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Black seeing red

Police brutality fuelled the anger and art of AKA-X

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Montreal in the late-’80s and early-’90s was a city bubbling with racial tension. Anglos and francos were still arguing language. In 1990, armed Mohawk Warriors faced off against the Sûreté du Québec and the Canadian Armed Forces because of a land dispute. Quebec Cree were threatening standoffs of their own over the James Bay Hydro project. The black community was up in arms due to the indiscriminate use of force, sometimes lethal, by the police against young blacks.

Civil disobedience was the catchphrase of the day, and the Mirror seized on it. In the August 15, 1991, cover story, headlined “An Excess of Democracy,” Eleanor Brown looked at the phenomenon as it was applied and interpreted by groups like the Quebec Cree, the local Alliance for Non-Violent Action, controversial University of Boulder professor Ward Churchill and local black activist group AKA-X.

amuna baraka-clarke (who asked that her name be spelled entirely in lower case), an AKA-X co-founder whose 21-year-old face graced the Mirror cover, still sees similarities between then and now. “We felt at the time, and still believe now, that black youth were in a precarious situation,” she says. “Our actions were really an attempt to impact the lives of young people, especially within our community but also in the community at large.”

Police on their back

baraka-clarke is now 35, the mother of a young daughter, and works at the Parkdale Legal Clinic in Toronto. But 15-odd years ago, she and a group of fellow university students began to see the need to examine and agitate from “an Afro-centric perspective,” she says. All of the founding members had been politically active, but decided in 1989 to create a community organization that would speak with a louder, angrier voice than their elders. “We brought the bass to the chorus,” she says. They started with the name Also Known as X.

“The ‘X’ was symbolic,” says baraka-clarke. “We felt it needed to be pan-African, to say, ‘We are unknown, we can be lots of people, we are the others.’” Drawing on the teachings of Malcolm X and other great civil rights leaders of the past, she says the group wanted to “reject our Judeo-Christian name and reclaim the essence that was taken from us through slavery.”

The immediate need, says poet and playwright Michael Pintard, AKA-X’s then-spokesman and co-founder, was “to address the indiscriminate use of force by police.” There were too many reports of arrests, beatings and killings of young black men by the cops to be justified, they felt.

“The most important point we were trying to make was, a number of youth felt they were at risk,” says Pintard. “Even we, as university students, still felt as if we were in an environment that was such that officers could attack you.”

Art over crime

AKA-X staged demonstrations without permits and would take to the streets every time a black man was killed by police. And while they were unabashedly vocal about police brutality, they were involved with other issues of the day. But, Pintard says, they weren’t shy about addressing problems within their own community, especially drugs and black-on-black violence.

“Yes, we accepted the fact there were diminished opportunities for African and Caribbean youth, but there was no justification to resort to criminal activities in order to fill that deficit,” he says. “It only further devastates the community.”

But both point out that AKA-X did more than protest and denounce the powers-that-be. Art played a big part in the group’s approach, says Pintard, now 41 and living in his native Bahamas, working as a playwright, real estate developer and customer service consultant. They organized poetry readings, story-tellings, played music in metros—but all with a political bent. They also created after-school and weekend programs, held weekly rap sessions and began educational initiatives.

Pintard says he tries to follow goings-on in Canada as best he can, but baraka-clarke says many of her clients in Parkdale, a traditionally poor neighbourhood in west end Toronto now gentrifying, still face similar problems today that they faced 15 years ago.

“But what’s maybe different today is people think it’s okay to talk about it now,” she says. “The youth are coming up with a stronger voice, which is amazingly empowering.”