders, and our people's futures depend on learned lessons from our past.  You are the storehouse, the house of life (per ankh), of those lessons.  

Your task is obvious. Assume your ancient role again: guide our young in the way of the ancestors. Give them a chance.  Give them new life.  There is so much to learn, and so little time before it all slips away.  For even the toughest among us, this task has been too much in the past.  But those of you who know what is at stake, those who have not given in to a string of broken hearts, a litany of lost lives, shattered dreams and broken promises---you can get this done.  And you must.  The future is now: in this moment, in this time, where you now stand.  It's up to you.  Destiny is what you make it. It is up to you, Elder.

Locked up in the belly of the beast, the prisons are filled with young, misled Black men and women. Many have completely lost their way, murdering, maiming, raping, drug dealing and molesting.  They deserve to be held accountable in the severest way for their degenerate action against our people.  Their victims were usually innocent women and children.  But they also need answers in this time. They need to atone, to understand what damage they have done, to repent, to be reborn---in this life.   They need to redeem, repair, and reparate in this world, not in some fantasy after-world. 

Many Black unemployed and working poor have become permanently confined to hustling in the rotting urban ghettos. They need a way out in this world not some pie in the sky.  AIDS, cowardice, family abandonment, domestic violence, dropping out, lying, cheating, drug abuse, wasting time, stealing, pimping, etc, are pandemic in the poor Black neighborhoods.  None of these problems can be resolved on a racial/class/cultural basis within this country---its (1) become completely independent or (2) somehow join the radical/liberal/moderate/conservative whites who don't want you against the Nazi Klan whites in some fantasy united front.  Like abolition, and the aftermath of reconstruction, a modern 40-acres and a mule will be yet another pipe dream.

Today, in the tradition of Black leaders of yesteryear, dedicated men and women are confronting the deteriorating social and economic conditions of African American workers. Our innocent children face the beginning of a society in social decay.  This process may take as little as 10 years or as many as 50 years (or more) to unfold.   You as elders must help our children to understand what is at stake.  All social revolutions begin as fundamental changes in the technology of the economy. Since the old society no longer conforms to the new economy, it cannot distribute what is produced by computerized robots because the people who would buy the houses, cars, computers, clothes, buildings, schools, books, shoes, hats, trucks, and food are made unemployed by the computerized robots on a mass scale.  Temporary, part-time and contingency workers, working at or below minimum wages, or the permanently unemployed end up ultimately in the streets or in prison. No job, no money; no money, no food/clothing/shelter/education/health care/transportation/culture, etc.  Families fall apart.  Hustling and fast money schemes replaces the 9 to 5.  Hope is organized around the state's lottery---just another government scam.  The economy falls into credit/debt circulation, debts are called in, cars are repossessed, houses are foreclosed, government tax bases collapse, inflation becomes deflation, stockmarkets teeter on the brink of collapse, over-ground economies become underground economies, schools are closed---social destruction begins.  Those who are fortunate enough to move, migrate south, then face the same, though belated circumstance, only more  intensely.  With the end near, desperate people (already in the streets) take to the streets in protest, disorganized first, then later with limited organization.  The state sends in the police, national guard, then the army when necessary.  You know the rest.

The demand that robot production without wages must be distributed without money requires a revolutionary transformation of the society. At the crisis point of social destruction, after a period of a fascist decay, political revolution occurs with classes struggling to take power as to remake the society in their own image and interest---reflective of the new technology.  A white Greco-roman male society whether it is striving to be slave, feudal, capitalist, socialist, or communist will remake itself in the image and interest of its largely Greco-roman, male, white supremacy population.  Pay strict attention to history.  White (english or spanish) workers will drive Blacks back into slavery for the privilege of a job in a factory or office.  In short, power is shifted from one class of whites to another and the process of social reconstruction begins.  "Black and white, unite and fight" was yet another meaningless slogan full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

In their future "revolutionary" society (even after the coming fascist dictatorship), the white worker's race is still the ruling class, and ruling race; men are still the ruling sex/gender; Greece and Rome is still the ruling culture; and the English are still the ruling ethnic group/language/value system.  Blacks are again left with no 40 forty acres and not even a mule. Whites will then reconstruct societal infrastructure, evolve their economies, adapt their political systems of governance, write another white constitution perhaps for white men and white women this time, and refine their greco-roman white supremacy cultural/educational systems to serve them until their next social system runs its course hundreds of years in the future.  Their "revolutionaries" will call this progress.  Our children are again left with fluttering fake flags fantasizing a future filled with false freedoms.  We can do better and we must. 

The United States and the countries of Africa, South America, and the Caribbean Islands will continue along their own historical evolutionary path, using up all stages of the productive forces bequeathed them.  They will reach their own natural historical points of exhaustion, they will decline, they will fall into decay, they will rot, and they will die and be replaced by what is the next definitive stage in their unique yet inevitable process of development.  

As computer technologies, robotics, artificial intelligence, flexible manufacturing systems, just-in-time production, and computer automated machine production continue to develop and replace workers in industry after industry and job after job, employed consumers become unemployed nonconsumers, wageless nonworkers cannot buy commodities at a profit-no profit no wage; no wage no circulation; no circulation no capitalism, no capitalist class, and the entire economic system collapses. 

Like clockwork, the last hired are the first to be fired;  the least skilled and educated are the first to be replaced by labor replacing machines; unemployment leads to homelessness, hunger, no education, no health care and the drift to vice and self degeneration.  With no more affirmative action, no more quotas, no more set asides, no more free education, schools closing, plants closing, full time will become part-time, part-time will become permanent unemployed, the education system will work for only those with money.

Hustling and underground economies will lead to prison, prison will lead to work camps, work camps will lead to solutions that are final.  The same type of technology putting people out of work at Ford, GM, Diamyler-Chrysler, IBM, Dell, Xerox, hospitals, colleges, high schools etc., will put people out of service jobs when implemented.  Blacks will be hardest hit, as usual.  They will lose their job, have their car repossessed and the house foreclosed.  They will seek unemployment, it will run out.  They will move south seeking a job; jobs will dry up in the south. Hundreds, thousands, now millions are going through this freefall.  It will get worse. 

In economic crisis, we as Black populations (scattered throughout a world we were brought into to slave) are no longer needed to slave in their fields, cook their meals, take care of their children, clean their homes, work in their factories, or nurse/sedate/narcotize our people for them in their institutions of health, mis-education, welfare, and criminal injustice.  Where computer automated machines haven't replaced us, cheaper foreigners have; obsolescence means elimination and solutions that are final in a capitalist equation.  When wage labor is ended the unemployed has no means of earning money to buy the necessities of life and pay taxes; without taxes, no state dole, welfare, workfare, education,or health care-no surplus value, no profit, no wage, no economic system-absolute poverty-no life.  Prisons for profit await millions of permanently unemployed.