Mr. DeCONCINI: Mr. President, I wish to bring to the attention of my colleagues the growth of an important new symbol of black unity, the MUNTU.  The MUNTU emblem consists of a black engraving of the United States on a background of the African Continent and emphasizes the awakening of cultural unity among black Americans based upon common ancestral pride.
   The MUNTU is enjoying increasing recognition by prominent black Americans and the black community as a whole as outlined in recent Washington Star and Washington Post articles.  Mr. President, I commend these articles to my colleagues, and ask that they be printed in the Record.
   The articles follow:

   When Mayor Marion S. Barry showed up at the White House recently wearing a small pin - a black outline of the United States recessed into a gold silhouette of the African continent - Vice President Walter Mondale peered closely and asked about its origins.
   It was a Muntu medal, which in Swahli means "soul" or "essence of mankind" and in the jewelry market, is a new line that's taking off as a symbol of the black American link with Africa.
   The medal is also worn by NAACP Executive Director Benjamin Hooks, labor leader William Lucy, civil rights lobbyist Yvonne Price and occassionally, by U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young and Mayors Ernest Morial of New Orleans, Maynard Jackson of Atlanta and Coleman Young of Detroit.
   Ten years ago, many blacks were inspired by the stormy civil-rights struggle to don flowing dasikis, adopt the colors of red, black and green, and wear medallions of clinched fists as symbols of black identity and cultural pride.  Such symbols were largely relinquished during the 1970's.  Still, some blacks quest for a symbol, and the Muntu is for them a statement.
   Its creator, Sam Lax, is a white former San Quentin inmate, who is now a Los Angeles jewelry maker and photographer.  It is a sign of the times - some would say sophistication - that most wearers and promoters seem not to object.
   Mayor Barry owns three Muntu lapel pins and calls them "an expression of solidarity with my African brothers and sisters in general and with the liberation struggle of people in South Africa in particular.
   The jewelry also is gaining mileage from a current charity drive for the NAACP.  Lax convinced the Pillsbury Co. to substitute its usual advertisement in the weekly black press with a plug for a Muntu-NAACP drive.  Lax says he is contributing 50 cents of every dollar (the retail price is $12.50) to the civil rights organization.
   "We judged Lax's sincerity by the amount of time and energy he puts into it and the commitment of his resources", said NAACP spokesman Paul Brock.
   Ray Eiland, a Pillsbury vice president, said, "I think the project is fantastic.  Lax calls up and says he loves me, he calls himself a son of a black revolutionary.  I respond and don't question the idea of a white creating a symbol for blacks."
   Lax, 45, is a tall, bony man who prefers the look of the old West, levi's shirt and jeans, a fleece-lined vest and a silver belt buckle of horses, his own design.  His voice and manner tend toward the agitated.
   As he paces around his Los Angeles office, a converted dry-cleaning plant that is the headquarters of his company, SALA and Associates, his circuitous story is one of a latter-day believer, unaware of discrimation problems until one riveting experience and now driven to grandiose displays of brotherhood.  He calls Yvonne Price "my sister" and Benjamin Hooks "Dr. Ben."
   "I was raised in a medical family on the West Coast and was not really aware of the civil-rights groups and struggle.  Not until I was 19 1/2 years old and traveled across the country and saw those (segregated) bathrooms, those four bathrooms, then it hit me," says Lax.
   After that cross-country trip, Lax joined some political groups but largely pursued his career of photography and jewelry making.  He had a jewelry business in Los Angeles and worked on advertising accounts for Mattel Toys and Frederick's of Hollywood.
   In 1967 Lax ended up in San Quentin for violation of parole from a bad check charge.  There he says he experienced another kind of personal outrage.  "I walked into San Quentin and it was 60 percent black, but less than 1 percent of the administrators were black.  And that was totally out of proportion to the state's population to 12.5 percent.  He helped start a black awareness program and designed a cover of a prison program that became popular with the inmates, he says.  The sketch gradually evolved into the jewelry.
   After his release, Lax returned to buckles, rings and earrings, but says the Muntu idea became a passion.  He started marketing a piece called the Afro-American in 1972 by taking out a full-page ad in Ebony.  In six months, however, Lax and his wife went broke.
   As the dust of curiosity about the black experience settled following the "Roots I" telecast, Lax decided tha time was right to try to market Muntu again.  Two years ago, Sam and Carole Lax reopened their sales campaign with a press conference that featured Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and actor Louis Gossett.  Gossett became Muntu's national spokesman.  Lax went out on the road, pressing pins on author Alex Haley and Ambassador Young.  The promotion tour with Gossett failed and Lax turned to individual distrbutorships.
   The jewelry caught the eye of Yvonee Price, director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.  "I sought Sam out after I saw the jewelry.  Then I bought a couple of hundred pieces and sold them to friends". In the last two years she has become an adviser to Lax, visiting his workshops in Los Angeles, and introducing him to leadership of black church ushers groups and blalck trade unionists. "I liked the design because I am a person who had roots in America and roots in Africa.  And I just believe in Lax.
   Lax says the Muntu isn't an identity symbol.  "It simply shows the world we all have one stem, scientifically we all come from Africa," says Lax.  He relishes his own observation but his smile evaporates quickly. "The people in the jewlery industry think I'm crazy.  I know I can always go back to the other jewelry but right now I have a disease called Muntu."

   Langston Hughes ("The Negro Speaks of Rivers"):

   "I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. . .
   "I've bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
   "I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
   "I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids about it. . .
   "My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

   Warm hearted exchanges between two old friends paused just long enought to be captured as a tableau in American memorabilia.  It was a reunion of two once-powerful civil rights militants, and an introduction to February as Black History Month.
   Stokely Carmichael, now a Pan-African socialist revolutionary, had come to pay respects to a beloved former colleague, Marion Barry, now the mayor of the capitalist world.
   Ideologies as distant as their homes now separated the two men.  Yet, both were bound by a symbolic umbilical cord in Barry's lapel.
   The "Muntu", a gold-colored Africa-shaped pin with a black engraving of the United States and etched with lineal roots connecting the two continents, sparkled on the mayor's three-piece suit.
   "Right on! Hold up the flag!" exclaimed an exuberant Carmichael. He had previously noticed the pin in pictures of Barry chattng with President Carter.
   "I always wear it," Barry replied smilingly.
   So do NAACP President Benjamin Hooks, actor Lou Gosset of "Roots" fame, Rep. Bill Gray, D-Pa, Alex Haley, actress Gail Fisher, Tina Turner, U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley.
   For years impoverished by no emblem for peoplehood, black Americans at last could venerate a symbol of their ancestoral roots.

   Robert E. Hayden ("O Daedalus, Fly Away Home"):
   "Do you remember Africa?
   "I knew all the Stars of Africa.
   "My gran, he flew back to Africa, just spead his arms and flew away home."

   As an idea whose time had previously not come, Muntu now is being exalted by many black Americans into symbolic ties with their past.
   "That's what I had in mind when I designed it," explained Los Angeles-based Sam Lax.
   That was back in 1967, and Lax was serving time beyond the grey stone walls of San Quentin.
   A civil rights movement was rumbling across America.  Black convicts were quick to embrace any new affinity for black pride.
   But how does one wear an idea? It happened this way.
   When the San Quentin convicts clustered in their respective ethnic enclaves, Jews wore their Stars of David, and Chicanos carried their crucifixes.
   Blacks at first turned to Afros and dasikis.  But tonsorial and satorial styles can be co-opted and lost their uniqueness.
   Maybe, suggested one of the toughest black convicts, this "together" white dude who is a jeweler over there in the other cell block could design an emblem.
   Trusted and respected by black inmates, Lax went to work.  He poured his relentlessly created energy into after-hours metal smithing, using smuggled metals and a Zippo lighter for a torch.
   Even one of the black correctional officers, Darrow W. Smith, assisted in the under-ground manufacturing unit.
   Within weeks, Muntu became a thing of beauty.
   No longer obsequious "Negroes," the black convicts clasped the new pin around their necks and became proud descendants of African warriors.
   Malcom X: "If you put a cat in an oven and she has kittens, you don't call them biscuits".
   But the idea was still denied.  Nationally, blacks weren't ready for this summons from the African diaspora.
   After Lax had served 22 months and was released from prison, he and his new wife, Carole, mortgaged their home, invested all of their savings into merchandising Muntu - and went broke.
   "I still owe so many people money," Lax said in a telephone conversation, "I look like a miniature national debt."
   Then, the "Roots" phenomenom swept across the national landscape with the speed of a Zulu-drummed message.
   Blacks dug down deep into their psyches and rediscovered their African origins.
   "The time is now," declared a black friend of Lax.  They formed Sala & Associates in Los Angeles and started to market Muntu.
   "I want the money from Muntu to stay in the black community, says Lax.
   "Muntu is only being offered to the public through black churches, black-owned businesses, civil-rights groups, organizations like the NAACP, and educational institutions in places like Washington, New Orleans, New York City, Los Angeles and Providence, R.I.
   "It's already been assigned a Library of Congress number.
   "But there is only one person authorized to speak or negotiate on behalf of either myself or the Muntu symbol.  And that's Yvonne Price, an executive assistant with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.  Other than my wife, there is no other person in the country dearer to me.  She's a rare person."
   Had he encountered any flak because he is a white man and he had designed Muntu?
   Lax has been hanging out with the "bloods" so long, he explained it in a black perspective.
   "Man, that's not where it's at.  The bottom line is that all of us come from Africa because that's where the first man originated."  He chuckled, and added, "And a white scientist said that."
     "Muntu says three things, said Lax.  "I am African, I am American.  And I am proud of them all."
   W.E.B. duBois ("Of Our Spiritual Strivings" - 1903): "It is a peculiar sensation. . . this double consciousness. . . one ever feels his twoness an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body."
   Seventy-five years after the father of Pan-Africanism, duBois, wrote these words, Muntu has begun to harmonize those "warring ideals in one dark body."
   "No more appropriate symbol than the Muntu exemplified the meaning of February Black History month.