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Long live the spirit of the Panthers!

The Huey P. Newton Reader

Edited by David Hilliard and Donald Weise

Foreword by Fredrika Newton

Contents

Foreword by Fredrika Newton

Introduction by David Hilliard

Part I: The First Steps

Scoring

Freedom

Bobby Seale

The Founding of the Black Panther Party

Patrolling

Sacramento and the "Panther Bill"

Crisis: October 28, 1967

Trial

Part II: The Greatest Threat

Fear and Doubt: May 15, 1967

From "In Defense of Self Defense" I: June 20, 1967

From "In Defense of Self Defense" II: July 3, 1967

The Correct Handling of a Revolution: July 20, 1967

A Functional Definition of Politics, January 17, 1969

On the Peace Movement: August 15, 1969

Prison, Where is Thy Victory? January 3, 1970

The Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements: August 15, 1970

Speech Delivered at Boston College: November 18, 1970

Part III: The Second Wave

Intercommunalism: February 1971

On the Defection of Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panther Party and the Defection of the Black Panther Party from the Black Community: April 17, 1971

Statement: May 1, 1971

On the Relevance of the Church: May 19, 1971

Black Capitalism Re-analyzed I: June 5, 1971

Uniting against a Common Enemy: October 23, 1971

Fallen Comrade: Eulogy for George Jackson, 1971

On Pan-Africanism or Communism: December 1, 1972

The Technology Question: 1972

A Spokesman for the People: In Conversation with William F. Buckley, February 11, 1973

Eldridge Cleaver: He Is No James Baldwin, 1973

Part IV: The Last Empire

Who Makes U.S. Foreign Policy?: 1974

Dialectics of Nature: 1974

Eve, the Mother of All Living: 1974

The Mind Is Flesh: 1974

Affirmative Action in Theory and Practice: Letters on the Bakke Case, September 22, 1977

Response of the Government to the Black Panther Party: 1980

Selected Bibliography

Foreword by Fredrika Newton

HUEY P. NEWTON and the Black Panther Party he created have passed out of existence, as all things do. Like all things, they leave behind memories, those private sensory recollections sadly destined to be weaned out ofhistory with each new generation. Like some, they leave behind certain tangible references to lives lived and life works. But, in kinship with those rare few whose footprints remain in defiance of time, they leave a legacy, a humane legacy that is a beacon from the past for those of us searching still to cross the abyss of human barbarity that seems written into eternity.

I came to know and embrace the best of Huey Newton, first as a Black Panther Party youth member and later as his wife during the last five years of his life. In that, I am a witness to the enlightened dreams as well as the torture of the dreamer. I came to know that he was the truest revolutionary, seeking always to bring harmony between the nature ofthings and the state ofthings, to transform dark into light, to challenge fear and hate with courage and love.

The Huey P Newton Reader is the first summation of this revolutionary life told in Huey's own words. From this definitive collection of writings, readers will discover, perhaps for the first time, the astonishing breadth of Huey’s thoughts and actions. For history is a witness to the fact that he acted on his vision by inventing an instrument for freedom and enlightenment called the Black Panther Party. This was his essence and his life’s work, left behind as his personal legacy. As such, the Black Panther Party has left a living legacy, a work begun, but left undone, a foundation laid, a seed sown whose flowers brighten the barren fields today.

Fredrika Newton, President The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere.

—Huey P, Newton, from Executive Mandate No, 1, 1967

Introduction by David Hilliard

It has been twelve years since the death ofBlack Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton. Yet I still struggle with the memory ofhis life and the message of his legacy, Huey was a complicated man who resists easy categorization, even by lifelong comrades such as myself. He refused to be trapped by ideological or identity labels, considering himself to be, quite literally, a work-in-progress. Nevertheless, there is a tendency on the part of supporters and detractors alike to fix Huey in place. He is either the revolutionary savior of African Americans or public enemy number one. Hero worship and vilification, however, obscure more than they illuminate. For these often fanciful recollections, in spite of their divergent intentions, fail to help us understand that beneath the mythology lived an intrepid man with dreams, fears, and vulnerabilities—in short, an ordinary man whose extraordinary courage changed the world in ways we are still coming to terms with today,

To me a useful starting point for interpreting Huey’s life and legacy is October 28, 1967, when the twenty-five-year-old Black Panther leader was charged with the shooting-death of Oakland policeman John Frey. Huey’s armed confrontations with law enforcement officials had headlined San Francisco Bay Area newspapers since the Party’s inception the previous fall. But he had not been patrolling police in the early hours of October 28th when an officer signaled him to the curb. “Well, well, well, what do we have here? The great, great Huey P. Newton,” Frey is remembered to have said to the driver, who had been looking for parking. Experienced in routine police intimidation procedure, Huey patiently awaited release. Without provocation Frey suddenly ordered the unarmed Panther from his car. Protests that the officcr was detaining him illegally were met with an unexpected blow to the face, knocking Huey to the ground. When he attempted to rise, the policeman fired once, wounding him in the stomach. Then a series of gunshots rang out in the morning darkness, and Officer Frey dropped over dead. Establishing the identity of the unknown trigger- man became the national focal point for the press over the next three years, with journalists arriving from as far away as London to report on what quickly became the cause celebre of the New Left and a turning point in Black Panther history.

This incident raises many of the issues relevant to, if not also the mis-perceptions that preclude, a clear understanding of Huey’s formative contributions to liberation politics in America. The vast movement to “Free Huey” that evolved in the wake of his arrest launched the Black Panthers—an organization I had joined in 1966 as a founding member and its chief of staff—from the periphery of the declining civil rights struggle of the late 1960s and into the vanguard position of the black liberation movement. On a separate level, the events of October 28th also function symbolically to underscore the challenges inherent in any attempt to reclaim a man from the myths that overwhelm all vestiges of the native son. When the man in question is an African-American revolutionary leader identified with the open display of firearms and, more importantly, his willingness to employ those weapons in selfdefense as no civil rights leader had done before or since, the task becomes especially strenuous. Indeed, despite his acquittal in the killing of Officer Frey over thirty years ago, Huey’s memory remains figuratively “on trial,” often mired in the salacious details of disgruntled critics who have purposefully taken up the myth on behalf of political conservatism under various names. The historical record, however, speaks from a more sophisticated perspective, reminding us that the man in full can be appreciated only once the mythology has been laid to rest.

The Huey P. Newton Reader performs this role in several ways. Firstly, the book restores Huey’s voice as the Party’s founder and theoretician. It is therefore the benchmark for Black Panther ideology. This is also the first comprehensive volume of Huey’s writings, speeches, and dialogues ever published. The unprecedented scope of the project com bines classic texts ranging in topic from the creation of the Black Panthers to African Americans and self-defense, Eldridge Cleaver’s controversial defection from the Party, FBI infiltration of civil rights groups, the Vietnam War, and the burgeoning feminist and gay liberation movements, along with never-before-published writings, including articles on President Richard Nixon, prison martyr George Jackson, Pan-Africanism, and affirmative action. When approached collectively, this body ofwork assists the process of revisiting and revitalizing the intellectual legacy of African Americans whose political innovations shook the foundations of popular notions of socially acceptable forms of protest. One needs only to look to the resurrected historical standing of the long-maligned Malcolm X to understand that although old myths die hard, they do ultimately surrender to the scrutiny of time. As such, The Huey P. Newton Reader attests to the perennial relevance of Huey’s vision, inviting a new generation of activists to adapt his ideas to serve the present-day struggle against repression and as a model for youth toward meeting today’s challenges.

If the deconstruction ofHuey’s “outlaw” status is one point of entry to this collection, then the impact of Malcolm X on the Black Panthers is also worthy of comment. “Malcolm X was the first political person in this country that I really identified with,” Huey writes of the Party’s origins. “We continue to believe that the Black Panther Party exists in the spirit of Malcolm . . . the Party is a living testament to his life and work." Although Huey and co-founder Bobby Seale did not aspire to replicate Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity, the fledgling political entity whose fruition was cut short by his murder in February 1965, Malcolm’s teachings were nevertheless fundamental in structuring the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, as the group was originally named in October 1966. This new call for self-defense, however, furthered Malcolm’s ideology, rejecting his black nationalism while incorporating a class-based political analysis that owed much to the writings of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Mao Tse-tung. Huey’s innovation lay in arguing for the necessity of armed resistance while at the same time realizing that oppression would not be resolved through armed struggle alone. Rather, the Party’s corner-stone Ten Point Program approached self-defense in terms of political empowerment, encompassing protection againstjoblessness and the circumstances that excluded blacks from equal employment opportunities; against predatory business practices intended to exploit the needs of the poor; against homclcssncss and inferior housing conditions; against educational systems that denigrate and miscast the histories of oppressed peoples; against a prejudiced judiciary that convicts African Americans and other people of color by all-white juries; and, finally, against the lawlessness of law enforcement agencies that harass, abuse, and murder blacks with impunity.

Still, it was the police patrols and not our work on behalf of jobs and housing that won the Black Panthers immediate notoriety. It bears mentioning here that anyone who wished to carry a loaded, unconcealed weapon at the time was legally entitled to do so, as white militant groups like the Minutemen, the Rangers, and the Ku Klux Klan had done with limited intervention from the establishment. Among African Americans, especially activists schooled in the tenets of nonviolent resistance, armed self-defense was contentious to say the least. “We had seen Watts rise up,” Huey recalls. “We had seen Martin Luther King come to Watts in an effort to calm the people, and we had seen his philosophy of nonviolence rejected. Black people had been taught nonviolence; it was deep in us. What good, however, was nonviolence when the police were determined to rule by force?” The press therefore delighted in our public displays of weaponry, disregarding in the process the law-abiding basis at the foundation of the Party’s operations. “We wanted to show that we didn’t have to tolerate police abuse, that the black community would provide its own security, following the local laws and ordinances and the California Penal Code.” We were not, however, a security force but a community model for legally protesting police misconduct. Even highly publicized actions such as the Black Panther demonstration at the California State capitol in Sacramento, wherein twenty-nine armed African-American men and women entered the congressional floor to challenge pending legislation aimed at depriving blacks of their constitutional right to carry weapons, was administered by Huey in strict accordance with state laws. The Mulford Bill, or “Panther Bill,” as the legislation was alternately known when it was passed in July 1967, in effect criminalized all open displays of loaded firearms. “We knew how the system operated. If we used the laws in our own interest and against theirs, then the power structure would simply change the laws.” Nonetheless, we abided by the new legislation, ending our patrols overnight.

In spite of this momentary setback, the Black Panthers had left an indelible impression on the political landscape in a matter of months. According to Huey, “Our newspaper [The Black Panther] was reaching the people; the Sacramento stance had received tremendous support; new chapters were springing up in many cities; we were exploring new ways to raise the consciousness ofBlack people. Everything was working weU.” Included in the rush of events was the addition of newly appointed Black Panther Party Minister oflnformation Eldridge Cleaver, a former-con- vict-turned-journalist who had won acclaim with the release of his controversial bestseller Soul on Ice, in 1966. Like Huey, Eldridge was a committed proponent of Malcolm’s teachings. Significantly, Huey and Eldridge parted over ideological differences. “When Eldridgejoined the Party it was after the police confrontation, which left him fixated with the ‘either/or’ attitude. This was that either the community picked up the gun with the Party or else they were cowards and there was no place for them.” Eldridge ultimately dismissed the Party’s broad self-defense package, defining the black liberation battle exclusively in terms of armed struggle. But these differences were not wholly apparent to anyone, including myself, in 1967. At that moment, Eldridge was an articulate Black Panther spokesperson, a position that assumed critical importance with Huey’s arrest in the death of Officer Frey that fall.

It is perhaps impossible today for anyone who did not witness the proceedings at the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland to fully appreciate the political magnitude ofHuey’s trial. On the court’s opening day in July 1968 over 5,000 demonstrators and 450 Black Panthers crowded the streets to protest the injustice of the case, while messages of solidarity were received by the Party from around the world. There had, of course, been solidarity movements to free American political prisoners in the early part of the twentieth century. The call to “Free Huey,” however, was louder and larger than any other. Simply put, there had never before been a movement of this magnitude because never before had there been an African-American political prisoner of this caliber. Principally, this was due to the fact that there had never been a U.S. protest group that posed a greater threat to the racial status quo than the Black Panther Party. For Huey’s trial was in reality another form of state-sponsored political retaliation against the Panthers. Much as the ruling establishment had employed the Mulford Bill in a failed attempt to shut down the Party, monied interests now made use of the courts to accomplish what the legislature had been unable to do. Even a side glance at the details later involved in the state’s attempts to prosecute other African-American activists, including Angela Davis and Black Panther leaders Bobby Scale, Ericka Huggins, George Jackson, Gcronimo Pratt, and, more recently, Mumia Abu-Jamal, illustrate a pattern of politically motivated repression against black dissidents that has continued for years. Indeed, Huey’s defense movement is the progenitor of the modern American prison movement, and echoes from the call to “Free Huey” can now be heard in the public outcry to “Free Mumia.”

While the immense groundswell of support for Huey positioned us at the forefront of the struggle for social justice, this sudden prestige also incurred severe political backlash. According to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in October 1968, the Panthers were “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” and field agents were instructed “to exploit all avenues of creating ... dissension within the ranks of the BPP.” Further, an FBI memorandum dated the following month orders agents to develop “hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP.” COINTELPRO, an acronym for the Bureau’s “counterintelligence program,” became the FBI vehicle of choice in Hoover’s “war” against the Panthers. Of particular usefulness was the special COINTELPRO “Black Nationalist” division, whose specific purpose, in the FBI’s own words, was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists.” Hoover was determined to prevent the rise of a black “Messiah” who might “unify and electrify” African Americans. With Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., dead, Hoover predicted that Huey would fill this “messianic” role. The fanfare surrounding the “Free Huey” movement undoubtedly exacerbated Hoover’s hysteria, leading in turn to a campaign of military-style attacks new to the Bureau’s long, disgraceful history in combating activists. Wiretaps, burglaries, forgeries, as well as the use of undercover agent provocateurs and FBI-orchestrated killings of Black Panthers, were all put to use in the Bureau’s mission to splinter and destroy the Party. Therefore, when I speak of Hoover’s “war” against the Panthers, I mean precisely that: a declaration of war by the U.S. government against the Black Panther Party.

Perhaps the most unlikely target of FBI backlash was the Party’s free community service programs. As mentioned earlier, our Ten Point platform for self-defense included pragmatic concerns of social welfare alongside issues of armed resistance. To this end the Party, in late 1968, initiated a series of Survival Programs, or grassroots outreach programs, which provided free groceries, clothing, medical care, legal assistance, and other basic necessities to thousands of people nationwide. “We called them ‘survival programs pending transformation of society,’ since we needed long-term programs and a disciplined organization to carry them out,” Huey writes of this pioneering work. “They were designed to help the people survive until their consciousness is raised, which is only the first step in the revolution to build a new America.” Among the most successful of these offerings was the Breakfast for Children Program, which provided free hot meals to schoolchildren. Our programs were also enormously effective in communicating the Party’s teachings to the people, and law enforcement agencies accordingly took dramatic, if unsuccessful, measures to sabotage operations. Police raided the Breakfast for Children Program, ransacked food storage facilities, destroyed kitchen equipment, and attempted to disrupt relations between the Black Panthers and local business owners and community advocates, whose contributions made the programs possible. “The ostensible reason for this was that children participating in the program were being propagandized, which simply meant that they were being taught how to think, not what to think,” Huey comments. Nevertheless, the Survival Programs endured, growing to address issues of employment, housing, prisoner aid, and senior safety as well as other concerns in the 1970s.

Compounding the state’s frustrated attempts to end the Survival Programs was its concurrent failure to convict Huey in the murder of Officer Frey. Freed in July 1970, Huey returned to the streets to resume the leadership he had administered indirectly from his prison cell during the past three years. Unbeknownst to him, however, the landmark trial had exalted his image among the people to heights beyond his control. No longer Oakland’s native son nor even the renowned Black Panther charged with killing a policeman, Huey had become a symbol. “There was now an element of hero worship that had not existed before I got busted,” he writes of this unwelcome dynamic that separated him from the movement that had steadfastly protested his innocence and, in effcct, freed him from prison. “Too many so-called leaders of the movement have been made into celebrities and their revolutionary fervor destroyed by mass media The task is to transform society; only the people can do that—not heroes, not celebrities, not stars.” Resisting idolatry, Huey set to work on “life-and-death issues,” most visibly defending political prisoners Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins, and the Soledad Brothers. Huey also prioritized launching the Ide-ological Institute, a Black Panther education and leadership training center established in 1971. “I did not want to be, could not be, the only one developing ideas,” he observes of his role as the Party’s chief theoretician. “Given the opportunity, other comrades would be able to come up with fresh solutions as they encountered changing conditions.” Central to the Party’s longevity was Huey’s ongoing commitment to adapting Black Panther ideology to changing times, especially as these changes pertained to world affairs. Starting with Marx’s concept of “dialectical materialism” as his basis (that is, the struggle of opposites based upon their unity, contradiction being the ruling principle of the universe), Huey formulated an analysis in which he argued that the U.S. was not a nation but an empire. Indeed, foreign governments of any size could no longer claim complete independence from American interests, as Huey’s meetings with world leaders such as Yasser Arafat, Chinese premier Chou En-lai, and Mozambique president Samora Moises Machel made clear during his travels abroad in 1971. Instead, what had once been a series of separate nations now functioned collectively as a network of U.S.-controlled “communities.” Huey’s philosophy of “Inter- communalism,” one of the earliest recorded premonitions of present- day “globalism,” became the guiding intellectual current of the Party, infusing the Panthers with a global perspective that flew in the face of nationalism. “As one country becomes free, it makes each country stronger because it develops a base of liberated territory so that we’ll be in a better position to liberate our communities,” Huey asserts, underscoring the possibility for worldwide solidarity wherever opposition to U.S. dominance exists. “We will slowly strangle imperialism by freeing one country after another. This is why we support the brothers and sisters in southern and northern Mrica as well as those in Asia and Latin American who are struggling against the U.S. empire.”

Huey’s intellectual currency was further enhanced with the 1972 publication of To Diefor the People, his fi rst collection of writings and speeches made available to the general reading public. With Toni Morrison as the book’s editor, the project was instrumental in disseminating Black Panther ideology beyond the movement. In addition to highlighting seminal writings reprinted from the Black Panther newspaper, Huey addresses topics such as black capitalism, the relevance of the African-American church, and the Party’s role in mediating events after the Attica prison uprising. Following the success of To Die for the People he published a more intimate articulation of Party history in his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide. When the book came out in 1973, Huey’s private life, particularly his formative years pre-dating the Black Panthers, was still widely underreported and therefore unknown to most readers. Further, the book helped demystify the Party in the popular imagination. Attacked by the FBI and slandered throughout the press as “cop killers” and suicidal thugs, we were victims of outrageous accusations, which even the book’s tide seeks to rectify. “Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and dignity that existence without them is impossible .... Above all, it demands that the revolutionary see his death and life as one piece.” Appearing the same year as his autobiography was In Search of Common Ground, a book-length conversation with famed psychoanalyst Erik T. Erikson, in which Huey presents his most indepth rendering of Intercommunalism up to that moment.

By the mid-1970s, the Party had reached its pinnacle of influence. Huey was the preeminent African-American leader for social justice in the world, with the Panthers counting over forty chapters domestically, as well as chapters in England, Israel, Australia, and India. In addition to political coalitions with liberation movements overseas were unions established among Asian Americans, Latinos, white peace activists, feminists, and lesbians and gay men in the U.S. Fundamental to our work of this period was Huey’s renewed call for institution building. Although this feature had been central to the ideological platform laid in the Ten Point Program in 1966, we had strayed from our original purpose. Eldridge Cleaver, for example, had alienated the Black Panthers from many in the community who did not relate to his “either/or” philosophy of “revolution now.” Moreover, Eldridge had abandoned the Survival Programs during Huey’s absence while he was incarcerated, leading to further breaches in support where those ties were most essential: namely, between the Party and people living in local communities where we were active. Reclaiming the politics of empowerment as our keystone, the Black Panthers now exercised considerable strength to transform the American establishment, lobbying on behalf of the poor to secure thousands of jobs, low-cost housing, and public funding to operate the free community programs. Through this influence we helped elect progressive political candidates, including Party members, who now sat on public-school boards and other positions of regional and national authority. As a result, critics soon charged Huey with selling out the movement to the very “system” from which the Panthers had previously demanded independence. In reply, Huey invoked Intercommunalism by way of an explanation. “I contend that no one is outside the system. The world is so close now, because of technology, that we are like a series of dispersed communities, but we’re all under siege by the one empire-state authority, the reactionary inner circle of the United States.”

From its beginnings the chief ambition of the Black Panther Party had been to change the U.S. government by exhausting all legal means, and we had done so to an astounding degree by the late 1970s. The undeniably racist tenor of American culture and politics persisted, of course. Obliterating that reality altogether had never been our objective. However, African Americans and other oppressed peoples had in fact made tremendous advances through the work of the Black Panthers: Our police patrols had taken the initial steps toward establishing both the first community-based police review boards and the first wave of African-American officer recruitment; the Survival Programs provided revolutionary models for social service, which public agencies and, remarkably enough, the federal government adopted to feed children, clothe families, and offer medical necessities; the Party’s groundbreaking inroads into electoral politics brought the first black mayor to Oakland, laying in part the foundation for today’s political power base among black congressional leaders; and perhaps most notable of all, we raised the political consciousness of African Americans everywhere. I should add for purposes of clarity that, contrary to popular belief, Huey did not intend for the Party to “make” revolution. Wc realized at a very early point in our development that only the people arc the makers of revolution. “The main function of the Party is to awaken the people and teach them the strategic method of resisting a power structure,” Huey remarks ofthe Party’s purpose. “The people make revolution; the oppressors, by their brutal actions, cause resistance by the people. The vanguard party only teaches the correct methods of resistance.” And that is precisely what those of us in the Black Panther Party did for almost fifteen years.

Dialectical materialism assures us that all things ultimately reach a point of negation wherein there is a new stage of development. Around 1980 the Party took on new characteristics, realizing its slogan “Power to the People.” With progressive political representatives in authority and government agencies performing tasks previously operated by the Panthers, our revolutionary self-defense platform had by then been largely integrated into the political mainstream. Furthermore, Huey was exhausted by Hoover’s COINTELPRO campaign. The FBI’s relentless attacks, which had grown in sophistication with the Party’s own political maturity, now included charges of income tax fraud and misappropriation of funds. Complicating matters was Huey’s drug addiction, which I speak to prominently in my memoir, This Side of Glory. One of the saddest ironies in Huey's iconoclastic life was that he died in 1989 at the hands of a drug dealer just a few blocks from where Officer Frey had been killed. Even in death, however, Huey remains a necessary source of political inspiration, as this collection of writings and speeches attests. For his is a living history. The work of the Black Panther Party remains an unfinished agenda. Huey states that revolution is a process—not a conclusion. Contradictions are the ruling principles of the universe. “I will fight until I die, however that may come. But whether I’m around or not to see it happen, I know that the transformation of society inevitably will manifest the true meaning of ‘ all power to the people.’”

David Hilliard, Executive Director The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation

Part I: The First Steps

HUEY P. NEWTON was born the last of seven children in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1942. The family migrated three years later to Oak-land, California, where his father served as a Baptist minister. Despite Huey’s religious upbringing and close family ties, he was a troubled student involved in petty criminal activity and subject to constant expulsion from school throughout his adolescence. In part, this resulted from his being unable to read until age sixteen. Embarrassed by his illiteracy and determined to keep up with his older siblings’ academic strides, he taught himself to read with the assistance of an older brother. By 1959 Huey had advanced himself to college-level comprehension, entering Oakland City College that same year. Here he discovered the influential writings ofW.E.B. Du Bois, Mao Tse- tung, and Malcolm X, which shaped his fledgling intellect.

As his political consciousness became radicalized, Huey put his learning into action by takng part in black student activism. Unfortunately, the many self-described campus “radicals” focused on student issues alone, neglecting the concerns of the black community at large. Having grown up among poor African Americans, Huey understood that in spite of the newly granted legislative victories, blacks still lacked equality under the law. The Voter Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1965 we re breakthroughs for Mrican

Amciiuaiis but did nuL neaLe uig:eiiLly needed jobs and ulher basic necessities such as health care. Huey thus realized at this early point in his political development that only a liberation movement whose program addressed survival issues would bring about the revolutionary agenda he had begun to envision.

Although campus organizing had been a disappointing experience, this work was nevertheless instrumental in bringing Huey together with classmate and future Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale. The following excerpts from Huey’s autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, chronicle this formative period, including the Party’s founding in 1966, its turbulent first year on the streets, Huey’s historic encounter with Officer Frey, and the overnight rise of the Black Panthers to international prominence.

Scoring

first studied law to become a better burglar. Figuring I might get busted at any time and wanting to be ready when it happened, I bought some books on criminal law and burglary and felony and looked up as much as possible. I tried to find out what kind of evidence they needed, what things were actually considered violations of the law, what the loopholes were, and what you could do to avoid being chargcd at all. They had a law for everything. I studied the California penal code and books like California Criminal Evidence and Cal-ifornia Criminal Law by Fricke and Alarcon, concentrating on those areas that were somewhat vague. The California penal code says that any law which is vague to the ordinary citizen—the average reasonable man who lives in California and who is exposed to the state’s rules, regulations, and culture—does not quality as a statute.

Later on, law enforcement courses helped me to know how to deal with the police. Before I took Criminal Evidence in school, I had no idea what my rights really were. I did not know, for instance, that police can be arrested. My studying helped, because every time I got arrested I was released with no charge. Until I went to prison for something I was innocent of, I had no convictions against me; yet I had done a li t- tle of everything. The court would convict you if it could, but if you knew the law and were articulate, then the judges figured you were not too bad because your very manner of speaking indicated that you had been “indoctrinated” into their way of thinking.

I was doing a lot of things that were technically unlawful. Sometimes my friends and I received stolen blank checks from a company, which we would then make out for $150 to $200, never more than an amount consistent with a weekly paycheck. Sometimes we stole the checks ourselves; other times we bought them from guys who had stolen them. You had to do this fast, before the companies distributed chock numbers to banks and stores.

Wc burglarized homes in the Oakland and Berkeley hills in broad daylight. Sometimes we borrowed a pickup truck and put a lawn mower and garden tools in it. Then we drove up to a house that appeared empty and rang the bell. If no one answered, we rolled the lawn mower around to the back, as if we planned to cut the grass and trim the hedges. Then, swiftly, we broke into the house and took what we wanted.

Often I went car prowling by myself. I would walk the streets until I saw a good prospect, then break into the car and take what was on the seat or in the glove compartment. Many people left their cars unlocked, which made it easier.

We scored best, however, with the credit game or short-change games. We stole or bought stolen credit cards and then purchased as much as possible with them before their numbers were distributed. You could either sell the booty or use it yourself.

A very profitable credit game went like this: we would pay S20 or $30 to someone who owned a small business to say that wc had worked for him five years or so. This established a work record good enough for credit in one of the big stores. Then we would charge about $150 worth of merchandise and pay $20 down. Of course, we used an assumed name and a phony address, but we let them check the address, because we gave them a location and telephone number where one of our friends lived. We made payments for a couple of months. Then we would charge over the $150 limit. If you were making payments, they raised your credit. We would buy a big order, and then stop making payments. If they called our “place of work,” they were told we had just quit. If they called our alleged address, they learned we had “moved over a month ago.”The store was left hanging. They did not really lose, because they were actually robbing the community blind. They just wrote off the amount and continued their robbing. The lesson: you can survive through petty crime and hurt those who hurt you.

Once into petty crime, I stopped fighting. I had transferred the conflict, the aggression, and hostility from the brothers in the community to the Establishment.

The most successful game I ran was the short-change game. Short changing was an art I developed so well that I could make $50 to $60 a day. I ran it everywhere, in small and large stores, and even on bank tellers. In the short-change game I would go into a store with five onc- dollar bills, ask the clerk for change, and walk out with a ten-dollar bill. This was the $5-to-$1O short-change. You could also do a $10-to-$20 short-change by walking into the store with ten one-dollar bills and coming out with a twenty-dollar bill.

The $5-to-$1O short-change worked this way: you folded up four of the bills into a small tight wad. Then you bought something like candy or gum with the other bill so that the clerk had to open the cash register to give you change. I always stood a little distance from the register so that the clerk had to come to me to give me the change. You have to get the cash register open and get the clerk to move away from it so that his mind is taken off what he has in the register.

When he brought my change from the candy, I handed him the wad of four one-dollar bills and said, “Here are singles. Will you give me a five-dollar bill for them?” He would then hand me the five-dollar bill before he realized that there were only four singles in the wad. He has the register open, and I amprepared for him to discover the error. When he did, I would then hand him another single, but also the five-dollar bill he had given me and say, “Well, here’s six more; give me a ten.” He would do it, and I would take the S10 and be gone before he realized what had happened. Most of the time they never understood. It happened so fast they would simply go on to another customer. By the time things began to click in their minds, they could never be sure that something had in fact gone wrong until the end of the day when they tallied up the register. By that time I was just a vague memory. Of course, if the clerk was quick and sensed that something was not right, then I pretended to be confused and would say I had made a mistake and give him the right amount. It was a pretty safe game, and it worked for me many times.

The brother who introduced me to short-changing eventually became a Muslim, but before that he taught me to burglarize cars parked by the emergency entrances of hospitals. People would come to the hospital in a rush and leave their cars unlocked, with valuables in the open. I never scored on Blacks under any condition, but scoring on whites was a strike against injustice.

Whenever I had liberated enough cash to give me a stretch of free time, I stayed home reading, books like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Devils, and The Mouse of the Dead; The Trial by Franz Kafka; and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. I read and reread Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, the story of Jean Valjean, a French-man who spent thirty years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his hungry family. This really reached me, because I identified with Valjean, and I often thought of my father being in a kind of social prison because he wanted to feed his family. Albert Camus’s The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus made me feel even more justified in my pattern of liberating property from the oppressor as an antidote to social suicide.

I felt that white people were criminals because they plundered the world. It was more, however, than a simple antiwhite feeling, because I never wanted to hurt poor whites, even though I had met some in school who called me “nigger” and other names. I fought them, but I never took their lunches or money because I knew that they had nothing to start with. With those who had money it was a different story. I still equated having money with whiteness, and to take what was mine and what the white criminals called theirs gave me a feeling of real freedom.

I even bragged to my friends how good I felt about the whole matter. When they were at my apartment during times when there wasn’t any food to eat, I told them that even though I starved, my time was my own and I could do anything I wanted with it. I didn’t have a car then, because most of my money was spent on the apartment, food, and clothes- When friends asked me why I did not get a car, I told them it was because I did not want bills and that a car was not my main goal or desire. My purpose was to have as much leisure time as possible. I could have pulled bigger jobs and gotten more, but I did not want any status symbols. I wanted most of all to be free from the life of a servant forced to take those low-paying jobs and looked at with scorn by white bosses.

Eventually, I got caught, and more than once, but by then I had developed a fairly good working knowledge of the law, and I decided to defend myself. Although no skilled legal technician, I could make a good defense. If you are an existentialist, defending yourself is another manifestation of freedom. When you are brought into the courts the Establishment, you can show your contempt for them. Most defendants want to get high-priced counsel or use the state to speak for them through the Public Defender. If you speak for yourself, you can say exactly what you want, or at least not say what you do not want to. Or you can laugh at them. As Elaine Brown, a member of the Black Panther Party, says in her song, “The End ofSilence,” “You laugh at laws passed by a silly lot that tell you to give thanks for what you’ve already got.” The laws exist to defend those who possess property. They protect the possessors who should share but who do not. By defending myself, I showed my contempt for that structure.

It gave me real pleasure to defend myself. I never thought in terms of conviction or acquittal, although itwas an added treat to escape their net. But even a conviction would not have dismayed me, because at least I had the opportunity to laugh at them and show my contempt. They would see that I was not intimidated enough to raise the money to get counsel—money that I did not have in the first place—or to accept a Public Defender.

I especially liked traffic violations. For a while, I paid a lot of traffic tickets. When I became my own defender, I never paid another one. Of the three major cases in which I defended myself, the only one I lost was the one in which I was innocent.

Once, I was indicted on sixteen counts of burglary through trickery as a result of the short-change game, and I beat the cases during the pretrial period because the police could not establish the corpus delicti or the elements of the case. Each law had a body of elements, and each element has to be violated in order for a crime to have been committed. That’s what they call the corpus delicti. People think that term means the physical body, but it really means the body of elements. For example, according to California law, in order to commit armed robbery you have to be armed, and you must expropriate through fear or force related to weapons; you can have armed robbery without any bullets in the gun. The elements of the case relate to fear and force in connection with weapons.

In the short-change or “bunko” case I was accused of running my game in sixteen stores. However, they could get only a few people to say they were short in their registers. I was really saved from being con victed because the police tried to get a young woman teller from a bank to say that I had short-changed her. A lot of people will not admit they have been short-changed. In the pretrial, in which they were trying to get a federal case, they asked me whether I had gone into the bank. I refused to admit it. I knew that the young woman whom they wanted to testify against me had not shown up at court. When I bailed out, I went to her bank and asked her if the police had been there. She said they had and that they were trying to persuade her that I had short-changed her. She said she would not testify because she knew it had not happened. I invited her to court to testify on my behalf. She came and explained to the judge that the police had tried to persuade her to testify, but she would not comply.

My argument was that the police had invented the short-change rap against me. I pointed out that clerks who were short-changed would have missed the money either when I was in the store or at the end of the day. None of these people had notified the police. The police had sought them out and by suggesting that they had been short-changed were really offering the clerks a chance to make five or ten extra dollars—a sort of pay-off for testifying. Most people, I said, are not as honest as the young girl bank teller.

Another argument I put forth in my defense was that if someone else had gotten change after I had been in the store before inventory of the register, it was quite possible, even probable, that the money had been lost at some other time. I got a dismissal on the grounds of insufficient evidence.

In the second major case, I was accused of having stolen some books from a store near the school and of having burglarized the car of another student and taken his books. He reported to the bookstore that his books had been stolen. They were on the lookout for books with the marking he had described. I had not stolen the books, even though they were in my possession. I was doing a lot of gambling at the time, and some students who owed me money gave me the books instead. Wc used books for money, because if a book was required in a course, we could sell it to the bookstore. Even though I did not know where the books came from, I suspected that they were stolen.

I figured there was about $60 worth of books in the stack. When I needed money, I sent my cousin to the bookstore to cash them in. The bookstore took them away from her, claiming that they were stolen. They would not give her any money, nor would they return the books, I went down to the store and told them they could not confiscate my books without due process of law. They knew I was a student at the college and that they could call the police on me any time they wanted. I told them that either they return the books right then or I would take as many books as I thought would equal the amount they had stolen from me. They gave me the books, and I went on to class.

Apparently the bookstore notified the Dean of Students, who called the police. While I was in class, the Oakland police came and escorted me with the books to the campus police, who took me to the Dean’s office. No one could arrest me, because there was no warrant. The bookstore wanted to wait until the man who had reported the books stolen returned from the Army to identify them. So they took me to the Dean’s office, and the Dean said he would give me a receipt, keeping the books until the owner came back. I told him that he would not give me a receipt, because they were my books and he could not confiscate my property without due process oflaw; to do so would be a violation of my constitutional rights. I added, “Furthermore, if you try to confiscate my property, I will ask the police over there to have you arrested.” The police stood looking stupid, not knowing what to do. The Dean said the man would not be back for about a week, but he wanted the books. I took the books off his desk and said, “I’m enrolled here, and when you want to talk to me, I'll be around.” Then I walked out of the office. They did not know how to deal with a poor oppressed Black man who knew their law and had dignity.

When I was charged and brought to trial, I defended myself again. The case revolved around identifying the books. The man knew that his books had been stolen; the bookstore knew they had lost some books. Identification had not been made, but I was charged with a theft. I had stashed the books away so that nobody could locate them, and when I came to court, I left them behind. They brought me to trial without any factual evidence against me, and I beat the case with the defense I conducted, particularly my cross-examination.

The woman who owned the bookstore took the stand. The previous year, on Christmas Eve, she had invited me to her home, and I had seen her off and on after that. When I was unwilling to continue a relationship with her, she became angry. I wanted to bring this out, but when I began this line of questioning, the judge was outraged and stopped it. By this time, however, she had broken down in tears on the stand, and it was apparent to the jury by the questions I asked and her reaction to them that she had personal reasons for testifying against me.

When the Dean testified, I really went to work. Although no books were entered into evidence, he said that I had in my possession some books identical to those on the list the day the police brought me to his office. I asked him, “Well, if the police were right there, why didn’t you put me under arrest?” He said, “I wasn’t sure of my rights.” This was the opening I needed. I said, “You mean to say that I attend your school, and you’re teaching me my rights without even knowing your own? You’re giving me knowledge, and you don’t know your basic civil rights? ” Then I turned to the jury and argued that this was strange indeed. The judge was furious and almost cited me for contempt of court. I was in contempt, all right, and not only of the court. I was contemptuous of the whole system of exploitation, which I was coming to understand better and better.

I knew what the jury was thinking, and when the Dean said that he did not know his rights, I used his ignorance to my advantage. People automatically think, “You mean you’re a college professor and you don’t know something that basic and simple?” Once I planted this idea in the minds of the jurors, it completely negated the Dean’s testimony.

I told the jury that I collected books, which I did, traded and sold them, and that I had some volumes similar to those named in the indictment—same names, authors, and so forth. When they wanted to view the books, I asked the judge if I could go home and get them. The judge said that he could not stop a trial in the middle (it was a misdemeanor case) to let me go home. My strategy worked, however, and I ended up with a hung jury.

Then came the second trial. This time I had the books in court, but nobody could identify them. I had acquired some different books— same authors and same names—and put some similar markings in them. The man who claimed his car had been burglarized, the Dean, and the owner of the bookstore could not positively identify them. They kept saying that the books were either similar or the same, but they were not sure.

I emphasized this uncertainty, saying that all I knew was I had purchased the books from another person. I told the jury that I had not in fact stolen the books and that by bringing them to court I was trying to find out if they belonged to those who had brought the charges. I got another hung jury.

They tried me a third time, with the same result. When they brought the case up a fourth time, the judge dismissed it. Off and on, with continuances and mistrials, the case dragged over a period of nine months. It was simple harassment, as far as I was concerned, because I had not stolen the books. They might also have been trying to test new prosecutors; I had a different one every time, every chump in Alameda County, and still they got nowhere. I looked them straight in the eye and advanced.

The third case came out of a party I attended with Melvin at the home of a probation officer who had gone to San Jose State College with him. Melvin had known some of the people at the party quite a while, and most of them were related to each other in some way, either by blood or by marriage. Melvin and I were outsiders. As usual, I started a discussion. A party was good or bad for me depending on whether I could start a rap session. I taught that way for the Afro- American Association and recruited a lot of the lumpens.

Some of these sessions ended in fights. It was almost like the dozens again, although, here, ideas, not mothers, were at issue. The guy who could ask the most penetrating questions and give the smartest answers “capped,” or topped, all the others. Sometimes after a guy was defeated, or “shot down,” if he wanted to fight, I would accommodate him. It was all the same. If! could get into a good rap and a good fight, too, the night was complete.

At the party, while we were talking, someone called Odell Lee came up and entered the conversation. I did not know him, had only seen him dancing earlier in the evening, but I had gone to school with his wife, Margo, who was there. Odell Lee walked up and said, “You must be an Afro-American.” I replied, “I don’t know what you mean. Are you asking me if I am of African descent, or are you asking me if I’m a member ofDonald Warden’s Afro-American Association? If the latter, then I am not. But if you’re asking me if I’m of African ancestry, then I am an Afro-American,just as you are.” He said some words in Chinese and I came back in Swahili. Then he asked me, “Well, how do you know that I’m an Afro-American?” I replied, “Well, I have twenty twenty vision, and I can sec your hair is just as kinky as mine, and your face just as black, so I concludc that you must be exactly what I am, an Afro-American.”

Saying that, I turned my back and began to cut my steak. I was the only one in the room with a steak knife. All the others had plastic utensils, but since the steak was kind of tough, I had gone into the kitchen for a regular steak knife. Having made my point, my move, so to speak, I turned my back on Lee in a kind of put-down. To him it was a provocative act.

Odell had a scar on his face from about the ear to just below his chin. This was a very significant point, because on the block you run into plenty of guys with scars like that, which usually means that the person has seen a lot of action with knives. This is not always the case, but when you are trying to survive on the block, you learn to be hip to the cues.

So I turned my back and began cutting steak with the knife I had in my right hand. He grabbed my left arm with his right and turned me around abruptly. When he did, my knife was pointed right at him in ready position. Lee said, “Don’t turn your back on me when I’m talking to you.” I pushed his hand off my arm. “Don’t you ever put your hands on me again,” I said, and turned around once more to my steak.

Ordinarily I would not have turned my back a second time, because he had all the signs of a tush hog. But somehow the conditions did not add up. Most people there were professionals—or training to become professionals—and this man with the scar did not seem to fit. We were not on the block, so I thought perhaps the scar meant nothing. All of a sudden, however, he was acting like a bully, and now he wanted everyone to know he was not finished with me. When I turned my back on him a second time, this would have ended the whole argument for the Black bourgeoisie, but the tush hog responded in his way.

He turned me around again, and the tempo picked up. “You must not know who you’re talking to,” he said, moving his left hand to his left hip pocket. I figured I had better hurry up. Since the best defense is a good offense, my steak knife was again in a ready position, instinc tively. I said to him, “Don’t draw a knife on me,” and I thrust my knife forward, stabbing him several times before he could come up with his left hand. He held on to me with his right hand and tried to advance, but I pushed him away. I still do not know what he was doing with his left, but I was expecting to be hurt any time and determined to beat him to the punch.

Melvin grabbed Lee’s right arm and pushed him into a corner, where he fell, bleeding heavily. He got up and charged me again, and I continued to hold my knife ready. Then Melvin jumped between us, and Lee fainted in his arms. As Melvin took the knife from me, we turned to the rest of the people, and somebody asked, “Why did you cut him?” Melvin said, “He cut him because he should have cut him,” and we backed out of the room. Melvin wanted me to press charges against the man, but I would never go to the police.

About two weeks later, Odell Lee swore out charges against me. I don’t know why he delayed so long, perhaps because he was in the hospital for a few days. Maybe he was hesitant. He had been talking about getting me, I know, but I also heard that his wife had urged him to press charges instead. To me, he was not the kind of character who would go to the police. I saw him as a guy who would rather look for me himself and deal right there. When he sent word that he was after me, I started packing a gun. Instead, I was arrested at my house on a warrant and indicted for assault with a deadly weapon. After I pleaded not guilty, it went to a jury trial. I defended myself again.

I was found guilty as charged, but only because I lacked ajury of my peers. My defense was based on the grounds that I was not guilty, either by white law or by the culture of the Black community. I did not deny thatl stabbed Odell Lee—I admitted it—but the law says that when one sees or feels he is in imminent danger of great bodily harm or death, he may use whatever force necessary to defend himself. If he kills his assailant, the homicide is justified. This section of the California penal code is almost impossible for a man to defend himself under unless he is a part of the oppressor class. The oppressed have no chance, for peo-ple who sit onjuries always think you could have picked another means of defense. They cannot see or understand the danger.

A jury of my peers would have understood the situation and exonerated me. But the jurors in Alameda County come out of big houses in the hills to pass judgment on the people whom they feel threaten their “peace.” When these people see a scar on the face of a man on the block, they have no understanding of its symbolism. Odell Lee got on the stand and said that his scar resulted from an automobile acci- dcnt. It may well have. But taking everything in context—his behavior at the party, the move toward his left hip, and his scar—my peers would never have convicted me.

Bobby Seale explains it brilliantly in Seize the Time: you may go to a party and step on someone’s shoes and apologize, and if the person accepts the apology, then nothing happens. If you hear something like “An apology won’t shine my shoes,” then you know he is really saying, “I’m going to fight you.” So you defend yourself, and in that case striking first would be a defensive act, not an offensive one. You are trying to get an advantage over an opponent who has already declared war.

It is all a matter of life styles that spills over into the problem of getting a jury of one’s peers. If a truck driver is the defendant, should there be only truck drivers on the jury, or all white racists on the jury if a white racist is on trial? I say no. There is, nevertheless, an internal contradiction in a jury system that totally divides the accused and his jury. Different cultures and life styles in America use the same words with different shades of meaning. All belong to one society yet live in different worlds.

I was found guilty of a felony, assault with a deadly weapon, and faced a long jail sentence for the first time. Before and during the trial, I had been out on bail for several months. I came to court each time I was supposed to, but when I was convicted, the judge decided to revoke my bail immediately and place me in the custody of the bailiff while he considered what sentence to impose. Wanting none of this, I demanded to be sentenced right then. The judge said that if he sentenced me then, I would be sent to the state penitentiary. I told him to send me there immediately so that I could start serving my time. Pie refused, asking me, “Do you realize what you’re saying?” I said, “I know what I’m saying, that you found me guilty. But I am not guilty, and now I don’t want to wait around a month serving dead time while you think about it.” No time was dead to me. It was all live time, life. I felt that if the judge wanted to think about it for thirty days, he should let me stay out on bail while he did so. But he would not. He had me confined to the Alameda County jail, a place I would get to know well—very well.

While I was waiting, my family hired a lawyer to represent me at the sentencing. The judge was a man named Leonard Dieden, who did not give lawyers, much less defendants, any respect. He has sent so many people to the penitentiary that a section of San Quentin is called “Dieden’s Row.” I was against my family hiring a lawyer because I felt it was useless. Nevertheless, they did, and he charged them $1,500 to go to court one time. When I arrived for sentencing, he was there, and he worked his “white magic”: the judge sentenced me to six months in the county jail. Even though I had been convicted of a felony, the time they gave me was for a misdemeanor. This was to become a critical issue in my later capital trial, because the law says you can reduce a felony to a misdemeanor by serving less time. The penalty for a felony is no less than a year in the state penitentiary and no more than a life sentence or death. For a misdemeanor the maximum is one year in the county jail.

Freedom

Jail is an odd place to find freedom, but thatwas the place I first found mine: in the Alameda County Jail in Oakland in 1964. This jail is located on the tenth fl oor of the Alameda County Court House, the huge, white building we call “Moby Dick.” When I was falsely convicted of the assault against Odell Lee, Judge Dieden sent me there to await sentencing. Shortly after I arrived, I was made a trusty, which gave me an opportunity to move about freely. Conditions were not good; in fact, the place blew up a few weeks later, when the inmates refused to go on cating starches and split-pca soup at almost every meal, and went on a food strike. I joined them. When we were brought our split-pca soup, we hurled it back through the bars, all over the walls, and refused to lock up in our cells.

I was the only trusty who took part in the strike, and because I could move between cell blocks, they charged me with organizing it. True, I had carried a few messages back and forth, but I was not an organizer then, not that it mattered to the jail administration. Trusties were supposed to go along with the Establishment in everything, and since I could not do that, I was slapped with the organizing label and put in the “hole”—what Black prisoners call the “soul breaker.”

I was twenty-two years old, and I had been in jail before on various beefs, mostly burglary and petty larceny. My parents were pretty sick of me in my late teens and the years following; so I had to depend on Sonny Man to come up from Los Angeles, or wherever he was, to bail me out. Since I had been “given” to him, he came whenever he could. But sometimes I could not find him. At any rate, I was no stranger to jail by 1964, although I had never been in extreme solitary confinement.

Within jail, there are four levels of confinement: the main line, seg regation, isolation, and solitary—the “soul breaker.” You can be in jail in jail, but the soul breaker is your “last” end of the world. In 1964, there were two of these deprivation cells at the Nameda County Court House; each was four and a half feet wide, by six feet long, by ten feet high. The floor was dark red rubber tile, and the walls were black. If the guards wanted to, they could turn on a light in the ceiling, but I was always kept in the dark, and nude. That is part of the deprivation, why the soul breaker is called a strip cell. Sometimes the prisoner in the other cell would get a blanket, but they never gave me one. He sometimes got toilet paper, too—the limit was two squares—and when he begged for more, he was told no, that is part of the punishment. There was no bunk, no washbasin, no toilet, nothing but bare floors, bare walls, a solid steel door, and a round hole four inches in diameter and six inches deep in the middle of the floor. The prisoner was supposed to urinate and defecate in this hole.

A half-gallon milk carton filled with water was my liquid for the week. Twice a day and always at night the guards brought a little cup of cold split-pea soup, right out of the can. Sometimes during the day they brought “fruit loaf,” a patty of cooked vegetables mashed together into a little ball. When I first went in there, I wanted to eat and stay healthy, but soon I realized that was another trick, because when I ate I had to defecate. At night no light came in under the door. I could not even find the hole if I had wanted to. If I was desperate, I had to search with my hand; when I found it, the hole was always slimy with the filth that had gone in before. I was just like a mole looking for the sun; I hated finding it when I did. After a few days the hole filled up and overflowed, so that I could not lie down without wallowing in my own waste. Once every week or two the guard ran a hose into the cell and washed out the urine and defecation. This cleared the air for a while and made it all right to take a deep breath. I had been told I would break before the fifteen days were up. Most men did. After two or three days they would begin to scream and beg for someone to come and take them out, and the captain would pay a visit and say, “We don’t want to treat you this way. Just come out now and abide by the rules and don’t be so arrogant. We’ll treat you fairly. The doors here are large.” To tell the truth, after two or three days I was in bad shape. Why I did not break I do not know. Stubbornness, probably. I did not want to beg. Certainly my resistance was not connected to any kind of ideology or program. That came later. Anyway, I did not scream and beg; I learned the secrets of survival.

One secrct was the same that Mahatma Gandhi learned—to take little sips of nourishment, just enough to keep up one’s strength, but never enough to have to defecate until the fifteen days were up. That way I kept the air somewhat clean and did not have the overflow. I did the same with water, taking little sips every few hours. My body absorbed all of it, and I did not have to urinate.

There was another, more important secret, one that took longer to learn. During the day a little light showed in the two-inch crack at the bottom of the steel door. At night, as the sun went down and the lights clicked off one by one, I heard all the cells closing, and all the locks. I held my hands up in front of my face, and soon I could not see them. For me, that was the testing time, the time when I had to save myself or break.

Outside jail, the brain is always being bombarded by external stimuli. These ordinary sights and sounds of life help to keep our mental processes in order, rational. In deprivation, you have to somehow replace the stimuli, provide an interior environment for yourself. Ever since I was a little boy I have been able to overcome stress by calling up pleasant thoughts. So very soon I began to reflect on the most soothing parts of my past, not to keep out any evil thoughts, but to reinforce myself in some kind of rewarding experience. Here I learned something. This was different.

When I had a pleasant memory, what was I to do with it? Should I throw it out and get another or try to keep it to entertain myself as long as possible? If you are not disciplined, a strange thing happens. The pleasant thought comes, and then another and another, like quick cuts flashing vividly across a movie screen. At first they are organized. Then they start to pick up speed, pushing in on top of one another going faster, faster, faster, faster. The pleasant thoughts are not so pleasant now; they are horrible and grotesque caricatures, whirling around in your head. Stop! I heard myself say, stop, stop, stop. I did not scream. I was able to stop them. Now what do I do?

I started to exercise, especially when I heard the jangle of keys as the guards came with the split-pea soup and fruit loaf. I would not scream; I would not apologize, even though they came every day, saying they would let me out ifl gave in. When they were coming, I would get up and start my calisthenics, and when they went away, I would start the pleasant thoughts again. If I was too tired to stand, I would lie down and find myself on my back. Later, I learned that my position, with my back arched and only my shoulders and tight buttocks touching the floor, was a Zen Buddhist posture. I did not know it then, of course; I just found myself on my back. When the thoughts started coming again, to entertain me, and when the same thing happened with the speed-up, faster, faster, I would say stop! and start again.

Over a span of time—I do not know how long it took—I mastered my thoughts. I could start them and stop them; I could slow them down and speed them up. It was a very conscious exercise. For a while, I feared I would lose control. I could not think; I could not stop thinking. Only later did I learn through practice to go at the speed I wanted. I call them film clips, but they are really thought patterns, the most vivid pictures of my family, girls, good times. Soon I could lie with my back arched for hours on end, and I placed no importance on the passage of time. Control. I learned to control my food, my body, and my mind through a deliberate act of will.

After fifteen days the guards pulled me out and sent me back to a regular cell for twenty-four hours, where I took a shower and saw a medical doctor and a psychiatrist. They were worried that prisoners would become mentally disorganized in such deprivation. Then, because I had not repented, they sent me back to the hole. By then it held no fears for me. I had won my freedom.

Soul breakers exist because the authorities know that such conditions would drive them to the breaking point, but when I resolved that they would not conquer my will, I became stronger than they were. I understood them better than they understood me. No longer dependent on the things of the world, I felt really free for the first time in my life. In the past I had been like my jailers; I had pursued the goals of capitalistic America. Now I had a higher freedom.

Most people who know me do not realize that I have been in and out of jail for the past twelve years. They know only of my eleven months in solitary in 1967, waiting for the murder trial to begin, and the twenty-two months at the Penal Colony after that. But 1967 would not have been possible without 1964. I could not have handled the Penal Colony solitary without the soul breaker behind me. Therefore, I cannot tell incxpcricnccd young comradcs to go into jail and into solitary, that that is the way to defy the authorities and exercise their freedom. I know what solitary can do to a man.

The strip cell has been outlawed throughout the United States. Prisoners I talk to in California tell me it is no longer in use on the West Coast. That was the work of Charles Garry, the lawyer who defended me in 1968, when he fought the case of Warren Wells, a Black Panther accused of shooting a policeman. The Superior Court of California said it was an outrage to human decency to put any man through such extreme deprivation. Of course prisons have their ways, and out there right now, somewhere, prisoners without lawyers are probably lying in their own filth in the soul breaker.

I was in the hole for a month. My sentence, when it came, was for six months on the county farm at Santa Rita, about fifty miles south of Oakland. This is an honor camp with no walls, and the inmates are not locked up. There is a barbed-wire fence, but anyone can easily walk off during the daytime. The inmates work at tending livestock, harvesting crops, and doing other farm work.

I was not in the honor camp long. A few days after I arrived, I had a fight with a fat Black inmate named Bojack, who served in the mess hall. Bojack was a diligent enforcer of small helpings, and I was a “dipper." Whenever Bojack turned away, I would dip for more with my spoon. One day he tried to prevent me from dipping, and I called him for protecting the oppressor’s interests and smashed him with a steel tray. When they pulled me off him, I was hustled next door to Gray- stone, the maximum security prison at Santa Rita.

Here, prisoners are locked up all day inside a stone building. Not only that, I was put in solitary confinement for the remaining months of my sentence. Because of my experience in the hole, I could survive. Still, I did not submit willingly. The food was as bad in Graystone as it had been in Alameda, and I constantly protested about that and the lack of heat in my cell. Half the time we had no heat at all.

Wherever you go in prison there are disturbed inmates. One on my block at Santa Rita screamed night and day as loudly as he could; his vocal cords seemed made of iron. From time to time, the guards came into his cell and threw buckets of cold water on him. (iradu ally, as the inmate wore down, the scream became a croak and then a squeak and then a whisper. Long after he gave out, the sound lingered in my head.

The Santa Rita administration finally got disgusted with my continual complaints and protests and shipped me back to the jail in Oakland, where I spent the rest of my time in solitary. By then I was used to the cold. Even now, I do not like any heat at all wherever I stay, no matter what the outside temperature. Even so, the way I was treated told me a lot about those who devised such punishment. I know them well.

Bobby Seale

Out of jail and back on the street in 1965, I again took up with Bobby Seale. We had a lot to talk about; I had not seen him in more than a year,

Bobby and I had not always agreed. In fact, we disagreed the first time we met, during the Cuban missile crisis several years before. That was the time President Kennedy was about to blow humanity off the face of the earth because Russian ships were on their way to liberated territory with arms for the people of Cuba. The Progressive Labor Party was holding a rally outside Oakland City College to encourage support for Fidel Castro, and I was there because I agreed with their views. There were a number of speakers and onc of them, Donald Warden, launched into a lengthy praise ofFidel. He did this in his usual opportunistic way, tooting his own horn. Warden was about halfWay through his routine, criticizing civil rights organizations and asking why we put our money into that kind of thing, when Bobby challenged him, expressing opposition to Warden and strong support for the position of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, He felt that the NAACP was the hope of Black people and because of this, he supported the government and its moves against Cuba. I explained to him afterward that he was wrong to support the government and the civil rights organizations. Too much money had already been put into legal actions. There were enough laws on the books to permit Black people to deal with all their problems, but the laws were not enforced. Therefore, trying to get more laws was only a meaningless diversion from the real issues. This was an argument I had heard in the Afro-American Association and in Oakland by Malcolm X, who made the point over and over again. Bobby began to think about this and later came over to my point of view,

Whatever our early disagreements, Bobby and I were close by 1965. Later, I recruited him into the Afro-American Association, but when I left it, he continued to stick with Warden. At that time I was still going through my identity crisis, looking for some understanding of myself in relation to society. While I took a back seat in the Association and refused to make a stand on any position, Bobby threw all his energy into it, even after I left.

Still, we did not establish close contact until I got out of the hole in 1965. At that point, Bobby was planning to get married, and he needed a bed for his new apartment. I was breaking up with my girl friend and had a bed I no longer wanted. I sold it to him, and we hauled it to his home. That afternoon we began to talk; he told me that he also had left the Afro-American Association to hook up with Ken Freeman and his group, the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). Most of the brothers in this group attended Oakland City College, but the organization was a sort of underground, off-campus operation. They also had a front group called Soul Students Advisory Council, which was a recognized campus organization. The RAM group was more intellectual than active. They did a lot of talking about the revolution and also some writing. Writing was almost a requirement for membership, in fact, but Bobby was no writer. At the time I got out of jail, Bobby had been involved in an argument with the members and had been suspended for a time. Still angry about this, he told me he intended to break with them. Like me, like thousands of us, Bobby was looking for something and not finding it.

Bobby and I entered a period of intense exploration, trying to solve some of the ideological problems of the Black movement; partly, we needed to explain to our own satisfaction why no Black political organization had succeeded. The only one we thought had promised long-term success was the Organization of Afro-American Unity started by Malcolm X, but Malcolm had died too soon to pull his program together. Malcolm’s slogan had been “Freedom by any means necessary,” but nothing we saw was taking us there. We still had only a vague conception of what freedom ought to mean to Black people, except in abstract terms borrowed from politicians, and that did not help the people on the block at all. Those lofty words were meant for intellectuals and the bourgeoisie, who were already fairly comfortable.

Much of our conversation revolved around groups in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley areas. Knowing the people who belonged to them, wc could evaluate both positive and negative aspects of their characters and the nature of their organizations. While wc respcctcd many of the moves these brothers had made, we felt that the negative aspects of their movements overshadowed the positive ones.

We started throwing around ideas. None of the groups were able to recruit and involve the very people they professed to represent— the poor people in the community who never went to college, probably were not even able to finish high school. Yet these were our people; they were the vast majority of the Black population in the area. Any group talking about Blacks was in fact talking about those low on the ladder in terms of well-being, self-respect, and the amount of concern the government had for them. All of us were talking, and nobody was reaching them.

Bobby had a talent that could help us. He was beginning to make a name for himself in local productions as an actor and comedian. I had seen him act in several plays written by brothers, and he was terrific. I had never liked comedians, and I would not go out of my way to hear one. If a person presents his material in a serious way and uses humor to get his points across, he will have me laughing with all the rest, but stand-up, wisecracking comedians leave me cold. Still, I recognized Bobby’s talent and I thought he could use it to relate to people and persuade them in an incisive way. Often, when we were rapping about our frustrations with particular people or groups, Bobby would act out their madness. He could do expert imitations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Chester of “Gunsmoke.” He could also imitate down to the last detail some of the brothers around us. I would crack my sides laughing, not only because his imitations were so good, but because he could convey certain attitudes and characteristics so sharply. He caught all their shortcomings, the way their ideas failed to meet the needs of the people.

We planned to work through the Soul Students Advisory Council. Although SSAC was just a front for RAM, it had one large advantage—it was not an intellectual organization, and for that reason it would appeal to many lower-class brothers at City College. If these brothers belonged to a group that gave them feelings of strength and respect, they could become effective participants. It was important to give them something relevant to do, something not degrading. Soul Students was normally an ineffective and transitory group without a real program. Only if something big was happening did their meetings attract a lot of people. In the quiet times only two or three would show up.

Just then, however, Soul Students had a hot issue—the establishment of a program of Afro-American history and culture in the college’s regular curriculum. Although it was a relevant program, the authorities were resisting it tooth and nail. Every time we proposed a new course, they countered with reasons why it could not be; at the same time, ironically, they encouraged us to be “concerned.” This was simple trickery; they were dragging their feet.

Bobby and I saw this as an opportunity to move Soul Students a step further by adopting a program of armed self-defense. We approached them, proposing a rally in front of the college in support of the Afro-American history program. We pointed out that this would be a different kind of rally—the Soul Student members would strap on guns and march on the sidewalk in front of the school. Partly, the rally would express our opposition to police brutality, but it would also intimidate the authorities at City College who were resisting our pro-gram. We were looking for a way to emphasize both college and community, to draw them in together. The police and the school authorities needed a strong jolt from Blacks, and we knew this kind of action would make them realize that the brothers meant business. Carrying guns for self-defense was perfectly legal at the time.

We explained all this to Soul Students and showed them that we did not intend to break any laws but were concerned that the organization start dealing with reality rather than sit around intellectualizing and writing essays about the white man. We wanted them to dedicate themselves to armed self-defense with the full understanding that this was defense for the survival of Black people in general and in particular for the cultural program we were trying to establish. As we saw it, Blacks were getting ripped off everywhere. The police had given us no choice but to defend ourselves against their brutality. On the campus we were being miseducated; we had no courses dealing with our real needs and problems, courses that taught us how to survive. Our program was designed to lead the brothers into self-defense before we were completely wiped out physically and mentally.

The weapons were a recruiting device. I felt we could recruit Oakland City College students from the grass roots, people who did not relate to campus organizations that were all too intellectual and offered no effective program of action. Street people would relate to Soul Students if they followed our plan; if the Black community has learned to respect anything, it has learned to respect the gun.

We underestimated the difficulty of bringing the brothers around. Soul Students completely rejected our program. Those brothers had been so intimidated by police firepower they would not give any serious consideration to strapping on a gun, legal or not. After that setback we went to the Revolutionary Action Movement. They did not have many members, just a few guys from the college campus who talked a lot. We explained that by wearing and displaying weapons the street brothers would relate to RAM’s example of leadership. We also talked about a new idea, patrolling the police, since the police were the main perpetrators of violence against the community. We went no further than those two tactics: armed self-defense and police patrol. A more complete program was sure to get bogged down on minor points. I just wanted them to adopt a program of self-defense, and after that was worked out, we could then develop it more fully. We were not aiming then at party organization; there were too many organizations already. Our job was to make one of them relevant; that would be contribution enough. However, we were having a lot of trouble breaking through. RAM rejected the plan, too. They thought it was “suicidal,” that we could not survive a single day patrolling the police.

This left us where we had been all along: nowhere.

The Founding of the Black Panther Party

All during this time, Bobby and I had no thought of the Black Panther Party, no plan to head up any organization, and the ten point program was still in the future. We had seen Watts rise up the previous year. We had seen how the police attacked the Watts community after causing the trouble in the first place. We had seen Martin Luther King comc to Watts in an effort to calm the people, and we had seen his philosophy of nonviolence rejected. Black people had been taught nonviolence; it was decp in us. What good, however, was nonviolence when the police were determined to rule by force? We had seen the Oakland police and the California Highway Patrol begin to carry their shotguns in full view as another way of striking fcar into the community. We had seen all this, and we recognized that the rising consciousness of Black people was almost at the point of explosion. One must relate to the history of one’s community and to its future. Everything we had seen convinced us that our time had come.

Out of this need sprang the Black Panther Party. Bobby and I finally had no choice but to form an organization that would involve the lower-class brothers.

We worked it out in conversations and discussions. Most of the talk was casual. Bobby lived near the campus, and his living room became a kind ofheadquarters. Although we were still involved with Soul Students, wc attended few meetings, and when we did go, our presence was mostly disruptive; we raised questions that upset people. Our conversations with each other became the important thing. Brothers who had a free hour between classes and others who just hung around the campus drifted in and out ofBobby’s house. We drank beer and wine and chewed over the political situation, our social problems, and the merits and shortcomings of the other groups. We also discussed the Black achievements of the past, particularly as they helped us to under stand current events.

In a sense, these sessions at Bobby’s house were our political education classes, and the Party sort of grew out of them. Even after we formally organized we continued the discussions in our office. By then we had moved on to include not only problems but possible solutions.

We also read. The literature of oppressed people and their struggles for liberation in other countries is very large, and we pored over these books to see how their experiences might help us to understand our plight. We read the work of Frantz Fanon, particularly The Wretched of the Earth, the four volumes of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare. Che and Mao were veterans of people’s wars, and they had worked out successful strategies for liberating their people. We read these men’s works because we saw them as kinsmen; the oppressor who had controlled them was controlling us, both directly and indirectly. We believed it was necessary to know how they gained their freedom in order to go about getting ours. However, we did not want merely to import ideas and strategies; we had to transform what we learned into principles and methods acceptable to the brothers on the block.

Mao and Fanon and Guevara all saw clearly that the people had been stripped of their birthright and their dignity, not by any philosophy or mere words, but at gunpoint. They had suffered a holdup by gangsters, and rape; for them, the only way to win freedom was to meet force with force. At bottom, this is a form of self-defense. Although that defense might at times take on characteristics of aggression, in the final analysis the people do not initiate; they simply respond to what has been inflicted upon them. People respect the expression of strength and dignity displayed by men who refuse to bow to the weapons of oppression. Though it may mean death, these men will fight, because death with dignity is preferable to ignominy. Then, too, there is always the chance that the oppressor will be overwhelmed.

Fanon made a statement during the Algerian war that impressed me; he said it was the “Year of the Boomerang,” which is the third phase of violence. At that point, the violence of the aggressor turns on him and strikes a killing blow. Yet the oppressor does not understand the process; he knows no more than he did in the first phase when he launched the violence. The oppressed arc always defensive; the oppressor is always aggressive and surprised when the people turn back on him the force he has used against them.

Negroes with Guns by Robert Williams had a great infl uence on the kind of party we developed. Williams had been active in Monroe, North Carolina, with a program of armed self-defense that had enlisted many in the community. However, I did not like the way he had called on the federal government for assistance; we viewed the government as an enemy, the agency of a ruling clique that controls the country. We also had some literature about the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana, the state where I was born. One of their leaders had come through the Bay Area on a speaking and fund-raising tour, and we liked what he said. The Deacons had done a good job of defending civil rights marchers in their area, but they also had a habit of calling upon the federal government to carry out this defense or at least to assist them in defending the people who were upholding the law. The Deacons even went so far as to enlist local sheriffs and police to defend the marchers, with the threat that iflaw enforcement agencies would not defend them, the Deacons would. We also viewed the local police, the National Guard, and the regular military as one huge armed group that opposed the will of the people. In a boundary situation people have no real defense except what they provide for themselves.

We read also the works of the freedom fighters who had done so much for Black communities in the United States. Bobby had coUected all of Malcolm X’s speeches and ideas from papers like The Militant and Muhammad Speaks. These we studied carefully. Although Malcolm’s program for the Organization of Afro-American Unity was never put into operation, he has made it clear that Blacks ought to arm. Malcolm's influence was ever-present. We continue to believe that the Black Panther Party exists in the spirit of Malcolm. Often it is difficult to say exactly how an action or a program has been determined or influenced in a spiritual way. Such intangibles arc hard to describe, although they can be more significant than any precise influence. Therefore, the words on this page cannot convey the effect that Malcolm has had on the Black Panther Party, although, as far as I am con cerned, the Party is a living testament to his life work. I do not claim that the Party has done what Malcolm would have done. Many others say that their programs arc Malcolm’s programs. We do not say this, but Malcolm’s spirit is in us.

From all of these things—the books, Malcolm’s writings and spirit, our analysis of the local situation—the idea of an organization was forming. One day, quite suddenly, almost by chance, we found a name. I had read a pamphlet about voter registration in Mississippi, how the people in Lowndes County had armed themselves against Establishment violence. Their political group, called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, had a black panther for its symbol. A few days later, while Bobby and I were rapping, I suggested that we use the panther as our symbol and call our political vehicle the Black Panther Party. The panther is a fierce animal, but he will not attack until he is backed into a corner; then he will strike out. The image seemed appropriate, and Bobby agreed without discussion. At this point, we knew it was time to stop talking and begin organizing. Although we had always wanted to get away from the intellectualizing and rhetoric characteristic of other groups, at times we were as inactive as they were. The time had come for action.

Patrolling

It was the spring of 1966. Still without a definite program, we were at the stage of testing ideas that would capture the imagination of the community. We began, as always, by checking around with the street brothers. We asked them if they would be interested in forming the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which would be based upon defending the community against the aggression of the power structure, including the military and the armed might of the police. Wc informed the brothers of their right to possess weapons; most of them were interested. Then we talked about how the people arc constantly intimidated by arrogant, belligerent police officers and exactly what we could do about it. We went to pool halls and bars, all the placcs where brothers congregate and talk.

I was prepared to give them legal advice. From my law courses at Oakland City College and San Francisco Law School I was familiar with the California penal code and well versed in the laws relating to weapons. I also had something very important at my disposal—the law library of the North Oakland Service Center, a community-center poverty program where Bobby was working. The Center gave legal advice, and there were many lawbooks on the shelves. Unfortunately, most of them dealt with civil law, since the antipoverty program was not supposed to advise poor people about criminal law. However, I made good use of thc books they had to run down the full legal situation to the brothers on the street. We were doing what the poverty program claimed to be doing but never had—giving help and counsel to poor people about the things that crucially affected their lives.

All that summer we circulated in the Black communities of Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco. Wherever brothers gathered, we talked with them about their right to arm. In general, they were interested but skeptical about the weapons idea. They could not see anyone walking around with a gun in full view. To recruit any sizable number of street brothers, we would obviously have to do more than talk. Wc needed to give practical applications of our theory, show them that wc were not afraid of weapons and not afraid of death. The way wc finally won the brothers over was by patrolling the police with arms.

Before we began the patrols, however, Bobby and I set down in writing a practical course of action. We could go no further without a program, and we resolved to drop everything else, even though it might take a while to come up with something viable. One day, we went to the North Oakland Service Center to work it out. The Center was an ideal place because of the books and the fact that we could work undisturbed. First, we pulled together all the books we had been reading and dozens we had only heard about. We discussed Mao’s program, Cuba’s program, and all the others, but concluded that we could not follow any of them. Our unique situation required a unique program. Although the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed is universal, forms of oppression vary. The ideas that mobilized the people of Cuba and China sprang from their own history and political structures The practical parts of those programs could be carried out only under a certain kind of oppression. Our program had to deal with America.

I started rapping off the essential points for the survival of Black and oppressed people in the United States. Bobby wrote them down, and then we separated those ideas into two sections, “What We Want" and “What We Believe.” We split them up because the ideas fell nat-urally into two distinct categories. It was necessary to explain why we wanted certain things. At the same time, our goals were based on beliefs, and we set those out, too. In the section on beliefs, we made it clear that all the objective conditions necessary for attaining our goals were already in existence, but that a number of societal factors stood in our way. This was to help the people understand what was working against them.

All in all, our ten-point program took about twenty minutes to write. Thinking it would take days, we were prepared for a long session, but we never got to the small mountain of books piled up around us. Wc had come to an important realization: books could only point in a general direction; the rest was up to us. This is the program we wrote down:



October 1966

Black Panther Party Platform and Program

What We Want / What We Believe

1. We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community.

We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We Want Full Employment For Our People.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We Want An End To The Robbery By The Capitalists Of Our Black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter Of Human Beings.

We believe that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land