Denise Oliver-Velez Part Two

Denise Oliver-Velez, Contributing editor for the Daily Kos blog; Feminist, Activist, former Young Lords Party and Black Panther Party member, is a cultural anthropologist and one of the most active contemporary revolutionaries of the 20th and 21st century. 

Daily Kos, Denise Oliver-Velez

BlueSky: @deniseoliver-velez.bsky.social

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Welcome to Connections and Conversations, an Advocacy Arena podcast, working to increase civic engagement and strengthen our communities. Besides her activism, Miss Denise has spent many years in public broadcasting as a program director and co-founder of WPFWFM in Washington, D.C., a Pacifica radio station. It's the first minority-controlled radio station. As a current contributing editor at the blog Daily Cause, she publishes weekly on Caribbean matters, black music and art, and the occasional political rant. So now, back to my conversation with Denise Oliver Valez. What I love in talking to you now and all the things that I've learned about you and the movement and the work of the young lords, Black Panthers, is that all of it was connected to your community, addressing the needs of your community by being amongst those in the community. And I feel like sometimes now there's disconnect. People have like ideas, but they don't like relate to or talk to the people in the community to see how practical they are or if these are the things that they really want.

SPEAKER_01: 1:33

It's not organic. It has to be organic and come from the community. And if it does, your community is going to be there right with you, not proclaiming yourself a leader.

SPEAKER_00: 1:48

Right. I know that one of the women that was part of the Young Lords talked about. I remember her saying something to the effect that, you know, the people have to be with you, behind you, in a movement that really makes a difference. Now, also part of this movement, like I said, something else that I wanted to talk to you about, because during this time, the arts, black art, Latino art, that was a movement in and of itself as well, too, because art can be revolutionary. And I know that you're a writer, you're a teacher, you write for a publication, Daily Coast, and you do a couple of things. I know one of the things that always catches my eye that you do is Black Music Sundays. Could you talk a little bit about that and how and why you started doing that?

SPEAKER_01: 2:40

Okay. I joined Daily Coast as a community member. It's a a very large block, uh Democratic Party block, but more to the I hate to use the word progressive side of things. Inside Daily Coast, there are different collectives. And there was a group started by a brother named David Reed called Black Coast. So of course I joined Black Coast and was happily, you know, writing things and I could post things. And then I was asked to do some pieces for the front page of Daily Coast because it's like an online newspaper. And COVID hit. And my connections were still to Young Lords and Panthers who worked. They joined unions, they were in SEIU, which is the health workers' union, nurses and whatever, and people were dying like flies. I can't even I lost people, we all lost people. And I am of the spiritual belief that music heals, helps you cope. And it has always been something our community has turned to. And I'm not just talking about gospel either. I'm talking about the broad extensions of black music that have been part of our movement, but again, spiritually, it helps us get through the day and pain and suffering. So I told the powers that be at Daily Course, I wanted to shift what I was writing that was going on the front page and to do music. Now, I just have to backtrack just a little bit. What do I know about music? I grew up with jazz musicians, I grew up with musical artists. Paul Robeson sang, Happy Birthday to me when I was six years old. Get out of here. I was around black folk singers, Leon Bibb, you name it, the Bellafantes, Peter Paul and Mary and whatever. And I lived in a neighborhood in Queens where when I was a teenager, we used to hang out in Coltrane's basement because John Coltrane's wife kind of was like a den mother to a whole bunch of us. Oh my goodness. Collis Queens in St. Albans. Everybody basically lived out there. It was just the way it was. So later on, after the fall of the revolution and whatever, I ended up becoming the program director of a community radio station. The first minority-controlled Pacifica radio station, WBAI in New York, is one. And the initial one is KPFA in Berkeley, KPFT in Texas, KPFK in Los Angeles. With a group of people, we ended up putting the first sort of black-controlled one on the air in Washington, D.C. And we did public affairs, but we were jazz and jazz extensions. So getting jazz folks on the air. We actually had John Conyers, Congressman Conyers, come do a show on the station called Jazz from the Hill. Oh my goodness. Yeah, he was friends with like a whole lot of musicians like Clark Terry and whatever, and they used to come to the station. So I had a radio sense of music, but how to do that on a blog. And I figured I could do a lot of embedding of YouTube and things and talk about the history and whatever. So that's what I do every Sunday. I don't just do jazz because I've done things on folk, I've done things on RB. Having lived in DC for a bunch of time, I've done a lot of polymer funkedelic. And I do tribute to birthdays and passings when we have departures of musicians. I try to do a tribute, or when a birthday comes up, like it's Billy Holiday's birthday, do something on that too.

SPEAKER_00: 6:33

I just recently recall the one you did on Tracy Chapman's birthday.

SPEAKER_01: 6:37

Okay, yeah. So talk about a revolution. And if you join, it's not just the piece, but in the comment section, a regular group of people come every week. A lot of musicians come and post their favorites and whatever. So we have conversations about the music, and I learned so much from the readers because they'll come in and say, Oh, yeah, I played a gig with him last week and whatever, whatever. And I'm like, wow, you know, so it's interactive as well. It's not just reading the blog, but it's come and get involved. It posts at nine o'clock in the morning, and I'm usually in there until about one, two in the afternoon talking to people. And then I come back the next day and see who has showed up in the evening. I learn a lot from the readers as well. And I don't just do the Black Music Sunday because every Saturday I have a series called Caribbean Matters. This country tends to ignore stuff that's going on in the Caribbean. And I'm not just talking about Puerto Rico and Cuba. I'm talking about places like Dominica, which people are like, you mean the Dominican Republic? No, I'm talking about Dominica or Trinidad and Tobago or Anguilla, you know. So I try to educate folks here. We have a huge Caribbean population that lives here in the United States and they're under attack with this deportation crap for sure. From the orange fascist that we have now as president. So I'm trying to get people to learn more and pay more attention to what's happening to our Caribbean folks every Saturday that posts at nine too.

SPEAKER_00: 8:21

So thanks for letting me have a plug. Absolutely. Like I said, I am a fangirl and I am so happy to have you here. I've read a lot of stuff that you've done. Thank you. Watched a lot of YouTube, but every time I engage with you or encounter, I learned something new. Like all of these musicians that you were surrounded with, just as part of your everyday life. I mean, that had to add a layer of richness that I just can only imagine.

SPEAKER_01: 8:50

But I look back on it now and I'm like, wow, it was just normal. Your friend's parents, if you lived out there in Hollis or St. Aubans, you hung out, you know, with your friends. And it and the fact that your friend's dad is a famous bass player or famous pianist, it just, you know, it was just normal. And people said to me, Wow, you mean you were in Coltrane's house? I said, Yeah, because Ne, that was Naima Coltrane, that's a beautiful piece of music that Terrain wrote. Neat said, I know y'all standing out there on street corners smoking weed. We were like, What, what, what? And she said, I don't want you to get arrested. If you want to smoke herb, you come down here in this house and you can smoke it in here, and then you put it out when you leave. Now, that would have never been my mother's eight, to be very honest. But Neat was like our dead mother. She would take us to gigs, like at clubs in the city, and sort of shepherd us in. We would sit there, you know, and check it out. She was wonderful. And we would be in the basement. The young brothers who were all gonna be jazz musicians were in there, you know, talking stuff. And I remember Train never had anything to say. He was always in the corner, fingering, not blowing his horn, but just praying. He was very quiet. And I remember one day there was an argument. They were talking about up tempo music and blah, blah, blah. And I said, I like ballads. And they were like, Yeah, you girls, you know, do that. And she said, And they jumped on me and were criticizing me, and all of a sudden there was a voice from the corner of the room, and it was trained. And he said, She's right. And they turned around and they looked, and he said, Ballads are the most difficult and most important. It's about the space between the notes. Wow. And went back to they shut up and stopped yelling at me. I have never forgotten Coltry saying that she's right. Wow. And my favorite piece of music is the ballad that he wrote about Naima, his wife. I'll talk about Alice Coltre, and that was at the very end of his life. But Naeem is a person who saved him from drug addiction and wonderful.

SPEAKER_00: 11:21

I tell you, I have really, really enjoyed our conversations. And I look forward to more because you just have so much. And I don't want to take up too much more of your day, but I do want to thank you for hanging out with us. And I'm looking forward to the advocacy arena audience getting to learn a little bit more about you. I would just like to give you an opportunity to, you know, share some insights, whether it's about your activism, your music, or whatever it is that you want to share with us.

SPEAKER_01: 11:54

I mean, to me, my life is pretty normal. It's just it happened. I don't think it should be about me. I really, I really hope that more people will, particularly young people. I my students, I used to tell them, go and do an interview with your auntie or with your grandma or with your mother. As if you don't know the middle. You're gonna be surprised at what you find. Because I'm into connections with the ancestors. I do genealogy too. I have family members who are enslaved by a president of the United States, which is why I don't honor the founding great white fathers. I think that people need to do their own explorations. We're cut off now, everybody's texting and this and that and the other, and they're not talking. It's important. Building community is about dialogue, it's about talking face to face. It starts at home because I know I did it with my mom and was shocked to find out my mother worked in a parachute factory during World War II. I never knew that. I interviewed my dad and found out that he he almost died. My dad was a Tuskegee airman.

SPEAKER_00: 13:12

Wow. Now that's a piece of information I had not learned about.

SPEAKER_01: 13:17

I have written about it. He was almost killed going back to the base with uh one of the other airmen from Chicago, and they ended up getting off the bus arm in arm, and a group of peckerwoods hanging out at the bus terminal saw them, and they yelled at my dad. My father was very, very, very light complexioned with blue eyes. So they yelled, nigger lover, at my dad, who was with a brother that was brown skin. And so, of course, he got into a fight, but there were too many of these crackers. And the word got back to the base that my dad had been killed by crackers. So the brothers broke out tanks and half traps and whatever. They dragged the white lieutenant, because the officers for the airmen were all white, they went to the hospital and brought my dad out on a stretcher to show the brothers that he wasn't dead. But he was pretty wounded.

SPEAKER_00: 14:15

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_01: 14:16

What ended up happening was a court martial was called, and my father was imprisoned for inciting a riot. It actually took years after the end of the war and warriors and whatever for my dad to get his GI benefits, which a whole lot of brothers didn't get, period. People are all talking about FDR all the time and the GI bill. Yeah, you black, you don't get your money. But that's another issue. I could go for that. Like I said, many conversations for us to have. Those are the kinds of things my father never talked about that until years later I asked him about a scar on his face, and he told the whole story, but he had never talked about it. It was something that made and what saved him while he was in the brig, the racist white guy that was the head of the prison that he was in, was a chess player, and he was frustrated. Nobody played chess but my dad, and that saved my dad while he was incarcerated. It was terrible for him because he was worried about his brother Airman off doing people have seen those movies about the Tuscany Air. Yeah, there's pictures of Daddy on Twitter, and he was later with the Philadelphia Air Organization.

SPEAKER_00: 15:42

Wow. I just learned something new every time I start diving into your history, your work. And again, I want to thank you for hanging out, talking to us because I look to you as a role model. I've heard you speak in spaces in these audio conversations and things that we have, and you just have such great wisdom. And I do uh appreciate that you share it with us and you are living history to me. I mean, I'm not too far behind you, but I feel like you're an example of a life lived and lessons that we can learn and take. And I'm hoping that the conversations we have can inspire other people and inform them because the struggle continues. And you talk about how young you guys were. John Lewis is another icon of mine, and people don't recognize that how young he was when he was doing that work, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 16:41

Right. Right now, the only thing most people know is Martin Luther King as kind of like a cardboard figure that really has very little to do with his youth and whatever. And they don't know John's story, they don't know Stokely's wraparounds, whatever. They don't even know what SNCC was. They only know SCLC. And there were numerous organizations that were part of what now is just sort of written off as a civil rights movement. Right. I mean, they don't even pay attention nowadays. We've elected people. You know, you have the whole Congressional Black Caucus, and they don't pay attention to any of the things that are going on there. They don't know that one of the founders or the founder of the Congressional Black Caucus was Ron Dellums. And you know who got Rondellums elected? Black Panther Party women who went around and knocked on every door. You know, so in many ways, the Congressional Black Caucus was founded by Black Panther Party. But ain't nobody gonna tell you that history.

SPEAKER_00: 17:47

And I love that you have all of these little rich tidbits that people really don't know, but I think it's important that they do because, you know, like we talked briefly, there is an active assault. It's always been that way, but there is a resurgent active assault on history, on our history. So that's another reason why I enjoy having these conversations with folks like you to remind people of our history. I mean, they can take it out of the school books or out of the museums or whatever, but they can't change the fact that it happened. And it's important for us to continue to talk about it so that our kids and future generations do know that it happened.

SPEAKER_01: 18:33

They're trying to erase us. Yeah. And we cannot, we have enough things like this wonderful podcast that Ju put together. And I'm just overwhelmed sometimes by what we can do with social media rather than the negative side of things that people are using operationally to do negative things to us. So we have to seize the time, seize the power, seize the media, and get our messages out and not somebody else's.

SPEAKER_00: 19:07

Absolutely. I think that we'll just, you know, wrap it up there and stick a pen in this and plan to have another conversation soon because you're just a wealth of knowledge, and I look forward to another conversation soon with you.

SPEAKER_01: 19:21

Thank you, Misty.

SPEAKER_00: 19:23

Thank you, Miss Denise. Thank you for listening to Connections and Conversations. This is one of many wonderful interviews that we bring to you to help connect you to a larger community of advocates and change makers across the country. You'll get a glimpse into the various ways people are making an impact in their communities. My hope is that it will inspire you to get engaged in some small way as well. We can't all do everything, but at this moment in history, we can all do something. What are you doing? One of the things you can do is to continue to listen, subscribe, and share this Advocacy Arena podcast. You can also join and support the Growing Grassroots Advocacy Arena community in other ways. Join our weekly live chats hosted on Spotable every Monday at 12 p.m. Eastern. Subscribe to our Substack to get great articles on important topics and exclusive access to extended interview conversations. And don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel as well. We've got some exciting programming lined up. And keep listening to our regular podcast episodes wherever you get your podcast.