THE SHIT COMES DOWN: "FREE HUEY!" FREE HUEY I got out of jail on December 8, 1967. I came out with the feeling and desire to get brother Huey P. Newton out of jail and to keep them from sending him to the gas chamber, because this was the Party, and the Party was my life. It was like a musician learning how to play a horn and blowing some jazz and really being with it in such a way that it's your life, it's part of you. This is the way I always felt about the Party. I don't generally go into things about the Party from the way I might subjectively feel about them - I try to project them objectively. But I also came out of jail with a feeling that I had a wife and I had a little baby. My wife wanted me to go to work. I have nine trades - musician, comedian, community organizer, carpenter, builder, draftsman, journeyman sheet-metal mechanic, general machine-shop work, and non-destructive testing of machine and aircraft parts. I have a number of trades like that. But going to work wouldn't give me enough time, I felt, to work to free Huey. Before Huey had gotten shot, I was contemplating that half of my time would be taking care of my family, and the rest of my time would be used to work diligently in the Party. I felt that we would have to have some kind of financial support that would help back up the Party.   I knew I was a good draftsman, so before Huey got shot, I made up my mind to do the kind of work that I'd need to support my family, at home. I would try to get private drafting jobs that I could do at night. If I could do private drafting at home, I could make money to take care of my family, and the rest of the time, if I could be flexible and be my own boss, I could do work for the Party at any time, and in any way it called upon me to do so.   I was only into having a family for two years at that time, but I really related to my family. This was my first experience at being married and having a family, and having this responsibility. I never really was afraid of the responsibility, but at the same time, I knew that life and living were not really secure with all the racism and all the exploitation black people were subjected to.   After I had been out of jail a couple of days, I was riding down Grove Street with Eldridge, David Milliard, Artie, and a couple of other people. I told Eldridge that we had to do something for Huey, but said that I also felt that I had to go to work, get a half-assed job, and possibly do some drafting at home to make some money on the side, and put some specific scheme together to bust out Huey.   Eldridge ran it down that our real work was organizing people. "Man, don't worry about doing any work," Eldridge said. "We've got a lot of work to do. This isn't like leaving your family. Well take care of that, all together. But let's organize the people to free Huey."   "You're right, man," I said. "I don't have time for a job." Before I came out of jail I had actually known, deep-down inside me that we didn't have any more time to be hung up on jive jobs, with all this stuff happening to us, and these pigs trying to railroad brother Huey.   So we really went into motion, using every means we had, taking every speaking engagement we could, and rallied the community. The Party moved rapidly to the campuses, and held rallies and forums. We had funds and donations coming in. A lot of brothers were flocking to the Party. There were a lot of brothers, a lot of Party members who worked doing leafleting, announcing rallies, raising money, and stuff like that. Brothers and sisters would come back and report how they went out to collect funds on the streets of the Fillmore district. They would have buckets and cans to collect donations and funds. Some of the pimps would throw a five or ten dollar bill in, and some would drop two or three dollars in.   The pimps would say, "Is this for Huey Newton?"   "Yeah, brother," the brothers and sisters would say, "You know you're making money. You gotta come on and cough up some of them coins, so brother Huey can have some righteous legal defense."   The brothers threw the money in. I think Huey knew three main pimps very well. You know there's no really successful pimp, but there were about ten of them who you could call successful in the Bay Area at the time, and I think Huey knew most of them. He knew most of the cats in and around the black community.   So Eldridge, David, and I were all working, and figuring out different things that were necessary to be done. A couple of days later, there was a court appearance for Huey. We went there and I did a couple press interviews about how we were trying to mobilize people for the defense of Huey, And that's how we launched our campaign to free our Minister of Defense. A WHITE LAWYER FOR A BLACK REVOLUTIONARY Shortly after I got out of jail I went over to San Francisco to check out Charles R. Garry, the lawyer the Central Committee had tentatively chosen to defend Huey. I had never met Garry before and I guess, to be honest about it, I had a little tingling bit of racism still hanging onto me. It wasn't that I hated white people, but I had to find out if I could trust this white lawyer to fight for Huey's freedom. Everyone had said that he was very good. He was recommended to us by Beverly Axebod.   We had been considering a number of lawyers - Donald Warden, Clinton White, and a couple of others. White and Warden were both black cats, but Warden had too many guys who went to jail, some of whom we thought were on death row. The way Warden operated wasn't cool, we thought, because he would tell you one thing out of the side of his mouth, and then go and do another thing behind the scenes with the police department and the people downtown. Clinton White had the reputation for being a good lawyer and a good fighter, but I was fearful that they would try to manipulate him, and Huey and the Party would become political football. I really don't know if he decided not to take the case, or if the Party decided not to hire him, because when I got out of jail, Garry had already been tentatively chosen.   So I went over to meet Garry. He told me about the kind of law firm he was running, and why these political cases related to him. I popped up right away and asked, "How much money is it going to cost?"   "Let's not worry about that," Garry said. "Let's worry about the fact that we want to free Huey." He seemed to be a very honest person, from everything I could detect about him. "Well, let's see how he works out in practice," I said to myself. I generally hold back on my judgment of people until I see how they work out in practice.   A couple of days later, another lawyer was being considered. We went up to see him, and right away we decided that we didn't like him because he wanted ten to twelve thousand dollars in advance, off the cuff. We judged that Garry's firm was a better firm and that Garry himself was a better lawyer. We looked at the man's record, the number of people he had kept off death row, the number of murder cases that he had won, and those in which he had actually proven people innocent.   From all this, and because of our concern for brother Huey, we felt that it was Garry who was needed.   Three or four days after we made our final decision, I went to a meeting of the defense committee for Huey P. Newton, and there were less than ten people there. I had read in the papers that there were hundreds of people on the committee. The problem was a bit of black racism which was hanging on and which was very bad. The people who were originally on Huey's defense committee were all black people, naturally. But it turned out that they were mad because Huey's family and the Black Panther Party had decided that Charles Garry was the best legal technician available. Our argument was that we couldn't judge the man by the color of his skin. We wouldn't chose a lawyer just because he was black. We would choose him on the basis of his ability. We said that if you had cancer or another bad disease, you would want the best medical technician that you could find. This was our argument, but they didn't understand it. We tried to show them that you could not judge Garry by the color of his skin. We tried to show them that Garry had no reason or desire to be a tool or a puppet of the power structure. We had to remind them that Garry had been viciously attacked by cops in the past when he fought for the labor unions in San Francisco, and that a lot of corrupt people in the local power structure didn't like him. The man had integrity, we said, and his record and everything else about him were all in Huey's favor.   But they still wanted to hinge it on a little old thing like, "He's not black." Someone even had the nerve to say that we should hire John George, a man who had never handled that kind of case. Those two kinds of politics developed in the black community: one on the basis of a racist line, another on the basis of our progressive line. Later, we didn't get along with John George at all, because opportunistically he sided with the hundred or so people who only wanted a "black" lawyer and were trying to form a Huey P. Newton defense committee, but who didn't really have any power in the community. When it turned out that there wasn't going to be any black lawyer, most of them stopped worrying about saving Huey's life, but some worked to free Huey. So the Black Panther Party hired Garry, and when I went to this first meeting of the defense committee, there was only David Hilliard, Eldridge, myself. Huey's brother Melvin Newton, Sid Walton, and three or four other people who showed up. There were only about eight or nine people actually functioning on Huey's defense committee right after we hired Charles Garry.   Eldridge and I were very pissed off at some of those people who had their little racist hang-ups. So many of them, about sixty or seventy, used to crowd into meetings before I got out of jail, Eldridge told me. They used to stand near the door trying to get out what they had to say, just running off at the mouth. They weren't really interested in doing any work. When we hired Garry, they all dropped away like a bunch of little scared rabbits and racists. I didn't like that at all. Some of those people had been to college, and had talked about all of the oppressive conditions black people were living under. The way I looked at it, their actions were tantamount to selling out the black community.   Some of the local black lawyers and black cultural nationalists tried to attack Garry publicly. "You guys have got to have a black lawyer," they told us. We just wanted the best one we could get. Those black lawyers had some kind of a meeting in Berkeley and tried to condemn Garry. That kind of stuff even hit the newspapers.   We realized that half of those lawyers were just thinking about money. They were thinking that we were going to raise a lot of funds for Huey's defense, and they wanted to get their hands on those funds and stick them in their own pockets. When we hired Garry, we didn't have any money. Garry's firm didn't get any money from us for a long time and went into the ole on Huey's case. Most of those black lawyers who condemned Garry never would have stuck with us when we were without funds. They would have gotten rid of us. But they really had to get up off Garry's back after he got Eldridge out of Vacaville in June, and later on when his legal and political work together with our community efforts kept Huey out of the gas chamber.   Black racism is a fault of a few within the black community. Black racism is a very selfish thing. It is definitely not a progressive or a productive thing. COALITIONS Three weeks after I got out of jail, we formed a coalition with the Peace and Freedom Party. Eldridge called me and told me to come over and meet some people who wanted to give us money to help Huey out. When I got there he told me an organization, the Peace and Freedom Party, was trying to get on the ballot, and they wanted to know if they could come into the black community and register people into their party. We thought about it, and talked about what Huey had said. Huey thought that we should not become an official party on the ballot at that time, because he knew political repression was going to come down. The Black Panther Party wasn't massive at that time and hadn't yet spread across the country. Remembering what had happened to the American Communist Party, he was afraid that the government would take every person who was registered or attempted to register as an official Black Panther Party member, and try to trump up charges on them. At the same time, we wanted to spread out a lot more and get a massive group of white people to work in their communities because Huey had always held the position that white people should work to end racism in their own community.   Eldridge told me that the Peace and Freedom Party would give us money and also give us $3,000 for Huey's defense fund. They not only wanted to register people for the Peace and Freedom Party in the white community, they also wanted to do it in the black community and saw us, the Black Panther Party, as representatives of the black community. I thought that that was correct and right in line with "White Mother Country Radicals," an article written by Eldridge. I decided we should form the coalition. Eldridge agreed that we should form a coalition for a specific purpose, which was an idea Huey had talked about. Later we went to the jail and asked Huey about it and he agreed. We had a number of rallies in the black community, in Hunter's Point, the Fillmore, and West Oakland, with the Peace and Freedom Party supplying sound and technical equipment which the Black Panther Party did not, at that time, have at all. With the $3,000, we were able to pay a fair retainer to Charles R. Garry for Huey's defense. In the white community as well as the black, we initiated a broad campaign for increased concern about the problems of the black community, centered around our leader and Minister of Defense, brother Huey P. Newton.   There were a few black members of the Peace and Freedom Party, and they always said they represented the black community in the Peace and Freedom Party. We would look at them and say, "What do you mean? Huey P. Newton represents the black community." It got to be a hassle, and they would sometimes ask us what we thought they should do. We would say that they should join the Black Panther Party. We looked upon the Peace and Freedom Party as a predominantly white organization for the white community. At the same time we saw that it was valuable to form a coalition for the specific purpose of encouraging black people to register in the Peace and Freedom Party instead of the Republican or Democratic parties who were oppressing us. With this understanding we formed the coalition and later announced that we would run brother Huey P. Newton for Congress from the Seventh Congressional District and myself for the Assembly from the Seventeenth Assembly District, districts that were half white and half black.   There were attempts by the power structure to limit the Party's activity with this coalition. We had a lot of clashes with a lot of different groups of people, but there were thousands of black people coming into the Black Panther Party because of what was happening. The coalition was a working coalition, not just a verbal one. There was some very good work done in the community. When the university students were being viciously attacked by the Berkeley police, the students understood that the people in the black community were being attacked, murdered, and brutalized all the time.   The Peace and Freedom Party came to the realization that we had to do something about the police, on a political level. The Black Panther Party agreed, and they asked us what we thought should be done. Eldridge talked to Bob Avakian, Rick Hyland, and quite a number of others about the concept of community control of police. We began to work jointly on this with members of the Peace and Freedom Party, because it would not only be community control of police in the black community, it would also be community control in the white community.   It was at this time that I began to think that some members of the Peace and Freedom Party weren't really concerned with brother Huey P. Newton as a political prisoner who needed to be free. Many people worked on our campaign, and showed concern, but some of them just weren't interested. Some of the leaders looked at it as a political lever, or something to use, but others were earnest and really wanted to free Huey. It became apparent that many Peace and Freedom Party members would have to become more radical and more revolutionary. Many people did not understand that the very police who attempted to kill Huey were controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties, so they weren't very concerned with community control of police. They didn't understand that Huey's situation was inseparable from the needs of the community. We also saw that they didn't have a real interest in the community control of police. We weren't in good communication about it, so we just naturally worked on our own with the petition.   This didn't make us against coalitions. It mostly placed us against people who allow themselves to stagnate, who think they don't have an issue, when there's a lot of hard work to be done.   There were some 25,000 votes cast for Huey P. Newton for Congress in the Seventh Congressional District. For the people who still thought like the old politicians, if a candidate lost, it was over. Some of the leaders felt that running Huey was a losing tactic, but that was not the case. They misunderstood how much Huey was interlocked with every black man in the black community who suffers from oppression. We'd run Huey again because ours is a revolutionary struggle. They acted like social democrats and were not able to advance to a higher level and continue working. The coalition began to split up. I still believe that if the Peace and Freedom Party would really rally its people together, then membership alone could place the community control of police issue on the ballot; but they wouldn't push for it.   We will continue to have working alliances with other groups like Los Siete de la Raza, a group supporting the seven Latino brothers who are accused of killing a cop in San Francisco. Alliances with groups like Los Siete have worked out a lot better than coalitions with white liberals because the brown American people are suffering from the same things black American people are. The Young Lords, a Puerto Rican gang that turned political, works in alliance with the Black Panther Party in Chicago and New York. They're suffering the same oppressive conditions that black people are subjected to. There's also the Young Patriots who are a vanguard in the poor white communities. We can relate well with them because they are in opposition to the power structure's oppression.   Alliances between poor oppressed peoples work out readily. It is the poor oppressed people who have to dictate their political desires and needs, and explain what should be done and what should not be done. The organizations of the lumpen proletariat are the ones we can relate to. We even have a problem with black students sometimes because they tend to have a detached understanding of the realities in the black community.   A lot of people don't understand that when we make coalitions, we're not trying to shuck people. We have no time to be shucking and jiving. When we get three or four brothers shot up and killed, we can't say that it was bad, and forget about it, because we know the pigs are coming back tomorrow. They'll try to attack us again. We know that because of our historical experience as black people. We are not against intelligence. The Party is very intelligent, and we read the same materials that the college students have read. But it's different when cats like Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver write and talk, because it is coming out of a lot of experience. It comes from the guts of their souls. STOKELY COMES TO OAKLAND Early in January of 1968, we decided to have a huge rally in Oakland in support of brother Huey's freedom. We knew that a rally for Huey would fill the Oakland Auditorium, and we went about securing it. The auditorium is owned by the City of Oakland, and they said they couldn't rent it out to us because they didn't want "black power advocates" coming to Oakland to cause riots.   We went back down there with a lawyer, and he told the auditorium manager that he should rent the place to us for any date he had open. "Well, I can't give it to them," he said. "If you don't give it to them," our lawyer told him, "We'll get a court injunction on you for violating the right of the people to be able to assemble in the auditorium. Now there must be some date open, so you'd better just cough up a date." He decided to cough up a date, so they arbitrarily said, "Well, the only date we have open is next month some time . . . February 17." Eldridge quickly said, "We'll take that date, any date."   When we came out of the auditorium, Eldridge ran back across the street to the County Jail, where Huey was being held, and told him we were going to have a big rally for him, for him and his freedom, and that we were going to pack the Oakland Auditorium. "The rally is going to be on February 17," Eldridge said. Huey looked up at him and said, "Hey, that's my birthday." Eldridge had had no idea Huey's birthday was in February. So right up there in the County Jail is when Eldridge got the beautiful political idea that it would be a birthday rally for Huey, a birthday rally for the freedom of our Minister of Defense.   I wasn't allowed to go into the jail to visit Huey. They have some kind of jive rule, that after you get out of the County Jail, you can't go back in to visit someone else. I didn't go up that time with Eldridge, but a number of times after that, I disguised myself, and went up and saw brother Huey. They have a little booth up there where you're supposed to identify yourself, but sometimes when I came up in the elevator, there were so many visitors and supporters of Huey that the brothers just shifted me sideways away from the booth, and I went in and visited Huey. I don't think it's illegal, but they have this jive rule. If they want to try to prosecute me on it now, let them try it.   Eldridge came out of the courthouse (the holding section of the Alameda County Jail is on the top floor of the Alameda County Courthouse) and ran it all down to me about how we were going to have a birthday party for Huey. We only had about a month before the rally. We went down to the Peace and Freedom Party and told them that we needed some money because we wanted to go see Stokely Carmichael in Washington, D.C. Stokely had just come back from his world tour of Vietnam, Cuba, Africa, and other places. We felt that Eldridge and I should go directly to Washington, D.C., and sit down and talk to him, and run it down to him because he really hadn't committed himself to coming to the rally yet, although we had told him about it. We asked the cats in the Peace and Freedom Party to finance that trip for us. They financed it, but not before we went through a few changes.   When we first asked them, they said that they didn't have any money. Eldridge and I told them they were a bunch of liars. "How can you tell us you don't have any money?" we asked them. "If you don't have it, you can raise it." We said, "We need $500 in plane fare and $100 in expense money to go and see Stokely so we can secure this whole rally." So they said, "Well, we can get about $200 but we can't get any more."   "Well, you're damn liars," we said. "You cats are talking about working with us in a coalition and you want to go into the black community and want us to be key spokesmen there for the Peace and Freedom Party. But at the same time, we are talking about Huey's freedom. The reason we entered into this coalition was to talk about Huey's freedom. That's what this rally is all about; politically educating the masses of people that Huey P. Newton must be set free now.   "Are you cats going to be racists and jiving around and go back on your word, or are you cats going to be able to go out and hustle that money? We don't have much time because we want to start getting some other things together and we want to raise some more money to print our posters."   Then I got mad and I told them I didn't want to talk to them. "Don't talk to me," I said. Eldridge would do this all the time. He would get mad and cuss them all out and say the hell with them sometimes. Later on I didn't do that, but at that time I was overtly concerned with brother Huey and I didn't want to be jiving around with anybody that was going to be bullshitting. We knew they had enough money to help us out. We were so concerned about Huey and the organization and black people that we felt that we had to use these "tactics" to make those cats see that it was important.   Eldridge came back out of the office and sat in the car. Then they went back inside the office and got $500 and brought it out. I said, "No, no, no!"   "We can make it with this," Eldridge said.   "We haven't got any expense money." I said.   "We can get some."   "If they're going to have a coalition with us," I said, "then they can get the other $100. I'll be they've got it with them!" So Mike Parker and some other cats raised that extra $100 in thirty minutes.   That night, Eldridge and I got on the plane and split When we got to Washington, we rented a car to get around with. We drove to this address we had for Stokely, and when we got there we went up and knocked on the door. It was kind of early in the morning, about 8:00 A.M., but when we knocked on it the guy who answered it was uptight. The FBI and the CIA had been trailing Stokely consistently. But the cat looked at us and he had to know that we weren't FBI or CIA agents. Eldridge told him we were from the Black Panther Party. So they said, "Stokely is sleeping now. Come back later on."   "Well, wait a minute," we said. "We've come to sit down and talk."   "Well, you have to go to somebody else's house," the cat said. He wrote something on a piece of paper and said, "Go to this address."   "Now what kind of shit is this!" we thought. These cats are crazy. These cats lack understanding, placing their egos before the struggle. But we decided to go to the other address. When we got there, those cats were a little bit more hospitable.   About two hours later, we went back to talk to Stokely. We talked a little while about different things, about going around the world, asking about Cuba and things like that. We went on for a while. We tried to relax, had some coffee, and then somebody brought in half a gallon of wine, and we righteously relaxed. After that we got into the care we had rented, to talk to Stokely about what we really wanted, his coming out to Oakland for the big rally.   We let Stokely drive. He drives like he's crazy. We looked back and noticed that some cops were trailing us. They looked like FBI agents. "Man, look at those cops trailing us," I said.   "Don't worry about it," Stokely said. "They trail me like that all the time."   "But they're not even hiding themselves."   "Well, they know that I know that they're following me, and they don't care if I know or don't know that they're going to follow me."   "You mean they're right there on your bumper all the time? And if you speed up, they speed up? And if you slow down, they slow down? And if you turn a corner, they turn the same damn corner?"   "That's the way they do it," Stokely said. Meanwhile, he's driving real crazy.   I told Stokely that we didn't allow any cops to be following us around like that. "Aw, just leave 'em alone," he said. Then he took off and just started driving wildly, speeding down the streets and everything. He actually lost the cats and left them out of sight. He'd drive all the way up a street and stop. About four minutes later, the same cops would come after us in the same car. Then Stokely would turn around and drive back down the street. As he drove back down the street, the cops would see him coming that way. They would turn into a driveway and back out and have their car sitting in the same direction that Stokely was going. We would pass them and they would get right back on our tail again. They were never more than thirty feet away from him.   They followed Stokely around wherever he went, twenty-four hours a day. Another time, Stokely cut out and completely lost them. We waited ten minutes, then they drove right up behind us.   "They've got a beeper on the car," Stokely said.   "What do you mean, a beeper?" I asked.   "They've put a beeper on this car already. That's what I was trying to find out," he said. "You all just got this car and they checked you out when you came to see me. While you were upstairs, they put a beeper on the car, some kind of radar-type beeper that can find this car, wherever it is. They've already put it on and can find you guys wherever you are. That's how they keep up with my car."   We cut out again and lost them. We lost them for a number of blocks, but they almost caught up with us. Then Stokely went into a park and wound his way up a road. It's not a big hill, but it's got a good slope to it. You go up the road, and it makes a complete circle and comes back into itself. Stokely sped up this road and made a complete circle. Then the road came right back into itself. So here was Stokely barreling down this very narrow road, coming right back down on the cops. They saw him coming so fast, and they just swerved off of the road and let Stokely go by. Stokely cut out while they were hustling to turn around and get their car off the dirt and back onto the road so they could continue following him.   Stokely drove to another part of the park, almost a mile away. We just sat there in the parking lot, and watched them from a distance wind their way toward us. We turned the radio on to try to drown out any bugging of the car that might have taken place.   We talked about the fact that we wanted Stokely to come out to Oakland and speak, and that we probably would have five to six thousand people there. Stokely agreed to speak, and we wound up our meeting with him. Eldridge and I went down to the SNCC office later that night. We talked to a lot of different organizations. They had heard about our coalition with the Peace and Freedom Party.   "Why do you trust white people?" some SNCC members and cats from black nationalist organizations wanted to know.   "We don't trust white people in the sense that you're talking about," we said. "We judge everybody by what they do."   They asked us why didn't we get a black lawyer for Huey. We told them it wasn't necessarily true that if Huey had a black lawyer he would automatically be well defended and not become a political football to kick around. We told them that we readily went forth to secure legal defense for Huey and that the coalition with the Peace and Freedom Party was not something based on just "trusting" white people, just because they were white. They should at least respect the fact that at one time there was a John Brown and that the John Browns had done a lot more than some black college intellectuals had ever done. We respected John Brown for that, we said, but we live in the spirit of Nat Turner, Patrice Lumumba, and Malcolm X. And Malcolm denounced every kind of racism in his last days.   They were unable to understand this. They had a basic psychological block, because, as Fanon put it, their intellectual possessions wore still in pawn to the man's system. A lot of cats down there were college students. They couldn't see it when we told them that a lot of their ideas were black racist and that we couldn't operate in a black racist thing. They couldn't see it because they were trying to say that there was no such thing as black racism and we were trying to show them that there could very easily be such a thing as black racism. Black racism is not overt in most people in the black community, but it's the way a lot of those cats in the colleges think. They think about their own selves being free, and they think with the same racism that a lot of white people project on to them. And you're not going to end racism by perpetuating more racism.   We also told them that ours was a working coalition to get white people to work in the white community against racism, to destroy it, and ultimately get rid of it there.   Our aim, we said, was to educate the masses of people to understand that they have to get rid of the system that exploits us, get rid of the oppression, and create some real government. Well, all in all, the cats there, the SNCC people and the others, didn't accept what we were saying. There was also a rally planned in Los Angeles, on the day following ours. Ron Karenga of the US organization had sent two of his bald-headed black racists to Washington because he had found out in some kind of way that we were going to see Stokely. He flew them in that evening. Those cats were trying to get Stokely to see to it that Ron Karenga would get to speak at our rally. Stokely was going to be on a forum with them in Los Angeles, the next day. We didn't object to it. We didn't even want to argue about it. We said we would check it out when we got back to Oakland.   The next day we talked to Stokely again and secured everything. We agreed up on when he would be out. when he would receive travelling expenses, and who was coming with him. We were aware that Stokely and James Foreman weren't getting along at all at that time. There had been a dispute of some kind, because Stokely traveled out of the country without the approval of the central committee of SNCC. But even with Stokely at our rally, we still wanted a working alliance with SNCC so as to better unite black organizations around the country. We felt that they should come forth in this working alliance to further the defense of Huey and lay a broad foundation of unified organizations across the country.   We proposed this, against their arguments that they didn't want to work with white people. We reminded Stokely that he himself set in motion the idea of white people working in the white community when he spoke at Berkeley about a year before this. The Black Panther Party had adopted the idea, and saw it as something that was in opposition to all forms of racism. Huey and I respected it and used it. Now Stokely was saying "down with white people." He told us that many people around Washington, D.C. didn't want him to speak in Oakland because there were going to be white people on the platform. We told Stokely that there was going to be a Peace and Freedom Party member speaking from the platform and we thought it was very necessary that he speak. The person from Peace and Freedom was going to set forth their understanding of what white people have to do to end racism in the white community, which is something black people have to understand.   Stokely definitely agreed to come. We drove around for the rest of that day and talked in the car. The next day we left Stokely off at the SNCC office, cut out to the airport and flew back to Oakland. We told the Peace and Freedom Party that everything was set up and that we were going to have a major rally. We knew that Stokely would definitely speak, so we could put things into motion. We publicized the event in the black community and they did the same thing in the white community. We brought Stokely out a little early to visit Huey. There was a lot of press coverage, and a lot of people realized that it was time to come out for Huey P. Newton. It was one of the biggest rallies that ever took place in Oakland. Besides Stokely, Rap Brown and James Forman of SNCC showed up. It had become clear to Stokely, to James Forman, to Rap Brown, and to a lot of other people that brother Huey P. Newton, the Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, had become the central leader of the revolutionary movement that was coming out of the black community on a new and a higher level than it had ever been before.   The place was packed. Stokely, Eldridge, and I could hardly get into the Oakland Auditorium ourselves. When we first announced the rally, we said that we didn't want any cops in or around the auditorium. We said that we would take care of all the traffic direction ourselves, and that we had enough Panther Party members to do this. We said the community would support us in this. A few days before the rally, Chief Gain of the Oakland Police Department called up the Party. Eldridge and Emory Douglas went up to talk to some of his lieutenants and captains. Eldridge told them flat that we didn't want any cops on the premises and that we would take care of the whole thing. The cops tried to shake hands with Eldridge, but Eldridge told them, "I don't want to shake hands with you. I'm just letting you know that we don't need any cops around the auditorium." And there were none. Not a pig in sight. And naturally, there was no rioting. It was Stokely's first speaking engagement since he returned from his world tour. It was very important because it linked up SNCC with the Black Panther Party, although many people in SNCC were in disagreement with Stokely at that time. We had met with James Forman in Los Angeles about a week after we came back from Washington. We had talked about his working with the Party and we told him that we wanted that kind of alliance. But Forman was definitely against us making Stokely Carmichael the Honorary Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party. He thought we should make Rap Brown the Honorary Prime Minister. We saw then that there were fractional differences inside of SNCC. There was Rap Brown running on one end with James Forman directing things, and Stokely on the other end, directing his own thing.   So we decided that if they all accepted the ten-point platform and program, we'd make Stokely Carmichael the Honorary Prime Minister, James Forman the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and brother Rap Brown the Minister of Justice of the Black Panther Party. We thought that would give us a good group of black revolutionary leaders to unify the black liberation struggle across the country.   So we had an SNCC-Panther alliance. The alliance was supposed to be practical and functional. They wholly accepted being special kind of officers in the Black Panther Party, which indicated that they saw the Panther Party as a revolutionary organization which a lot of black people were sitting up and taking notice of, with regard to both our political line and our stand on the right to self-defense.   We felt that these brothers should work with the Party. We were attracting thousands of young brothers off the streets, cats who in the past had been in riots and what have you. We were also getting people from other organizations who were dropping their old groups and coming to check out the Panther Party, except for the bootlickers who were deathly afraid of cops and weren't about to mess with them whatsoever. James Forman was going to be the head of a most profound and necessary political education program. He had spent a lot of time with me and Eldridge while we were down in Los Angeles. We asked Forman to come to Oakland too, and he said he'd definitely be there.   Forman was playing politics, though, and his strategy was to try and keep the Panthers weak. Stokely at this time was only a field marshal in the Black Panther Party. We had drafted him as a field marshal seven or eight months before, and he accepted the draft. Forman told us again that he thought we should make Rap Brown Prime Minister, instead of Stokely. So what we wound up doing was to try to bring them all into the Party. This was going to be the basis of the alliance, a working alliance, where united we would work together for the liberation struggle. They accepted this idea.   At the rally, Eldridge announced that we were making Stokely Carmichael Prime Minister, James Forman Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Rap Brown Minister of Justice of the Black Panther Party. Forman and brother Rap Brown were also the heads of SNCC, at the time, and we respected them as that. Everyone turned out - there was a huge crowd at the rally. Rap Brown showed up by surprise. Nobody actually knew he was coming until the last minute. James Forman set that up to strengthen SNCC.   The rally came off. It came off real good. As Eldridge put it, it was the biggest line-up of revolutionary leaders that had ever come together under one roof in the history of America. That was just about the truth, because Eldridge and myself, Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, David Milliard, Stokely, Forman, and Rap Brown were all there. We set Huey's chair in the center, the wicker chair that many people have seen in the picture, where he's holding the spear, the shotgun, and the shield, exemplifying the right to self-defense. This in itself made a big impact, a very big impact. We raised some $10,000 at that rally, for Huey's defense fund. It was the biggest fund-raising operation in Huey's behalf that had ever gone down. At that time, it was the largest we'd ever had. We really needed the money, because Garry's whole firm was working on Huey's case almost on an around-the-clock basis. They must have been in the hole for $30,000 on us by then.   After Stokely spoke at our big rally, we had numerous speaking engagements throughout the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area, down in Los Angeles, and all over California. The last speaking engagement we had was on a Saturday night down in Palo Alto. That night, the Berkeley police raided my house and arrested me. BREAKING DOWN OUR DOORS Early in the morning, a number of brothers and I had talked in my house about the fact that we had raised $10,000 for Huey's defense fund, and about organizing bigger rallies to raise the thousands of dollars we needed to keep our legal machinery together to keep Huey out of jail. I left the house at about 12:30 P.M. and I know I left a back window open.   That night the cops busted into my house and found a sawed-off shotgun. In court it came out that my fingerprints weren't on it and my wife's fingerprints weren't on it. The shotgun was planted. They charged me with having an illegal weapon and, to poison the atmosphere, they originally charged me with conspiracy to commit murder. Some cop said he heard someone in my house saying, "We want Rap." He said that later that night he heard the clacking of guns in my house. I didn't know anything about it because I was asleep. I was very tired from the preceding week of running around, and going to different speaking engagements with Stokely. When I got home that evening, I went to bed.   My wife woke me up around 2:00 A.M. and told me the cops were outside. The cops tried to pull a slick operation, calling me "Mr. Seale" and trying to sound polite.   "We would like to speak to you about a disturbance in the area."   "Well, I don't know anything about a disturbance," I said. "I don't want you in my house. If you want to find out about a disturbance in here, go see the landlord who's upstairs."   "No, we want to talk to you in your apartment," they said. "There was a disturbance around here."   "There was no disturbance in my house and I don't want you in my house. If you want to see somebody about a disturbance, then go see the landlord."   I had been talking to them through my apartment window. I was about to open the door all the way up, step out and show them where the landlord was, but no sooner did I get the door two or three inches open when they knocked me up against the wall, put a shotgun to my belly, and started pointing a gun at my wife. I got mad and started hollering at the top of my voice, "Don't shoot my wife." They handcuffed me, sat me on the bed, and went all through my house. I didn't see any shotgun the night I was arrested, but I heard them say, "We got it." They expected to find it. We were made to sit on the couch handcuffed, while two cops stood over us with guns trained on us. Sitting there, I couldn't see who he was talking to, but a cop said "Look what we found." The cop near me answered, "Yeah, we expected to find that." Then they took me out.   The lady next door, who was later a witness, came to us after the bust and said a man had rented a room in her building two weeks prior to the bust. He was a white guy, a racist, this woman said, and all he did was watch our house. She had never paid too much attention, but had seen him out there fooling around watching us. After the bust, she realized what was happening because she knew this guy had called the cops. The next day she asked him why he did it. He was packing his bags and leaving at the time, and he told her it wasn't any of her damn business, and then he split. That was the last we saw of him. The cops say he's the one who called them.   I was charged with possession of illegal weapons. I had an Army .45 and I know there was a serial number on that weapon, that it was not illegal. In court, they delivered a gun with the serial number ground off, which is against the law.   At the station, I thought about the arrest and I asked the cops what they were doing searching my house without a search warrant. "We didn't need a search warrant," they said. "We've been listening to you all day." If they were listening to me, the main thing they heard was that we had made over $10,000 for Huey's defense fund.   In jail I thought that over again. They had our bail high - $6,000 on me. "They're planning to drain our funds," I said to myself. "That must be what they're attempting." It was only a week after the rally for the defense of brother Huey, and that is the only reason I could see for arresting me and my wife on such trumped-up charges.   The charges against me were dropped by Judge Lionel Wilson. He quashed them on the basis that the policeman was lying, that he was contradictory in his statements, and because they had no reasonable cause to bust into my house at two o'clock in the morning. They said they had reasonable cause, but the judge ruled that if everything was peaceful and quiet, as they testified it was, they had no reasonable cause to break into my house. It was illegal search and seizure.   A month before my arrest, the San Francisco Tactical Squad has busted into Eldridge Cleaver's house, trying to intimidate and harass him. They were trying to find a gun. When Eldridge first came into the Party, Huey let it be understood that Eldridge couldn't have weapons because he was an ex-felon. The Party had set that policy because we understood that we just couldn't get into a lot of illegal activity. Huey always said our activities should be legal. Eldridge followed orders and didn't himself have guns. One night after the search, Kathleen said, "What if we actually got attacked and didn't have anything to defend ourselves with?" Eldridge said that she would just have to get herself a gun, because the Minister of Defense had told him he couldn't have one because he was an ex-felon. So Kathleen went down to the store and purchased some guns. Eldridge told his parole officer that his wife was definitely buying some guns, and as they lived in the same house, there was nothing he could do. Eldridge stayed completely legal about this and stayed within the policy that Huey set. * * * Huey made a lot of policies like that one, so we would have a legal organization. At the very beginning of the Party, Huey had done a lot of research in law books and he had also been in law school for a year. Huey would go to the law library downtown and he also studied the case histories that were in the North Oakland OEO poverty center, where we were able to obtain a lot of information. It was a multipurpose poverty center and one service was legal aid. They had two full walls of law books so we could check into all possible ways the cops might charge us with breaking. We were very aware of the laws related to illegal possession of weapons, so that we wouldn't get caught in the snares and traps of the system. At the time of my arrest, thousands of members were coming into the Party. Seattle started a chapter and the Los Angeles-Southern California branch was already operating. My arrest was not only an effort to drain the Party's resources but also an attack on the leadership of the Party. Chief of Staff David Hilliard; Deputy Minister of Defense Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, who has since been murdered; Bunchy Carter's brother, who's now dead also, and a girl who since dropped away from the Party were also busted the same night as I was. I first realized that other people had been busted when I came into the jail. I saw this girl in an interrogation cell. I was completely confused because I couldn't understand what she was doing there. She had been working with the Party almost a year. Because I had been asleep at my house, I didn't realize what was going on. I heard one of the officers say, "We've got the other four and we're booking them." When I was in the booking cell, they brought Bunchy out. They were going to book him, too. He said twenty cops surrounded them with shotguns pointed at the car, and busted them for nothing.   I finished getting booked and made my phone call. When Bunchy was booked we were put in a cell together. I really began to worry about Bunchy because he had been in prison with Eldridge, and he was on parole. One of the things Huey and I dreaded was brothers in the Party who were on parole getting busted, because the California fascist operation just sends them back to prison for practically no reason at all. I told Bunchy I had just made a phone call and that I would probably be out soon.   "You'll be the first one I come back and get out," I said, "because you're on parole." My brother, John Seale, came to bail me out. My wife was in jail too, but I knew we could always get her out. The thing was to get Bunchy Carter out. Three hours later we bailed him and his brother out.   They told me everything that had happened. There had been a pistol in the glove compartment of the car and there was another pistol in the car, but it wasn't concealed. They told me how the bust had happened and what they were charged with. We got our lawyer and about $100. I told Bunchy to go back to L.A. and continue organizing, and to lay low. He said he would try to deal with his parole officer down there.   In March, the cops busted into Eldridge's house for the second time. For that reason Huey P. Newton wrote Executive Mandate Number Three, concerning Gestapo cops busting down our doors. It stated that we had a right to defend our threshold, and that everyone must defend his threshold. If the police come up to our door acting in an unorderly manner, it said we could only consider them as a danger to our lives. Huey was aware that members of the John Birch Society, Ku Klux Klanners, and many other sick, "Patriotic" racists join the police force, and also work with racist vigilante groups. Information had also been sent to him that a number of these people disguise themselves. Huey set forth Mandate Number Three, for all Party members, that said that when someone came to our door acting in a manner other than as a police officer should, kicking in our door and attacking, we were to defend ourselves.   By this time we had chapters in Seattle, Southern California, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and our national headquarters in Oakland. Every time they attacked1 us, the Party grew. At that time, early in 1968, they were mainly interested in the leaders, like Huey, Eldridge, David Hilliard, Bunchy Carter, and myself. When arresting us failed to stop the growth of the Party, the power structure escalated its attack and began shooting us down in the streets, in our offices, and our homes. SHOOT-OUT: THE PIGS KILL BOBBY HUTTON One day in the middle of March 1968, Eldridge called me up and said, "Hey, man, come over here. I've got something to hip you to about the pigs plotting to attack us." I went over to Ramparts, and they took me into a room. There was a white girl standing there. Eldridge said, "Tell Bobby what you told me." She ran down to me that she had been sitting in a bar and heard two cops talking about the Black Panther Party. One was saying that on April 2 they would have something for us. They said they were going to get rid of all the Panthers. I asked her if that was what she heard. She ran down some other things about the Panther Party. She said they went over April 2 again, and talked about doing the Panther Party in. I looked at Eldridge and we walked out of the office.   "What do you think, man?" he asked me.   "Man, they're going to try and attack us," I said. I asked him if this chick was reliable. Eldridge thought she was pretty reliable, so we knew we'd have to check it out.   Three days later, an ex-policeman, a black cat, came over to the office and told me that he had heard some cops saying that sometime in April they were going to get rid of us. He had heard rumours going around and he thought he'd come down and tell us.   I talked to Eldridge and I told everybody that we were going to have to get some guns, keep the guns in our houses, and keep them clean and ready, because there's no telling what they might do. We had had some guns before, but I told everybody to be prepared, and to make sure that if somebody didn't have a gun, to see that they got one because there was no telling what was going to happen. We might get attacked at any time.   At the birthday rally for Huey, we had announced that we were running him for Congress from the Seventh Congressional District. The primaries to get Huey's name and my name on the ballot as Black Panther Party candidates running on the Peace and Freedom Party tickets were coming up in June. I was running for the State Assembly for the Seventeenth Assembly District. We had scheduled a rally in the black community at De Fremery Park for April 7, a Sunday. It was to be a barbeque-picnic rally for the Huey P. Newton Defense Fund, and the campaign funds to run Huey and myself. We were already getting a lot of good response from the people. Many people had already said that they were going to be there for the dollar-a-plate barbeque. We had sound trucks and all sorts of publicity out in the community. We even got a radio station to announce it. We'd been getting donations from stores of barbeque ribs, things we needed to make potato salad, barbeque meat and stuff like that; we got chickens and boxes of weiners and lots of other food that people had donated to us for this barbeque picnic. At the same time this rumor had gotten around inside the Party that the pigs were going to attack us.   Threatening notes had come to me from members of the sheriffs' department - I assumed it was the Alameda County sheriffs. The notes just said, "I'm the sheriff and when you come into court, you're going to get it." This kind of stuff had been going on for a while. I had to appear in court on April 1, and we were trying to speculate on which one of the deputy sheriffs had written the notes. We were used to getting threatening notes, but the cats would never say who they were. If you get a threatening note from the American Nazi Party you don't pay any attention to it; but when you get threatening notes from fools who say they're in the sheriffs' department, you begin to speculate a little bit because you know the cops want to deal with you. So I holed up in an apartment while we were doing some quick investigation on whether one of the deputies who act as bailiffs in the Alameda County Courthouse in downtown Oakland, has actually written the notes. We wanted to check out who was wearing guns, and try to case the courthouse, and look around all the buildings before I showed up in court, to see if anybody was going to shoot me on the courthouse steps. It was all related to the rumors that they would try to get us April 2. I didn't show up in court and the judge issued a warrant for me. We were going to try to expose this possible plot, and we figured the judge would eventually have to see why I didn't appear. But it didn't work out that way. Thursday evening I was at the house where I was staying. I did some reading, got a phone call from Eldridge, and went to sleep. Then I woke up and decided to turn on the TV to catch the news. Someone said, "Martin Luther King was shot today," but I was in the back room of this apartment and it didn't really dawn on me that Martin Luther King had been assassinated, because here I was, hiding out in this room until we finished our investigation. Well, I came back into the room and some other kind of news was on but all of a sudden it was announced again. "Martin Luther King has been assassinated." I said, "What!" and turned up the TV. Martin Luther King assassinated! It really got off of me.   I went to the window and saw a lot of cops. The cops weren't supposed to know where I was, but I saw cop cars coming down the street, four cops in a car. I didn't know what was happening. Then I saw two more cop cars coming down and going back up the street, four in a car, and I went back in the room and thought, "God-doggit, maybe they're trying to surround this place." So I went around and looked in back. I was in the upstairs room window, I was able to see an empty lot to the side with a lot of trees around the driveway of the house and I could see a stairway going down. If I crawled across the bathtub and out the window I could reach the platform. I went back and shaved and then called my brother up and told him to bring his clippers over. When he got there, I said, "Cut my hair."   "Why?"   "Just cut my hair."   I checked out the closet of this apartment where I was staying. (It belonged to a friend of mine.) There were some clothes in there other than the ones I had been wearing. My brother left, and later that evening I got a call from Eldridge who told me everything was all right.   But the next day it was bad, man. I began to think the monkeys had surrounded the place. I saw police cars every five or ten minutes, and it looked to me like they were circling the block. Then I saw two cars drive up, and this is the thing that got me off. When I was looking out the front window, one car drove up four doors to the right, and when the guy got out of the car, he unbuttoned his suit coat. He walked across the street and across from where I was staying. "That's a cop," I said to myself. "I know that's a cop. Dammit, these bastards are trying to surround me up here." So I changed clothes right quick, put on some shades, crawled out the back window, and came down among the trees. Then I cut across the lot to the right and on to the street and I just walked down the streets of Berkeley.   I saw cops everywhere. I hadn't heard any more news and I didn't know about the riots that were taking place. I speculated that there was going to be some trouble though. I ran into a cat I knew who didn't recognize me because I had completely shaven and had cut my natural way down. I walked up to him and said, "Hey, man, what's happening?" He just looked at me. I said, "This is Bobby Seale." It had been in all the press that I hadn't shown up in court, so he looked at me and said, "Man, what's going on?"   "Look, man," I said, "I want you to drive me somewhere. At least out of this vicinity, because I think the pigs are surrounding the place I just left. I snuck out the back way and if they bust in there now, they might come looking for me, and I need somebody to drive me away from here." So I got into his Volkswagen and we drove down to San Pablo Avenue and Dwight Way. That corner was flooded with cops, man. It was flooded with cops, twenty-five or thirty. There was a police telephone on the corner that a cop was talking into. They seemed to be watching cars but I just looked at them. I had my shades on and acted normal, and the cops didn't recognize me.   We drove down and got on the freeway, went across the Bay Bridge, and drove out onto the Peninsula. We drove in the hills for an hour and I talked to the brother a long time about the Party and Martin Luther King and what was going on. I began to hear more about the riots and everything that was happening. I finally told him to take me 1o Palo Alto where I knew somebody. When we got down to the sister's house there. I told him to take a message back to Eldridge Cleaver and David Milliard. I gave him the phone number of the place where I was and told Eldridge to call me about the investigation of the possible plot. Eldridge called me late that night and told me that Judge Staats had pulled the warrant off and just didn't want me to "start anything" as he put it. Early the next morning, April 6, the brothers and sisters were cooking the food and preparing salads and stuff for the rally and barbeque at De Fremery Park. There were sisters down at Father Neil's church, and over at David Hilliard's house cooking potato salad, and also in back of the office, barbequeing ribs. We had a real operation going with sound trucks throughout the community, four or five of them. We had leaflets everywhere, and a big bus, the Peace and Freedom Party's big sound truck, telling people to be at De Fremery Park for a one-dollar-a-plate barbeque to raise money for the Huey P. Newton Defense Fund, and for campaign funds for Huey and myself. We had a beautiful thing going and we knew it was going to get thousands of black people out there.   Since the judge had withdrawn the warrant on me, I came down to the office. A lot of cops were floating around the office. There were cops everywhere, many more cops than usual. That whole day the brothers were saying that if they attacked us we would defend ourselves. One of the captains said he was going to transfer some weapons over to San Francisco. I told him to make sure they weren't loaded, to keep them all in the trunk, and to keep everything legal. But I said, "If it looks like you're going to get attacked or something like that, you might have to use the weapons, because you've got a right to defend yourself."   That afternoon I met Eldridge at the Peace and Freedom Party office and he said he was going to David's house that evening. I told Eldridge to take me down to the church because I wanted to talk with Father Neil about going to Martin Luther King's funeral. Eldridge had the white car that the Peace and Freedom Party had picked up cheap and given to us. That was in the late afternoon. I asked Eldridge where he was going, and he said he was going over to David's house. I told him I was going over to Father Neil's house and I left with Father Neil in his car.   After I was introduced to Father Neil's family, we sat down and ate. We were talking about the Party and the Party's philosophy. Father Neil was in a clergyman's organization that was set up so that whenever there was a disturbance in the community, this little group - a minister, a lawyer, and a doctor - would be taken to the trouble. Each group had a section of the city that it was assigned to. The organization had been set up for quite a while. Father Neil got a phone call and all of a sudden he jumped up and said that we had to go, that they were shooting at somebody. His wife asked where he was going, and he said, "There's a shoot-out going on somewhere. The police attacked somebody and shot two or three people." Then I began to think about this April 2 thing and those threatening notes from the so-called sheriff. I naturally thought about the Party. We jumped in the car and drove all the way up to Berkeley where the switchboard office was. They said the shoot-out was between Panthers and police on Twenty-eighth Street in Oakland. At that point I was wondering who the supposed Party members were. I knew a lot of people just didn't have any guns. I got as much information as I could and then I told Father Neil I wanted to go down there. The other ministers started saying that they didn't think we should. Then, information came over the radio that the shoot-out was over, and that they had all been arrested. The radio report said that Eldridge Cleaver had been arrested and that Bobby Hutton was shot (at that point they didn't say he was dead). It also said that David Milliard had been arrested and two or three other Panthers had been shot.   It was late at night by the time we got the final report - David and Eldridge were arrested and Little Bobby was supposedly shot. I felt the best thing to do was to sit down and start trying to figure out some way to get them out of jail. I gave Kathleen Cleaver and a number of other Panthers a phone call and told them to stay in their houses, and if they got attacked, they ought to defend themselves.   I went to my father-in-law's house. I began to think about everything I could, about what had happened, and how to go about getting the brothers some political defense. Father Neil called me up about two hours later, about 2:30 or 3:30 in the morning, and told me that Bobby Hutton had been killed. He told me that Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Hutton had somehow been forced into a house. As they were coming out of the house, Bobby had his hands up, but they shot him in the head. Eldridge and I had been spotted twice by cops in the white car that day. We saw them looking at us and carrying on. I really felt they shot Bobby Hutton thinking they were shooting me.   I was mad. I knew Huey had said that we didn't believe in spontaneous riots, but I was so mad at that point that I felt that I was going to tell all those people at the rally the next day to turn Oakland upside down. I was going to tell every black person who came to the rally to tear up the town. I was going to tell them to hit the big man, the big-time businessman's businesses. That's what I was going to tell them. I kept thinking about the fact that Huey had said, "no spontaneous riots." But I felt differently with Bobby Hutton dead, and feeling that they thought they were killing me, and instead they murdered Little Bobby Hutton.   Maybe I shouldn't have felt that way but that's what I was thinking. The next morning I went over to Garry's office so that he could take me up to the police station where we had called a press Conference. Before we went there Garry went to visit Huey at the County Jail in Oakland, and Huey sent a tape back, and told me to remember to tell the people not to spontaneously riot, but to tell them to organize themselves; that the cops occupy our community like a foreign troop, and that we have a right by the Constitution of the United States to have guns and weapons in our homes. He urged me to tell them not to spontaneously riot because that's not the correct method, and because all it would do, would get fifty or a 100 black people killed, maybe 200 wounded, and thousands arrested as in riots in the past. He said we had to think of the safety of our people, even when brothers were murdered like brother Bobby Hutton was murdered. He said I knew that, and shouldn't act on emotions, but should act on the correct methods of the struggle. Huey told me to tell the people to arm themselves and put arms in their homes, and to say that if they see racist cops brutalizing and murdering our people, that we have but one alternative - to go forth as an organized force in our community to defend ourselves against unjust, fascist, brutal attacks.   I went over to June Hilliard's house (June is David Milliard's brother), two blocks from De Fremery Park where the rally was being held. A large crowd was moving toward the park. Garry came to June's house and took me up to Oakland police headquarters where he had arranged for the press conference. I wasn't too happy about having it there, but I thought, "Well, if I'm with Garry and they arrest me, they'll just have to do it right." So we held the press conference and told the press what Huey had said. I know Huey was right, and I made it a point not to function off of emotions because emotions won't guide a correct revolutionary struggle.   Then I went back to the park and spoke to the people and told them exactly that. I told them we were not going to spontaneously riot, but riot because we were with the power structure. We're against the racist power structure of the pigs and the murderers. I told them that if we rioted the only thing that was going to happen was that maybe fifty would get killed, 200 would get shot up and wounded, and three or four thousand arrested. And that's too many warriors gone. I told them that in those past riots and rebellions, people were exposing their disgust with the social evils that exist in society, but that now, we had to organize ourselves, and learn to defend ourselves with guns when we were unjustly attacked. I told them that we should go to our homes and make sure each home had a shotgun, a .375 Magnum pistol, and a .3.8 pistol. "Be safe with weapons," I said. "The Black Panther Party isn't going to get hundreds of our people shot up, killed, and wounded. Even though they murdered Bobby Hutton and we don't like it, Bobby Hutton was a freedom fighter." And I ran it all down to them about Bobby Hutton.   And you know what? Those people really applauded at what I had told them. It showed me that the people had learned from the past riots; that they had really learned that when they go out in big riot form, the only thing that happens is they are surrounded by Gestapo policemen, and that they're herded around and shot up like cattle.   People related to the idea of being spread out in the community. I told them that if the pigs come down in our community in vicious force, then we should move around in small groups of threes and fours in defense of ourselves. I explained to them that if the pigs bring tanks down to our community, the young brothers are going to have to use guerilla tactics and learn how to take those tanks, because those tanks are brought there only to slaughter and kill our people.   The people clapped, man. The people really dug it. They really dug this understanding, and that got off with me and made me feel like I was doing right. It showed me that the people had learned, and what the people had learned is what the Party had learned. That's the reason the organization came to exist in the first place. GETTING ON THE BALLOT After the April 6 shoot-out, we buried Bobby Hutton as Fanon had said we would, and tried to get Eldridge out of jail. He was being held in Vacaville State Prison about fifty miles east of Oakland. We began to mobilize people for the primaries that Huey and I were running in that June. Huey's trial had already been postponed several times, but the Peace and Freedom Party had been officially placed on the ballot.   In May, while Eldridge was still in jail, Kathleen and I went to New York to help raise funds for Eldridge. I made a speech then that a lot of people wondered about. I said in my speech, ". . . we hate you white people . . ." and I didn't put it in the proper context of what I wanted to say. We didn't hate anybody for the color of their skin, but at the same time we were reserved towards a lot of white radicals who wouldn't move or do anything. A lot of people got upset over that part of the speech.   I laugh about it sometimes because I'm truly not a diehard cultural nationalist. That night I wanted to knock a play we had seen in New York in which LeRoi Jones and some others got on stage, silhouetted in shadows, and hollered, "Black black black black black black black black black . . ." That went on for about nine or ten minutes and it just got absurd. It kept going over, "Black black black black black black." Every once in a while a voice would change pitch, but it went on and on. It didn't make any sense. It didn't convey anything. We called Jones and Ron Karenga the high priests of cultural nationalism because they didn't really produce anything except fanatics. They would have been better off, if they were going to express anything, to talk about revolutionary culture in a way that would change something. Four of five Panther brothers and I sat in the audience and ridiculed it among ourselves.   When I made that speech, a lot of people asked questions. Take everything else in that speech, and when you come to the statement, "We hate you white people," weigh it with everything else I said. I was ridiculing the cultural nationalism of Jones and his "black black black." They were embedding a form of black racism in the minds of the people rather than giving them proper perspective on the revolutionary struggle.   In New York, people were interested in brother Eldridge, brother Huey, Huey's trial, and in the fact that the cops had murdered Bobby Hutton. Cops attempting to attack and wipe out the Party had caused the Party to grow, and when we left New York, on May 22, 1968, their first chapter was forming.   The primaries were coming and we did a lot of campaign work. We had acquired a new office before the April 6 shoot-out. The Bay Area Committee to Defend Political Freedom raised some money and printed up 50,000 broadsides about what the government was doing to Huey. Half of the reason we ran Huey was to let people see that Huey wasn't what the power structure was trying to picture him as - a small-time hoodlum. Throughout the primary campaign, there was a lot of conflict. We had trouble with other black groups who were trying to run in the Seventh Congressional District, with some Peace and Freedom people over $1,300 we thought we were supposed to have, and with some of the brothers and sisters who still didn't understand the significance of running Huey P. Newton for Congress.   The night of the primary, our workers went out to get tallies of the vote, and the power structure gave them the run-around. They were told that votes weren't counted at the polls, but were counted downtown at the county clerk's office. They went down to the county clerk's office and were told votes were counted at the polls. The brothers and sisters got very discouraged when they came in that night, and could only give estimates of the vote. When they tallied them up they came up with only seventy or eighty votes. They thought Huey was not going to get on the ballot, and everybody was disturbed, thinking that not enough people would even take time to vote Huey's name onto the ballot. But I said, "What are you talking about? We're going to be on the ballot by three or four times the votes we need." They didn't believe it.   I went down to the Peace and Freedom Party office and I took the votes they had tallied up from the black community and put them together with the ones that had come in for the Peace and Freedom Party in the white community. We stood there and watched, and a lot of people started coming in with votes from everywhere. The next titling we knew, we were way over what we needed, so I called up the brothers and sisters and told them, "Hey, we're on the ballot." They felt a little better then.   We still believe a lot of the votes went uncounted. In the actual election, Huey got 25,000 votes, but I think the votes were tampered with because they definitely wouldn't let us anywhere near the counting.   The primaries were important to the Free Huey campaign. We talked about the trial and educated the masses of people about who Huey was, so the people could come out to support him. A vote for him was a vote of support. One thing we found out for sure, was how many thousands of voters really support the Party. A person would have to support the Black Panther Party and know something about our basic ideas to vote for a member of our Party who was on the ballot. Although presently we aren't running any candidates, we will work for candidates who support the ten-point platform and program of the Black Panther Party. HUEY IS TRIED FOR MURDER We knew before Huey's trial began in mid-July, that the whole power structure wanted to hang Huey. We-understood that William Knowland (the publisher of the Oakland Tribune), the mayor, the other politicians, the D.A., and the cops were all so treacherous that they would do anything to get a conviction and send Huey to the gas chamber.   We asked Charles Garry a number of times what he thought would happen. He would run it down, how Huey was really innocent, and how the two cops had shot each other in an attempt to kill Huey. He knew that defending Huey was the most necessary thing that a lawyer could do to save human integrity, because the power structure was attempting to crucify a black man who was the heir of Malcolm X - Huey P. Newton, the man who put in motion a revolutionary movement to bring the struggle to a higher level. Brother Malcolm had educated black people to the need for a political party like the Black Panther Party, and Charles Garry understood this.   Charles told us that Lowell Jensen, the D.A. prosecuting Huey, knew that Huey wasn't guilty. He said that even though these cats were going to do everything possible to get a guilty verdict, and that even though he shared our understanding of how corrupt we felt the legal system was, he knew that we should get a not-guilty verdict. We should definitely get a not guilty.   The trial started and Charles defended Huey. The way that trial went down, the so-called kidnap charge had to be dropped right away. The person who was supposed to have been kidnapped came forth on the witness stand and refused to testify. Later, he said that he had been intimidated by the police to make false statements.   They tried to set Huey up as the "only person who could have done the shooting". Gene McKinney, who was with brother Huey on the evening when the cops tried to kill him, came to the witness stand, and Jensen and the judge tried to force him to testify. He refused. He took the Fifth Amendment. The judge is supposed to be impartial, if nothing else, but he was working with the D.A. through the whole trial.   The main prosecution witness Jensen put up against Huey was a bus driver named Grier, who said that he had gotten a clear look at the shooting. Garry found a passenger who was on the bus who completely contradicted Grier's story and said that Grier couldn't have seen anything. Apparently, months before, when the police first asked Grier questions, he had initially stated: "I didn't get a clear look as to who it was." He said he didn't get a clear look. However, on the police report that Jensen had entered in as evidence for the jury to have and read over, this particular statement had been changed to, "I did get a clear look." It had been changed by the D.A. and the cops. Grier was lying on the stand and Jensen knew it.   It came out during the trial that Grief's first interview had been taped by the police department. Garry got hold of the tape, duplicated it, and brought it to court while the jury was trying to decide on our Minister of Defense. Garry argued in court that the tape recording showed that somebody had tampered with the written transcript and that the D.A. had knowingly submitted that crap as evidence.   Garry didn't take any crap from the judge. He played the tape recording, argued with the judge, and finally got the judge to recognize the tape recording as the real evidence, and order that a new transcript be made, in which Grier said, "I didn't see who did the shooting." Even though they brought the new transcript into the jury room, no one on the jury was told that this was new evidence, so they didn't bother to read it.   Garry's a hard-working revolutionary lawyer who really goes after the facts. All during the trial, he worked in the evenings investigating and digging up evidence to prove brother Huey's innocence. We waited in those days when the jury was out on brother Huey and we knew that they had to come up with a not-guilty verdict, especially if they read the last piece of evidence Garry had submitted. We didn't really know it at that time, but we speculated that Judge Monroe Friedham was really working in conjunction with the power structure which was trying to get Huey railroaded, and that, because of him, the jury didn't know about the new evidence. We didn't put it past the power structure to try to buy out a member of the jury or anything like that. But we felt that someone on that jury would know the real facts, after having read them, and would realize that brother Huey wasn't guilty, not even of voluntary manslaughter.   That night, we heard that the jury had reached a verdict. We had said, "If they kill Huey P. Newton, the sky is the limit." We meant every word of that. "If they kill Huey P. Newton, the sky is the limit." We were going to go down with brother Huey because Huey was the leader of our Party. But "the sky is the limit" also meant that we would go to the highest court if necessary. They had thousands of cops around in those days when the jury was deliberating so that you couldn't go two blocks anywhere throughout the black community without seeing a regular city police car or highway patrol car. I had also heard that they had secretly placed National Guardsmen in different places around Oakland and San Francisco. You couldn't go two blocks in that city day or night, especially in the afternoon, without seeing a cop car with two, three, or four policemen in it, with shotguns and helmets and all that riot equipment. That's how tight the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Richmond were.   I was at home, at my mother's house, and my mother came in and said, "Bobby, Bobby, did you hear that on TV? They said that the jury has reached a verdict on Huey P. Newton." I jumped up and got into a car and drove over to David Hilliard's house. When I got there, it was on the radio that they had found Huey guilty of third degree murder, "voluntary manslaughter." I just couldn't see that. That pissed me off. It really made me mad. And some brother started saying, "Let's burn the town down. Let's burn the town down." At that point I remembered that there had been a press interview on TV a few days before the jury came out. Huey was asked, "What do you mean by 'the sky is the limit'?" Huey had said that he was sure that he would not be convicted at all, but that if he was, the Party would fight it all the way to the Supreme Court. Huey also had sent a message to us that we should defend ourselves if unjustly attacked, but that we just didn't believe in spontaneous rioting.   I was sitting in the house and this brother was talking about, "Ah, man, let's go burn it down. Let's go burn it down." I told them no, that they couldn't do it. A lot of Party members were calling up from all over town, asking, "What should we do? What should we do?" We told them, "Cool it and don't do anything. We're not supposed to be doing anything. They haven't killed the brother," I said "We said that if they kill Huey P. Newton, "The sky is the limit.' But right now the sky is the limit in terms of the legal fight, because they got Huey in for two to fifteen years and we're going to have a one-and-a-half or two year fight on our hands trying to get Huey free. We're going to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court. That's what Huey P. Newton said and that's what we're gonna do. Don't be running out in the streets there," I said, "because there's so many cops out there now that if you turn your head wrong, man, you might get shot down - you'll just be brutalized and murdered." From there, we started getting petitions signed demanding that Huey P. Newton be given appeal bond, because a third degree conviction allowed a man to have bail. But Judge Friedman, racist and punkish as he was, wouldn't give Huey the bond. Huey is now in some jail in San Luis Obispo. They had denied him bail while the case goes to the higher courts. He is nothing but a political prisoner. The whole ten-point platform and program and the Party's true ideology and philosophy came out during Huey's trial, although much of the press didn't want to print it. It would have been in our favour if people had learned the truth. People would have known the real objectives of the Black Panther Party. Charles Garry is the man who really brought all that out, and was able to set forth the philosophy and ideology of the Black Panther Party. A lot of judges in the future are going to try and cut it off, but they can't separate our ideology and our philosophy from ourselves, when they trump charges up on us and try to railroad us to prisons and jails. PIGS, PURITANISM, AND RACISM One Tuesday night around midnight, right after the verdict on Huey had come down, two Oakland pigs just drove up in front of the Panther National Headquarters office, and emptied twelve rounds into it. One shell shot the window all up, and another went into the café next door. Luckily, no one was in the office at the time. They talk about law and order! It's a felony to shoot inside of any building where people are living. There are apartments in the back of the building, and apartments upstairs. You dig where it's at? These dudes are breaking the law, but they keep saying we are the lawbreakers.   Huey always made us follow the law to the letter, because within the confines of following the law to the letter, Huey had a principle. The principle was that "laws are made by mankind to serve mankind, but once those laws stop serving mankind in any society, anywhere in the world, the people are supposed to move forth to change those laws so those laws will serve them." That's how intensely the whole Party has related to this system. That's what people never know. It's very dangerous to try to bring about this change, especially when you are messing with a tyrannical, despotic system. Most people, most middle-class people, don't understand that the system is very despotic and very tyrannical.   Now those pigs were there, waiting, waiting for something to happen in Oakland because of the guilty verdict. You dig? They were on the look-out for a Panther, for any cat in a black leather jacket, to shoot him, to blow him away. They had murder and malice in their hearts. When you read the law book on the charge of murder, it says malice and intent. That's what it says. The same bulls were waiting there, but they couldn't find any Panthers, so they decided to shoot up the office.   Even Police Chief Gain saw that the incident could be politically destructive to the whole police department. We'd been down on the police department for two years, talking about the acts of brutality and murder they'd committed in the black community. Two hours later, Gam suspended them from the force. Boom! Then he charged them with a felony (shooting into an inhabited building), and fired them from the police force. Gain was running around trying to defend himself by doing these two pigs in. Later the court let them off with two or three years probation.   He didn't use the excuse that they were drunk. He said stuff like, "Well, they're human and they didn't like the way the verdict came down, and blah blop de bloo . . . And I want all you other police officers not to feel this way. But at the same time we must remember that these were only two police officers, etc." He also had to appeal to all the police officers; he's got over 1,000 cops. He appealed to them through the newspapers and the mass media. "Don't do anything else. Let us keep our heads, blah, blah, blah . . ."   All that stuff exposed those pigs. The racism was placed out front, where it belongs. You dig? The people saw it for what it was. There's a lot of good cops on the police force, but you don't go around depending on 20 percent of the force, on the good cops, when 80 percent of the force is fucking you up. Every time we turned around those pigs would be blasting people away, arresting dudes, railroading them, and attacking cats. So you can't depend on them. We attacked that racist aspect of the police department.   Then we had a big scene about Gain hiring cops from the South. We found out that one of the Oakland pigs came from Florida. Down South it's a bitch. The average white person down South really envelops himself in this superiority bullshit. That's very important to understand. "Really I'm a liberal." All that's a bunch of bullshit. Black people know it. They don't want to hear it. Don't be calling "colored," and "these Negroes," and speak articulately with a lot of verbal sincerity around it. Fuck that, because black people don't want to hear it. That shit's 100 years old, as old as the Emancipation Proclamation. Later for that. Down South, the cops get an orientation that is really laid on by the local power structure, and they project all these ideas and misconceptions about black people. It's just a perpetuation and institutionalization of racism.   We don't practice racism. We practice dualism, two ways of thinking. Most people don't understand what the Panther Party means by this. What we did was research a lot of history. This is what Huey did. This is what Eldridge did. We researched it all the way back to Europe. Not only are we down on white racism, but we are down on black racism. You know, the cultural nationalists say, "I'm black, I'm beautiful." Most of those cats will project a puritanical concept of blackness. They relate only to the purity of blackness, of being a black person. When we say blackness we mean relating to black culture. These cats, they hang themselves up. White people have always projected, in their educational institutions, etc., a very puritanical, very absolute, superiority thing. This is projected in what they teach us in the school systems. So what do we get? I'll give you a few examples to show you what I mean.   You're looking at a soap opera:   "Mary, you cannot marry John."   "Mother, why?"   "John has an illegitimate child."   "Oh, Mother!"   Wow, they go through all these goddam fucked up changes. But this is directly related to something. Sometimes during a speech, Eldridge would say, "Power comes out of the lips of a pussy." Just like that. Then twenty minutes later he'll turn right back around, and say, "Power comes out of the barrel of a dick." People don't know what the fuck he's talking about. But I tell him, 'Eldridge, I understand exactly what you're saying because I know what's happening." In Soul On Ice, Eldridge says it's very necessary to relate the mind to the body. They both must function together to survive. That's key. So take the analogy of a human being, these very practical things of the mind and the body functioning together, and relate them to a whole society having a government with people in it who are supposed to serve the people. The government becomes the mind, that leads the people, that represents the people, and gives them proper representation.   When you start talking about relating the mind to the body of each individual, practicing this dualism, this two-way thing, you're talking about man. Then you have a thing where the power structure, the government, masses forces and guns, goes to Vietnam, kills poor people, masses forces in the black community, police forces are doubled, tripled, and quadrupled, and murdering and brutalizing goes on around the world. The people, who the government is supposed to represent, want to bring themselves into a part of the government, but the government is cutting them off. In an individual, if his head were cut off, it would be a very direct tragedy, a mind being separated from a body. Neither would survive. Neither would function without the other. So when you're talking that way, you're relating to the essence of the body. The dick on a man - we say it just like that - and the pussy on a woman, are related to reproducing human beings. This is what this all relates to. This is how human beings come about. But we have to check out history now, see how in the fuck we were taught that sex, pussy, and dicks were bad and nasty things.   In California now there's a controversy about whether or not sex should be taught to kids. Why do we have to go through this controversy? Three billion people on the face of this motherfucking earth got here through good old downhome human screwing. You got here that way. I got here that way. Everybody got here through good old downhome screwing. How in hell can sex be nasty and bad? Who in the fuck would project such an image? So you ask the question, "Why the fuck did this happen?" All you have to do is relate back to history, and see how different societies develop, and see how different concepts took over those societies and became dominant, and pervaded the society, the minds of its people, and how they were perpetuated up to now.   So, as Huey said, let's go back, back, back. Let's go to Europe. Let's take Europe and let's take Africa. Let's take two different peoples, even before they met each other. Let's take Europe. Europe had the one-headed god concept, the all-pure god, right? The pure blood, and my son of pure blood will become king, and my daughter of pure blood will become queen. This is the thing that went down through history. This is directly related to this purity of god bullshit, the single-headed god, the one-headed god. It's not just the idea of the one-headed god, but what people projected and put into it. People said, "I'm made in the image of god." Boom. They're made in the image of this pure head who's absolute, who's all superior, who's all pure, so goddam pure that people began to read things into the bullshit, and they began to reject their basic animal drives.   But even the masses of people in Europe screwed. They had a tendency to accept the so-called bad things about themselves. It was that monarchy, that government, that king, queen, and hierarchy that laid the rules out, and they themselves projected themselves in this puritanical image of god. They were created in the image of god and they had the power and the guns and force to see that everybody stayed pure. And if you didn't stay pure, then you were a witch, and you were burned at the stake. This happened even before they met black Africans. Europeans were lynching people then.   I'm not saying all societies in Africa didn't have this puritanical concept, but many societies they call primitive, even some outside of Africa, had what many people define as pagan gods; a two-headed god system or a three, headed god system, but they also said they were made in the image of god. You look at the society, and the way people develop, and you look back in history, and you can find these things out. This head was a three-headed god, with a neutral head, a bad head, and a good head. They said they were made in the image of god, so they were able to accept the bad things and the good things about themselves; but the European monarchies perpetuated this purity bullshit, tabooing things, like sluts or those who were downgraded and under their feet. "You're a vassal!" This projection by the monarchy of "I am the greatest" and all that shit was very bad for human society, because it was a process of chopping the head from the body, of the government heads being cut away from the masses of the people.   The Africans mostly had the two-headed god system, bad and good, and said they were made in the image of god. Maybe it developed out of the fact that they had so much fucking food and fucking land down there, they didn't have to worry about a bunch of bullshit. It may be related to industrial development and poor peoples, I don't know. So when the European met the African, when the whole economic development of using slaves came about, these taboos were ingrained in the minds of the people in European society, especially with the monarchy projecting that purity for the people.   "Ah, he's different than I am. He's black." In the kind of system that has a two-headed god, that's impossible. But if god is one-headed, pure-headed, he's absolute. They put taboos on the Africans the same way they put them on their own people, in their own society, with the witch concept. They were burning white people at the stake in their own society even before they met Africans. That even got transported over to America, this thing about witches. They even have a tendency to carry it on now. They superficialize the witch, like the one on TV. Samantha. A good little puritanical witch. It's a thing with them. You have to understand society and have a concept of how human beings function, to be able to see them, and to be able to define how things will go, especially if you try to relate directly to it.   When the Panther Party first came on the scene, the man said. "They're all anti-white. They're a bunch of black racists!" We never considered ourselves a bunch of black racists. "They're going to come up in our communities and they're going to shoot us all up!" This wasn't the thing at all. We're saying, "We aren't going into the white community shooting up white people.   We're going to defend ourselves against those racists who already occupy our community, those pigs, and others who come down and shoot us up. We're going to defend our community because we want the power to determine our own destiny in our own black community. We have a right to this, brother, the way we've been treated for 400 years. This is what we want.   "At the same time," we say, "we hope to civilize all of those who are racists in their own communities, or who relate to it, who don't understand what the fuck's going on." Boom.   "Oh no, they can't do that. They have guns. They've got to be racists." They accuse us of being what they are.   What we're saying is, you don't fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water. The thing is to define what the fuck is the water. We're saying it's the mass of the people. We say that the water represents a very defensive thing. We say that the people have a right to pick up guns. They're the water. All the people - the hippies, the yippies, the whites, the blacks, the Vietnamese - they have a right to pick up guns to defend themselves against the fire of aggression.   That's why we go through a long process of trying to educate the people. All of them. The hippies, whites, blacks, everybody. We try to organize them. We're talking about revolution in the Mother Country. We have a tendency to parallel the Mother Country with relating only to the mind, and the black colony being related to the body.   Eldridge says that the closest this country has ever come to relating the mind to the body symbolically was when we heard rumors of Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy doing the twist inside the White House, because to wiggle your butt is very low-down in white society. Elvis Presley is a white boy who wiggles his legs and wiggles his ass. What is he doing? We felt something was happening, a change was occurring.   A lot of hippies appeared. The hippies denounced their mamas and daddies. "You're a bunch of capitalist exploiting bastards and you relate to racism. I don't even want to hear you. I don't even want to talk to you." They tried to escape. We respect them because they were trying to redeem themselves in their own way from the racism that they'd been caught up in. But you can't look at them as individuals. You have to look at them as a collective group, and a development. If you don't look at it that way, you won't see it.   I can always talk about myself as an individual. Huey can talk about himself as an individual. At the same time, we're still a collective group, because we always tell black people, "We don't give a fuck whether you're wearing a pimp suit, whether you're wearing an African gown, whether you've got a natural on, whether you're wearing a Black Panther uniform, whether you live in Africa, whether you're over in Vietnam, because wherever you are, the racists and the imperialists will brutalize, murder, and oppress you, because they've been doing it for 400 years and they're still practicing it."   Many leftists, hippies, and yippies, will go out to redress their grievances against something they see that's dead wrong - "Appear to me that war is wrong - " but what happens? The same, goddam things that have been perpetuated against all the colored peoples of the world. The pigs whipped their heads, and cracked their skulls. They stopped and they said, "Wait a minute. You guys are really right. Police brutality's a motherfucker. It's something else. It's bad."   All we're doing is saying we want some land, some bread, some housing, some education, some clothing, some justice, some peace. When we say that, they go through a bunch of sincerity bullshit, that you hear on the radio. "So and so from the NAACP in conjunction with Governor Reagan and representatives from so and so, are now investigating the school integration problem. They are also concerning themselves with how welfare recipients receive their checks, blah, blah, blah." That's all we hear.   Bob Dylan sings about one of these cats, you don't know what is happening, do you, Mr. Jones? OK, so he eats his motherfucking salami sandwich on sour French bread with cheese and mayonnaise and lettuce and all this motherfucking bullshit in the middle of a TV program. Meanwhile, while he's doing that, either there's a pimp on the block thinking about robbing some joint, or he's pimping some chick, or he's beating somebody's ass, or there's a mother over here, wondering how she's gonna feed her kids tomorrow morning. Or the mother's tired, black, and broke. She had to work twenty years, like my mother worked. She used to scrub kitchens, like that woman you see over there. You've seen her over there, that black woman, right next door there. She sweeps and I don't know what kind of pay she gets. She may even get paid good. I don't know. But my mother used to work for a buck an hour. I even remember when my mother worked for seventy-five cents an hour, scrubbing those floors. She'd come home with shopping bags. She's tired.   So you have a woman like that, another cat going to jail, hundreds of them getting busted by the pigs. Some cop walks up to them and says, "Nigger, where you going?" And this black man stands there and says, "I'm not a nigger. What you mean. Don't call me that." Or if he doesn't want to defend himself, he says, "I'm going down the street, sir." It doesn't make any difference whether he rises up and defends himself or whether he tires to use the technique of meekness and acquiescence; he's still being brutalized or murdered.   We read in the papers that so and so was allegedly committing a burglary. I'm not saying that some of the brothers aren't committing burglaries. I'm not even condoning them committing a burglary, because I know why he's doing it in the first place. He'll walk off into a bank and say, "Stick 'em up, motherfucker, this is a hold-up." When a brother gets mad, after living in this confinement, in these ghettoes, twenty or thirty years, and walks up and says, "Stick 'em up, motherfucker. Up against the wall. This is a hold-up," he isn't asking anybody in there what the color of their skin is, because there's some black tellers in there too. All he wants is that money to relieve himself of that oppression he's been subjected to for so many years.   Talk about dualism. Talk about the mind and the body. I think this is the key thing. And sometimes when the teachers say, "You talking about the mind and the body," you're really talking about the pussy, the dick, the mind, the body. The pussy, the dick, the mind. We're talking about the babies that come out of the pussies of women. We're talking about the dudes that put their dicks in the pussies of women. We're talking about the minds being related to the correct social order. Stop all this existing bullshit. We're talking about human being beginning and surviving. That's what we're talking about. ELDRIDGE IS FREE! Eldridge finally got out of prison after the April shoot-out on June 6, 1968. The day Eldridge got out of Vacaville was a beautiful day. It was a great feeling to see Eldridge free once again.   Stokely Carmichael, while he was out to California for Huey's Birthday Rally, said some stupid things to me and Eldridge like, "You guys might as well forget it, because Huey will never get out of jail. They're going to send Huey to the gas chamber and that's it."   "Man, are you crazy?" I said. I got mad at the cat. "Man, you're out of your damn mind. I'm going to keep working for Huey, and Eldridge is, and all of us are." Eldridge was pissed off at Stokely too. He wouldn't say a word to him. Eldridge just looked at him like he was a goddamned fool.   Before Eldridge got out of jail in June, Stokely came out to California again. (This was in May 1968.) He brought a friend of his, George Sams, with him then. Later on, Stokely cut George Sams loose, because he suspected him of being an agent of some kind. Stokely told me again that I might as well forget about Huey, that they were going to put Huey in the gas chamber. He told me this crap a second time! He also said they were going to keep Eldridge in jail for the rest of his life.   I got mad again. I didn't hit him or anything, but I was pissed off at him. And man, when Eldridge's feet hit the ground, you talk about a dude being happy - I was really glad. Before Eldridge was released, we went to work, and started calling people up, telling them that Eldridge was coming out and that we needed some bail money and some securities to get him out right away. The bail was hanging at $50,000, but we got him out. "I wonder what the hell that stupid Stokely Carmichael is talking about now," I said to myself.   A lot of people were talking about how we couldn't get along, and how we really needed unity. Yeah, we need unity. I'm not denying that, but Stokely Carmichael said some weird things to us. If you can't stand up for the leaders and if one leader can't support another leader, then you'll never have an organization because the leaders will always be jiving. That's very important. That's why the Black Panther Party, first and foremost wants to free our leader, Huey P. Newton. The Minister of Defense is the man we want to free along with all the other political prisoners. This is what Stokely wasn't able to see. My analysis of it is that Stokely is an opportunist Chief of Staff David Hilliard, Kathleen, and a couple of other Panthers went up to get Eldridge. I stayed down at Charles Garry's office in San Francisco, waiting for them to bring brother Eldridge in. They drove in, and we had a big press conference. The pigs had shaved Eldridge's face, and had cut off all his hair, but the brother was in righteous good spirits, like most revolutionaries are who are involved in the struggle. Even before he knew he would be released, Eldridge was in good spirits. I had gone up to Vacaville to visit him along with Stokely and some other brothers a few weeks before he got out, and Eldridge was feeling real good. This was shortly before Judge Raymond Sherwin of Solano County released him on the grounds that he was being held solely for political reasons, that he was, in fact, a political prisoner. That day, after we had visited Eldridge in jail. I noticed Stokely running around talking a whole lot of crazy stuff, about how he was going to organize the Party and discipline the Party and things like that. About half of the stuff he was talking about was cultural nationalism. It didn't relate. We needed brothers to help organize and educate more members, but Stokely still relied on that cultural nationalism, and cultural nationalism will not educate people. It makes racists out of them.   Cultural nationalism is trying to popularize dashikis, the natural, the wearing of sandals, and African dress. There's nothing wrong with having a natural. I have a natural and I like it, but power for the people doesn't grow out of the sleeve of a dashiki. That is something the cultural nationalists just don't understand.   Stokely's game was that every Negro was a potential black man. But what we were trying to show him was that every black man must be a revolutionary if he intends to change this decadent society. A lot of Africans know that, but Stokely didn't seem to be aware of it at all.   Well, they brought Eldridge down to San Francisco the day he was released. Kathleen, David, and the other Panthers brought him down to Garry's office where I was waiting. We had a big press conference there, and then went over to Eldridge and Kathleen's house on Pine Street. After a while, Eldridge got Kathleen and told me, "Look, Chairman, I've got to go."   "Right on, brother," I said. "I sure can understand it. It's just like when I got out of jail a few months ago."   "I'm going to hide out for a day or two," he said.   "Right on. I'll see you, man."   So Eldridge and Kathleen cut out. They went to stay with some friends, and that was beautiful. OUR MINISTER OF INFORMATION When the higher court overturned Judge Sherwin's decision to release Eldridge from the Vacaville State Prison Facility, and Eldridge was informed that he had to go back to prison, I guess he must have made up his mind right then that he just wasn't going back. He stated in speeches that he wasn't going back. He knew that they were planning to kill him there. I also think that he felt that we didn't want him to go to prison. And I didn't. I was always opposed to it.   Eldridge never would say anything about what he was doing. All of us were hoping we could work out something legally to keep Eldridge from going to prison. We were really hoping for the State Supreme Court decision to come down in favor of Eldridge. But in those days before he left, Eldridge was in another big dispute with the state and with Ronald Reagan concerning the lectures he had been hired to give on "Racism in America" at the University of California.   Between early September and November 27, 1968, Eldridge spoke on college campuses up and down the State of California, to 3,000, 5,000, and 10,000 people at various homes. There are eighteen state colleges and nine university campuses in California alone, and he was speaking not only in California but also on other campuses all over the country. He had students cussing out Ronald Reagan by the thousands. The students were opposed to Reagan because of the rotten, underhand politics of the rich men who were directing him. Eldridge was telling it to the students and they were beginning to understand the truth about politics.   Eldridge said, "I've cussed my way all across this country and back again. These pigs are really scared of what I'm saying. They're scared because the people are listening. They've got to shut me up, and they know the only way they can do that is to put me in prison again, and kill me there. They think I'm going to go back to that goddam prison," he said, "but I'm not going."   "Eldridge," I said, "if you decide you're going to split - don't tell me. Just split. You've done what was needed. You've got us all cussing out these dogs, and they've been needing cussing out for a long time. But it's been an issue, you know. Brother Huey P. Newton has said that we shouldn't cuss."   "I know, man," Eldridge said. "I guess I should try to obey what the Minister of Defense says. But they got Huey isolated, he's been down almost a year. Somebody's gotta cuss these pigs out for doing that to Huey!"   I said, "Yeah, man, you're right. I feel like cussing them out too." Huey always said that the older people in the community wouldn't understand the cursing. He felt that that kind of language would cause the older people, especially the mothers, to misunderstand the real program of the Black Panther Party. So one day I asked my own mother about that.   "Mother," I said, "what do you think about Eldridge?"   She said, "Ooh, I think Eldridge is beautiful. He's one of the best persons around." She told me she voted for Eldridge for President. After voting for all those Democrats and Republicans for all these years, she voted for Eldridge Cleaver.   I said, "Mama, I love you. You're really seeing the revolution in your late days." Mama's about sixty.   "Well, I like everything that Eldridge is saying," she said. "And he's right. He's telling them the truth. But I wish he wouldn't cuss so much."   I said, "I hope that don't turn you off."   "Oh, no, it sure doesn't," she said. "I just always wanted y'all to do right, and I know you're doing right. I understand your getting mad sometimes at the way these" - she hesitated for a moment, and then went on and said it - "these racist pigs - the way they treat us and all our people."   Mama was always a Christian woman. She never talked hate or cursed the oppressors. But she said, "I hate the way they do. I just hate the way they murdered Bobby Hutton. I just hate them for being ol' low-down nasty dogs. They been treating us like this for so many years, just mauling over our people, killing and stomping on our people. Eldridge Cleaver is a very beautiful person and he's got a very beautiful and wonderful wife. I respect him. I understand why he cusses those low-down politicians out. Still, I do wish he'd stop cussin' just a little bit."   I said, "But are you with us, Mama, in spite of it?"   She said, "Oh, yes, Bobby, I'm with y'all, I'll always be with you, because I know you're doin' right. Way back yonder, in the days when my mama was just mauled over, and our peoples was owned like animals, I remember my mother tellin' me that we shouldn't have to be over here in this country treated like we was, and that somehow or other we should be back over in Africa."   "Mama," I said, "you know we ain't ever going back to Africa. We can't."   "Sure. I know that," she said. "I'm just telling you what my mother felt. But also I know that you and Huey used to talk about Africa and going back, and visiting over there and so on, a long time ago. I guess all our people sort of dream like that, even you young generation. But I know y'all all are trying to do what you can, and I just hope nobody hurts y'all. But if y'all can just do something for the people - "   She sighed. "I'm old now," she said. "I wish I was young. I'd get right out there with you and Huey and Kathleen and Eldridge and all of you. But I'm old, and I just can't be in the Panthers, can't do your young ways. But I sure voted for Eldridge Cleaver."   Of course, being my mother, she was bound to take our part and be on our side. But I hope that she was telling it the way a lot of older mothers felt. I hope they understand that when we cuss those politicians out, we're not cussing out our people. It's only against the power structure, and never shows disrespect of the people. We're honestly calling them what they are for messing over us. I hope the mothers understand what we feel against those who maintain this exploitation, this rotten capitalism and racism, the brutality, and all the political, economic, and social evils. I hope these older people know that we have to stand up for ourselves.   Some of them have said, "Well, you wouldn't be getting attacked if you didn't say 'pigs' and all." but we point out to them that our people have always been attacked and now we have to let other people know what these racist pigs are. We have to redefine them for exactly what they are and stop letting them fool us. And mostly, I think, the older people do understand and are for us.   Well, Huey wanted the people to understand the real ten-point platform and program, so Eldridge, in his position as Minister of Information, was laying it on thick, but with a creativity and a sense of humour that was only Eldridge's.   I remember one evening Eldridge was due to speak on Channel 44, a television station in San Francisco, on some talk show. I had arrived at the station first, and they led me back to one of those rooms with mirrors on the wall, with stools and chairs to sit in and wait for the program to come on.   In came one of the guys who direct or produce that show. He said, "Look, tell Eldridge please, please do not do any cussing on the program. It's live."   "Well, I don't know," I told him. "You know how Eldridge is. He just gets so fed up with these politicians . . ."   When Eldridge arrived, I said, "Huey said he'd be watching this, so I don't think you ought to be cussing on the program. Besides," and I couldn't help laughing, "this ol' jive producer came by here, and he was really worried about you cussin' on the program. After all, it's live."   Then Eldridge jumped up and said, "What! What! They can't tell me what not to say! I'm gonna cuss all of them, every avaricious businessman, every pig, every last one of them who has ever committed brutality on black people. That's what I oughta do, Bobby." He went on, saying, "I gotta do it, I gotta do it," but actually he was kidding of course, putting them all uptight. He didn't say one cuss word on the program.   But one time Eldridge and David had just come back from a series of speaking engagements, across the country, and David told me, "Man, that Eldridge. You just wouldn't believe that cat. He was at a Catholic girls college, a place where they train girls to be nuns, and, Bobby, he had 5,000 girls singing. 'Fuck Ronald Reagan.'"   "I just don't believe that, David," I said. "He must have been blowing some heavy politics to get them to see it."   David said, "He was exposing the politicians for what they are, man. He was exposing them ninety miles an hour. He was talking about the pigs something terrible! The next thing I knew, right in the middle of the speech, Eldridge had 5,000 chicks out there singing: 'Fuck Ronald Reagan! Fuck Ronald Reagan! One, two, three, four: Fuck Ronald Reagan! Fuck Ronald Reagan! One, two, three, four: Fuck Ronald Reagan.' I've got a tape recording of it."   "David," I said, "let me hear it. I'll believe that tape when I hear it" Eldridge was doing everything he could to expose the power structure. You could see signs all over that he wasn't going back. You could see by the way he was moving, and by the way he was talking. He was exposing Ronald Reagan. He'd go to other cities and expose other demagogic politicians, and he was doing it in a hurry. It was good that he did it. Eldridge knew that he had to do everything he had time to do, to expose this fascist power structure for what it really was.   Before Eldridge left, I think everybody contemplated it, trying to figure out what effect it would have on the Party if they sent Eldridge back to prison. Then when it was announced in the papers that Eldridge was gone, it made all of us more energetic, trying to move to get things organized. One of the principles that we really began to place forth was the one that brother Huey had run down about the oppressor. The oppressor has no rights that the oppressed people are bound to respect.   Eldridge's action was a clear example of this. By not appearing, he was refusing to respect the oppressor's right to lock him up unjustly after he had already been bailed out and released from jail. He was being held as a political prisoner by the government of California, led by Mickey Mouse, fascist Ronald Reagan.   I think most of us had read Soul On Ice already. But I made it a thing that brothers should reread Soul On Ice, reread what Eldridge was running down. That book is very key and very clear when one looks at the massive brainwashing of America as a whole. We know about the brainwashing of black people, but this is not really separate from the brainwashing of the proletarian masses of America. I think that many times the cultural nationalists miss this point.   We want to unbrainwash our people by telling them the true history. One must tell the true history in terms of the class struggle, the small, minority ruling-class dominating and oppressing the massive, proletarian working-class. When I say working-class, I mean those who are employed and unemployed, living below subsistence and at subsistence level.   This book, Soul On Ice, really shakes loose the misconceptions that exist. When you read that book, you'll see that, in the beginning, it was a brainwashed black man who was in jail. He had only the white ideals, the Western ideals, and the white woman. When he put the Playboy picture on the wall, he was saying that, psychologically and personally, he fell in love with that woman. Then this racist cop guard inside the prison rips the picture down. Eldridge tells the guard that he doesn't have any right to rip it down because everybody's got pin-ups. The guard tells Eldridge, "If you had put up a pin-up picture of a black girl, I wouldn't have said anything." And because of that, Eldridge's consciousness changed, and he began to become what he is. Th