Speaker 1: What's accepted that this is the best introduction schema I'm
Speaker 1: going to put together and I should just roll with it.
Speaker 1: My Robert Evans me, Uh, pooh, boy, that was rough.
Speaker 1: That didn't go well. Um. This is Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 1: a podcast about terrible people. UM and today Uh, my
Speaker 1: guest is uh rap artist musician propaganda. Say West West,
Speaker 1: how you doing man? Man, I'm honored to be here.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm toning down my fandom. This is Zoe.
Speaker 1: You know. Well, I've been listening ever since you started
Speaker 1: following me on Twitter and listen to your music a
Speaker 1: number of times and I like it a lot, particularly
Speaker 1: Board of Education. I think that's probably my my favorite
Speaker 1: one of years that I've heard so far. UM And
Speaker 1: I thought you'd be a good a good guest for
Speaker 1: this episode, especially since you have some like family history
Speaker 1: with the subject we're talking about. UM. Before we're gonna
Speaker 1: do you want to introduce yourself differently than I introduced you.
Speaker 1: I think it was great? Yeah? No, I um yeah,
Speaker 1: hip hop artists. UH do a pod A couple of
Speaker 1: pods now, UM once called hood politics, which maybe we'll
Speaker 1: talk about that later. But uh and UM one with
Speaker 1: my wife called the Red Couch and I yeah, I
Speaker 1: do wrapping poetry for a living in l A native
Speaker 1: two daughters and a cat. Now frustratingly anyway, I love cats. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well you can have ours. Yeah, do you want to
Speaker 1: should I call you for this episode? Should you want
Speaker 1: to go by propaganda? Should I call you? Jason? It's
Speaker 1: mostly has been shortened to prop that's but in the consensus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to be cod with that. Yeah. All right. UM,
Speaker 1: so today we're gonna talk about, um, the Black Panthers
Speaker 1: and specifically the bastards who killed the Black panthers. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's going to involve a lot of talk about
Speaker 1: what the black panthers did, what they believed, um, which
Speaker 1: I is one of a subject I find really fascinating. Um.
Speaker 1: And this was a frustrating episode to write, in part
Speaker 1: because there's so much that I had to leave out
Speaker 1: just because you know, this is an eleven thousand words script.
Speaker 1: You can only you can only get in so much. Um.
Speaker 1: This is going to be one we have a number
Speaker 1: of episodes like this where like people will hit me
Speaker 1: up after it, why didn't you bring up this? Why
Speaker 1: didn't you bring up that? And it's like, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: one of the when you can cover something as complex
Speaker 1: as the Panthers, You're you're going to leave stuff out
Speaker 1: just because we have about two hours two and a half,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, but yeah, you have some family history, yes,
Speaker 1: and I thought it might be good to go into
Speaker 1: that first. Yeah. Yeah. So my father was a member
Speaker 1: of the you know, South the like I guess they
Speaker 1: call it South erely now, but it was we called
Speaker 1: it South Central, um chapter of the Black Panther Party,
Speaker 1: uh in the sixties or at the end of the
Speaker 1: six And my father Vietnam war Vett. Essentially as a
Speaker 1: matter of fact, when we say we're gonna do this,
Speaker 1: I like I called him to make sure I had
Speaker 1: my storyline right and back straight. I don't want to
Speaker 1: get up here and embarrass myself, you know. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so he essentially landed from Vietnam back in Los Angeles
Speaker 1: and almost made a bee line of like forty one
Speaker 1: and Central and enjoined the joined the Black Panther Party
Speaker 1: and um yeah, so he was a part of the
Speaker 1: sort of after school tutoring part program. He also um
Speaker 1: was like basically they all took turns as far as
Speaker 1: like the which I'm I'm we're gonna get to like
Speaker 1: the policing the streets. So he was just you know,
Speaker 1: standing behind as like, you know, interactions with the police
Speaker 1: were there because you know, police brutality was such a
Speaker 1: big deal. So he was a part of that. Um
Speaker 1: he was at the u c L a event that
Speaker 1: got shot up. He was, yes, and the he said
Speaker 1: it was the span of time he was at was
Speaker 1: by the time that like FBI got involved, so his
Speaker 1: office got bombed, you know, he was at shootings. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So and at that point my grandmother was like, baby,
Speaker 1: you can't do this some more associated she kind of
Speaker 1: pulled the card on him. But you know, but yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he stayed involved in Uh yeah. So I've been
Speaker 1: hearing bits and pieces of those stories as he like
Speaker 1: unpacks his trauma, you know what I'm saying. Um, And
Speaker 1: I just grew up without with those stories in my life,
Speaker 1: you know, and paintings of African princesses and kings on
Speaker 1: our way, had no Disney in my house at a
Speaker 1: picture of Mark Martin and Malcolm and Marcus Garvey like
Speaker 1: lining our walls and Geronimo Pratt and just I had
Speaker 1: that in my house. Yeah, you know, that's that's that's
Speaker 1: fascinating perspective to have had in a fascinating like way
Speaker 1: to learn about this. But like for me, like obviously
Speaker 1: it's like a white kid who grew up in um
Speaker 1: a pretty mixed suburb, but a suburb that didn't have
Speaker 1: a very a huge black population. Um, I learned almost
Speaker 1: nothing about the Black Panthers. I guess a lot of
Speaker 1: our listeners are kind of in that the boat where
Speaker 1: like there's about three things you know about them. Obviously,
Speaker 1: they were a alexivil rights organization. They did that thing
Speaker 1: where they put their fists in the air, and some
Speaker 1: of them carried guns, and there's pictures of them carryings.
Speaker 1: And I think when I got out of high school,
Speaker 1: that's about all I knew about the Black Panthers, right, Like,
Speaker 1: there wasn't really anything else UM I was aware of.
Speaker 1: I think I caught the name Huey P. Newton for
Speaker 1: the first time in the lyrics of some hip hop
Speaker 1: songs like and, and didn't really know who he was. UM.
Speaker 1: So for the longest time, I had no real understanding
Speaker 1: about the organization, and I think they kind of blended
Speaker 1: into the general wallpaper of the civil rights movement for
Speaker 1: me until I started reading about them specifically. And I've
Speaker 1: come to the conclusion and I say this a lot
Speaker 1: um that it's like an unforgivable failing of our education system,
Speaker 1: that this isn't a bigger part of like standard American history. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and like so I know you'll get into, but the
Speaker 1: importance I know my father did put on and the
Speaker 1: party put on of like knowing the Constitution, knowing the
Speaker 1: billow Rights. Like I felt like I was so well
Speaker 1: versed in American civics because my father was a panther,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying, And which was funny because
Speaker 1: I was like, I just didn't understand that. I thought
Speaker 1: every house was like this because it was just this
Speaker 1: was normal for me. So when then you'd bring up
Speaker 1: I'm like, well, you know, the fourteenth a moment say YadA, YadA, YadA,
Speaker 1: you know, seventh graders and kids are like what you know,
Speaker 1: It's just I just knew this because that's how that's
Speaker 1: what you learned as a panther. Like you need to
Speaker 1: know your rights, man, you know. Yeah, yeah, it's critical.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, um so uh we' we yeah, I think
Speaker 1: we've we've introduced this well enough, I'm gonna start get
Speaker 1: into the episode at uh, not the beginning, but I
Speaker 1: guess a beginning um. On February seventeenth, nineteen forty two.
Speaker 1: Hughey P. Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, the youngest
Speaker 1: child of Walter and Armilia Newton's seven children. His dad, Walter,
Speaker 1: was I would say, pretty badass guy. He worked two
Speaker 1: jobs his entire life. He served as the minister for
Speaker 1: the Bethel Baptist Church in Monroe on Sundays, and Walter
Speaker 1: was very infamous in his community for not taking any
Speaker 1: ship from white folks. Um. And there's a story about
Speaker 1: him getting into an argument with one of his employers,
Speaker 1: a young white guy who yells at him that he
Speaker 1: whips colored men for arguing with him, and Walter shot
Speaker 1: back that nobody. Basically, nobody whips me unless they're a
Speaker 1: better man than me, unless they can beat me up.
Speaker 1: And this guy, this guy backs down, proving that he
Speaker 1: was not um. Yeah. Yeah, basically, if you want to
Speaker 1: whip me like you gotta you gotta be able to
Speaker 1: kick my ass like you want to try that. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: in the nineteen forties in Louisiana, saying that sort of
Speaker 1: thing could get you murdered as a black guy. But
Speaker 1: Walter had a strange and somewhat unique ability um to
Speaker 1: stand up to white folks in his community without being killed.
Speaker 1: And hue later theorized that this is because his dad
Speaker 1: was mixed race. His father's father, he was grandpa was
Speaker 1: a white man who had raped his mother. Um, and
Speaker 1: Walter's neighbors knew his white family and didn't want to
Speaker 1: shed part white blood. This was Huey's theorist. White's ad
Speaker 1: was able to do this. Um, there is there is
Speaker 1: something to be said that, like unless you're in like
Speaker 1: communities of color, just how colorism does like in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways police, how we treat each other and
Speaker 1: how we see you other. So, yeah, someone that's a
Speaker 1: little more fair skin we would say like they would
Speaker 1: say passing, like he passes as something else. So like
Speaker 1: a few things you can get away with, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: And at least in the psyche of you know, a
Speaker 1: person of color like myself who's not light skinning. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In when he was a toddler, the Newton family moved
Speaker 1: to Oakland, California. UM. Now, Walter always managed to bring
Speaker 1: in a very stable income. The family was still very poor,
Speaker 1: but like they weren't ever sort of like starving or
Speaker 1: anything like that. Um. Their most common meal was kush,
Speaker 1: which is I guess a fried cornbread dish, which they
Speaker 1: often ate for every meal of the day. Um. Heh.
Speaker 1: We grew up watching his father work eighty hour weeks
Speaker 1: and still constantly be like stressed out over bills. Um.
Speaker 1: And this was like really had a big impact on
Speaker 1: him growing up, this kind of constant economic anxiety. UM.
Speaker 1: He didn't have an easy adolescence. School was difficult for him,
Speaker 1: and he seems to have had I think we probably
Speaker 1: would would have today have diagnosed him with a learning
Speaker 1: disability because he was incredibly intelligent. He just I think
Speaker 1: teachers had a difficulty reaching him, is how I would
Speaker 1: It seems like what was going on. By the time
Speaker 1: he was in eleventh grade, he was still illiterate, and
Speaker 1: his teachers assumed that he was just not intelligent. UM.
Speaker 1: And this was obviously not the case, because Huey's hobby
Speaker 1: outside of school was memorizing poetry with his brother. UM.
Speaker 1: But it was not until his high school counselor told
Speaker 1: him that he was too dumb for college that Hui P.
Speaker 1: Newton decided he had to prove them all wrong. So
Speaker 1: for two straight years he studied like a madman, teaching
Speaker 1: himself to read and write, and eventually to graduate high
Speaker 1: school UM. In nineteen fifty nine, he enrolled at Merritt College,
Speaker 1: where he joined the Afro American Association and became well
Speaker 1: known for his debate skills. All thought that he might
Speaker 1: not be college material fell out the window as he
Speaker 1: began a meteoric path of scholastic excellence and he would
Speaker 1: eventually receive a PhD. Um. Yeah, this seems to me
Speaker 1: to be a clear case of a kid that maybe
Speaker 1: just had like his teachers didn't know how to reach him,
Speaker 1: but like he was, he was brilliant. Um. So do
Speaker 1: you know it's funny because it's like I thought about
Speaker 1: the my credibility I'm putting on danger here by you
Speaker 1: saying stuff that I didn't know Joe saying and being like,
Speaker 1: oh wow, I didn't I didn't know that, you know,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of already started. I was like, I didn't,
Speaker 1: I didn't know you couldn't read till you till eleventh
Speaker 1: grade because I've only known him as like you said,
Speaker 1: the sports ur you know, that was able to articulate
Speaker 1: the feelings and the sentiment of lack America in that time.
Speaker 1: That's crazy. I didn't know that well. And I think
Speaker 1: one of the one of the reasons it's important is
Speaker 1: that from a very early age he gets this lesson
Speaker 1: that like the system clearly failed him because he didn't
Speaker 1: know how to treat him properly, and he had to
Speaker 1: build a system for himself to elevate himself. Um. And obviously,
Speaker 1: like I didn't know any of this until I read
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago. I read a book, a
Speaker 1: really good book called Black Against Empire by Joshua Bloom
Speaker 1: and Waldo Martin. Um. That's a really fascinating history of
Speaker 1: the Black Panther Party. UM. And I it's it's very readable,
Speaker 1: I would say, compulsively readable. It's a really good history. UM.
Speaker 1: And it's like one of the major sources of this episode. Um.
Speaker 1: It's very comprehensive and detailed. And I didn't know almost
Speaker 1: any of this stuff until I read it. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I hugely recommend that. Yeah. And I'm gonna actually I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna read a quote from it now discussing
Speaker 1: what set Hughey P. Newton apart from his academic colleagues quote,
Speaker 1: he had a side that most of the budding intellectuals
Speaker 1: around him lacked. He knew the street. He could understand
Speaker 1: and relate to the plight of the swelling ranks of unemployed,
Speaker 1: the brothers on the block, in his words, who lived
Speaker 1: outside the law. Newton street knowledge helped put him through
Speaker 1: college is he covered his bills through theft and fraud.
Speaker 1: But when Newton was caught, he used his book knowledge
Speaker 1: to study the law and defend himself in court and
Speaker 1: pressing the jury and defeating several misdemeanor charges. So I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm on board with this guy. Yeah, it's that
Speaker 1: dual consciousness that w boys talk about, Like you just
Speaker 1: your street knowledge and your book knowledge. Is like you
Speaker 1: got them both rock and you're unfathable. You know. It's
Speaker 1: this thing that you brought up earlier, where like it's
Speaker 1: so important and this is like something the Panthers always
Speaker 1: emphasized to under have an understanding of the law in
Speaker 1: your rights. Yeah yeah, in a nineteen I'm sorry, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, yeah, I firmly believe this, Like
Speaker 1: and and like I said, like we're we were built
Speaker 1: an entire show around it. That like, especially when it
Speaker 1: comes to like politics, specifically geopolitics, Like I have this understood.
Speaker 1: Like my belief is, like if you came from any
Speaker 1: sort of like neighborhood environment, I don't care if it's
Speaker 1: like rural Oklahoma or you know, inner city Detroit. If
Speaker 1: you come from a city and you had to navigate
Speaker 1: you know, tribes in the city, you understand geopolitics. You
Speaker 1: just don't. You ain't got the language for it, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. So so being able to use
Speaker 1: your own what we would call like hood antennas to
Speaker 1: figure out what's happening in you know, dominant culture world.
Speaker 1: Like if you have a grasp on both of those, dude,
Speaker 1: you're under you're undefeatable. Yeah. That that does make me,
Speaker 1: like I think maybe one of the major issues we
Speaker 1: have diplomatically and like the international stage is that number one,
Speaker 1: so many of our diplomats are guys who like donated money,
Speaker 1: rich kids who donated get the job. But like also
Speaker 1: nobody who I do feel like somebody with that sort
Speaker 1: of street experience would do a better job, for example,
Speaker 1: of doing diplomacy in a place like Baghdad, because you
Speaker 1: just have a deeper understanding of like, yeah, kind of
Speaker 1: the interpersonal relationships necessary to make if you had to
Speaker 1: convince a bully to not give you a swirlie, if
Speaker 1: you had to, if you went through that, you know
Speaker 1: how to come to a negotiation table. You know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, especially especially like if your bagh dad, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, and the bully is you know
Speaker 1: the G six you know what I'm saying, or you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. Bullies America, It's like, well, I
Speaker 1: know how to deal with bullies. So here, here's here's
Speaker 1: how I think we can handle this. You know what
Speaker 1: I mean? Yeah? Now. Um. In nineteen sixty two, Hue P.
Speaker 1: Newton met a guy named Bobby Seal at a protest
Speaker 1: opposing the U. S blockade of Cuba. Um Now. Bobby
Speaker 1: had been born in nineteen thirty six, about five years
Speaker 1: before Hughie, and while Hughie was the youngest of seven,
Speaker 1: Bobby was the oldest child of three. He'd grown up
Speaker 1: in Oakland, where both his mother and father worked. Bobby's
Speaker 1: dad was profoundly abusive, and Bobby grew up kind of
Speaker 1: accepting that random violence from authority was a regular fact
Speaker 1: of life, which again would have you know, be obviously
Speaker 1: influential in his worldview as he grew up. Now, obviously,
Speaker 1: when people go through that, there's a number of different
Speaker 1: ways they react to it, and I think Bobby is
Speaker 1: sort of dealt with it in the healthiest way you can. UM,
Speaker 1: and became sort of obsessed with fighting bullies wherever he
Speaker 1: found them. UM. At one point when he was a
Speaker 1: little kid, he saw another child shove his sister out
Speaker 1: of a swing. Bobby pushed that kid out of the
Speaker 1: swing and declared that now everyone had on the playground
Speaker 1: had a right to use the swing. Um. Justice. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Bobby joined the Air Force as a young man,
Speaker 1: both to get out of the house and so he
Speaker 1: could learn how to use firearms. UM. He was given
Speaker 1: a dishonorable discharge three years in when he hunted down
Speaker 1: a man who stole from him and beat that guy
Speaker 1: very badly with a pipe. UM. You can read the
Speaker 1: story in Bobby's biography, Seize the Time The Story of
Speaker 1: the Black Panther Party, which is available for free online.
Speaker 1: I'll have a link to it. UM. Personally, I think
Speaker 1: the dude that he attacked had it coming. Um. Bobby
Speaker 1: bounced around for a long time after this, getting whatever
Speaker 1: jobs he could for a few months at a time
Speaker 1: before they found out about his dishonorable discharge. By nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty two, he was down and out in California, and
Speaker 1: he took the refuge taken by all such men in
Speaker 1: that situation. He became a stand up comedian. I didn't
Speaker 1: know this about his back story, yeah, he later wrote.
Speaker 1: He later wrote this that year I worked as a
Speaker 1: comedian in two or three clubs around Oakland and at
Speaker 1: private parties. I think comedians know a hell of a lot.
Speaker 1: They know a lot of things that are oppressive and wrong. Um, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I like that that attitude. Huey and Bobby Seal met
Speaker 1: at that protest against the blockade of Cuba, and they
Speaker 1: were both members of the Afro American Association together. The
Speaker 1: leader of that group, Donald Warden, was a confusing man
Speaker 1: who really liked castro but was also a major believer
Speaker 1: in the power of black capitalism to fix societal injustice. Um.
Speaker 1: He was a bitter critic of mainstream civil rights organizations.
Speaker 1: Hui P. Newton was initially enthralled by Donald's ideology, but
Speaker 1: he grew frustrated when, over the course of months it
Speaker 1: became clear that that this like talk was basically all
Speaker 1: that he felt Donald was good for. UM. He also
Speaker 1: grew critical of Donald's focus on black capitalism, which he
Speaker 1: didn't think would do a very good job of liberating
Speaker 1: black people from the hole that he felt capitalism had
Speaker 1: dug for them. And again, Huey's this guy growing up
Speaker 1: with all this economic anxiety. Not a pro capitalism dude.
Speaker 1: I mean we're still debating this, yeah, you know, in
Speaker 1: community and UM. During this episode, I think we're going
Speaker 1: to discuss at length a group of people who were
Speaker 1: distinctly on the fringes of the civil rights movement and
Speaker 1: often very critical of the men and women in like
Speaker 1: kind of mainstream civil rights movement who worked to alleviate
Speaker 1: American racism through more traditional legal means. UM, and I
Speaker 1: feel like we should pause right now to talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about what legally and acceptably working towards equality
Speaker 1: looked like in this period, because I think we get
Speaker 1: a sanitize at least I think as a white kid,
Speaker 1: I got a very sanitized version of the civil rights movement.
Speaker 1: You got, you got nice MLK yeah, well yeah and
Speaker 1: socialist mL and his couch mL k um. But even
Speaker 1: more to the point where we're going to talk about now,
Speaker 1: what I think I got a sanitized version of more
Speaker 1: than anything, was the sanitized version of how white people
Speaker 1: reacted to mlka um and how people like lb J
Speaker 1: reacted to MLK. And so we're gonna talk a little
Speaker 1: about now that now. So then as now, most black
Speaker 1: people in America voted Democrat um. But this should not
Speaker 1: lead people to believe that the Democratic Party at the
Speaker 1: time embraced black people is like equal comrades. Um. They
Speaker 1: were just moderately less racist than the Republicans, and not
Speaker 1: always moderately less racist than the Republicans. Some state Democratic parties,
Speaker 1: including the one in Mississippi, banned black people from membership.
Speaker 1: Members of that state's Democratic Party regularly beat and even
Speaker 1: murdered black people who tried to register to vote. So
Speaker 1: black Mississippians developed their own party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,
Speaker 1: which focused on registering black people to vote. Three of
Speaker 1: the party's activists were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty four, which is the year that the Civil Rights
Speaker 1: Act gets signed into law by President Johnson. Um So
Speaker 1: Johnson at the time was again, you know, the man
Speaker 1: who signed the Civil Rights Act. In the law, um
Speaker 1: played a what I would describe as a profoundly cynical
Speaker 1: and gross game of political brinksmanship with the Mississippi Freedom
Speaker 1: Democratic Party, and he kind of yielded to the civil
Speaker 1: rights movement and a couple of areas, but also tried
Speaker 1: to maintain the Democratic Party's Southern dominance by throwing bones
Speaker 1: to the racists in the Democratic Party. And in doing so,
Speaker 1: he was engaging in like a proud tradition that goes
Speaker 1: back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, because during the Great Depression,
Speaker 1: FDR successfully won the black vote for the first time
Speaker 1: for did the Democratic Party by involving black people in
Speaker 1: the New Deal and giving them access to social programs
Speaker 1: and even appointing several black men as advisers. But he
Speaker 1: kept southern racist Democrats on board by refusing to take
Speaker 1: any action against segregation. Um So, lb J was kind
Speaker 1: of engaging in what at that point was a decades's
Speaker 1: old tradition within the Democratic Party. UM yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: and again these are still the conversations we're having, you
Speaker 1: know to this day, like uh we yeah, I'm my
Speaker 1: thought here, like yeah, there's the idea of like, um,
Speaker 1: I know you're only helping me because it's expedient for you, right.
Speaker 1: And then you have which you'll see in the in
Speaker 1: the Black Panther Party, to like these two two two
Speaker 1: sides of this coin of like the like like yeah,
Speaker 1: like the Marcus Garvey's of the world that are like
Speaker 1: they're never gonna treat us fairly. We will never get
Speaker 1: a shake here. It's never gonna work. Let's just sleeve right.
Speaker 1: And then you have the other side that says like no,
Speaker 1: like my grandparents, my ancestors, like built the built the damnation,
Speaker 1: Like you know what I'm saying, that's our blood in
Speaker 1: this soil, Like we we picked this. You know why
Speaker 1: you were superpower because you ain't pay the workers, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. So like that's why you were superpossed.
Speaker 1: So so it's like, no, I'm just as much American
Speaker 1: as you are. You gonna include me in your documents,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. So like that that two
Speaker 1: sides and then and then and then you're and then
Speaker 1: it's like I remember the the pain and hurt in
Speaker 1: my eye and my my parents, my father, and my
Speaker 1: grandmother's eyes. When I got so disillusioned early on that
Speaker 1: I was just like, man, it's like, hey, you're gonna
Speaker 1: go vote today. And I was like, man, I don't know,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. I'm like, was sitting in
Speaker 1: this traffic, man, you know what I'm saying. I was like,
Speaker 1: I don't even I don't know you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: And just like how hard they fought just for me
Speaker 1: to have the right to do it, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. Like made me be like, dog, I can't
Speaker 1: but yeah, just that that like just how hard they
Speaker 1: fought for me to be able to do that, you know,
Speaker 1: it really gave me pause. But it's still yeah, that
Speaker 1: same for us raction where it's just like I just
Speaker 1: these people don't love us, and we just will never
Speaker 1: know unless it's like expedient for them, you know that
Speaker 1: if you pass a civil rights loss, like, oh, I
Speaker 1: don't know if you really like me though, you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, And it's that that's that's um. That's kind
Speaker 1: of where lb J finds himself in this issue. He's
Speaker 1: a guy who's racist, and he's willing to count out
Speaker 1: a racist. He's also not so racist that he's unwilling
Speaker 1: to push for progress when he thinks it advantages him electoral.
Speaker 1: Not exactly pragmatic racist. That's a fair way to refer
Speaker 1: to Lyndon Baynes Johnson. Um and I'm I'm gonna read
Speaker 1: a quote from Black Against Empire again kind of describing
Speaker 1: how this all comes to a head at the Democratic
Speaker 1: Party State Convention in Jackson, Mississippi in nineteen six four. Quote.
Speaker 1: The MFDP held a state convention in Jackson in early
Speaker 1: August and selected sixty eight delegates to attend the upcoming
Speaker 1: Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. President Johnson
Speaker 1: was determined to maintain white Southern support and worked to
Speaker 1: undermine the m f DP. On August twelve, Mississippi's Democratic Governor,
Speaker 1: Paul B. Johnson told the all white Dixiecrat delegation that
Speaker 1: President Johnson had personally promised him not to seat the
Speaker 1: m f d P. The President refused to discuss the
Speaker 1: m f DP with civil rights leaders and instructed FBI
Speaker 1: Director Hoover to monitor the renegade party closely and provide
Speaker 1: regular updates on its activities to the White House. It's
Speaker 1: not gonna be the last time we hear about the
Speaker 1: FBI and the story she so yeah. Basically, the m
Speaker 1: f DPS goal was to try and make enough noise
Speaker 1: at this assembly um that the Credentials Committee would have
Speaker 1: to call a vote about whether to seat the delegation
Speaker 1: from the m f d P at the convention that year.
Speaker 1: And they called a number of people to testify before
Speaker 1: the committee, including a woman named Fannie Lou Hamer who
Speaker 1: is a black activist with the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee. Now,
Speaker 1: she was fired from her job and beaten in jail
Speaker 1: by black prisoners who were being ordered by probably under
Speaker 1: the threat of death from white policeman to attack her. UM.
Speaker 1: So basically she gets thrown in jail for registering people
Speaker 1: to vote, and the cops tell other people who are
Speaker 1: in prison or who are in jail with her, like
Speaker 1: beat the ship out of this lady, or will deal
Speaker 1: with you. And this is what Fanny lu Hamer says
Speaker 1: at the Jackson Convention quote, the first Negro began to beat,
Speaker 1: and I was beat until I was exhausted. After the
Speaker 1: first Negro was exhausted, the state highway patrolman ordered the
Speaker 1: second Negro to take the black jack. The second Negro
Speaker 1: began to beat I began to scream, and one white
Speaker 1: man got up and began to beat me on my
Speaker 1: head and tell me to hush. One my white man,
Speaker 1: my dress had worked up high. He walked over and
Speaker 1: pulled my dress down, and he pulled my dress back up.
Speaker 1: All of this on account we wanted to register to
Speaker 1: become first class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party
Speaker 1: is not seated, now I question America. Yeah, yeah, ah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: It's just this onion of pain. Every time and more
Speaker 1: you dig, you're just like, oh, yep, yeah that happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what's not an onion of pain? Geez? Most
Speaker 1: likely the other pod that's about to be advertised. I'm
Speaker 1: just saying. If I'm if I'm running y'all's random things,
Speaker 1: usually it's another pod, yeah, or the Koke Brothers. Let's
Speaker 1: hope it's an oil refining. Yeah. Anyway, here it is.
Speaker 1: There's not going to be a single good ad transition.
Speaker 1: We're back. So we just talked about, um, we just
Speaker 1: talked about Fannie Hamer and her her speech at the
Speaker 1: Mississippi Democratic Conference UM, and it caused enough of an uproar,
Speaker 1: and it gained enough national sympathy because it was televised
Speaker 1: that lb J couldn't just completely ignore the m FDP.
Speaker 1: So she gets up and kind of pulls it people's
Speaker 1: human heart strings, like even people, most people are pretty
Speaker 1: racist back then, but they're not inhuman and something like
Speaker 1: that makes them feel terrible, and so they're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe we should seat this delegation, which lb J feels
Speaker 1: he can't do because again he's trying to cow tow
Speaker 1: to the racist contention to the Democratic Party. So he's
Speaker 1: put in this situation where he has to deal with them,
Speaker 1: but he also is not willing to actually deal with them.
Speaker 1: So instead he brings in his vice president, History's greatest monster,
Speaker 1: Hubert Humphrey UM, and Hubert Hubert's job is to deal
Speaker 1: with this problem, which is again, the problem is black
Speaker 1: people wanting to vote without being murder them. Is the
Speaker 1: constitution anyway? On the problem is the Constitution that pesky document? Yet,
Speaker 1: So Humphrey meets with the m f DP delegation and
Speaker 1: he tells them that they're not going to be seated,
Speaker 1: but that the president is willing to compromise by letting
Speaker 1: what he called educated professionals from the group, one of
Speaker 1: whom was white, sit with the Mississippi delegation at the convention.
Speaker 1: Humphrey refused to let miss Hammer sit with the delegation, saying,
Speaker 1: the President will not allow that a literate woman to
Speaker 1: speak from the floor of the conventions. So that's yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: the m FDP, to their credit, refuses to compromise. But
Speaker 1: that wound up not mattering because this was all a
Speaker 1: scheme in the first place. While they were meeting with
Speaker 1: Humphrey l b J. Had the party announced that the
Speaker 1: m f DP had reached a compromise with the Democratic Party,
Speaker 1: the whole thing had been a double cross, so he'd
Speaker 1: put them in that meeting so they wouldn't know that
Speaker 1: this was going on, and then by the time it
Speaker 1: was announced, they have to either spoil the whole convention
Speaker 1: and the election, which obviously matters to them because civil
Speaker 1: rights is on the docket, or like, just let him
Speaker 1: get away with this ship. Um. So l b J
Speaker 1: kind of wins this round. Um yeah, and it sucks, um.
Speaker 1: But what happened there, like the double cross in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty four, was really widespread knowledge, particularly in the black community,
Speaker 1: and it infuriated many people who felt the civil rights
Speaker 1: movement had mainly achieved cosmetic victories. Malcolm X addressed these
Speaker 1: people when he said, quote, now you're facing a situation
Speaker 1: where the young negro is coming up. They don't want
Speaker 1: to hear that turn the other cheek stuff. No, there's
Speaker 1: a new deal coming, there's new thinking coming in, there's
Speaker 1: new strategy coming in. It'll be molotov cocktails this month,
Speaker 1: hand grenades next month, and something else next month. It'll
Speaker 1: be ballots or it'll be bullets. It'll be liberty or
Speaker 1: it will be death. The only difference about this kind
Speaker 1: of death it'll be reciprocal. Yep. Yeah, very famous speech,
Speaker 1: very famous quote. Yeah, ballot and bullets speech man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: resonates too deep. It resonates. And if we're you know there,
Speaker 1: like obviously the story of the white sort of people
Speaker 1: generally referred to as the Founding Fathers, almost all of
Speaker 1: them um were deeply racist. But there is still there
Speaker 1: is this one thing that's really interesting me. There's this
Speaker 1: similarity in sort of the language um, anyone fighting for
Speaker 1: what they perceive as liberty tends to use because Malcolm
Speaker 1: X's ballot of the bullet speech very similar to Nathan
Speaker 1: Hale's liberty or Death speech, um, which is fascinating to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good catchman. You're really astute young man. So
Speaker 1: February six, sixty five, we're going back to Bobby Sealing
Speaker 1: and Hughie Pine Newton. Now, I just wanted to give
Speaker 1: that sort of context of what kind of how frustrating
Speaker 1: and feudal it would have felt to try to do
Speaker 1: this legally and respectably by kind of the mainstream attitudes.
Speaker 1: So February six, nineteen sixty five was a very key
Speaker 1: day for Bobby Seal and Hue P. Newton. That is
Speaker 1: the day that Malcolm X was assassinated by a member
Speaker 1: of the Nation of Islam. Um. This made Bobby so
Speaker 1: angry that he grabbed a bunch of bricks from his
Speaker 1: mother's garden, broke them in half, and started tossing them
Speaker 1: at the cars of any white people who drove by.
Speaker 1: He vowed to make himself into a motherfucking Malcolm X.
Speaker 1: Millions of black folks across the country were incensed by
Speaker 1: Malcolm X's death, and six months after his assassination, the
Speaker 1: Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles was host to something that
Speaker 1: looks very close to a civil war, the Watts Riots. UM.
Speaker 1: And I think riot might even be an unfair term,
Speaker 1: Like legally that's what they were declared. Um, it was
Speaker 1: an uprising. Um. The most direct cause of this was
Speaker 1: the mass murder of black people by the l A. P.
Speaker 1: D UH. Sixty five black men had been murdered by
Speaker 1: Los Angeles cops from January of nineteen sixty two to
Speaker 1: July of nineteen UM. In twenty seven cases, the victim
Speaker 1: was shot in the back. Only one of these murders
Speaker 1: was actually ruled an unjust homicide, though, and this was
Speaker 1: a case where two cops were literally playing cops and
Speaker 1: robbers with real guns and accidentally murdered a newspaperman. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so so no, no, no, I wasna saying, I see
Speaker 1: it's crazy, like today's just one of those heavy days.
Speaker 1: I just left my my great aunt's house, like my
Speaker 1: grandma's sister, and she was just now right before I
Speaker 1: got here, talking about the Watts Riots, and it was
Speaker 1: so it's like the stuff that she's never said, well
Speaker 1: because I never really asked, but like you know, my
Speaker 1: family has been in Los Angeles since the fifties, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. So Um, when she was describing
Speaker 1: the moment of riots, she started dropping these other gems like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know when Jim Crow, because my family's originally from Texas,
Speaker 1: then they moved here. Um said the that LAPD was
Speaker 1: like recruiting from like disgruntled, like Southern once Jim Crow ended,
Speaker 1: Like they were recruiting these like disgrunt old Southern men
Speaker 1: that were like frustrated about Jim Crow and wanted to
Speaker 1: do something about America. So they were coming to be
Speaker 1: a part of law enforcement. So if you feel Compton
Speaker 1: Watts l a with these men who are mad that
Speaker 1: Jim Crow's over, it's a powder keg. Yeah it's gonna explode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's going to explode. Um and it does. Um in
Speaker 1: in during the Watts riots, and the most direct cause
Speaker 1: of the riot itself for the uprising itself was the
Speaker 1: traffic stop of Marquette and Ronald fry Um. Both men
Speaker 1: were pulled over by a highway patrol cop and a
Speaker 1: crowd gathered while they argued with him. Um. The crowd
Speaker 1: got very angry when the police started beating Rena fry
Speaker 1: Their mother with a black act when she came in
Speaker 1: to intervene. So they started beating this this middle aged
Speaker 1: woman with black jack's. Basically, it's like a big leather
Speaker 1: beat stick, I guess is the best way to describe it.
Speaker 1: Um uh yeah, So the Watts riots deserve an episode
Speaker 1: of their own. UM for now. What's worth noting is
Speaker 1: that large numbers of the police would call them rioters.
Speaker 1: I would prefer to call them protesters fired on police
Speaker 1: helicopters with rifles. Um. Huge numbers of guns were stolen.
Speaker 1: The police chief compared the violence to Vietnam, and so
Speaker 1: did black activists on the street who were interviewed by
Speaker 1: journalists at the time. Thirty four people, most of whom
Speaker 1: were black, were killed in the violence, and mostly by police. Now,
Speaker 1: all of this, the failures of conventional politics to provide
Speaker 1: an effective remedy to racism, the death of Malcolm X,
Speaker 1: and the Watts Riot, all of this helped spurge a
Speaker 1: massive surge and revolutionary black activism in the United States
Speaker 1: in the mid nineteen sixties. UM. Now, Huey P. Newton
Speaker 1: and Bobby Seal were already very politically radical UM when
Speaker 1: this happened, and they'd flirted over the years with a
Speaker 1: series of different groups, and including one called the Revolutionary
Speaker 1: Action Movement. Um RAM argued that black people were a colony,
Speaker 1: UM had basically been colonized by American white people, and
Speaker 1: that the struggle for black liberation was part of the
Speaker 1: global struggle against colonialism, which was then happening. You know,
Speaker 1: we're in the post World War two period. All these
Speaker 1: different colonies around the world are starting to either fight
Speaker 1: for their freedom or protest for it. Um and Huey's
Speaker 1: brother Melvin joined RAM, but Hui was kind of frustrated
Speaker 1: by the fact that he felt the organization preferred posturing
Speaker 1: and intellectual discussion to direct action. He became convinced that
Speaker 1: none of these ideological organizations could reach black people on
Speaker 1: the street who didn't have like a thorough grounding in
Speaker 1: political theory. Basically, like what you're talking about I agree with,
Speaker 1: but all you're doing is talking, and you're talking about
Speaker 1: theory that's at such an intellectual level that you're not
Speaker 1: able to reach people who are just like you know,
Speaker 1: living and working sort of at a street level that
Speaker 1: aren't academics. UM and Bobby Seal actually joined RAM for
Speaker 1: a while but he developed basic the same frustrations that
Speaker 1: Hughie did with them, and he wrote about it in
Speaker 1: his autobiography quote, I got very frustrated with those cats.
Speaker 1: I didn't think they were going to do anything, and
Speaker 1: I became very discouraged about being able to work with them.
Speaker 1: They had a lot of paranoid hangups, and they began
Speaker 1: to accuse me of things. They had so many bull
Speaker 1: crap suspicions. I couldn't deal with them, and I broke
Speaker 1: loose from those cats. I got mad at them one
Speaker 1: night and busted down their door. All of them hid
Speaker 1: behind their damn beds. At that point, I couldn't deal
Speaker 1: with them anymore because they wouldn't defend themselves even against
Speaker 1: one little old me. There were four or five of
Speaker 1: them in the pad, but they ran hiding. I just
Speaker 1: didn't respect them anymore. I was thinking to myself later,
Speaker 1: for these dudes, I'm going to find myself a righteous
Speaker 1: partner to righteously run with. See this is terrible, but
Speaker 1: I as right as that is, and as serious as
Speaker 1: this moment is, I only hear that in like my
Speaker 1: dad's friends voices, just like man, I was looking for
Speaker 1: some righteous dudes you know. Yeah, man, these cats they
Speaker 1: weren't even back to revolution. Yeah. Like I said, I'm Dad.
Speaker 1: I would say it. He's like, man, I just need
Speaker 1: to look for dudes I can run. Would be real bad,
Speaker 1: Like all right, Yeah, my dad still talks like that,
Speaker 1: Like what does that mean? Pop? Put that on plane
Speaker 1: and split it Jack? Like what what what does that mean? Dad? Anyway,
Speaker 1: the whole his whole lot of biograph, he's written that way,
Speaker 1: and it's part of way. I really enjoy it because
Speaker 1: it's not something I had much exposure to UM, and
Speaker 1: I enjoy that sort of like the language he uses,
Speaker 1: I like it a lot. Yeah, there's almost poetic cadence
Speaker 1: to it. Yes, yes. Uh So. The partner that Bobby
Speaker 1: Seal wound up finding was Hughey P. Newton. Now, the
Speaker 1: two had known each other for a while and they'd
Speaker 1: always gotten along, but they drifted politically and slightly different
Speaker 1: activist circles UM. But now after the Watts Riots, they
Speaker 1: decided to create a new organization together, the Soul Students
Speaker 1: Advisory Council, and they were the only people who created it,
Speaker 1: but they were two of the founding members UM. Now
Speaker 1: they organized protests against the draft for black students um
Speaker 1: because they felt it like without sort of being treated equally,
Speaker 1: that they shouldn't be expected to fight for the country
Speaker 1: without consenting to in the same way. And they also
Speaker 1: worked to have black studies courses added to Merit college curriculum,
Speaker 1: and in this last one they were successful. He we
Speaker 1: suggested the group should next get involved in fighting police brutality,
Speaker 1: But before this project could really get off the ground,
Speaker 1: Huey and Bobby wound up running straight into some police
Speaker 1: brutality of their own. On Thursday, March seventeenth, nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: and around nine pm, Bobby and hue and their friend
Speaker 1: Weasel were hanging out in Berkeley, walking to the University
Speaker 1: of California campus. Bobby was reciting an anti war poem
Speaker 1: he liked. Uncle Sammy called me fulla lucifer. They drew
Speaker 1: a small crowd to themselves, who urged Bobby to recite
Speaker 1: it more loudly, and a police officer arrived right as
Speaker 1: Bobby sang out these lines, You school my naive heart
Speaker 1: to sing red white and blue stars and stripes songs.
Speaker 1: You school my native heart to sing red, white and
Speaker 1: blue stars and stripes songs, and to pledge eternal allegiance
Speaker 1: to all things blue, true blue eyed, blonde, blonde haired, white,
Speaker 1: chalk white skin with USA tattooed all over, and the officer,
Speaker 1: an off duty cop named George Williamson, tried to arrest
Speaker 1: Bobby Um for this. His justification was that Bobby had
Speaker 1: been blocking the street. This caused a fistfight, which brought
Speaker 1: in more cops, which led to both Bobby and Huie
Speaker 1: being arrested. So from poetry, yaw, yeah, alright, artists write
Speaker 1: the poems. It's it's interesting like that. It says a lot, yeah,
Speaker 1: about the power of poetry that like this scares a
Speaker 1: cop enough that he has to on his off hours,
Speaker 1: he has to get involve more country God darted. Yeah
Speaker 1: what yeah? Uh so next, According to the book Black
Speaker 1: Against Empire quote, a few weeks later, Newton and Seal
Speaker 1: saw a policeman pushing around a black man for no
Speaker 1: apparent reason. The officer arrested the man and took him
Speaker 1: to the station. Following Mark Comfort's example, Newton and Seal
Speaker 1: went to the station and bailed the man out using
Speaker 1: money from their organization's treasury. The brothers started to cry
Speaker 1: and it touched Bobby deeply. Bobby was fed up with
Speaker 1: armchair intellectualizing and wanted to stand up against the police,
Speaker 1: recalling I was filled with a staunch belief of the
Speaker 1: need for brotherhood and revolution and rebellion against the racist system.
Speaker 1: So it was Hughie who first suggested that the s
Speaker 1: s a C Members should arm themselves with rifles and
Speaker 1: shotguns and host an armed rally for Malcolm X's birthday.
Speaker 1: The guns were explicitly to honor Malcolm X's call for
Speaker 1: black people to engage in armed self defense. Um and uh.
Speaker 1: Bobby Seal would write in his autobiography quote who he
Speaker 1: was running Down, that the law says every man has
Speaker 1: the right to arm himself by the Second Amendment of
Speaker 1: the Jyvass Constitution of the United States. He says that
Speaker 1: we are going to exhaust that because in the end
Speaker 1: the man will say, we don't have a second Amendment
Speaker 1: of the Constitution. So Hue saying that, like, we should
Speaker 1: arm ourselves in protest because we have the right to
Speaker 1: do that, but also they're going to strip us of
Speaker 1: our right to carry guns once we start doing it.
Speaker 1: History like and it's that brilliant, Like, um, I know
Speaker 1: the word is so it's such a pregnant word. But
Speaker 1: just like the co opting of language that you you
Speaker 1: same thing Frederick Douglas did with this like fourth of
Speaker 1: July speech of like, he homie, you said, you built
Speaker 1: this thing for liberty and freedom, and this ain't my celebration.
Speaker 1: I don't know what you're talking about. You know know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. He was like, these are your words. You
Speaker 1: said that film that I started this nation because it is.
Speaker 1: And he's like, well, okay, that's those are your words.
Speaker 1: You said all men were created equal. That's what you said.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying. And then right here you
Speaker 1: said every man has the right to bear arms. That's
Speaker 1: what you said in my I mean, what am I
Speaker 1: a martian? Like I have a right to bear arms? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And he we uh thought that the presence
Speaker 1: of firearms would also help to draw in the people
Speaker 1: he called the brothers on the block um more than
Speaker 1: you know, waving protest signs and placards, because a lot
Speaker 1: of those guys were involved with like different like gangs
Speaker 1: and stuff, and they understood guns, and you know, they
Speaker 1: weren't political theorizers. And he was like, this is something
Speaker 1: that I think I can get them on board with UM.
Speaker 1: The other members of the s s a C thought
Speaker 1: this was too risky. Bobby Seal was the only person
Speaker 1: who backed Huey's plan UM, so he and Huey quit
Speaker 1: the s a C And formed a new organization, the
Speaker 1: Black Panther Party for Self Defense in October of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six. And during his studies WHO he had done
Speaker 1: research into the state of California's laws, and he'd learned
Speaker 1: that it was actually legal for Californians to openly carry
Speaker 1: firearms in public, even loaded ones, provided those weapons were
Speaker 1: not pointed at anyone in a threatening manner. And it's
Speaker 1: interesting when you read modern stories about this by like
Speaker 1: mainstream news sources like the Chicago Tribune, they always say
Speaker 1: it was a loophole in the law. It's not a loophole.
Speaker 1: It was just legal law. It was just the law.
Speaker 1: He didn't find a loophole. This is the law. Was
Speaker 1: the law. This is me putting my hands up as
Speaker 1: if I'm holding an actual paper. That's the law. Now.
Speaker 1: This was not entirely Hughey's idea. He'd also read about
Speaker 1: the actions of a group called the Community Alert Patrol
Speaker 1: or CAP over in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: After the Uprising, cap had been formed to watch police
Speaker 1: in black neighborhoods, and capps efforts were incredibly important, but
Speaker 1: their activists were often victimized and abused by the l
Speaker 1: a p D. And some of them had started talking
Speaker 1: about carrying guns during their patrols. So as the Black
Speaker 1: Panthers came together, Hughey's plan evolved. He decided that the
Speaker 1: Panthers would organize armed patrols to follow police officers around
Speaker 1: and observe them during traffic stops. The new Black Panthers
Speaker 1: started doing just this. In February of nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: a group of them, including Newton and Seal, were stopped
Speaker 1: in a car loaded down with rifles and handguns. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote now from a great article in
Speaker 1: The Atlantic titled The Secret History of Guns. Quote. When
Speaker 1: one officer asked to see the guns, Newton refused, I
Speaker 1: don't have to give you anything but my identification, name
Speaker 1: and address. He insisted this too, he had learned in
Speaker 1: law school. Who the hell do you think you are?
Speaker 1: An officer responded, Who in the hell do you think
Speaker 1: you are? Newton replied, indignantly, he told the officer that
Speaker 1: he and his friends had a legal right to have
Speaker 1: their firearms. Newton got out of the car, still holding
Speaker 1: his rifle. What are you going to do with that gun,
Speaker 1: asked one of the stunt policemen. What are you going
Speaker 1: to do with your gun? Newton applied. By this time,
Speaker 1: the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer
Speaker 1: told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at
Speaker 1: them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a
Speaker 1: right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so
Speaker 1: long as they didn't interfere. Newton played it up for
Speaker 1: the crowd in a loud voice. He told the police officers,
Speaker 1: if you try to shoot at me, or if you
Speaker 1: try to take this gun, I'm going to shoot back
Speaker 1: at you, swine, which is the balls on him. Y'all
Speaker 1: wonder why that man on everybody's T shirts talk about
Speaker 1: him all the time, goddamn right, because it's like, I mean,
Speaker 1: like straight up, I mean it's it's I love that
Speaker 1: you're painting the picture of like the totality of the
Speaker 1: cultural moment. A lot of times we see history is
Speaker 1: like these like single file line events that aren't like interact,
Speaker 1: like you're all living the same moment just like now,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. So he put all those
Speaker 1: moments together like nothing. I mean, I grew up in
Speaker 1: I'm l A in the eighties and nineties. I'm like,
Speaker 1: you won't talk to police like that, you know I'm saying, right,
Speaker 1: you feel me? Like this week, you know the streets,
Speaker 1: we was a gang injunctions, like you'll talk to police
Speaker 1: like that, you know. So just seeing that type but
Speaker 1: like these are my right, tell me, like, it's just amazing.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm a tall white guy, so I have
Speaker 1: a certain degree of police shield and I would be
Speaker 1: terrified of talking about police like that. Crazy. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: fucking incredibly, Huey, Bobby and their comrades were allowed to
Speaker 1: continue on without arrest because they hadn't broken the law. Um.
Speaker 1: The whole event left everyone in the car and all
Speaker 1: of the onlookers who had gathered to watch the altercation stunned,
Speaker 1: as we're stunned just talking about it today. Um, it's
Speaker 1: it's just hard to imagine even this happening without bloodshed. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the whole event made Bobby Seal decide that Huey P.
Speaker 1: Newton was, in his words, the baddest motherfucker in the world.
Speaker 1: It convinced Huey of something important too. The gun is
Speaker 1: where it's at and about in Yeah. So uh. This
Speaker 1: spreads through the community like wildfire, and young men begin
Speaker 1: joining the Black Panthers in droves. They're armed. Patrols of
Speaker 1: the police become a regular thing. Um. And you know,
Speaker 1: they have a lot of strict rules about this. You're
Speaker 1: never supposed to be closer than ten feet to the
Speaker 1: officer or the person being stopped. You have law books
Speaker 1: on you at the time. You're quoting directly from them.
Speaker 1: Like they're not just like like there to intimidate the police.
Speaker 1: They're there to give information on rights to the person
Speaker 1: being stopped. Um. Yeah, and so yeah, whenever a black
Speaker 1: person was stopped by the police, observing Panthers would both
Speaker 1: be an armed presence there and would be providing legal advice. Um.
Speaker 1: And as their notoriety spread, so too did the Black
Speaker 1: Panthers UM all across the country. UM and firearms were
Speaker 1: a central facet of their identity. From the beginning, new
Speaker 1: recruits were taught the gun is the only thing that
Speaker 1: will free us. The group purchased rifles by selling copies
Speaker 1: of Mousey Dung's Little Red Book to students in Berkeley.
Speaker 1: Over the years, their arsenal grew to include machine guns
Speaker 1: as well as tens of thousands of unds of ammunition.
Speaker 1: New recruits received training on black nationalism, socialism, and how
Speaker 1: to clean and handle and use firearms. It's also worth
Speaker 1: noting during this period that we talk in my audiobook
Speaker 1: The War and Everyone, we talked a bit about how
Speaker 1: KKK groups, white supremacist groups are easily able to buy
Speaker 1: and smuggle machine guns and other military grade weaponry from
Speaker 1: the army from like racists in the army at this point,
Speaker 1: and the Black Panthers do the same thing from black
Speaker 1: people in the army, Like they're getting machine guns and
Speaker 1: weaponry directly from the military. If I shouldn't share, I
Speaker 1: probably shouldn't share this, but I'm going to all trillion
Speaker 1: of your followers. But like I just found this out
Speaker 1: on Thanksgiving, that like my uncle Charles was like doing that,
Speaker 1: Like he was like he was like selling. First of all,
Speaker 1: he was, like he said, he was selling, like he
Speaker 1: was selling like engine parts in like Munich when he
Speaker 1: was hit. He just like to like civilions, like just
Speaker 1: sell it parts. You're just like selling selling guns out
Speaker 1: of San Francisco, like Uncle Charles. It's like I was
Speaker 1: like what He's like, Yeah, he discharge because he was
Speaker 1: selling weapons. Sorry, sorry is listening? Uh? I mean, statute
Speaker 1: is over. It's Um, it's a situation where there's there's
Speaker 1: a lot going on here. But both the panthers in
Speaker 1: the KKK, not that there's any moral equivalency between the groups,
Speaker 1: but they both suspect that a massive civil war is coming.
Speaker 1: Either it's going to break out or the bombs are
Speaker 1: going to fall in the wake of the nuclear apocalypse,
Speaker 1: there's going to be fighting between um, you know, like
Speaker 1: racists and non racists or black and white, depending on
Speaker 1: your your perspective. Um. And so there's this belief that,
Speaker 1: like we are arming ourselves for a war of survival, um.
Speaker 1: And considering there are thousands of heavily armed racist people
Speaker 1: like Louis Beam who are specifically talking about wars waging
Speaker 1: award extermination against America's blacks, like that's not an unreasonable
Speaker 1: thing to one arm yourself against. And now, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the part that like I really wish people could like
Speaker 1: understand like the tone and ire of the moment, that
Speaker 1: this stuff is not imaginary, Like this is with like
Speaker 1: elected officials you know in certain states or just people
Speaker 1: like him are just like, no, our plan is to
Speaker 1: wipe y'all out. Yeah do you said? Yeah? Oh, you're
Speaker 1: not You're not like you're not like ambiguously racist. You're
Speaker 1: not like kind of Nazi light you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: It's like, nah, now we try to wipe y'all out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you It's like, this is something I come to
Speaker 1: a lot in the modern day. It's like, you can
Speaker 1: your opinions on gun control. Um, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: different attitudes on that. I will listen to them, but
Speaker 1: I can tell you from experience talking to a lot
Speaker 1: of people in a lot of parts of the world,
Speaker 1: when someone wants to exterminate you, there's nothing you'd rather
Speaker 1: have in your hands asolutely, absolutely as again, like for
Speaker 1: like the the invention of the modern day I say
Speaker 1: modern with quotes as a historian of crip and blood,
Speaker 1: like the invention of the street gang is specifically growing
Speaker 1: up in Los Angeles put such a different taste in
Speaker 1: your mouth about guns. You know what I'm saying. So
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, so, like it's hard for me
Speaker 1: to like, you have my father, that's like, no, you're
Speaker 1: what are you talking about? Your civil rights? Man? These
Speaker 1: people finda you know what I'm saying, it's like, look,
Speaker 1: look white, you're gonna come get you, you you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. And then and then you got the streets
Speaker 1: where that's like, if you pull a gun out, then
Speaker 1: that means that, like, yo, I'm not a civilian. Like
Speaker 1: so when somebody stops you and it's like, hey, where
Speaker 1: you from. You know, I'm saying, if I got a
Speaker 1: weapon on me, it's like, oh, oh, you signed up
Speaker 1: for this gang life, you know. But if you don't
Speaker 1: have one, it's like, man, look I'm a square. I'm
Speaker 1: on my way at basketball practice. You know. So with
Speaker 1: that sort of like juxtaposition, it's sometimes it's hard for
Speaker 1: myself to get my brain around it, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. But at the same time, if knowing again
Speaker 1: the context that these people are living in Syria, Mazul,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying, Like, these people who live
Speaker 1: in these contexts, it's like, no, this is not an option.
Speaker 1: And it is also yeah, yeah, it's also like the
Speaker 1: difference between just individual self defense and this idea which
Speaker 1: there's a lot of you know, flaws behind a lot
Speaker 1: of the thinking that occurs in the United States on
Speaker 1: this this subject. You can say statistically like actually, you're
Speaker 1: more likely to be harmed if you have a gun
Speaker 1: in the home. The difference between that individual self defense
Speaker 1: and collective self defense, which is yeah, um, too deep
Speaker 1: a subject to really delve into, very while we're trying
Speaker 1: to delve into the Panthers. But you know what's not
Speaker 1: too deep a subject to delve into? Right now? Here
Speaker 1: we go? What is products? I'm gonna set it, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do, I'm gonna do the best set up? What
Speaker 1: is that Robert product? Uh? And a service which which
Speaker 1: I think we can explain in the context of this episode.
Speaker 1: Off we go. We're back, all right. Um, So, as
Speaker 1: we before, we had our little disgression about community self defense.
Speaker 1: We were talking about the Black Panthers start their civilian
Speaker 1: patrols of the police, armed patrols of the police, um,
Speaker 1: which are very popular, um and very revolutionary. And of
Speaker 1: course the man as embodied by the Republican Party and
Speaker 1: the governor of the state of California and Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: was not in any fucking way about to let a
Speaker 1: bunch of black men exercise their right to bear arms
Speaker 1: and legally observed the police. And I shouldn't just say
Speaker 1: black men, because there were black women involved at this
Speaker 1: point too. Of the black panther party was really the
Speaker 1: ladies because they locked up, autom or killed us. Yeah
Speaker 1: so yeah, yeah, yeah so yeah. Like the the the
Speaker 1: white Republicans, particularly who governed the state, although it's not
Speaker 1: like the white Democrats in the state provided in the
Speaker 1: opposition to this um decide that action needs to be
Speaker 1: taken um. And the guy to do this was a
Speaker 1: ship heel named Don Mulford. A ship heel. I love it.
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you guys, this is another digression. I
Speaker 1: feel like, I don't know, nobody cusses more poetically than
Speaker 1: black people are old black man. Nobody cuss is more
Speaker 1: poetic than him. But the most creative and innovative things
Speaker 1: to call someone come out of the mouth of middle
Speaker 1: aged white man. I just don't know anyone that's just
Speaker 1: fucked hard, like I'm telling you, man, shit stick, like
Speaker 1: what yes, yeah, touchet man. I see, that's why that
Speaker 1: This is why intersectionality is so important. You used to
Speaker 1: learn the best way to cuss. Oh, multiculturalism really improves
Speaker 1: the use of obscenities. It's critical, yes, um so uh yeah.
Speaker 1: Don Don Mulford. Mulford was the community assemblyman for Oakland,
Speaker 1: and in April of nineteen sixty seven, he proposed the
Speaker 1: Mulford Act, a build that would strip Californians of their
Speaker 1: right to carry firearms in public. The Mulford Act was
Speaker 1: a pure act of legal targeting against the black panthers.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote again from that Atlantic article. Quote. Republicans
Speaker 1: in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told
Speaker 1: reporters that afternoon that he saw no reason why on
Speaker 1: the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.
Speaker 1: He called guns a ridiculous way to solve problems that
Speaker 1: have to be solved among people of goodwill. Doesn't read
Speaker 1: that the Republicans now tell that to a cop, right, So,
Speaker 1: I mean that's so funny to me. I'm just like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: not even thirty years ago, not even thirty years ago,
Speaker 1: thirty four years ago. You're saying literally the opposite of
Speaker 1: what you're saying right now, yeah, yeah. In a In
Speaker 1: a later press conference, Reagan says he he doesn't know
Speaker 1: of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun
Speaker 1: to go out into the field or to hunter for
Speaker 1: target shooting who carries that gun loaded. Uh. And he
Speaker 1: says the Mulford Act should work no hardship upon the
Speaker 1: honest citizen. And of course the n r A completely
Speaker 1: backs the Mulford Act. No problem with it at all. All,
Speaker 1: all on board this ship. Appreciate that. I appreciate you.
Speaker 1: Take a second to appreciate that. Somebody dropped some like
Speaker 1: some like spa music right now to appreciate the n
Speaker 1: I was for gun control, to make sure you can't
Speaker 1: carry a loaded weapon. I don't know. I just thought,
Speaker 1: like where you go get the thing is? You know
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about. That's the best part, exactly what
Speaker 1: Hughie Hughey's furious about this, but he's not surprised. As
Speaker 1: I read that quote from him earlier, he'd immediately predicted
Speaker 1: this is going to happen once we start doing this. Um.
Speaker 1: But he carries out a protest. He organizes a group
Speaker 1: of panthers armed to the gills to go march on
Speaker 1: the Capitol Building in Sacramento. Twenty four men and six
Speaker 1: women showed up, led by Bobby Seal. They walked up
Speaker 1: the capital steps guns in hand, and Bobby read a
Speaker 1: speech quote, The American people in general, and the Black
Speaker 1: people in particular, must take careful note of the racist
Speaker 1: California legislature aimed at keeping black people disarmed and powerless.
Speaker 1: Black people have begged, prayed, petition, demonstrated, and everything else
Speaker 1: to get the racist power structure of America to right
Speaker 1: the wrongs which have historically been perpetrated against black people.
Speaker 1: The time has come for black people to arm themselves
Speaker 1: against this terror before it is too late. M After this,
Speaker 1: Seal and the others went inside the building bearing loaded
Speaker 1: firearms the Capitol Building. UM. And they were allowed to
Speaker 1: do this because they were abiding by the law entirely
Speaker 1: in the day proceeded peacefully. UM. And before we move on,
Speaker 1: I think it's worth dedicating a little bit of time
Speaker 1: to how the mainstream media covered all this, and the
Speaker 1: short of it is they were not fans of the panthers. Um.
Speaker 1: The New York Times is coverage of the event which
Speaker 1: I can only read in my old timey white man
Speaker 1: voice om Negros protest gun bill Sorry response to that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: um and now I did find in some credit to
Speaker 1: the New York Times a modern day New York Times
Speaker 1: article that quotes Jane Rhodes, which is a very like
Speaker 1: admitting like, we fucked up and we're very unfair in
Speaker 1: our coverage. Um. And it quotes Jane Rhodes, a professor
Speaker 1: of African American studies, as saying the newspaper was dubious
Speaker 1: and skeptical of them. It also gave them a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of coverage. The media, like most of white America,
Speaker 1: was deeply frightened by their aggressive and assertive style of protest,
Speaker 1: and they were offended by it. And that October two
Speaker 1: thousand sixteen Times article I found analyzing this by Giovanni Rossinello,
Speaker 1: it leans into acknowledging how unfair the coverage was, and
Speaker 1: he writes about the Times his first articles on the
Speaker 1: Black Panthers. What the article did not explicitly say, though
Speaker 1: it was reported later by others, was that the Panthers
Speaker 1: had read a statement that afternoon calling upon the American
Speaker 1: people in general, not just African Americans, to help them
Speaker 1: in their push for rights. The Time sent its own
Speaker 1: reporter a few days later to write a profile of Mr. Newton,
Speaker 1: the party's young co founder. That article was no more
Speaker 1: measured than the first. It barely mentioned police brutality, instead
Speaker 1: lavishing attention on the fact that the Panthers had weapons.
Speaker 1: Political power comes through the barrel of a gun. Newton
Speaker 1: was quoted as saying, so, the journalists who cover this
Speaker 1: ignore police brutality, ignore that, Like, there's a self defense
Speaker 1: narrative here. What do you expect us to do when
Speaker 1: we're being shot. That's one of our rights. Our nations
Speaker 1: founded on the idea that that human beings can arm
Speaker 1: themselves in self defense. That's what we're doing. They ignore
Speaker 1: that necessarily. Look at these black men carrying god, oh
Speaker 1: my god. Yeah. Um so. On July, the racist California
Speaker 1: legislature passed the Mulford Act with the n r as
Speaker 1: enthusiastic approval, and Governor Ronald Reagan signed it in the law,
Speaker 1: so the Black Panthers were thwarted, at least in the
Speaker 1: state of California, from carrying out armed patrols any longer,
Speaker 1: but the organization continued to grow, spreading across the country
Speaker 1: and drawing in thousands upon thousands of members, and as
Speaker 1: the group grew, Huey and Bobby and the other leaders
Speaker 1: expanded the sort of things the Black Panthers did. It
Speaker 1: was not enough to just advocate armed protests in police patrols.
Speaker 1: They needed to mobilize their community and that they felt
Speaker 1: meant helping their community. In the early years, the Black
Speaker 1: Panthers developed a concept they called revolutionary intercommunalism, which is
Speaker 1: something I really think the modern day left needs to
Speaker 1: get it ship together. Oh my god, if you do it,
Speaker 1: yes um PBS describes this as the strategy of building
Speaker 1: community service programs or survival programs. Programs meant to develop
Speaker 1: positive institutions within the community to help individuals meet their needs.
Speaker 1: The Panthers developed over sixties such community programs. Now, these
Speaker 1: community survival programs ranged from the People's Freeshoe and Clothing Program,
Speaker 1: to the Free Plumbing and Maintenance Program, to the Free
Speaker 1: Pest Control Program, to the Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation
Speaker 1: and the People's Free Ambulance Service. Well, the news breathlessly
Speaker 1: covered the Panthers armed marches and their confrontations with police,
Speaker 1: they ignored most of these other programs. One member later,
Speaker 1: a guy named Roger Smith said this. You don't read
Speaker 1: about the survival programs we're doing for the people. The
Speaker 1: free children's breakfast program, trying to feed some of these
Speaker 1: hungry kids before they go off to school in the morning.
Speaker 1: The educational programs we had going on for these kids,
Speaker 1: for the older folks as well. You don't read about that.
Speaker 1: The shoe giveaway, the clothing giveaway, the code giveaway we
Speaker 1: had going on back East so these people don't freeze
Speaker 1: to death during the winter months. The free prison bussing
Speaker 1: program where we bust people from the community out to
Speaker 1: the prison the penitentiary so the people can visit their
Speaker 1: loved ones who are incarcerated. You don't read about that.
Speaker 1: You don't read about the free ambulance service that we
Speaker 1: had going on in Winston Salem, North Carolina, because black
Speaker 1: people in Winston Salem, Carolina were denied basic emergency healthcare.
Speaker 1: You don't read about that. You don't read about the
Speaker 1: free sickle cell anemia testing program, where we tested over
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand, half a million people before the US
Speaker 1: government ever realized that sickle cell anemia was a threat
Speaker 1: to the well being of black people in America. You
Speaker 1: don't read about that. Why because there's no sensationalism, There
Speaker 1: no dramatic value. It doesn't sell newspapers, it doesn't boost
Speaker 1: the television ratings. It's just some black people getting organized
Speaker 1: to help some other black people. Yeah, that's so, that's
Speaker 1: the panthers, I know. Yeah, you know the like which
Speaker 1: I mentioned at the top of the show, that's what
Speaker 1: my father was part of the after school tutor program.
Speaker 1: So like I just know them as people that fed
Speaker 1: us in the morning. I mean obviously not us because
Speaker 1: I wasn't around them, but like fed kids in the morning,
Speaker 1: helped him with their homework after school. And the attitude
Speaker 1: even to this day was like you can't look out,
Speaker 1: you can't look for a handout from your oppressor. Like
Speaker 1: these people ain't gonna help you, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: Like why would you take their money, why would you
Speaker 1: take their services? Because they they they are you're oppressor.
Speaker 1: Therees don't make no sense, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: So like that was his that was always his attitude
Speaker 1: was like, man, find it on your own, Like, man,
Speaker 1: you don't don't look uk owe these people not to
Speaker 1: find it on take care of your own. That was
Speaker 1: always an attitude. Yeah yeah, yeah, that makes a ton
Speaker 1: of sense. Um, there's still sorry, but there's there's a
Speaker 1: few still like like leftover things where just generationally speaking,
Speaker 1: there's like we still have a generational like like gap,
Speaker 1: Like you know, when when I started doing music full time,
Speaker 1: like the label I was a part of was like
Speaker 1: one of my best friends and you know he's white dude, right,
Speaker 1: so my dad still had this like I like, I
Speaker 1: like that boy, but you know, you you you got
Speaker 1: you gotta watched them white men. Now you know. I
Speaker 1: was like, okay, pop, Okay, I mean I get it
Speaker 1: with like I mean it's for instance, high school man,
Speaker 1: like you know what I'm saying, Like I think we're good,
Speaker 1: you know, but but still like he still has a
Speaker 1: little bit of that. I mean he's definitely not the
Speaker 1: same man he was, but he still has that like
Speaker 1: how do you know you gotta you gotta you gotta
Speaker 1: watch them you know what I'm saying that, and they
Speaker 1: don't they really take care of you, you know. I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's not unfair. Yeah, yeah, not unreasonable considering
Speaker 1: like yeah, the time and place and experiences he had,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, and uh, I do think like you
Speaker 1: have to open the story of the Black Panthers by
Speaker 1: talking about armed self defense. The past controls the guns,
Speaker 1: because that is how it it really started. But I
Speaker 1: do think even a lot of like people on the
Speaker 1: left who admire, like particularly white people left to admire
Speaker 1: the Panthers, they focus a lot on that part because
Speaker 1: it is again the most and and not enough on
Speaker 1: what really is the most revolutionary part of the Panthers,
Speaker 1: which is the survival program. Yeah, the the I don't
Speaker 1: know if the book got into it that or maybe
Speaker 1: we'll get to it later, but just the actual like
Speaker 1: provable success rate, you know what I mean of, like
Speaker 1: the provable results like this actually worked. I mean blood
Speaker 1: testing half a million Black people for sickle cell anemia,
Speaker 1: like before the government realizes it's a problem for black
Speaker 1: Like that's huge. That's an enormous effort. That's like a
Speaker 1: state level effort that is is all community volunteer driven.
Speaker 1: It's amazing now by some accounts, the most influential of
Speaker 1: the survival programs was the Free Breakfast for Children program.
Speaker 1: While students were guaranteed a free lunch was part of
Speaker 1: their public education. In nineteen sixty seven, the US government
Speaker 1: spent only six dollars a year on breakfast for students.
Speaker 1: The Black Panthers saw this whole the social safety net
Speaker 1: and realized it was harming Black children more than any
Speaker 1: other group in the country, and so they took action
Speaker 1: to fix this. Now, the communities in which they provided
Speaker 1: free breakfast for children were not all instantly on board.
Speaker 1: The Black Panthers were a revolutionary organization famous for confronting
Speaker 1: police with firearms. People like Minister Bridges of the St.
Speaker 1: Augustine Church in Oakland were initially suspicious when the group
Speaker 1: asked to start meeting and distributing breakfast there, but gradually
Speaker 1: the Panthers won them over and the community rallied to
Speaker 1: provide them with donations of grits, eggs, toast, and milk
Speaker 1: to feed hungry school children. Much of the food was
Speaker 1: donated by local businesses from a mix of ultruism and
Speaker 1: fear of social reprisals by the Black Panthers, and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from Black Against Empire again. At times the
Speaker 1: Panthers cajoling blended into harassment and strong arming. Far more
Speaker 1: common were boycotts and pickets of businesses that refused to
Speaker 1: assist the programs equally common with the tactic of calling
Speaker 1: out or publicly shaming those who refused to help. Churches
Speaker 1: and other community based organizations that refused to help, notably
Speaker 1: those who refused to sponsor or allow breakfast programs on
Speaker 1: their premises, face similar treatment for starters. The Panther newsletter
Speaker 1: and Panther representative railed against the non supportive business person
Speaker 1: or community leader as a capitalist pig. Other epithets included
Speaker 1: religious hypocrites, lying creatures and merchants, and avaricious businessmen. Dang
Speaker 1: cancel cultured since yeah sixties, canceling fools. I mean, you
Speaker 1: know it's I think that's perfectly fair, um, because the
Speaker 1: ultimate goal here is to get kids food, and you've
Speaker 1: got you've got plenty of extra food, Like why are
Speaker 1: these kids starving in the morning, and then you're probably
Speaker 1: complaining about them staying kid, yeah, you know, running your streets.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, they're hungry and you can fix that. Yeah. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: the free breakfast program itself was a mix of pure altruism,
Speaker 1: poor kids needing good food, and also clever propaganda. The
Speaker 1: program highlighted the fact that the richest nation on Earth
Speaker 1: then waging a brutal and expensive war in Vietnam could
Speaker 1: not provide a simple breakfast for all of its children.
Speaker 1: The leadership of the Panthers, who suspected or outright hoped
Speaker 1: in some cases that they might one day wind up
Speaker 1: in an armed revolutionary struggle with the US government, new
Speaker 1: there was a tactical benefit in winning hearts and minds
Speaker 1: this way. One of them noted, well, we might not
Speaker 1: need their direct assistance in waging armed revolution. We were
Speaker 1: hedging our bets that if we did, they would respond
Speaker 1: more favorably to a group of people looking out for
Speaker 1: their children's welfare. Yeah. Yeah. Uh. In November nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: the Black Panthers announced that their program had spread to
Speaker 1: twenty three cities and distributed free breakfast to more than
Speaker 1: twenty children. That number wound up being more like fifty
Speaker 1: thou in minimum um. The law took notice. In Baltimore,
Speaker 1: the police called this program a front for indoctrinating children
Speaker 1: with Panther propaganda. They responded as only law enforcement came.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to quote again from Black Against Empire.
Speaker 1: Police and federal agents regularly harassed and intimidated program participants,
Speaker 1: supporters and party workers and sought to scare away donors
Speaker 1: and organizations that housed the programs, like churches and community centers.
Speaker 1: Sophia Abukari's discovered that participation in one of the Harlem
Speaker 1: free breakfast programs fell off after the police spread a
Speaker 1: false rumor among black parents that the children were being
Speaker 1: fed poisoned food. Police disinformation campaign in Richmond, California suggested
Speaker 1: that the Party used free Breakfast for Children program to
Speaker 1: spread racism and foment school riots. Student participation began to decline,
Speaker 1: forcing local Panther leaders to combat the official disinformation. The
Speaker 1: police were not above raiding breakfast look program locations even
Speaker 1: while the children were eating. In The Baltimore Panther branch
Speaker 1: was comparatively small, but as Judson L. Jeffrey's demonstrates, the
Speaker 1: branch and dirt an excessive amount of violent repression, and
Speaker 1: not even children were spared harassment by the police. One morning,
Speaker 1: the Baltimore police disrupted the children's breakfast, barging menacingly onto
Speaker 1: the premise. A witness recalled they walked around with their
Speaker 1: guns drawn and looked real mean. The children felt terrorized
Speaker 1: by the police. The police were like gangsters and thugs.
Speaker 1: Day yeah, just getting breakfast, homie, just trying to feed
Speaker 1: kidst breakfast. Yeah a while now. Yeah. Eventually the state
Speaker 1: decided that the danger of this propaganda of the deed,
Speaker 1: as I think Bacunan would have called it, was so
Speaker 1: great that the only reasonable response was to start providing
Speaker 1: American children with free breakfasts. By nineteen seventy two, the
Speaker 1: US government free breakfast program had reached more than one
Speaker 1: point one eight million children. The massive upswing and funding
Speaker 1: for this program proceeded directly from Panther activism. Normamat, a
Speaker 1: former Panther, said this in an interview with eater dot com.
Speaker 1: I really do believe that the government expanded their program
Speaker 1: because of the work we were doing. I don't think
Speaker 1: the government wanted to be outdone by a community based organization,
Speaker 1: especially the Panthers. I really think we were very instrumental
Speaker 1: in school food programming. Yo, I'm positive positive that's what happened. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: hey man, what do we It's like, hey, hey guys,
Speaker 1: are these at these are these poor three fists of
Speaker 1: a humans? People out humanizing us? Like what do we
Speaker 1: what do we do it? What are we doing? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's remarkable the amount of fear that was
Speaker 1: generated by the Panther Breakfast program, and in some cases
Speaker 1: it was more than the fear they had as a
Speaker 1: result of the armed confrontations by the Panthers. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: sizeable evidence of this putting ideas in their brains and
Speaker 1: getting in the old skull alister thinking they don't need
Speaker 1: the government at all, saying yeah, we shouldn't have navigated more.
Speaker 1: On nineteen sixty nine, j Edgar Hoover, director of the
Speaker 1: FBI and gigantic piece of Ship, wrote this in a memo.
Speaker 1: One of our primary aims and counterintelligence as it concerns
Speaker 1: the Black Panther Party is to keep this group isolated
Speaker 1: from the moderate black and white community which may support it.
Speaker 1: This is most emphatically pointed out in their Breakfast for
Speaker 1: Children program, where they are actively soliciting and receiving support
Speaker 1: from uninformed whites and moderate blacks. So yeah, I like
Speaker 1: they immediately assume they're uninformed. Yeah, it's like, oh, you
Speaker 1: must not know. It's like not, I know, I know
Speaker 1: what they're doing. Yeah, I know what they're doing. They're
Speaker 1: feeding our kids, feeding the kids. It's just it's just
Speaker 1: feed the kids. Well, you know they're socialists. Well, if
Speaker 1: socialists means means socialism means my kid doesn't start, maybe
Speaker 1: I like socialism. Here's the thing, here's the thing. I
Speaker 1: can't pay for purkfast, and y'are not helping me get it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you caught him. Whatever they want, You got whatever
Speaker 1: you want. I'm gonna come and get some breakfast with
Speaker 1: my children. But you know, it says a lot about
Speaker 1: the state of the government, about the nature of capitalism,
Speaker 1: about the nature of law enforcement that the free breakfast
Speaker 1: program was one of the things that scared the FBI
Speaker 1: director the most. Um. And in part two we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about j Edgar Hoover's plan uh in the
Speaker 1: nationwide law enforcement campaign to take down the Black Panthers.
Speaker 1: Made for you guys to learn this stuff. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: this is a behind the behind the Bastards episode. We're
Speaker 1: not talking mostly about bastards in this one, but you
Speaker 1: need the set up to really understand how shitty the
Speaker 1: bastards are. Yeah. So prop has been the end of
Speaker 1: part one. Um, you want to drop a couple of
Speaker 1: plugs at the end, and we will sail out until Thursday.
Speaker 1: Oh my ad. Yeah. So website is prop hip Hop,
Speaker 1: which is also all of my sort of social media
Speaker 1: handles prop hip Hop. Um, that's for tour dates for
Speaker 1: my own podcast again callhood Politics. I believe politics is
Speaker 1: just gang banging in nice suits. So we just kind
Speaker 1: of like explain your headlines just in gang terms to
Speaker 1: help you understand what's going on. Um and uh yeah
Speaker 1: and yeah, I just hit me on the website and
Speaker 1: the social medias prop hip Hop. And I'm sure folks
Speaker 1: who are listening who are really knowledgeable of the Panthers
Speaker 1: will notice there's some crucial stuff we left out from
Speaker 1: this period we we haven't talked about. Um, some important
Speaker 1: figures we haven't talked about, like the ten point program.
Speaker 1: We're gonna get to a lot of that in part two.
Speaker 1: It's kind of impossible to like do this all chronologically.
Speaker 1: I just kind of had to set it up the
Speaker 1: way it makes I was. I was prepared to before
Speaker 1: you've asked to be on, So I was prepared to
Speaker 1: have like mercy for you because it's such a big thing,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. And it's like, I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure there's other episodes where there were other people that
Speaker 1: were like grossly well familiar with like whatever you're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about it. I just didn't know nothing about you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, So like, like like the R
Speaker 1: Kelly episode, I was like, you didn't grow up on
Speaker 1: nineties R and B. You're not gonna know some deep
Speaker 1: cut things that I know, like man cut the guys
Speaker 1: some slack you know what I'm saying. Anyway, So I
Speaker 1: was prepared to give you. So I'm telling I'll listen
Speaker 1: to to man cut the some slack dag like you
Speaker 1: have saying can't cover everything. Yeah, and we'll we'll get
Speaker 1: to I think a lot of it, uh in part two. Um,
Speaker 1: you know as much as as possible in eleven thousand
Speaker 1: words and two hours and change. But that's gonna be
Speaker 1: on Thursday. You can find all the sources for this
Speaker 1: h on Behind the Bastards dot com. You can find
Speaker 1: me on Twitter at I right, okay, you can find
Speaker 1: this podcast on Twitter and the gram at at Bastards
Speaker 1: pod and that you can buy shirts on Team Public.
Speaker 1: And that's that's the damn episode. Um, We'll be back
Speaker 1: with part two. Oh. I have another podcast that exists
Speaker 1: on the internet called Worst Year Ever. And if you
Speaker 1: want to learn about another community of people who have
Speaker 1: been ignored by law enforcement in the media, react, acting
Speaker 1: to violence, and using community self defense to protect themselves.
Speaker 1: We just did a two part episode UM on a
Speaker 1: chlorine gas attack on a furry convention and everything that
Speaker 1: resulted from that, So I was listening to it on
Speaker 1: the way. That's really good. It's really good. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: really good. Plug. Yeah, it's it's it's really good. Is
Speaker 1: my plug? Yes, it's really good. Double plug. Plug's good.
Speaker 1: Now the episode is actually over.