The Road Not Taken

By John R. Rice

Author's Note

"In my opinion the pantheon of American warriors (past & present) will forever and never cease to be my enlightenment when it comes to the questions & answers of American justice (no threat standing) it is simply the way we were."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503594555

John R. Rice

John Ralph Rice was born five years after the Second World War on October 12, 1950, in Newark, New Jersey. I was educated in Newark, New Jersey, at Essex County College, the University of Medicine and Dentistry New Jersey, and the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. I am the great-grandson of African American slaves who were freed after the American Civil War in 1865. My ancestry prior to my great-grandparent’s lineage in South Carolina is unclear; however, in a recent interview in September 2009 by my great nephew, Al-Tariq Ibn Shabazz, I said, “I knew the relationship between African American females and the American white slave master was well known, and so I viewed the whole proposition as a system of sacrilege.” Thus becoming, in the words of Carter G. Woodson, “the miseducation of the Negro.” Upon graduation as a massage therapist (2004) many doctors, intellectuals, scholars, and activists around the world know my name and in every home in my family as well. I devoted my life to peace and change one week after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and my view of the world’s health problems became clear to me when I accepted transcendentalism as a philosophy in my professional years. I often said Sigmund Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis played a major approach to my client’s problems on their first visit to my clinic. My passion for healthy lifestyles became rooted in acupressure, and the vision I bring to my work as a massage therapist is scientific. I believe in an empirical reality; that is to say, a patient’s symptoms has mental, not physical, causes and the unconscious part of the mind has a strong influence on behavior. I still consider myself to be a Renaissance man and here are my most important writings: 1) The John R. Rice Narrative 2) Rape, The Secret Assault on Women, 3) The Judgment of History, The Race For Freedom, From Slavery To Manhood, 4) The African American Spirit and The Search For Its Destiny, 5) The Voices in East Harlem 6) Africa’s Greatest Triumph, 7) The African American Body Politic, and 8) The Prison Door are donated to the New Jersey Historical Society in Newark. “Imhotep would be proud.”

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Copyright © 2015 byJohn R. Rice.

ISBN:                Softcover                  978-1-5035-9456-2

                          eBook                        978-1-5035-9455-5

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Rev. date: 08/12/2015

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Contents

Acknowledgments

To The Student

Preface

Introduction

The Promise

Influence

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King

The Road Not Taken

The Genealogy of John R. Rice

Past, Present, Future

Forward

Preface

Introduction

Kemba Smith

Sitting on the Sideline

The Players Dispensation

Memories

A Man From Columbia

John Rice, sr. (1918-1986)

The Fountain

Epilogue

Afterthoughts and Conclusions

In Memory & A Tribute

Africa’s Greatest Triumph

Juan Raphael

The Fully Functioning Person

Science, Technology, Math, & Engineering

Rape, The Secret Assault on Women

Domestic Violence

The African American Body Politic

The African American Spirit, and The Search for Its Destiny

The African American Spirit

The Search for The African American Destiny

The Voices In East Harlem

The Prison Door

This entire book is dedicated to prisoner# F 16 @ The Essex

County Penitentiary now known as The Northern State Prison

July 1969

The Summer Knows

This book is also dedicated to The New York Executive Club

My membership number was 4281, and my locker combination number was 47L 1SR 27L, the staff knew me by name and the club’s services & facilities were readily available to me.

September 11, 2001

Part 1

Having and not having … The king of the window

Part 2

Scandals and life after death

Part 3

The projects and the edge of the universe

Part 4

The empire strikes back

Image36160.JPG

Right: John R. Rice at the Sacred Circle Café presentation of Sekou Sundiata and Band, with Ras Baraka, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, May, 18, 2002

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Image36152.JPG

Mattie McClain Rice 1950

M Y NARRATIVE WILL not answer all the questions Newarkers have about the city’s past. No one regrets more than I the need to squeeze fifty years of my life into eight chapters. For those who note omissions, especially in the 21 st century, I must say the story is still being written. For those Newarkers whose research, remembrances, and interpretations of the past forty years differ from mine, such is the difficulty of recording what is freshly remembered. My goal has been to present a balanced, fair portrait of my birthplace in the Renaissance City. To be sure, there were times when dominant personalities forged to the front and assumed roles of responsibility and leadership; these individuals have been recognized.

~John R. Rice

Newark NJ

August 2008

TO THE STUDENT

T HOUGH IT SHOCKS me somewhat to say so, I have been an activist (or personal counselor) for more than forty years. This means that during two thirds of my life I have been trying to help children, adolescents, and adults. The purpose of my narrative is to share with the student something of my experience- something of me. Here is what I have experienced in the concrete jungles of modern New York City and Newark, NJ, in the unmapped territory of personal relationships. Here is what I have seen. Here is what I have come to believe. Here are the ways I have tried to test my beliefs. Here are some of the challenges, which I face. I have located my heritage in African philosophy, such as the Egyptian Pharoahs, and the Kuba Kingdom. College professors such as, Sekou Sundiatta, and Dr. Louis E. Wright has influenced me. My beliefs are rooted in the philosophy of Transcendentalism or the constitution of the mind itself, the primacy of self- reliance.

There is one final reason I want the student to know why I believe in an empirical reality. I believe I must present myself as a blank slate. I must believe in sociology and history. Or, as I put the matter repeatedly, When man is most fully man, he is to be trusted. ~John R. Rice

PREFACE

T HE BLACK YOUTH Organization of Newark, New Jersey in 1968 was about a handful of young men and women with a curious claim to fame. By all the rules of school history books, we were nonentities: we commanded no police force, sent no men to their deaths, ruled no states, and took little part in history-making decisions. A few of us eventually received PhD’s, but none was ever a state hero; a few were abused, but none was ever quite a city bully. Yet what we did was more decisive for Newark’s history than many acts of state senators who became U.S. Congressmen and women, often more profoundly disturbing than commanding Newark’s police force back and forth across the city; more powerful for good and bad than the Star Ledger’s (Newark’s newspaper) announcing the plans of Newark’s Mayor and City Council. It was this; we shaped and swayed student’s minds.

Who were these men and women? To be sure, Newark’s history records them as part of my social history. I will not lecture the student on their individual principles, but I will explain my personal history, my personal shaping, and my personal ideas and why my father, John Rice Sr. is the central theme in my narrative. Although my Narrative is about my personal opinions, my use of the slogan The Road Not Taken or Another Day In Paradise, or Reflections Of The Atlantic Years is about my early years and my not knowing the true and living God, worshipping that in which I knew not what, and being easily led in the wrong direction but hard to lead in the right direction. So the truth lies elsewhere. First, however, we must understand the world that preceded my father’s entrance– the earlier world that gave birth to the Free Negro – the age of Reconstruction. In my opinion, it was the most important point in shaping my father’s character. To appreciate my narrative, to understand my family we must first transition into that earlier and long-forgotten world of slavery from which the Rice family sprang in Columbia, South Carolina. In my speculative hypothesis my family’s history was misplaced, in Newark, New Jersey. For example, most of the major world powers owe their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priest, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people thenceforth, to a large extent were unconsciously, guided in their social behavior. Albert Einstein.

The African American political paradigm shifted in the 1970 Newark, New Jersey Mayoral election to the future of unregistered young black voters. My mission as Liaison Secretary of the BYO was to eliminate the concept of the pathology of African American imprisonment in Newark and reintroduce the student to a robust economic and financial investment plan. I thought it was almost impossible to do, but to deal with the problem,

President Lyndon Johnson