PICKING UP THE GUN NIGGERS WITH GUNS IN THE STATE CAPITOL On May 2, 1967, we went across the bridge to Sacramento with a caravan of cars. We wound up right in front of the Capitol building. There were thirty brothers and sisters. Six sisters and twenty-four brothers. Twenty of the brothers were armed.   Huey P. Newton was not with us. The brothers felt we could not risk Huey getting shot or anything, so we voted that he would stay behind in Oakland. We voted Huey down and wouldn't let him come.   When I first drove up, I didn't know where the steps were. The Capitol looked about a block or so away from me. I didn't know whether this was the right place or not, because we were specifically looking for the Assembly of the State of California. The reason I didn't know is because of an old thing they'd taught me in school about the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The dome, a round dome, you know, it was supposed to be the "omnipotent area," as brother Eldridge Cleaver puts it. It's the top, and it was supposed to be made up of two houses.   So I assumed it was the same as Washington, D.C. I didn't know if I was going to the right place or not. But I said, "Look, there's some cameramen up there." Huey said there's always cameramen around these places, so I thought, "This is probably it." The other brothers had parked their cars and had come back around to where we were. We got out of the car and got all our guns out. You know we always follow the laws. As soon as the brothers got out of the car, they were putting rounds into the chambers because Huey and I researched those laws in the past. We had to follow the law to the letter. There was a fish-and-game code law that you couldn't have a loaded shotgun or rifle in a car. That didn't refer to a pistol, but to a shotgun or a rifle.   The loaded rifle or shotgun meant an unexpended cartridge in the chamber. The law also read that unexpended cartridges in the magazine do not constitute a loaded gun. That is, bullets that haven't been fired do not constitute a loaded gun, even if they are in the magazine. But if there is an unexpended cartridge or bullet inside the chamber of a rifle or a shotgun, then it is considered loaded. The brothers got out of the car, and you could see brothers, just jacking rounds off into the chambers.   A lot of people were looking. A lot of white people were shocked, just looking at us. I know what they were saying: "Who in the hell are those niggers with these guns? Who in the hell are those niggers with these guns? What are they doing?"   One or two white people, they probably passed it off, "Oh this is just a gun club," and this is where Bob Dylan gets down on Mr. Jones, "You don't know what's going on." Because this was getting to be a colossal event and those people did not know what the hell was going on. Some of them did look at us like we were a gun club. But a lot of them only had questions on their faces of, "What the hell are those damn niggers doing with these goddam rifles?" They actually stopped and looked at us and stood up there around the Capitol, and stared up from the grass and looked at us. I didn't pay a damn bit of attention to them because we knew our constitutional rights and all that stuff about the rights of citizens to have guns. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and no police or militia force can infringe upon that right; it states that specifically.   Anyway, all the brothers got up, and I said, "All right, brothers, let's roll." We started walking and moving. We didn't walk in military form. We just moved. We were scattered all across the sidewalk. We were not in any rank, but we held our guns straight up because Huey had taught us not to point a gun at anyone - not only was it unsafe, but there was a law against just the pointing of a gun. So all the brothers had that stuff down. They all had their guns pointed straight up in the air or pointed straight down to the ground as they carried them. We were walking up the sidewalk. I remember a brother in the background saying, "Look at Reagan run." I thought that he was just referring to something symbolic, but I did find out later on, after all this shit was over, that Reagan was over there with a bunch of kids. We'd walked almost up this long twenty-foot-wide sidewalk leading up to the first steps of the Capitol, and one of the dudes said, "Look at Reagan run." Now this is very important, because we found out later that Reagan had had with him 200 Future Youth, Future Leaders they call them. He was speaking to them on the lawn of the Capitol. I was looking straight up at the front of the Capitol building and I saw a couple of cameramen running around up there.   I found out later that Reagan had righteously spotted us. One of the brothers saw Reagan turn around and start trotting away from the whole scene because here came all these hardfaced brothers. These brothers were off the block; righteous brothers off the block. From what they call the nitty gritty and the grass roots. You could look at their faces and see the turmoil they've lived through. Their ages ranged anywhere from sixteen, which was about the youngest we had there - that was Bobby Hutton - all the way down to myself, thirty-one. I guess I was about the oldest.   We righteously walked on up to the first stairs, and then we walked on up to the next stairs. Bobby Hutton was on my right side and Warren Tucker was on my left side. Bobby Hutton had a 12-gauge shotgun, and Warren Tucker had a .357 Magnum. We walked all the way up, and they stayed right next to me.   We got to the stairs. Now personally I do not remember reading Executive Mandate Number One on the stairs, as I was ordered to do. I don't remember reading it there, but the brothers told me and everybody told me that I did in fact read it.   I'm on the stairs and I'm trying to make my mind up about going in. It wasn't any long process by which I had to make up my mind. Huey's emphasis on going into the Capitol was based on the fact that there might be a string of National Guards and policemen there, in case they found out we were coming. I heard the security guard over there talking to two brothers, when I glanced over there a second time, and I heard him say, "You aren't violating anything with your gun, so if you want to, you can go inside." And that made my mind up for me. But I also made up my mind in another context too. That I personally wanted to see the area where a citizen has a right to observe the legislature. I read in the paper that Mulford was an assemblyman from the Sixteenth Assembly District in Oakland, so it was the Assembly that I wanted to see. I waved to all the brothers. I said, "All right, brothers, come on, we're going in here. We're going inside."   The brothers were scattered all out in front of the Capitol. One of the cameramen walked up to me. "Are you going inside the Capitol?" he said. I said, "Yeah, we're going inside." And I snatched the door open, and me and Bobby Hutton and the rest of the brothers, walked through that door. Warren Tucker was on my left and brother Bobby Hutton, with his 12-gauge shotgun, was on my right. We walked off into the lobby area. All around, to my right, to my left, everywhere, there were people, predominantly white people, who looked shocked. Man, they were shocked.   As we began to walk, I noticed one thing. They moved and stepped aside, and I saw some with their mouths hanging open, just looking, and they were saying with their eyes and their faces and expressions, "Who in the hell are these niggers with these guns?" And some of them were just saying, "Niggers with guns, niggers with guns," and I pointed those out as enemies because they were confused. I saw three or four faces that really caught what was going on. They must have been in the Assembly and heard Mulford talking about us because they frowned their faces up and looked at us like a bunch of pig racists, like I've seen racist pigs look at me and Huey, like they wanted to kill us. I saw a long hall in front of me, a very long hall. I said, "We're looking for the Assembly." I saw a sign that said "Senate" and had an arrow that pointed to the right. But I was looking for the Assembly and I hadn't seen any sign. So I walked on. As we walked down the hall, cameramen were running from our left and from our right, around Bobby and around Tucker, jumping in front of us taking flicks and clicking flicks. Cameramen with movie cameras were shooting, but that didn't make any difference. I just tightened up and squeezed the mandate I had rolled up and kept walking. I stopped and said, "Where in the hell's the Assembly? Anybody in here know where you go in and observe the Assembly making these laws?" Nobody said anything. Then somebody hollered out, "It's upstairs on the next floor."   We went up to the second floor and started walking again. By this time there were many cameramen in front of us, backing up and taking pictures of us walking down the hall. Movie cameramen, still cameramen, regular cameras. Bulbs were flashing all over the place. I got about midway down the hall when I saw a gate. I didn't relate to the gate at first, but I turned around and asked a reporter, "Could you please tell me where I go to observe the Assembly making the laws? I want to go there. I want to see Mulford supposedly making this law against black people." That's what I was thinking to myself - I want to see this. So he said, "Straight down, sir." I went ahead and saw this gate. As I was approaching the gate, when I was about five or six feet from it, this pig jumped out, this state pig, and said, "Where the hell are you going?" I said, "I'm going to observe the Assembly. What about it?"   "You can't come in here!"   "What the hell you mean, I can't come in here? You gonna deny me my constitutional right? Every citizen's got a right to observe the Assembly. What's wrong with you?" And while the conversation was going on, the reporters were vamping inside the gate. And so many reporters were trying to get in there, they bammed and knocked the pig all up against the wall. Trying to get pictures. The only thing that was in front of me was the pig, and just a little gate. Swing gate, like a swinging door, but it was only about three feet high. When the reporters vamped all over the pig, he just moved out of the way, and I just proceeded to move on.   As I proceeded to move, the reporters always had a way for me to travel. I noticed the way to go was to the right, so I moved to the right, and as I moved to the right, I could see a kind of heavyset short man, about five-foot six inches or five-foot seven. As I approached a big door that was three or four times as tall as I was, he was opening the door. He was opening the door in a manner of, "Yes, sir, you sure can come in. Come right on in, sir! You have the gun!" That's what he was saying. You have the gun. Come in. And he opened the door in a very humble manner. Like a servant. Like a vassal. That's the way he opened that door. He was scared.   I walked inside, and as I did, I saw a lot of what we call "back seats." Back seats in a theater. Inside the Assembly, I looked to the left and I looked to the right. I walked to my left. There was an aisle over there. Cameramen and reporters jumped all in front of me. Something funny about the cameramen and reporters getting up in that aisle to my left. A lot of them came in another door. Because I know they weren't in front of me when I hit that door. They must have come in another door.   As I was walking to my left, I remember hearing this speaker, the Assembly speaker, saying, "Get those cameramen out of here, they're not supposed to be in here." As I got to the aisle, Eldridge Cleaver Was there all of a sudden. Eldridge Cleaver was there, and Warren Tucker was half-way up the aisle with a .357 Magnum on his side. I glanced up, and I saw some so-called black representatives in the legislature who we refer to as "Toms, sellouts, bootlickers."   They were looking at the man as if to say, "Why did they have to come here?" They hated us being there, those bootlickers. I looked at those bootlickers, those Uncle Toms, very intensely. I didn't care for them because they never represented us there. And this kind of humble-shoulderedness and looking back, "Well, here they are, they're here. What are they doing here?"   Someone was saying, "This is not where you're supposed to be. This is not where you're supposed to be." We were trying to decide whether to stay there on the floor of the Assembly or go upstairs. We were trying to discuss that in a very short span of time, in less than a minute. The next thing I know, a pig and Bobby Hutton passed behind my back. Bobby was cussing out the pig who had snatched his gun out of his hand. He had snuck up behind him and snatched his gun out of his hand. Bobby Hutton was cussing the pig back, "What the hell you got my gun for? Am I under arrest or something? If I'm not under arrest, you give me my gun back. You ain't said I was under arrest." He was remembering very well what Huey had taught. Always ask if you are under arrest. And if you're not under arrest, then you stand on your constitutional rights.   So I turned and ran up to the side of the pig and said, "Is the man under arrest? What the hell are you taking his gun for?" He said, "You're not supposed to be in here. This is not where you're supposed to be." I asked him, "Is he under arrest? If he ain't under arrest, what the hell you got his gun for?" Another pig walks up and hands this same pig a gun, which I recognized as the same gun which Mark Comfort had had, a 30-.06. I walked out of those big doors - this pig, me, and Bobby. Bobby was on one side and I was on the other side, Bobby cussing the pig out, calling him all kind of motherfuckers, and telling them to give him his gun back if he ain't under arrest.   Just as we got to the elevator, the pig grabbed hold of my right shoulder. I kept asking him if I were under arrest. He pushed me, and when he pushed I went into the elevator. I said, "All right, we're under arrest, brothers. We must be under arrest. Come on in, let's go." Because just before the pig grabbed me, he said I wasn't under arrest. So I think I accepted this kind of informal thing of him arresting us at this point. Then it flashed in my mind. The mandate . . . the message that Huey sent . . . I haven't read it. I gotta read the message, I gotta read the message. So nine or ten of the brothers just crowded in the elevator with guns, and some reporters got on that elevator too. We went down to the first floor and we went to the right, into a little room with a counter. The room was about ten feet long and six feet wide. All of a sudden I saw all these cameramen poking their cameras in the doors. I said, "Yeah . . . the mandate." The message that Huey told me to read. The message. Gotta get the message over. So I pulled the message out and opened it up, and I read the whole thing. In the background Bobby Hutton was cussing the pigs out and telling them to give him his gun back: "You give me my gun back. You ain't placing me under arrest. You give me my gun back. You ain't placing me under arrest." That might have been mentioned three or four times. He called the pigs all kind of motherfuckers, which even came over on TV, I heard later on. At this point, after I finished reading the message, right at this point, a black pig walked in. A nigger pig, a "Negro" pig walked in. As he was passing in front of me I said, "Look man, are we under arrest or not?" And he says, "No, you're not under arrest." "Then dammit," I said, "give these black brothers back their guns." At this point he said, "They're going to get their guns." I said, "Well, give them back to them!" And Bobby Hutton tore into them, "Bastard, load my gun back up. You unloaded my gun. I seen you unload. You unloaded my gun. Load it back up, just like you had it. Give me my gun back."   I glanced over at the counter there, and they were doing something to the guns, the 30-.06 and Bobby Hutton's pump shotgun. Next thing I knew they had the guns back in their hands. I was looking at all these cameramen. They asked me some questions. Somebody said to read it again. Said he didn't catch it. I read the mandate again, right inside that little room. When I finished reading it, I figured it was time to go. So I said, "Let's go." We cut out and came out the door. Then some cameraman walked up to me and asked me to read the message once more. So I read it again. First I was on the upper steps in front of the Capitol. I read it and then I got down to the lower steps and read the message still another time. I said, "All right, brothers, let's go."1   At that time I knew that what Huey P. Newton was saying about the colossal event had occurred. Because many, many cameramen were there. Many, many people had covered this event of black people walking into the Capitol, and registering their grievance with a particular statement. A message, Executive Mandate Number One, that Huey P. Newton had ordered me to take to the Capitol, to use the mass media as a means of conveying the message to the American people and to the black people in particular. We walked out and got to the car and brother Eldridge Cleaver came up behind me. And Eldridge said, "Brother, we did it. We did it, man. We put it over." I said, "That's right, brother, we sure did."   So I said, "All right, brothers and sisters, let's go. Let's get out of this town." I remember telling everybody, "The sisters and brothers cooked some chicken." The brothers were crowding up. Some of them were slightly behind us, and I said, "Let's go. We gonna go eat all this fried chicken that we got here, 'cause I'm hungry and it's hot in this town. It's hot, brother." So I went and got in my car, and I looked back for those people who'd parked behind me.   I opened the car door and asked the people if they were ready to go. "Let's go," they said. "All right, brothers and sisters. "Let's go," I hollered. As I pulled out, I asked, "Where's everybody else?" "They're around the corner," somebody said. "Some of them tried to park around the corner." So we drove around the corner. Further on, down a long, long block, I stopped and made sure that all of our people and all of our cars were in a line behind me. Warren Tucker who was driving the second or third car hollered to me, "Hey man, this car is hot." He was driving my '54 Chevy. "It needs some water in it, so we can cool it down." The engine was running hot because there was something wrong with the radiator.   "Later for that," I said. "We're going outside of town. We'll eat that chicken, and we'll get water later on." So I took off in the right-hand lane. Just before the corner, I noticed a sign: SAN FRANCISCO - TURN RIGHT. I stopped for the light and noticed a service station across the street. I debated in my mind. I decided that we'd go ahead and get the water. Instead of turning right, I waited until the green light came on and went straight across the street, and turned up into the service station. The rest of the brothers and sisters rolled into the station and just sat there. It was very, very hot. It was burning up. I decided to take off my leather jacket, but to take off my jacket I had to get out of the car.   As I was opening the door, I looked up and saw a pig at the corner walking south on the sidewalk from his car. He had his gun in his hand. I jumped out. I came on out of the car. I walked straight toward him. I stopped and he stopped. I said, "Now wait a minute." I said, "Now first thing you have to do is you have to put that gun away. Put it back in that holster. If you want to make an arrest you can make an arrest, but you better put that gun away." And the next thing I heard was brothers jacking rounds, jacking shells off into the chambers of their guns. When they saw the pig walking up with that gun, they started jacking rounds off. I said, "Put that gun away!" I looked him dead cold in his eyes. He was a scared pig, with his gun out. He took his gun, after hearing all the rounds, and me telling him to put his gun back, he slid his gun back into his holster, and kept his hands off of it. Right on!   Then I looked up and there was another pig who had walked up near. He'd parked his motorcycle, and jumped on his little radio. I can't remember what the hell he said on his radio but he looked back at me. "We got a right," he said, "we got a right to have identification." I said, "Maybe you do have a right to identification, but you just make sure you keep your damn guns in your holsters!" The next thing I knew, other pigs were driving up. I heard something come over that radio that said, "Arrest them all. On anything. Arrest them all on anything." That's what it said. Then he asked me where I had been. I said we'd been to the Capitol. "Why? What about it?" You know what he asked me? He said, "What are you, a gun club?" I said, "No, we're the Black Panther Party. We're black people with guns. What about it?" As I began to move away, I saw a lot of pigs coming up; plainclothesmen jumping out of cars, cars in the middle of the streets, everything. I still wasn't disturbed by them at all. I was just walking. Some plainclothesman came up. "You got any identification?" I said, "Yeah, I got identification." I saw a pig opening a door of one of the cars. I ran over to the car. I said, "Keep your hands off."   I turned around and two pigs were sneaking up behind Sherman Forte. Before I could say anything, they grabbed hold of both of his arms, and one of the pigs snatched his pistol out of his holster. And I said, "Is he under arrest?" "Yeah, he's under arrest." I said "Take the arrest, Sherman."   The pig asked me again about identification. I went to my back pocket to pull out my wallet, and when I did that the pig, almost simultaneously, grabbed my right arm, and another pig grabbed my left arm and said, "You're arrested for carrying a concealed weapon." Then he snatched my gun out of my holster, holding my arms. They handcuffed me readily, and began to move me to the car.   They drove me to the Sacramento police station. As we came out of the elevator there, one pig grabbed the handcuffs and pushed them up real high - real high, so it hurt and pained. And he ran me right up against the wall and said, "Now you stand there with your face against the wall." That's what the pig said. And my face hit that wall. The wall was very cool. It was a soothing cool. I was glad to lay my face against this cool wall. Sherman Forte was to my left. I looked over at him. "What about it, brother?" "Ah man, it's nothing," he said. "It's all right." "Yeah," I said. "Going to be all right."   They took me to a cell. I asked myself, "Did I fuck up?" I didn't know. I was very tired. I got on the other side of the door, three or four feet away from it, lay down, and righteously fell off to sleep.   Somebody was unlocking the cell. There was Eldridge. "Oh, goddam it." That hurt me. That hurt me bad. I said, "Goddam, Eldridge is arrested!" I knew that was bad. Eldridge was on parole. I said, "Eldridge isn't going to get out of jail." I felt so bad. I said, "Man, they got you arrested. You might have to go back to prison." Eldridge said, "Fuck it. It was worth it, because we did it." SACRAMENTO JAIL Eldridge spotted a brother down inside the cell. He was bleeding. Somehow Eldridge detected more than I detected, when I first looked at him. Eldridge could see that his face was all fucked up. Then he began to groan. Eldridge said, "Hey brother, what's wrong?" He got down, looked at him, and saw that the brother's eye was almost hanging out of his head. His face was swollen all up around his right - eye. The pigs had beat up the side of his head. His nose was bleeding, too. A pig come to the door later on and Eldridge told that pig that he'd better get this man to hospital. "You get this man to a hospital. Look at his eye. Look what's happened to him. His head's all swollen up and everything." Eldridge knows how to deal with the pigs and the prisons. The pigs went on and got themselves together, and called the ambulance and took the man to the hospital. That was very good. We got the brother out of there to the hospital. The pigs had whipped him all up inside and he was drunk too. The pigs beat cats up when they're drunk, just because they're sadistic motherfuckers, and they have somebody who's helpless and they can beat him. That was the way a lot of that shit went down in Sacramento.   A little after that, they decided to move all eighteen of us to this big tank, this big drunk tank. You had to take your shoes off, and you couldn't have any cigarettes or stuff like that. A couple of lawyers had gotten together, and they got up there from Oakland. We got one of the lawyers to go to the cigarette machine and smuggle us some cigarettes.   They called me out to try to get me to sign some jive statement. I didn't have to sign a statement, nobody signed any statements. I think one brother almost broke down and got weak, and almost signed the statement, but he held on. I was out there refusing to sign the statement for quite a while, and when I came back in, the brothers had already smuggled some cigarettes in while I was out there. The lawyers wanted to talk to me, and I talked to them a long time. The pigs seen all this smoking there and began searching for the cigarettes, trying to find the cigarettes, but the brothers hid them in a loose piece of tile near the ventilator in the ceiling. Before they left, Eldridge and I said, "When are we going to get some food in here?" One of the pigs was talking about, "You ain't gonna get no food," and Eldridge vamped on him. "What you talking about, we ain't going to get no food? We're going to get some food in this motherfucker, or don't you motherfuckers never come up to this door no more because you come to this door, there's eighteen of us and maybe three, four, or five of you." Big Willie walked up, and the pigs looked at him. Willie was a bad-looking cat. He looked like he could knock a dude out of the picture, which he could (I saw him knock a dude out, later on, in Big Grey-stone). We were mad because when the brothers started getting hungry, they got to remembering the big pans of chicken everyone was going to eat. The brothers were mad about that chicken. That's when we told them, "Don't you come back in here because if you come in here you might get your heads whipped." And Big Willie walked up and put his arms up. That was a righteous protest.   Personally, I thought they weren't going to feed us. I thought they were going to lock us up and just never come back. But forty-five minutes later the dudes said, "All right. Line up. Line up. Line up. Let's go. Hit the food. Hit the food." All the brothers lined on up to get that food because you gotta live. Everybody lined up and we had a bag apiece. We had a carton of milk, a cheese sandwich, a hamburger, and an orange.   We were hungry, man. We hadn't eaten all day and it was five or six o'clock that evening. We knew they weren't going to feed us and we were getting mad, remembering that chicken. It wasn't only Big Willie jumping up talking about, "I'll knock you out," but everybody was saying, "You'd better get some food in here, you goddam motherfucker. Who the fuck you think you are? You better bring some goddam food in here. We've had this shit." That was a little power play we made on them. They went out and bought our food. That's the way you have to do it. Use them tactics.   That was very important, to revive the spirits. Everybody was kind of down. Except for Eldridge, most of the other brothers hadn't been to jail. Some of the brothers were sloughing in the corner while we were busted. Mark Comfort's boys, two of them sloughed out, jumped up talking about, "If I'd a known this was gonna happen, I'd a never come along." Just got to jiving. They hadn't been in enough situations with Huey P. Newton out there on the streets. There were a couple of other brothers who had been in jail before who could relate to the situation because that's all there was to it. I personally had this goddam feeling that I had just made a big mistake. I kept running over it. But it made me feel good, too, because we were vamping on these pigs, and Eldridge just knew more about how to vamp on the pigs than I did. I'm glad he was there that day. I'd been in jail before but that was in a military stockade. I'd been in the stockade twice (for one month and eight months) when I was in the Air Force, and the most time I'd been to jail in between those times was ten days here, twelve days here, or thirty days in Los Angeles on some bullshit. But Eldridge knew how to deal with the pigs. He was vamping on them in a minute, and it always made me feel good, to know that he was there, because he wasn't going to let pigs mess over any of us. He'd remember things like food, and know how to talk to the motherfuckers.   All the brothers' spirits revived. I know most of the brothers must have thoughts about what we said in the last point of the program. We wanted land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace. But the brothers knew that bread was food. Righteous food. I know they must have remembered that, because I remembered it. We were off in jail there, and the man was talking about how we weren't going to eat. Shit. He must have been crazy. Burn that padded cell up, one way or the other. We had no matches or anything but we would have found something to burn it up with, and cause shit.   Brothers started ripping those iron strips on the wall. Big Willie started ripping them off. Big Willie had lifted some powerful weights and his muscles just rippled all over his arms. He'd been in the joint before. He got most of that in the joint. He got a lot of it, I found out later on, outside on the streets. Anyway, Big Willie Thompson, the Black Panthers, and Eldridge Cleaver were all in jail there. We finally ate, and after we ate most of us laid out across that padded cell floor and went to sleep.   I went out and made a phone call. A lot of brothers went in and out making phone calls. I called the bail bondsman. I called Williams Bail Bonds. He's an older cat, about forty-five years old. He's a boyfriend of my sister's and he told me on the phone that Huey had already been to the office and he had gone somewhere to do a radio program to get some support, saying that we should be set free, we were political prisoners. I told him that I wanted him to bail out all the brothers. All the brothers now. "Just bail us out, and we'll raise the money for you." He said he'd see what he could do about getting on up there. So I said, "If you can't bail out all of them, then bail out me and Eldridge, right now." The reason I wanted Eldridge bailed out was because Eldridge was on parole.   When a dude's on parole or probation, the teletypes get to working, from city to city. They find out about the person being on parole and they'll call up the parole officer and make him put a hold on him right away. One time Huey was getting out of jail in Berkeley. He was on his way down the stairs, coming out of the front door, and the teletypes got to working. Ten pigs ran downstairs and grabbed him and said, "Your probation officer put a hold on you so you can't get bailed out." That's why I told Lionel Williams to try to bail out Eldridge, me, or anybody right away, right quick. But he didn't do it.   Anyway, we went and got some sleep. It had been a long day. We'd done a lot of revolutionary work for the Party. Revolutionary and political work. I remember George Dowell talking about how he never was going to jail no more. He didn't like jails. I can relate to that brother's feelings about jail, because George Dowell had five, maybe six children. The youngest one was about three or four years old. His wife was at home in North Richmond. His brother Denzil had been killed. He readily joined the Panther Party, because he knew it was the right thing. He understood that you couldn't call on pigs to help you. He related to that unity we were talking about, the unity of black people defending themselves against these pigs murdering us in our community. But with his wife and his kids home there, he just couldn't see being locked up in jail. George also talked about how he was supposed to have been back to work that night. That job, of course, was directly related to his family, and he just hated to be locked in jail. He never was going to jail no more. He just didn't like it.   But I kept reassuring the brothers, and I begin to ask the brothers their names, because with some of the brothers, I didn't know their full names. I wanted to remember their names, so that if I got bailed out right away, I could tell the bail bondsman which names to ask for, because sometimes, if you come up and say you want to bail some people out, and you don't know their names, the pigs won't bail them out. I asked them their names for that specific reason. Pigs will withhold information on you, while you're inside the jail, in a minute.   Anyway, we fell asleep. I guess it was about twelve or one o'clock at night and somebody came in there and called me. One of the brothers shook me, to kind of help wake me up and said, "You getting bailed out. Let's go." I looked around. I saw all the brothers asleep. I said, "Well, I won't disturb them. The best thing to do is get on out of here and start working to get some bail money to get these brothers out of here." So I got out and went downstairs. Mark Comfort was there with the lawyers. One of the lawyers was Beverly Axelrod. I explained to her the best thing to do was to run back to Oakland and get Huey, so I could get with Huey and figure out a way to get the bail money together and get all the brothers bailed out.   We jumped in the car and drove on down the ninety miles to Oakland. I didn't even go to sleep. We drove all the way down. In fact, I drove. I'd already had some sleep. They were pretty tired, and I drove all the way in. We got to my house, on Fifty-seventh Street in Oakland. Huey was waiting there and handed me a cold colt 45 beer.   Huey greeted me and said, "Brother, you were good. You were beautiful. You were a true revolutionary. You did the job you were supposed to do." He shook my hand, wrapped his arm around my shoulder like the brother will do when he knows we've done righteous revolutionary work. We sat down, and I explained a few . other things, other than what the TV had put over. We talked a little bit, talked to Beverly about the fact that we had to get these brothers out on bail. I guess it was about 3:00 in the morning by then, so we decided to take off at 6:00 to make sure we were back in Sacramento by 8:00. I went to sleep, and somebody came back over to my house and got me up. Huey, Beverly, and I jumped into the car about 6:15 and cut out, back to Sacramento. BAILING OUT THE BROTHERS There was supposed to be a court hearing at 9:00 concerning the lowering of the bail, which had been arranged by Beverly Axelrod and another lawyer. Huey held a press conference and he blew those pigs away. He talked about the power structure like it had never been talked about before. He brought out significant things about why we had guns, the reason we had guns. We had guns to defend ourselves against the 400-year-old brutality and oppression.   They were asking him if he was anti-white. He said, "No, we're not anti-white. I don't hate a person because of the colour of his skin. I hate the oppression that we're subjected to daily by racist pigs and other racists who attack and murder and brutalize us. Those who have been brutalizing us for 400 years." And Huey just ran it all down about the wars. Politics is war without bloodshed - and war is a continuation of politics, with bloodshed.   You talk about antagonistic contradictions and non-antagonistic contradictions that exist between the people and those who're supposed to represent them in the government. I remember him running down that antagonistic contradictions are created by the power structure attacking the people, or attacking those who disagree with the basic political decisions that have been made by the power structure and put on the people's heads. And when the people disagree with those political decisions made by the power structure, the power structure always sends in guns and force. By sending guns and force, attacking the people, the contradiction becomes very, very antagonistic.   Therefore the people should always stand, and they do stand, for peace. The people, the masses of the people, want peace. The masses of the people do not want war. Huey, quoting Chairman Mao, said the Black Panther Party advocates the abolition of war. But at the same time, we realize that the only way you can get rid of war, many times, is through a process of war, because war has been unjustly waged against us in our communities. Therefore, Huey says, the only way you can get rid of guns is to pick up a gun and get rid of the guns of the oppressor. The people must be able to pick up guns, to defend themselves against all forms of aggression, all forms of racism - all forms of real racism.   We went off in the courtroom to sit down, and the lawyer from Sacramento and Beverly Axelrod were making motions for lowering of bail, and we looked and listened. The judge didn't want to lower the bail. He started citing off the records of brothers who had been arrested before, the hard-core brothers off the block. Even Emory Douglas, an artist, who went to art college of some kind for two years, had a record on him - he'd been arrested three, four times, spent five, six months in jail.   They came down to Eldridge Cleaver's record and Beverly Axelrod began to explain how Eldridge Cleaver was arrested. That he didn't have a gun or anything. That in fact, and it was true, Ramparts had sent him up there. That he was a writer for Ramparts, and he knew that the Panthers were going, so Ramparts sent him up there to cover the story as a reporter. And Beverly Axelrod blew so beautiful about how Eldridge Cleaver was snatched up off the corner just because he was black. She went further to prove this to the judge about how everybody had witnessed a black woman, who was a citizen of Sacramento, and not a Black Panther, being snatched up by the pigs and taken apart just because she was black. That was very important, I think. And she said that's why Eldridge Cleaver was arrested, a man with a camera in his hand, without a gun, who was taking pictures just like twenty other cameramen took pictures on that corner, the same corner where the Black Panther Party got arrested.   She blew a beautiful set, Beverly Axelrod did, in defense of Eldridge, that they should release Eldridge, that he's on parole, and there's no reason for them to hold him. They arrested him erroneously, etc., which they did. Because that's exactly what Eldridge was doing. Eldridge was righteously covering. Although Eldridge was a Panther at the time, he didn't have a gun, and he was functioning as a reporter. And so she blew.   They announced that the brothers were supposed to appear the next day at the Municipal Court across the street, and me and Huey went home and came back the next day and we appeared in court and we vowed that if the brothers weren't out by Friday at two o'clock, that by hook or crook, any way we can, we gonna get that money, to bail the brothers out. We were worried about the money. We figured we had a few funds coming in, but we were going out to get that money, we were going to bail all the brothers out. But our most extreme worry, our major worry, was Eldridge Cleaver, because Eldridge Cleaver was on parole. He just spent nine years in prison and he could possibly go back to prison. And that's what we worried about the most.   Huey said, "The reason we're going to get those brothers out is because those brothers off the block who stuck with the organization, who took time to learn the principles of the organization, and who took time to understand and follow the leadership of the organization, they are the real true heroes, not us, Bobby." I said, "You're right, Huey, I know that, you're right. By hook or crook I'm with you. We going to get the money to get the brothers out of jail." * * * The next day we came up early in the morning, and before the brothers came to court, we cornered a bail bondsman, a jive motherfucking bail bondsman. We found him out later to be a really jive dude. He was a black one. Name was Glen Holmes, who was in Sacramento. He had a statewide licence. He could bail out anybody all over the state. We called on him and started talking to him. And Huey got on one side of him and I got on the other side of him. And we got to rapping to him. We got to talking to that brother so strong and so hard and so fast, and running it down to him why he should bail these brothers out of jail, the fact that we have enough publicity to raise the money, just that we have to get these brothers out of jail now. And these brothers, their feet have to hit the ground. Work hard. This is something that Huey always stressed, and I really learned this from Huey, the meaning of being dedicated to pulling brothers out of jail.   Huey was rapping to that dude, Glen Holmes, and running it down to him about how he should go forth and bail the brothers out on credit. Glen Holmes was the dude who went on and bailed me and Mark Comfort out initially on half credit, because all they had put up was half the bail. But we talked to him before the court appearance came about. He says, "All right, I'll do it." And Glen Holmes did it. He said, "They'll be out by six o'clock this evening." And Huey said, "Well, we said two o'clock, but if they can hit the ground free like this by six o'clock, good." We waited for the court appearance, for the arraignment, and they arraigned the brothers, charged us all with conspiracy to commit a misdemeanour, the said misdemeanour being disturbing the peace. Disturbing the decorum of the legislature.   Conspiracy to break any law - a conspiracy is that you conspire to break a law. But we weren't guilty of any such thing. Huey only told me to go to the steps, and we went inside the place to observe the legislature. But who disturbed it? The fact that we were running down, was that the TV cameramen disturbed it. The first thing that the speaker said when we walked inside, and when the cameramen flushed through another door and ran all up the aisles, the speaker said, "Get those cameramen out of here! Who brought those news reporters in? Get those cameramen out of here, they have no right to be in here, and bloppety bloppety blop," that's what he said. He never said get those Panthers out of here with those guns, never said that all through the whole set. It never was said. I mean that's the legal technicality of the whole thing. Of course I served five months in jail, and Tucker served six, along with some other Panthers who served some other misdemeanour time for doing nothing illegal.   Anyway, we got the brothers out of jail. Six o'clock, we were waiting for them. They start filing them out. They filed the brothers out, and as each brother would come out, Huey would give him a big hug and pat the brother on his strong, revolutionary back, hit him on his strong, revolutionary back, and say, "Brother, are you glad you did it?" And the brother would say, "Right on." Huey said, "We did a good job," and hit every brother on the back that come downstairs. And Warren Tucker, the man on my left, with the .357 Magnum, was the last one to come out. He said, "Well, goddam. I was getting ready to say, these motherfuckers better let me out of this motherfucker." He saw everybody else leaving. We got those brothers out, and Huey greeted them as revolutionaries. Huey greeted them as dedicated brothers. We piled them in the cars, and we took them back home, to their home, in the confines of a decadent ghetto that we live in, in Oakland. We bought them a beer or two, and let them drink the beer. Our juveniles were still in jail. Bobby Hutton, Orleando Harrison, one other brother who was in North Oakland working on the poverty program with me, and two other brothers of Mark Comfort's. THE BLACK PANTHER NEWSPAPER A colossal event had occurred, that Huey P. Newton had put in motion. A colossal event had occurred that had significant meaning to the Black Panther Party. News of the existence of the Party went all the way around the world. A few days after we came back from Sacramento, Huey found out that the fact that we went to the Capitol was plastered across the front pages of the London Times. Things developed from there. We now had a case where some twenty-four brothers were charged with conspiracy: $2,200 bail apiece. When we tried to raise the money at the time, we found that the Black Panther Party was known everywhere. After we brought the brothers home from jail, we went over to the Black House, which had actually been named and established as the San Francisco headquarters of the Black Panther Party. Eldridge Cleaver had named it that, and Huey and I had agreed to it. Black House was where brother Eldridge had been living.   The objective was to get out The Black Panther.   Huey and I had been around the Black House all day, that third day after Sacramento, and news reporters were calling us and trying to get in touch with us, and calling Eldridge Cleaver. Everyone was trying to vamp in on us to see what was going on. They called all day. One call told us that the next morning they wanted us on Channel 7, on the "A.M." program. We agreed to be there. That night, we got set to lay out the ten-point platform and program for the Party Newspaper, and to lay out the second issue of volume one of The Black Panther, Black Community News Service.   We had a lot of things set up to lay out The Black Panther. Emory Douglas, who's now our Minister of Culture, had brought over all his materials and Huey was explaining to him about revolutionary culture, explaining that the only real culture is revolutionary culture. Huey told him that if he was going to be an artist for the Black Panther Party, he had to relate specifically to the revolutionary culture, the black people. Emory explained that he had related to revolutionary culture.   I asked him a couple of questions myself. I remember trying to explain to Emory that culture is basically learned behavior, and what is involved in learned behavior, especially when you speak of black people and a revolutionary culture. The Molotov cocktail had become a significant part of black people's culture, and now Huey P. Newton had brought forth the meaning of guns, organized guns and force as a significant part of black people's culture. They had to graduate from rocks and bottles and Molotov cocktails, Huey was saying, to a level where they understood the proper use of organized guns and force, and where they understood what a political party represented when it started to go forth to liberate black people. I was hoping that he understood that the Black Panther Party was concerned specifically with the basic political desires and needs of the people and seeing that those be answered in a revolutionary fashion. The brother was all head-shaking and yeses saying, 'Yeah, I can understand it, I can dig it. He just wanted to do some art.   So we sat up that night, and I sat down myself and laid out the first little Black Panther headline - THE TRUTH ABOUT SACRAMENTO. Many people ask us where we get our money from. The power structure has been accusing us of being robbers and thieves. This is not the case. A large portion of our money comes from many groups and people who support us. That includes different sources: lawyers groups, church organizations, other types of organizations, and many people who sympathize with the Party because they have taken time to read our newspaper.   Speaking engagements are another way we get funds. Sometimes we get $500 and $1,000 for speaking, especially when Eldridge, myself, and Kathleen were moving around, but they still are being given to other leaders of the Party and these funds help the Party function.   One of the main sources of funds is the Party's newspapers. It is an organ which lumpen proletarian brothers and sisters produce. Eldridge Cleaver is the chief editor of the paper, but the quality and development of that paper has come from brothers who have previously been in jails, brothers who have previously just been on the block, lumpen proletarian everyday Afro-American brothers who became politically organized and politically conscious, and learned their skills in producing that paper.   The brothers in the Party don't receive any kind of salary from the Black Panther Party, but for every paper that they sell, they keep ten cents. We give a lot of the young brothers, the little brothers in the community, ten cents for every paper they sell. Some of the brothers were able to buy themselves bicycles from selling so many papers. This is very good because it's constructive, it helps them work, and at the same time it helps the Party get correct information about the Party to many more people.   The paper has the highest circulation of what are generally called "underground newspapers" although we are not really underground. We're very much on top of the ground. Underground is a way to distinguish us from the Establishment press. Our circulation is 125,000 copies per week at present and is rising rapidly across the country. The brothers in the Party, the paper's staff, and all the brothers and sisters who work to help produce that paper are the ones who deserve credit for seeing to it that that paper consistently moves, for gathering the news, and for becoming reporters of news in the community where they can serve the people with the truth of what's happening.   So it's not a case of some white people behind the scenes putting our paper out or some special Jewish money being the sole source of the Party's existence. This is not the case at all. It's a thing where the Afro-American lumpen proletarian has become the vanguard, and the newspaper in itself is key in teaching the people that the brothers in the community who are revolutionaries, who want revolutionary change are not about to step back from the power structure, but in fact the Party's going to go forth, and is consistently going forth. Some very tricky methods have been used to try and stop our paper from being published. We received a letter from the Printers Union of America, which stated that since our paper had become of such "professional quality" they demanded that we have our paper printed and put together in a union printers shop. We understood that this was part and parcel of FBI and police attempts to try and stop the Black Panther Party news-newspaper. Howard Quinn, the place where we print the paper, is a union shop, but the Printers Union was referring to the people who lay the paper out, the members of the Black Panther Party. Since we understand the workers and we understand that we are workers, four or five of the brothers and sisters who actually do the layout of the paper, and who are Party members, joined the Printers Union, and that stopped all of that noise.   In the past, a large number of papers have been stopped, and thousands of issues were received soaking wet. This went on for a year off and on. In the process of shipping the papers, the airlines would hold them up in their freighting operations for a week or two. This included American Airlines, TWA, and United. We've got the records to prove it. We also have records of the notices we sent to the airlines saying we were going to sue them for holding our papers up like that and sometimes causing fifty or sixty thousand papers not to show up at all or to show up when they couldn't be sold, two and three weeks after the date on the paper.   There were also numerous attempts to factionalize the workers inside of the Howard Quinn Printing Company where they roll our paper off the press. Half the workers got on our side and the other half were on the side of this CIA-FBI operation, who said they were going to quit Howard Quinn if they didn't stop printing the Black Panther Party paper. The other half, the workers who were on our side, were the ones who run the press downstairs. They were getting along fine with us because we were helping them make more money. We were running off more papers than any other underground newspaper printed at Quinn's. They said they would quit if Quinn didn't continue printing the Black Panther Party's newspaper.   Well, we survived through that and we finally started sending the papers on a C.O.D. basis so as to be able to collect insurance from the airlines. Suddenly a lot of our papers began to arrive on time, although there are still some cases where they're holding them up. In the past there were actually cases where the police department would be out at the airport waiting for the particular plane that our papers were coming in on. The airlines were checking out the papers and giving them to the police, and the police would take our property somewhere and destroy it.   It costs about eight cents to produce the paper, but with mailing and shipping costs it comes to about ten cents a paper. The paper sells for twenty-five cents but we only receive about five cents from every paper. This money goes back to pay rent on our offices, phone bills, and other expenses. We are very proud of our paper. It comes from the hard core of the black community, the grass roots.   This should let people know that we have a national organ that they can read to keep themselves informed about the Black Panther Party and what's going on in the world, in these changing revolutionary times. HUEY DIGS BOB DYLAN Later we moved to Beverly Axelrod's house to finish the paper. This was about eight or nine blocks south of the Haight-Ashbury district over in San Francisco. It was a nice, big house, and we moved over there for room and space, and to get things together. We righteously got it together. Eldridge and Barbara Auther were pounding out some articles.   We called up a white Mother Country radical photographer, got him together, and asked him to shoot some pictures of Huey because we knew it was necessary for us to try and get a centralized symbol of the leadership of black people in the black community. We had to centralize it in some way, so we decided on a picture of Huey. This photographer came over with his cameras and his tripods, and Eldridge set the scene. The photographer took a number of different shots. We got a wicker chair and African shields, and we had a shotgun over there, and Eldridge said, "Take the gun and put the spear here." He artistically put that picture together that everyone sees of Huey P. Newton sitting in the chair, with the shotgun and the spear, and the shields sitting on each side of the chair.   The shields were very important, because Huey was articulating that we use the spear and the shield, and the shield is very significant. Huey would say many times that a long, long time ago, there was a man who invented a spear, and he frightened a whole lot of people. But, Huey said, the people invented a shield against the spear. The people weren't so frightened after all. So this is really what Huey P. Newton symbolized with the Black Panther Party - he represented a shield for black people against all the imperialism, the decadence, the aggression, and the racism in this country. That's what Huey P. Newton symbolized with us. That's the way we projected it. The headline of the Party paper was THE TRUTH ABOUT SACRAMENTO, because there were so many lies about the Black Panther Party, and the Black Panther Party in Sacramento. Lies by the regular mass media - television and radio and the newspapers - those who thought the Panthers were just a bunch of jive, just a bunch of crazy people with guns. Many and many an Uncle Tom and our backward brainwashed black men had a misconception about the whole thing, when you get down to it. While we were laying that paper out, in the background we could hear a record, and the song was named "Ballad of a Thin Man" by Bob Dylan. Now the melody was in my mind. I actually heard it, I could hear the melody to this record. I could hear the sound and the beat to it. But I really didn't hear the words. This record played after we stayed up laying out the paper. And it played the next night after we stayed up laying out the paper. I think it was around the third afternoon that the record was playing. We played that record over and over and over. Lots of brothers stayed right over there with a lot of shotguns for security. It was a righteous security in those days. There wasn't any bullshit.   Huey P. Newton made me recognize the lyrics. Not only the lyrics of the record, but what the lyrics meant in the record. What the lyrics meant in the history of racism that has perpetuated itself in this world. Huey would say: "Listen, listen - man, do you hear what he is saying? " Huey had such insight into how racism existed, how racism had perpetuated itself. He had such a way of putting forth in very clear words what he related directly to those symbolic things or words that were coming out from Bobby Dylan. The point about the geek is very important because this is where Huey hung me.   I remember that the song got to the point where he was talking about this cat handing in his ticket and he walked up to the geek, and the geek handed him a bone. Well, this didn't relate to me, so I said: "Huey, look, wait a minute, man." I said, "What you talking about a geek? What is a geek? What the hell is a geek?" And Huey explains it. He says, "A geek is usually a circus performer. Maybe he was an experienced trapeze artist who was injured. He's been in the circus all his life and he knows nothing else but circus work. But he can't be a trapeze artist anymore because he's been injured very badly, but he still needs to live, he needs to exist, he needs pay. So the circus feels very sorry for him and they give him a job. They give him the cruddiest kind of job because he's not really good for anything else. They put him into a cage, then people pay a quarter to come in to see him. They put live chickens into the cage and the geek eats the chickens up while they're still alive . . . the bones, the feathers, all. And of course he has a salary, because the audience pays a quarter to see him. He does this because he has to. He doesn't like eating raw meat, or feathers, but he does it to survive. But these people who are coming in to see him are coming in for entertainment, so they are the real freaks. And the geek knows this, so during his performance, he eats the raw chicken and he hands one of the members of the audience a bone, because he realizes that they are the real freaks because they get enjoyment by watching what he's doing because he has to. So that's what a geek and a freak is. Is that clear?   "Then to put it on the broader level, what Dylan is putting across is middle-class people or upper-class people who sometimes take a Sunday afternoon off and put their whole family into limousine, and they go down to the black ghettoes to watch the prostitutes and watch the decaying community. They do this for pleasure, or for Sunday afternoon entertainment. Of course the people are there and they don't want to be there. The prostitutes are there because they're trying to live, trying to exist, and they need money. So then that makes the middle-class and upper-class people, who are down there because they get pleasure out of it, freaks.   "And this goes into the one-eyed midget. What is the one-eyed midget? He screams and howls at Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones doesn't know what's happening. Then the one-eyed midget says, give me some juice or go home. And this again is very symbolic of people who are disadvantaged. They're patronizing Mr Jones, the middle-class people. You know, they're not interested in them coming down for entertainment. But if they'll pay them for a trick, then they'll tolerate them, or else they'll drive them out of the ghettoes. This song is hell. You've got to understand that this song is saying a hell of a lot about society." The white society and the middle-class society are surprised to see that black people will pimp chicks on the block. They come down that way because they looked at black people as freaks. They thought black people were in a big freak bag. They thought they had niggers all figured out. But black people were not even niggers. Black people were not backward and apathetic.   Huey says that whites looked at blacks as geeks, as freaks. But what is so symbolic about it is that when the revolution starts, they'll call us geeks because we eat raw meat. But the geek turns round and hands Mr. Jones a naked bone and says, "How do you like being a freak?" And Mr. Jones says, "Oh my God, what the hell's going on?" And Bobby Dylan says, you don't know what's happening, do you, Mr. Jones? And to hand him the naked bone was too much - was really too much.   Eldridge Cleaver explains in Soul On Ice that the black man has been led around by the white man, the white omnipotent administrator primarily - big businessmen who manipulate and bullshit and control the government. The black man has been led around, and was projected as being led around, with a little piece of string, cord string, that could be broken in a minute. The string was tied around the black man's neck, and the black man was projected as a big gorilla. He was a gorilla. He was inhuman, and he couldn't talk. He's not supposed to be able to think. But the gorilla beats on his chest and says, "I'm a man."   One of the symbolic things that Eldridge was pointing out with this thing was that Cassius Clay said: "I'm the greatest" - the symbolic thing of him beating on his chest. He said in fact, "I'm a man." He said, "I'm a strong man." What shocked the racists, what shocked the omnipotent administrator, is that he looked up at the big gorilla. The string had been broken and he saw this gorilla beating on his chest saying, "I'm a man." That was Cassius Clay.   Cassius Clay would brag. People misunderstood the bragging. All Cassius Clay was saying was that he was defying all this omnipotent, racist bullshit by stepping forward and saying, "I'm the greatest! I can't be hit." He beat on his chest, and when he said that, the white racist omnipotent administrator who had a hold on the string had to ask himself, "Well, if he's a man then what the hell am I?" And that's what Bobby Dylan meant by the geek handing Mr. Jones the naked bone and saying: "How do you like being a freak?" And that's the whole meaning of the question. If he's a man, if he's not a freak, and he tells Mr. Jones he's a freak, then Mr. Jones has to ask, "Am I that?" That's symbolic of saying that if he's a man, what am I?   This song Bobby Dylan was singing became a very big part of that whole publishing operation of the Black Panther paper. And in the background, while we were putting this paper out, this record came up and I guess a number of papers were published, and many times we would play that record. Brother Stokely Carmichael also liked that record. This record became so related to us, even to the brothers who had held down most of the security for the set.   The brothers had some big earphones over at Beverly's house that would sit on your ears and had a kind of direct stereo atmosphere and when you got loaded it was something else! These brothers would get halfway high, loaded on something, and they would sit down and play this record over and over and over, especially after they began to hear Huey P. Newton interpret that record. They'd be trying to relate an understanding about what was going on, because old Bobby did society a big favor when he made that particular sound. If there's any more he made that I don't understand, I'll just ask Huey P. Newton to interpret them for us and maybe we can get a hell of a lot more out of brother Bobby Dylan, because old Bobby, he did a good job on that set. SERVING TIME AT BIG GREYSTONE After Sacramento, we made a deal. Myself and a few other brothers who had no previous records would serve some time for "disturbing the peace" or something like that, and all the other brothers who were on parole or probation would be cut loose. We weren't guilty of anything, but we made that deal to save the other brothers from going to state prison. Warren Tucker and I served the longest sentences, six months each.   At first they had me in Sacramento County Jail, but later they transferred me to the Alameda County Jail at Santa Rita. I was in a maximum security wing of a place everybody calls Big Greystone, because the buildings are made of this drab gray stone.   Huey tried to visit me in Sacramento County Jail shortly after I went in to serve my sentence in August 1967, but when Huey arrived, I had been transferred down to Greystone. I remember Huey saying to me, just before I went to jail, "You can do six months for the Party, can't you?"   "Sure I can." I told Huey. "I can do it easily." On the morning of October 28, 1968, I was lying on my bunk inside one of those jive cells they have at Big Grey-stone. Suddenly someone hollered, "Bobby Seale, Bobby Seale!" It was one of the trustees, walking on the catwalk above me. "Bobby Seale, where you at?" he called. I said, "Over here, in cell 82." This cat walked up and said, "Two Panthers had a shoot-out, and one cop is dead, and one of your boys got wounded, I think." I said, "What! You know who it was?" He said, "No, we don't have information on who it was, yet. They shot him, though. That's what one of the bulls said."   A lot of names flashed in my head, but not Huey's. I thought it might be Sherman Forte, Bobby Hutton, Reggie Forte, Orleando Harrison, any one of the brothers who went to Sacramento with us. "Who could it have been? Who could have been shot?" I remember saying to myself. I knew the Oakland Tribune would have the information. That's the only thing they let you read in jail; they just cram that junk right down your throat, and they won't let any other papers in. I waited, reading some portions of a book, waiting for the newspaper.   Finally around twelve o'clock, the trustee brought me the paper. There was Huey P. Newton's picture on the front page. He was on a stretcher.2 The paper said he had been shot.   At first I worried if he was all right. I read the pig's lying story. Then I thought about getting the brother out. They were going to charge brother Huey with murder. All kinds of schemes went through my mind about busting up the jail or busting up the court. He had to appear in court, and I thought about walking in there, and blasting away at every judge, every bailiff, and the clerk, just blasting at all the pigs, walking over to Huey, and walking out. I had scenes in my head, of crowds of people in the court, and while Huey was there in the crowd of people, I would dress him up like a woman. I'd put some kind of dress on him and let him walk out with another dude, disguised as man and wife. The pigs would never figure that out, I thought.   I remembered that Huey had told me many times that he never wanted a murder charge where you have to be on death row. Huey described death row as a form of righteous torture. You sit on death row three, four, or five years, not knowing when you're going to die. That in itself is torture, but the real torture comes, he said, when they're about to walk you up to the gas chamber, and five or ten minutes before the time of execution, somebody would give you a stay of execution for one month, or one year. He said that's righteous torture.   I began to intensely count my days left in jail, so that I could get out and work to get Huey free. I was scheduled, as far as I knew, to get out of this jail sometime between January 8 and 15. It wasn't very clear. I'd gone into jail on August 8, on that Sacramento bust. It was now October 28 and I had to wait all the way till January 8 to get out.   I had read the papers. I had also read about the protest over police brutality about a week or two before, in which the pigs busted up the heads of the anti-draft demonstrators who went forth to close down the draft office in Oakland. Chief Gain and his pigs, the highway patrolmen, and others from surrounding cities beat the heads of all these peaceful demonstrators. They were peaceful demonstrators. They'd sit down in front of the draft office and say, "If I'm violating the law by sitting down, then arrest me." And they would go to jail peacefully. But Chief Gain and the pigs wanted to beat their heads. These demonstrators called a press conference after what had happened to brother Huey and said that the racist dog policemen who attacked Huey P. Newton must be removed and Huey must be freed. Solidarity and support were shown in this article. They said that the pigs who jumped on the anti-draft demonstrators in Oakland there were the same pigs who vamped on Huey. (The demonstration at the induction center had taken place a few weeks before.)   I also read that Judge Staats held court to arraign and charge Huey in the hospital room where he was getting better from the gunshot wound. Some Panther brothers had also gone to the hospital, but it was surrounded. The pigs asked them what they wanted, and the Panther brothers said, "We come to get Huey." Six or seven brothers got busted. These brothers really loved Huey. They came to get the Minister of Defense, they came to see about Huey, to set Huey free. A pig jumped up with a shotgun in front of them, stopped them, and asked them, "What you want?" And one of the Panthers dedicated to the revolutionary struggle, dedicated to the liberation of black people, looked at this pig and told him, "We come to get Huey." That pig must have shit! These were crazy Panthers. Sunday mornings, when you're in jail, you have to go to the day room to hear some puritanical thinking, Christian preacher preach a bunch of bullshit about how we were wrong and we must seek for the Lord. How ironic can this shit get! Here's some preacher in the day room cell, with over 200 cats crowded in. This guy is just blabbing out of the mouth and the brothers aren't even listening to him. There are guards standing on each side, telling you to be quiet and listen. You get mad at those pigs, especially when you've got a minister of defense like Huey P. Newton. You get real mad when you know there's a hell of a revolutionary leader who wants to give the land and bread back to the people. You just want to break out of that joint; you want to go and do something about Huey. That's the way you feel.   There were a lot of brothers in jail who suddenly all wanted to be Panthers. They had listened to me before, but now they wanted to be Panthers. They saw there was hope. They looked at Huey as a hero of the people. Huey was so beautiful; he'd turn around, and tell the people, "You're the heroes, you're the heroes, people. So let's unite, go forth in unity, so we can get land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and some peace."   I thought and wondered, and read the papers, and schemed about what to do for Huey. There were demonstrations for Huey, and people showed up in court. Panthers jammed into the courtroom, and 200 people besides jammed the hallways. They had literature and information concerning Huey P. Newton. They wanted him to be set free, cut loose. They ran down how unjust this racist decadent system is, and said it couldn't do this to Huey.   I made up my mind and said that when I got out I was going to work myself to the bone, harder than I ever had before. Our first objective and first goal, working with Eldridge and the other Panthers, would be to mobilize 5,000 people, standing around in the courthouse for Huey. Then if necessary, we might have to bust him out of jail, because Huey's gotta be set free somehow. That's what I was saying. That is the way I felt. That's what I became dedicated to as I sat there in jail waiting to get out. Five weeks later, I was talking to Huey. I had to appear in court a couple of times, somewhere around the latter part of November. They transported one from Greystone to the County Jail in downtown Oak. land. I was in Tank B, and Huey was in Tank A. He sent a couple of messages around to me, like "Power! Power to the People!" The brother also sent me some cigarettes. That was kind of funny when I thought of it. Here's this brother, on a murder charge, which Huey never wanted, and he sends me cigarettes.   I had another court date, December 8. Once again they drove me from Greystone to the jail in Oakland where the court was, and they put me in Tank B. I knew Tank B was next door to Tank C. That's the hospital tank where I figured Huey was. I knew that you could holler from Tank B to Tank C, although you couldn't see anybody. I asked the trustee, "Is Huey P. Newton still in Tank C, the hospital tank?" He said, "Yes he is." Then I went to the bars, as close as I could get to Tank C, and started hollering, "Hey, Huey!"   "Yeah," he said.   "This is Bobby."   "Hey, man!"   The brother was glad to be able to talk, and I was glad to be able to talk to him. He told me about a few things that happened, a few things that he'd read in the paper, about some brothers getting in a shoot-out with some pigs, and how the pigs rammed their car. He ran down how I wasn't to say anything around a couple of jive trustees who, he knew would turn words around and snitch to the man. And I told him how the pigs came out to the jail, three days after he'd been shot, and how they were trying to say that I knew where the 9mm gun was, that Huey was supposed to have had the night he got shot. I told Huey I had nothing to say to the pig, that I took the Fifth Amendment on it. One of them was a nigger pig, a bootlicker pig, who acted like he wanted to jump me, so I just backed up against the wall, and braced myself, and got ready to fight the pig, right in the middle of this jive 7' x 7' Greystone cell. Huey and I hollered around there in the Oakland jail, talking to each other for a long time, and then I had to go downstairs and appear in the court.   They brought me back upstairs around noon, and one of the trustees told me that I would be able to see Huey in a few minutes. I said, "What!" He said, "Yeah, because they bring him around to Tank B, in the aisle over there. The entrance is to the side." I said, "Right on, brother, right on. I get to see brother Huey P. Newton. That's good, that's good." I was really happy. -I really wanted to see the brother because I hadn't seen him since August 8, the day I went to jail. I wanted to see how he was doing.   He walked around and he looked like he was in pretty good shape. He lifted his hands to the bars, and we grabbed each other's hands, shook each other's hands real tight and hard. I mostly just wanted to look at the brother, and see if he was all right because Huey was out of sight. It was just good to see him. It was just a filling thing for me. I felt like we were close to some kind of freedom for Huey, when I saw the cat. We had to free Huey.   The next time I came up to court, I saw him again. I was in the day room and he was locked in an aisle in the hallway. He walked up to the end of the aisle, and spoke through that chicken-shit hole that the pigs set up for visitors. I said, "Go on and take your visits, brother." It was good to see him. I looked and saw some of the visitors, his girl friend La Verne, and Orleando, and the others through that little hole on my side. They all came over to see me after visiting with Huey.   When we were hollering, before the visitors came, Huey had asked me how long I had to go. I told him that I might be out January 8 or January 15, as close as I could figure. I said, "Well, brother, you've got to be set free. Something's got to be done, and we're going to have to do it. I hope I can do it." He reassured me, "You can do it, Bobby. You can put it together, you and Eldridge and everyone. You can do it." It made me feel good. I had to relate to that, because I had to believe and understand I could do something to help the brother get free. You sit in Greystone, in a (7' x 7') cell, all day long. Then they move you and put you in another 7' x 7' cell. They let you go to the day room every three days. In the course of an hour, you go to the day room, take a shower, shave, and then they put you in another one of the same 7' x 7's, somewhere. You get used to it, especially when you know you haven't got too much time to do.   A lot of cats naturally get pissed off at Greystone. I took mine out on thinking about the organization, and what I could do for the organization, and for the revolutionary struggle. During those last weeks, October 28 to December 8, I thought about ways to free Huey P. Newton, and about the fact that we have to get this brother free somehow or other. This brother's got to get cut loose, he's got to beat this case, because these pigs are trying to jack him up, and they're trying to jack the Panther Party up. On December 8, after I came back from court, they called me out of the bullpen, and I walked back down the hall, to change out of my civilian clothes, that I used to appear in court, back into those regular jail clothes. There are three security prisons there really - Big Grey-stone, which is maximum security, 7' x 7' cells, and Santa Rita (farm work for sentenced inmates), or Little Grey-stone, where there's barracks and compounds, maximum security, and you can walk around. Most of the cats in Big Greystone have felony cases, or have gotten into fights and have been put over there. Mostly, those in Little Greystone have smaller cases and are unsentenced. I knew one thing through that routine of going back and forth to court - if you go to Big Greystone, you aren't allowed to wear any shoes. When you go to Little Grey-stone, you put on shoes, because you walk around. The shoes are very significant.   I stepped forward, took off my coat, and the pig wrote down the color of my jacket, my slacks, and my pinstriped brown shirt. He looked at a list of the jail clothes I was supposed to get and said, "Shoes." I said, "No, you got it wrong, no shoes. I'm at Big Greystone." "Nope," he said, "here it says, shoes." "Uh uh," I said, "I'm in Big Greystone. You got it wrong." He said, "Shoes, Seale!" I said, "All right."   They have some special shoes they give you, brogans.   I told the pig, "Wait a minute, I have to wear shoes?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "Am I going to Little Greystone?" He said, "Yeah, I guess so," in a real snotty way. I said, "Well, then, I can't wear those brogans." I took my sock off and showed him my left foot. My left foot is about three-quarters of an inch shorter than my right foot, because I was hit by a car when I was thirteen. I said, "This is a skin graft you see on the top of my foot. Those brogans will rub the skin graft, and the next thing you know I'll run around infected. The shoes are too heavy. I'd rather wear my regular civilian shoes." So he said, "OK, let's go." So I dressed, put my shoes on, climbed on the wagon.   He took me over to Little Greystone, dropped me off, and assigned me to one of those jive-assed barracks with barbed-wire fences around it. I went inside, looking for Warren Tucker, because he was supposed to be serving time there. I couldn't figure the whole switch out, and I really wanted to talk to Tucker. I inquired around, asking all the brothers if they had seen a brother, a Black Panther, named Warren Tucker, but they didn't know him. So I settled back to get my bunk straight, and get bedding from the trustee. Some brothers were singing some soul music. It was nice the way they were putting the harmony to it, putting the real soul into it. I lay there listening to them about forty-five minutes, thinking about brother Huey, and about how we were going to get him out.   Then one of the guards walked inside the barracks, and said, "Seale?" I said, "Yeah."   "Let's go, you're bailed out. You're out on bail."   I said, "Uh uh, you got the wrong man."   "Seale?"   "My name is Seale, that's right."   "Well it's supposed to be Seale."   "You got the wrong man, I can't get out of jail till January 8. Maybe you're looking for somebody else with the same name as mine. Who's got a name similar to mine?"   Some brother said, "There's a cat in here named Scales."   "That's who you're looking for, man," I said. "Well," the bull said, "I don't know, let me go check."   I rolled over and almost fell asleep, and about five or ten minutes later, the pig came back. "Let's go, Seale, it's you!"   "Now wait just on goddam minute," I said. "You dudes got Huey P. Newton in jail! You dudes pull all kinds of schemes, to mess up our Party, to mess up black people. To kill them and murder them."   "I don't have nothing to do with that," he said.   "Regardless of that," I ran on, "you're telling me I'm supposed to be out on bail, and I say I can't be out on bail because I can't get out till January 8. I'm going to be honest. You know that me and a lot of the people want to free Huey P. Newton. We want to do a lot of work in the black community. Get rid of you pigs. All you cats want to do is to say I'm out on bail, take me somewhere, say I escaped, and then give me a year and a half, so later!"   "I don't know anything about that, Seale, you just come on."   "All right, goddamit, let's go. But I know damn well I can't get out of jail till January 8, and that's even with good time. I can't get out of jail till January 8." I ran it down to him, "I got sentenced to six months. It's impossible for me to get out. I went in August 8, and now its only December 8. The only time I can get out, is by January 8. And that's with thirty damn days of good time." I argued with the cat. I didn't believe him. But I jumped up and put on my shoes.   We walked all the way up to the discharge place. I argued with the lieutenant. I argued with the captain. I argued with the sergeants and everybody else. I wanted to see some definite proof. They showed me a teletype message from Sacramento, where I had been sentenced, which said that they couldn't hold me any longer, that my time was up.   I snatched that teletype message and looked at it. Meanwhile some more brothers were coming through the bullpen. I told them, "Hey, brothers, remember. You see this discharge here? It says I'm out of jail, and I wasn't expecting to get out of jail till January. But you remember that all these cops came down here and said I was supposed to get released. You remember that, you hear?"   The brothers said, "Right on, Bobby. Right on. We understand."   "Brothers, I'll catch you later on." Then I said to the pigs, "OK, let's go."   The pigs were very upset, about why Bobby Seale wasn't going to leave jail. I was tired of the pigs, and the power structure scheming on us. I was very apprehensive about them saying I was discharged, because I didn't really believe it. I called my father and waited for an hour and a half. He came out and picked me up, and took me home.   My wife was in the car. When I saw her, I remembered that I told her that she was going to have to be ready to sacrifice, when I got out of jail. She said she understood. Now she was in the car, and she'd brought Little Stagolee with her. He was about a year and a half old. I had to get used to the idea that all of a sudden I was out of jail on my way home. I had to do a hell of a lot of things now, to try to help get Huey out of jail. Before I'd just been sitting in the cell, day after day, thinking about things to be done, but now it was time to implement them. Huey P. Newton always said, "Unite theory with practice. Unite your ideas with practice, by applying those ideas.   Of course, the first thing I decided to do when I got out of jail was to make love with my wife. Then I'd call everybody else up. It can be bad for a man's mind when he's locked up and taken away from good loving and good screwing. 1 Executive Mandate Number One Statement by the Minister of Defense Delivered May 2,1967, at Sacramento, California, State Capitol Building The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general and the black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California Legislature which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder, and repression of black people. At the same time that the American government is waging a racist war of genocide in Vietnam, the concentration camps in which Japanese Americans were interned during World War II are being renovated and expanded. Since America has historically reserved the most barbaric treatment for non-white people, we are forced to conclude that these concentration camps are being prepared for black people who are determined to gain their freedom by any means necessary. The enslavement of black people from the very beginning of this country, the genocide practiced on the American Indians and the confining of the survivors on reservations, the savage lynching of thousands of black men and women, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now the cowardly massacre in Vietnam, all testify to the fact that toward people of color the racist power structure of America has but one policy: repression, genocide, terror, and the big stick. Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetrated against black people. All of these efforts have been answered by more repression, deceit, and hypocrisy. As the aggression of the racist American government escalates in Vietnam, the police agencies of America escalate the repression of black people throughout the ghettoes of America. Vicious police dogs, cattle prods, and increased patrols have become familiar sights in black communities. City Hall turns a deaf ear to the pleas of black people for relief from this increasing terror. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense believes that the time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late. The pending Mulford Act brings the hour of doom one step nearer. A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society, must draw the line somewhere. We believe that the black communities of America must rise up as one man to halt the progression of a trend that leads inevitably to their total destruction. 2 On October 28, 1967, there was an early morning gun battle between Huey P. Newton and two policemen. Huey was wounded seriously. One policeman, John Frey, was killed, and the other, Herbert Heanes, was seriously injured. - Ed. The Shit Comes Down: Free Huey! Back to contents