Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. It's
Speaker 1: the show that you listened to on as a podcast,
Speaker 1: but no one has iPods anymore. Helloa, that you'll never
Speaker 1: thought about that.
Speaker 2: Well. There was a unnamed celebrity that I who I
Speaker 2: had to work with on a podcast at one point
Speaker 2: in time, that kept calling her podcast her iPad and
Speaker 2: I was okay with that.
Speaker 3: I love it.
Speaker 1: I love it for me, it would be my phone cast.
Speaker 1: The voices you've heard include our guests this week, Juan Monique, hooray.
Speaker 3: Hey, I'm still here and I'm really excited because we
Speaker 3: can talk more about breakfast.
Speaker 1: I know. But Okay, before we started recording, you mentioned
Speaker 1: that you say, Joel writes for a bunch of God,
Speaker 1: You've written for everything.
Speaker 3: A lot of places.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you used to write for home improvement shows.
Speaker 3: Okay, so I didn't write for home improvement shows. I
Speaker 3: was a production assistant and an office assistant. Did I
Speaker 3: start an NDA, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was what I was thinking as I'm about
Speaker 1: to ask you this.
Speaker 3: I was like, I'll just say it's one of the
Speaker 3: major ones where everyone seems to have no job but
Speaker 3: a budget of a million dollars. So if you know,
Speaker 3: if you know the show, you know the show. But yeah,
Speaker 3: so I worked for them for years. It was not.
Speaker 1: But what I'm saying, it's chaotic. People should ask Joelle
Speaker 1: for home improvement and redecoration advice.
Speaker 3: I have many thoughts and if I don't know, I
Speaker 3: know somebody who does know. I'll get you the hook up.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah. I finally introduced house plants to my house recently.
Speaker 3: Lovely, do you have a name?
Speaker 1: Some So I always thought I had an opposite of
Speaker 1: a green thumb because when I was an elementary school,
Speaker 1: they were like, it's plant a Tree Day, and they
Speaker 1: like just give you a pine tree and then you
Speaker 1: like take home and you plant it and mine died
Speaker 1: and so then I was like, I don't know how
Speaker 1: to get that stuff for me. Yeah, and I like
Speaker 1: never did it ever again. And then now I'm like
Speaker 1: a prepper and live in the woods and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I need to grow food. Yeah, so right now I
Speaker 1: have some like beans growing and some I think spearmint
Speaker 1: and some other stuff, but I have house plants. Finally,
Speaker 1: I really random shit, I grew some potatoes last year
Speaker 1: because I felt like i'd be a poser if I didn't,
Speaker 1: because we used to like do this whole potato bit
Speaker 1: on the show A lot.
Speaker 3: Potatoes are great. They're they're survivalists. Uh, they will not
Speaker 3: die and they're delicious in many, many, many forms. An
Speaker 3: excellent plant to cheese to grow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what are your house plants? I can't even remember
Speaker 1: the name one spider plant?
Speaker 2: You can't you can't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got like, can't kill ones.
Speaker 3: Okay, industrial strength plants. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But I'm like because I was like, I have a
Speaker 1: I have an anti green thumb, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: kill them. And then I'm like, I actually don't. I'm
Speaker 1: like a reasonably responsible person. I have like a pretty
Speaker 1: set schedule. I don't have a problem watering my plants
Speaker 1: once a week. Like, uh, what if I convinced myself,
Speaker 1: I've convinced myself that I'm incapable of taking care anyway.
Speaker 2: Your your spider plant will be fine. My spider plant
Speaker 2: currently lives on top of my freezer, getting no light
Speaker 2: and I barely water it and remember it's there and
Speaker 2: it looks great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, next time we talk, Margaret, I bet you have
Speaker 3: like nine plants. That's what happened, Like mist missed I
Speaker 3: don't know those miss disperser things are in special lights
Speaker 3: and amazing. I can't wait.
Speaker 1: The other voice that you're hearing is so fie me.
Speaker 2: Now, if you want to talk plants, you you can
Speaker 2: talk to me on the internet about that. I would
Speaker 2: love to talk to you about plants.
Speaker 1: I think that people like because like people like randomly
Speaker 1: tech podcasters to be like, I want to talk to
Speaker 1: you about these very specific things, and they're always the
Speaker 1: wrong specific things. Yeah, yes, especially when people get mad
Speaker 1: at me about mispronouncing. I mispronounced the name of an
Speaker 1: Irish town last week, and no one will let me
Speaker 1: live my life.
Speaker 2: Leave Margaret all about that.
Speaker 3: But Irish love to do that across it. There's multiple
Speaker 3: podcasts I've heard from where they're like trying to say
Speaker 3: something from an Irish space, and inevitably here comes the
Speaker 3: whole school of people be like, that's not it. Your
Speaker 3: language is tricky and we're doing our best.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, I look up so many pronunciations before I
Speaker 1: write these scripts. But I have one week to write
Speaker 1: these scripts, and since I like give myself weekends because
Speaker 1: my my heroes fought and died for those things. Yeah, like, anyway,
Speaker 1: I don't remember why we're talking about that. Oh, but
Speaker 1: you can message us about plants, yes.
Speaker 2: Speaking people who have plants Ian, our editor. I remember
Speaker 2: the first the first time when I interviewed him to
Speaker 2: be like, please work for us. Mostly it was mostly
Speaker 2: me being please pick me, uh and not and then
Speaker 2: not actually interviewing him out he had a plant and
Speaker 2: he knew how to take care of it, and I
Speaker 2: was like, that's what we need.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was all I tend to convince you didn't
Speaker 3: take much graduation.
Speaker 2: Do you understand my basketball jokes? You do? That's the
Speaker 2: life plant anyways are theme songs by un Woman.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks Sophy. He's like, Margaret, you're fucking dropping the ball.
Speaker 1: Also Hien hi Ian Oh yeah, everyone's say it has
Speaker 1: to say hien before we.
Speaker 2: So fun, so fun.
Speaker 1: Okay, So this is part two on a two parter
Speaker 1: about the Black Panther Party and particularly about their survival programs,
Speaker 1: although you can't talk about those without talking about the
Speaker 1: larger movement that they came out of, right, and so
Speaker 1: that's that's what we're talking about today. And if you
Speaker 1: didn't hear part one, then part of part two will
Speaker 1: make sense. But honestly, your life will be better served
Speaker 1: if you go back and listen to part one.
Speaker 3: We had some hot cereal takes, y'all, Like, I mean,
Speaker 3: you really don't want to miss that conversation.
Speaker 1: It's Virus's true. I have I mostly eat oatmeal now,
Speaker 1: well just as fast because I use instant oatmeal because
Speaker 1: I I am not picky. And then like cereal, you
Speaker 1: can put like a banana in right, but oatmeal you
Speaker 1: can put a banana or peanut, butter or nut.
Speaker 3: Your golden raisins in there. You can do extra cinemon
Speaker 3: if that's your dive. Oatmeal is great, especially I think
Speaker 3: when you live in wilderness. I used to live in
Speaker 3: wilderness and you have a hot bowl oatmeal, you feel
Speaker 3: very connected to the land of the people who lived here.
Speaker 3: For this is a meal we've been eating for a
Speaker 3: long time and it still hits. Add a little apple
Speaker 3: in there in the fall stop it amazing good.
Speaker 1: So the survival programs of the Black Panther Party, these
Speaker 1: are their most successful programs, and they started because their
Speaker 1: connections to black religious communities. When I first started this podcast,
Speaker 1: I kind of thought I'd be like, oh, I'm going
Speaker 1: to like write back in all of the like women
Speaker 1: and anarchists and other people who are written out of
Speaker 1: all this history, right, Hell yeah, and I still do that,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to do that here a little bit
Speaker 1: because we're going to talk about both women and anarchists
Speaker 1: and the Panthers. But but the thing that keeps coming up,
Speaker 1: at least as much as anything else, is that religious
Speaker 1: religiosity is also written out of a lot of these histories,
Speaker 1: especially if you're reading it from like a radical point
Speaker 1: of view. A lot of the radical points of view
Speaker 1: are like more atheistic, right, and so like people are like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: the Panthers had this survival program, and if they mentioned
Speaker 1: it's out of church, it's just like ah, because that's
Speaker 1: where there's a building.
Speaker 3: That was the location that would do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there were religious aspects of the Panthers. This is
Speaker 1: not like a majority thing. I'm not claiming there's a
Speaker 1: religious movement. There are religious people who are involved in it,
Speaker 1: whether you have Protestants in Oakland, Black Catholics in Chicago,
Speaker 1: or Yoruba in Islam and the New York Panthers, the
Speaker 1: religious aspects are absolutely a part of it. And Reverend
Speaker 1: Earl A. Neil is a Black episcopal pastor. He's still around.
Speaker 1: I think he lives in South Africa now. He moved
Speaker 1: there in the nineties to help fight apartheid, and he
Speaker 1: walked his first picket line when he was seven years old.
Speaker 1: He was all over the civil rights movement. He went
Speaker 1: to the South to register voters. I think I forgot
Speaker 1: to writ where he's from. He's from the Upper Midwest somewhere,
Speaker 1: maybe Minneapolis, but I didn't write that down. And he
Speaker 1: ends up going to Chicago for a while, and he
Speaker 1: ends up organizing marches. He works to root out racism
Speaker 1: in the episcopal hierarchy. And then he moves to Oakland
Speaker 1: in the late sixties and pretty quickly starts throwing down
Speaker 1: with the Panthers. He never joined formally, but he let
Speaker 1: the panthers meet at his church and they would come
Speaker 1: unarmed in deference to the church right. And one night
Speaker 1: he sheltered some panthers. And I actually think, this is
Speaker 1: my conjecture, I think he saved their lives because cops
Speaker 1: came in force to arrest the Panthers at one of
Speaker 1: their meetings. This is the day before Martin Luther King
Speaker 1: Junior was assassinated, and it is three days before Bobby
Speaker 1: Hutton was murdered, right, it is entirely possible that the
Speaker 1: cops are there to murder the panthers. That does not
Speaker 1: feel outside of the realm of possibility to me at all.
Speaker 1: Reverend Neil went outside and basically it's like you can't
Speaker 1: come in, and they're like, ah, drat, and then they
Speaker 1: leave again.
Speaker 3: They've they met the line of I have to respect
Speaker 3: this figure. The head of a church. God would not
Speaker 3: like that, no matter what the color. It's a bad
Speaker 3: look for me. Wow, what a brave person, because you
Speaker 3: never know some people may not adhere to that that ideal.
Speaker 3: It's crazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he went out alone and he'd like talked them
Speaker 1: down and like had them go away. You know, there's
Speaker 1: like I read his take on the whole thing, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just like first he gets first, he's like, you
Speaker 1: don't need all these cops here if you're just here
Speaker 1: because the cops were like, oh, we're here because we
Speaker 1: heard there was a black man with a gun around, right,
Speaker 1: and like this is just literally not true.
Speaker 3: Right, of course they don't need to tell it.
Speaker 1: They came on it invested. Yeah. A few days later,
Speaker 1: his church held a joint memorial service from Martin Luther
Speaker 1: King Junior and Bobby Hutton and Earl Neil has been
Speaker 1: called the spiritual advisor to the Black Panthers, and he
Speaker 1: wrote about religion for their newspaper. He wrote like four
Speaker 1: different front page articles over the years for them. In
Speaker 1: January nineteen sixty nine, his church, Saint Augustine's Episcopal Church
Speaker 1: in West Oakland started the first free breakfast for children
Speaker 1: program that the Panthers ran. They feeding kids before they
Speaker 1: went off to school, and he helped some write He
Speaker 1: was like part of it. But a parishioner named Ruth
Speaker 1: Beckford Smith gets the real credit is the woman who
Speaker 1: started the most successful program that the Panthers did. I
Speaker 1: actually don't know one way or the other whether she
Speaker 1: was like a registered Panther. But one of the things
Speaker 1: that's kind of interesting, right is the Panthers they peaked
Speaker 1: at about five thousand members, but their newspaper's going, Yeah,
Speaker 1: their newspaper is going to a quarter of a million people,
Speaker 1: and there are like it is a larger thing than
Speaker 1: just the core membership, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the wow yea. Their impact was literally everywhere. At
Speaker 3: some point, I don't know how much longer after this
Speaker 3: they like, spread to New York and really go house national.
Speaker 3: But wow, to do that with just five thousand people
Speaker 3: is very impressive.
Speaker 1: Yeah no. And that's with all of the different all
Speaker 1: of the different chapters. Yeah no. And they changed the
Speaker 1: world with five thousand people. Like m H and so
Speaker 1: Ruth Beckford Smith and Reverend Neil they draw up a
Speaker 1: meal plan. The thing I read didn't tell me what
Speaker 1: was on it. I'm kind of sad for that. They
Speaker 1: cleaned the place so it would pass health inspections, and
Speaker 1: then they opened the doors and the first day they
Speaker 1: had eleven kids. By the end of the week they
Speaker 1: were feeding one hundred and thirty five kids.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: A couple months later, another church in San Francisco opened
Speaker 1: its doors for another breakfast program on the other side
Speaker 1: of the Bay. Before too long, there's thirty six free
Speaker 1: breakfast programs across the country and they're feeding ten thousand
Speaker 1: children a day. That's so beautiful, I know. And these
Speaker 1: programs fucking ruled. They were generally in black neighborhoods, but
Speaker 1: they were open to kids of all races. We're going
Speaker 1: to talk more about their multiracial organizing a little bit.
Speaker 1: When we talk about Chicago one thing that kind of
Speaker 1: blew my mind. A lot of these kids had literally
Speaker 1: never eaten breakfast before.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: That is like wow, it's like every now and then.
Speaker 1: It's like like poverty looks different in different times, in
Speaker 1: different places with different people. Right, But like reading about
Speaker 1: some of the Panther stuff where they're like, these kids
Speaker 1: don't have shoes and have never eaten breakfast, you know, like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the line we're often sold this stuff happens
Speaker 3: in other countries and how sad that is for them. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this is our backyard. It happens here as well. It
Speaker 3: is an issue, it could be easily solved. It sounds like,
Speaker 3: I mean, obviously maximum effort was put in, but it
Speaker 3: was done quickly and efficiently and helped so many people
Speaker 3: so quickly. The bar was not that high. Yeah, that's that. Wow,
Speaker 3: you're giving it their first breakfast. And also when you
Speaker 3: start thinking about the way real community activism creates chain
Speaker 3: reactions of success. You know, we in the last episode
Speaker 3: we talked about the benefits of a breakfast and how
Speaker 3: how much that can just change a kid's ability to
Speaker 3: learn within a day. So you've not only done that,
Speaker 3: but you've also removed a burden from a parental figure
Speaker 3: who probably didn't have the money, who probably knows their
Speaker 3: kid is hungary who you know for whatever, or you know,
Speaker 3: now they don't have to cook it. They don't have
Speaker 3: to like that's in maybe an hour. They get back
Speaker 3: in their day, which you know is vital to caregivers.
Speaker 3: That's amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm really glad you point all that out,
Speaker 1: because there's just so many effects of this instead of
Speaker 1: just being like, oh, it's like some free food, right,
Speaker 1: and people are like, oh, it's some freefes's cool, free
Speaker 1: food's great, you know, and then being like, no, this
Speaker 1: is a this matters, you know. Yeah, And most of
Speaker 1: these free breakfast programs are run by women, both Panthers
Speaker 1: and non party volunteers. At this point, membership of the
Speaker 1: Panthers is about two thirds women. One thing that I
Speaker 1: read was that basically like the Panthers started of mostly men, right,
Speaker 1: and then they very quickly became majority women. And part
Speaker 1: of that apparently is like different people have just different
Speaker 1: takes on it. But one part is that early male
Speaker 1: leadership was on the run in jail or killed, and
Speaker 1: so women came in and got shit done.
Speaker 3: This makes a lot of sense too. I told you
Speaker 3: in the previous episode. I've been reading a lot about
Speaker 3: slaver volts. We know from mostly contextual history, which Margaret,
Speaker 3: I'm sure you're familiar with. But it's trying to read
Speaker 3: between the lines of historical documents to figure out the truth.
Speaker 3: But you know, most of them were led by women.
Speaker 3: And the theory is because, to be honest, they were
Speaker 3: being used for sex and often not chained up, they
Speaker 3: had access to tools, and because they were women, they
Speaker 3: were not considered threats well banned. Now you're shot, what
Speaker 3: you gonna do? You got a revolt on your head? Brilliant.
Speaker 3: So this is not surprising to me at all. If
Speaker 3: we think got the history of black women in this
Speaker 3: country that you know, they took the lead when there
Speaker 3: was an opportunity too, that's amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no it. And there's like and there's like
Speaker 1: complicated conversations that women and the panthers were having around
Speaker 1: like well, why are we in the fucking kitchen right,
Speaker 1: but also like, well, we're going to get this shit
Speaker 1: done because it needs to get done, you know, and
Speaker 1: so like there's this complicated back and forth about like
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, listen, it's so interesting to hear if
Speaker 3: you listen to a second wave feminists, particularly second with
Speaker 3: black feminists struggling with black liberation and women liberation and
Speaker 3: trying to educate the men in their lives while also
Speaker 3: liberating themselves while also dealing with white supremacy. Like it's
Speaker 3: it's such a complex space to exist in. And here
Speaker 3: we have babies that need to be fed. They need food.
Speaker 3: We have the resources to do so why are there
Speaker 3: no men here? The babies have to get fed. We
Speaker 3: don't have time. Totally, what a difficult situation to.
Speaker 1: Be in, totally, And so the way that they spread
Speaker 1: this across the country, they wrote up a manual of
Speaker 1: how to run a kitchen with the stuff that they've
Speaker 1: been learning, and each one of their kitchens at least,
Speaker 1: I don't know if everyone was exactly the same, but
Speaker 1: in the manual, at least it takes ten volunteers and
Speaker 1: including crossing guards outside. Because they took this shit seriously.
Speaker 1: It was like, how do we get kids safely? Like
Speaker 1: there's like people on crowd control and stuff. There's two cooks,
Speaker 1: but it takes ten people to build up everything else
Speaker 1: around that, and the crossing guards was the touch where
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, these people fucking thought it through.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, food.
Speaker 1: And or money for food was donated by various black
Speaker 1: owned businesses. And this is a I think this part's
Speaker 1: kind of funny. It's the part like there's a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff that gets like left out of the histories
Speaker 1: because people want to whitewash something. But like some of
Speaker 1: the things that are a little bit like sketchier, I
Speaker 1: think are just as yeah, you know, like yes, of course,
Speaker 1: so many of the black owned businesses gave super voluntarily.
Speaker 1: Other ones. The panthers were like, man, everyone else around
Speaker 1: here is help and feed the kids who live here.
Speaker 1: Should would be a shame if no one came to
Speaker 1: your store anymore because they knew that you weren't helping out.
Speaker 3: A reasonable and decent threat if I've ever heard one,
Speaker 3: because all you're really saying is I'm going to tell
Speaker 3: people you don't support your community. Yeah, let's find out
Speaker 3: what happens then. That is I mean, that's just justice.
Speaker 3: Like either this is such a good program is actively working,
Speaker 3: and you can come off a few dollars to help
Speaker 3: the kids who were going to come back here and
Speaker 3: frequent your store. At some point get out of here. Amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I read this one like right wing account of
Speaker 1: the survival programs and it was like talking about this
Speaker 1: like boycott of Bob's liquor store. I don't remember what
Speaker 1: city was in. And it was actually specifically that he
Speaker 1: wouldn't donate to the like shoes for Kids program, so
Speaker 1: they organized a boycott against him. And you know, it's like,
Speaker 1: see they're like a trying to suppress this good entrepreneur
Speaker 1: or whatever. And I'm like no, I mean, like, it's
Speaker 1: one thing if someone's like, hey, I need a new car,
Speaker 1: you better give us some money, and it's another guy,
Speaker 1: the kids in this neighborhood don't have shoes. You make
Speaker 1: a lot of money in this neighborhood, maybe you can
Speaker 1: help out. And if you don't, that's fine. No one's
Speaker 1: gonna shop here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're not bringing baseball bats to breaking knees, Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: calm down. I'm also infinity perplexed by the idea that
Speaker 3: somehow being a business owner makes you any kind of good.
Speaker 3: I know, it's such a weird bar for people to
Speaker 3: be like, yeah, you know, he's got a business.
Speaker 1: I can trust that guy. Yeh Neil Okay, yeah, upstanding
Speaker 1: member of the community. Like, all right, whatever you mean.
Speaker 1: He has a nicer house than some of the other
Speaker 1: people in your neighborhood. And the carrot to match the
Speaker 1: Boycott stick was that they gave advertising to their the
Speaker 1: donators in the Panther newspaper. And one thing I got
Speaker 1: really excited about. I really like Jimmy Hendrix when I
Speaker 1: was younger kid. He regularly supported the Seattle program. Like
Speaker 1: I don't think he just like gave them money once.
Speaker 1: I think he was like, he gave regularly. The implication
Speaker 1: is that he's supported the Seattle Free breakfast program.
Speaker 3: That's oh, man, you love you love to hear your
Speaker 3: heroes doing dope shit. Yes, Like when you talk to
Speaker 3: women who hung around Jimmy, they're like, no, he was
Speaker 3: a sweetheart. He just loved He just loved women, and
Speaker 3: they just loved him. And he had survived a bunch
Speaker 3: of horribly abusive men and so he just loved women.
Speaker 3: And I was like, what an.
Speaker 1: Ica, that makes me so happy. That's the like, whenever
Speaker 1: there's like a man I look up to, I'm like,
Speaker 1: do I want to know? Do I want to read
Speaker 1: about what women think of him?
Speaker 3: It's definitely closed eyes in mouse situation where you're just like,
Speaker 3: I don't want to look. If it's presented to me,
Speaker 3: I will observe, but I would just can I I
Speaker 3: just really want to believe you're a good person. But
Speaker 3: also I'll just never support a man verbally. I'll never
Speaker 3: be out here being like and this guy you can trust,
Speaker 3: No trust you, but.
Speaker 1: You know what you can trust as well as you
Speaker 1: can trust it a random stranger, eh is good Advertisers,
Speaker 1: We're brought to you today by breakfast. Eat breakfast. If
Speaker 1: you don't eat breakfast, maybe you have reasons and you
Speaker 1: don't want to hear about why you should. And I maybe.
Speaker 2: Definitely eat yeah one of my favorite meals.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but eat food when you're hungry. That's the only advertiser.
Speaker 1: And if any others slip in, that is a mistake.
Speaker 1: And you can write to our complaint department at I write,
Speaker 1: Okay on.
Speaker 2: X, I'm gonna keep calling it Twitter.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm almost like being ruder to it
Speaker 1: by calling it X because I'm like, this fucking bullshit thing.
Speaker 3: Here's zero SEO for your website. I was gonna type
Speaker 3: in X. Yeah, you still have to type in Twitter
Speaker 3: dot com endlessly confusing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, andlessly confusing. Anyway, here's breakfast and we're back. So
Speaker 1: all the cop watching an arms standoffs and shit. They
Speaker 1: appealed to one chunk of the black population, the more
Speaker 1: confrontational chunk. The free breakfast program made a much wider
Speaker 1: group of people into panthers and their supporters. One in
Speaker 1: three black kids in the city of Minneapolis ate their breakfast.
Speaker 1: There about twelve thousand kids total.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, oh my little heart.
Speaker 1: School administrators immediately noticed students doing better, and they didn't
Speaker 1: have to wait decades. Now we have science to back
Speaker 1: this up. But like administrators would just like come in
Speaker 1: and be like, you all are doing the fucking lord's work.
Speaker 1: I guess most people don't say fucking lord's work. People
Speaker 1: usually say one or the other.
Speaker 3: The real ones do, Marge, the real.
Speaker 1: They were like, the kids aren't falling asleep in class anymore,
Speaker 1: and like not everyone's grouchy all the time. Right, And
Speaker 1: I'd heard about this program time and time again. Right,
Speaker 1: this looms very large in the radical history of the
Speaker 1: United States, and for very good reason. I actually skirted
Speaker 1: around the panthers and like probably a dozen episodes at
Speaker 1: this point. So, and there were some things that people
Speaker 1: would say about the breakfast program that I wasn't sure
Speaker 1: if we're true. People were like, oh, the free breakfast
Speaker 1: program was really what scared the government way more than
Speaker 1: the armed marches. So I looked it up. Yep, that's true.
Speaker 1: Women's work scared the shit out of the FBI because
Speaker 1: it made the panthers look good. It showed that very
Speaker 1: clearly that the existing system was not functioning. Right to
Speaker 1: quote FBI Director j Edgar Hoover, who'd already announced that
Speaker 1: the panthers were the number one domestic threat to US security,
Speaker 1: which is impressive, five thousand people, right, he said about
Speaker 1: the breakfast programs, quote, the program represents the best and
Speaker 1: most influential activity going for the BPP, and as such
Speaker 1: is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to
Speaker 1: neutralize the BPP to and destroy what it stands for.
Speaker 3: Feeding black children. I hate it, Yeah, so evil, definitely
Speaker 3: the thing that could bring this great nation to her knees. Yeah, well,
Speaker 3: fed children in school? You yeah, cowardly bitch. Just oh,
Speaker 3: it's so. It's so. When you there's a TUPAC documentary,
Speaker 3: it's a series on Hulu Stay with Me his mother
Speaker 3: as I'm sure you know, maybe we get into her later,
Speaker 3: member of the Black Panther.
Speaker 1: She's come up a couple of times, and she's going
Speaker 1: to be in one of the court cases I'm gonna
Speaker 1: talk about.
Speaker 3: Later, Okay, so i won't get into her, but there's
Speaker 3: a clip she is fucking epic and was still her
Speaker 3: dying day, like amazing human being. She raised her son
Speaker 3: in the Black Panther Party. He was sort of being
Speaker 3: raised to be a leader in the Black Panther Party.
Speaker 3: This documentary explores a lot of that, but within it,
Speaker 3: there's this clip of them, a bunch of like young dudes,
Speaker 3: teachers maybe in their mid thirties, talking to very young boys,
Speaker 3: like seventy nine macs, and they're asking them how old
Speaker 3: are you? Maybe I'm six, No, you're not five. You
Speaker 3: know I'm six, And they're like, no, you're five, okay five.
Speaker 3: They're like don't no, no, They're like, don't let someone
Speaker 3: change the way you think. Don't let someone. They're teaching
Speaker 3: them about how they're going to be conditioned and giving
Speaker 3: them tools so early to navigate, like a system that
Speaker 3: they like. It's crazy to be a black parent. I
Speaker 3: can't imagine doing it myself to like, know, you don't
Speaker 3: have to send your kids out into a society that
Speaker 3: actively hates them. To have a Black Panther Party that
Speaker 3: is doing a lot of the work that is often
Speaker 3: left to parents. Be like, here's how you think your
Speaker 3: way out of racism actively in a moment, Because when
Speaker 3: you experience an act of hate or prejudice, a lot
Speaker 3: of times your system shuts down. You really have to
Speaker 3: be trained to use the tools to survive. And the
Speaker 3: Black Panther Party by creating a space like the Breakfast
Speaker 3: program that could allow children to gather safely before school,
Speaker 3: and then having these people in there who are educated
Speaker 3: and prepared to teach them about how to navigate those systems.
Speaker 3: I mean it, it's so crazy to think about how
Speaker 3: that was demonized, how efficiently and effectively that was demonized,
Speaker 3: and to see it so happening lely across this country.
Speaker 3: The way they're trying to rewrite the laws of what
Speaker 3: can be taught at school and things like that. Oh,
Speaker 3: it's sickening and it's hard. It's hard to hear about
Speaker 3: all these lovely things knowing you're still fighting these fights
Speaker 3: and trying to get these very basic programs that clearly worked.
Speaker 1: I know, like instilled. And it's like, if teaching people
Speaker 1: the truth about race relations in America destroys America, then
Speaker 1: America deserves to be destroyed.
Speaker 3: Two thousand percent. If you have to hide the truth
Speaker 3: to be comfortable, then what have you sacrificed? It's not
Speaker 3: worth it. And also it's only creating comfort for you.
Speaker 3: Literally nobody else is comforted by information. It's so damning
Speaker 3: and hurtful. It is trying to imagine being an educator
Speaker 3: or an institution of learning in Florida right now, and
Speaker 3: my heart is just with them. Whatn'n uphill battle?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I honestly can't imagine. And then there's like everyone's
Speaker 1: being like, oh, if you'r trends, you got to get
Speaker 1: out of Florida. And it's like most of us are poor,
Speaker 1: and like, do you know an awful lot of us
Speaker 1: like not me, I'm a good family that loves me.
Speaker 1: A lot of us are like kicked out of our
Speaker 1: families and don't have like things to fall back on,
Speaker 1: Like how the fuck do you think all the trans
Speaker 1: kids are supposed to like leave Florida?
Speaker 3: You know, I also think, fuck you if you tell
Speaker 3: people to leave the South is of a the problem
Speaker 3: is consistently it's only congregated there. This is a national problem,
Speaker 3: not a specific Southern problem. And on top of that,
Speaker 3: we know that like Florida has a huge queer population,
Speaker 3: a huge queer population of people. Yeah, you're just loving
Speaker 3: and having families down there, and many of them have
Speaker 3: been redlined out of existence in the same way that
Speaker 3: they do with black, brown indigenous people. So to tell
Speaker 3: people like, oh, just leave, like the problems won't follow them,
Speaker 3: Like they haven't made a home here, Like they don't
Speaker 3: deserve to stay in Texas or Louisiana or wherever they
Speaker 3: feel like is their home. It's just crazy to me
Speaker 3: to be like huge change, not those fuckers change.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, and if people do you know, like I've
Speaker 1: always been like, look, if you feel like you gotta
Speaker 1: leave for safety, leave for safety. If you feel like
Speaker 1: you're going to stay and fight because you have no
Speaker 1: choice or because you want to full support support people
Speaker 1: who stay, support people who go. Just support people who
Speaker 1: are fucking dealing with oppression, you know, And like yeah,
Speaker 1: but like, no teaching the actual truth about history in
Speaker 1: this country it's just like if.
Speaker 3: You slavery had a positive effect.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, and then like everyone that they list
Speaker 1: with like learned their trades after whatever.
Speaker 3: Anyway, I just yeah, no, just the lack of logic,
Speaker 3: the lie. Does you want people to swallow?
Speaker 1: Do you think that they'd be okay with it? You know,
Speaker 1: like being like, oh, okay, then like let's say people
Speaker 1: get mad of me no matter what I say about this,
Speaker 1: but like you know, like, oh, let's enslave you. Then
Speaker 1: would you want to be enslaved? No, you wouldn't. Then
Speaker 1: shut the fuck up if you.
Speaker 3: Right right, there's you can't spin being owned. There's they
Speaker 3: have spin on it. It is a crazy thing to
Speaker 3: tell someone, Hey, it was fine that we owned people
Speaker 3: they liked it, wasn't. I have a statement from a
Speaker 3: white person about his black slaves, because we have actual
Speaker 3: tapes from actual people, most of whom were enslaved as children,
Speaker 3: who were telling the stories about how they grew up
Speaker 3: in slavery, and even the ones who were like yeah,
Speaker 3: he was all right, We're still like it was a
Speaker 3: horrible institution to have to live under, and I fucking
Speaker 3: hated it. And you can't get past the idea that
Speaker 3: someone owns every decision. You can't move past it, you
Speaker 3: can't do anything like that is a bananas thing to
Speaker 3: try to sell. It is them so absurd, it is
Speaker 3: beyond and it's like, and you, what's really mannening is
Speaker 3: like I hate middle the real white folks who are
Speaker 3: like they're learning or that just happens over there, or
Speaker 3: they don't know what they're saying. They know exactly what
Speaker 3: the fuck they're saying. It's like there's not any confusion here.
Speaker 3: It's being done very on purpose. They're not stupid. This
Speaker 3: is what they want. It is so infuriating. I can't
Speaker 3: believe we don't. I can't. I don't know how we
Speaker 3: get the Black Panthers back in working shape. It's just,
Speaker 3: I really, community activism is so hard. It's so it's
Speaker 3: such uphill battle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because I think that a lot of the systems
Speaker 1: that they use to crush the early seventies movements, like
Speaker 1: I think that capitalism is like really good at recuperating things,
Speaker 1: and it's really good at like finding and patching its weaknesses,
Speaker 1: you know, and so like often the same kind of
Speaker 1: thing is not necessarily effective. Although there's so much we
Speaker 1: can still like learn and like, you know, keep trying,
Speaker 1: because even like things like the Black Panthers, people kept
Speaker 1: trying them over and over and over again. It wasn't
Speaker 1: like huey Phwton and Bobby Seel were the first people
Speaker 1: who were like, hey, what if we just get some shotguns.
Speaker 1: It's our phone cops around right now, and.
Speaker 3: We see activism frequently. The other problem I think is
Speaker 3: activism has horrible pr like like trying to show people
Speaker 3: like it's weird. People are like, oh, we had a
Speaker 3: movement in twenty twenty and now it's over. And I
Speaker 3: was like, I would just like you to know there
Speaker 3: are people actively fighting on your behalf. Many of them
Speaker 3: have gotten into small and local government. Call yeers and
Speaker 3: find out who's working there, looking about like active work
Speaker 3: is happening all around you. But it's just it's so
Speaker 3: hard to see and progress is so egregiously slow that
Speaker 3: it's yeah, I think it gets missed a lot, but
Speaker 3: I do think a lot of positive things are happening.
Speaker 1: It's slow and then it's fast, right sure, And it
Speaker 1: can't do the fast if you're not also putting in
Speaker 1: the work. Like it's like every time you go out
Speaker 1: and do some activist thing, whatever type of organization. Most
Speaker 1: of the time you live a quiet, poorly paid life
Speaker 1: where you do harm reduction in your community. And every
Speaker 1: now and then it's the spark of that changes everything,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, yeah, and yeah, okay, so I want
Speaker 1: to figure out where I'm at my script. But so
Speaker 1: this is the most successful of They have about sixty
Speaker 1: different survival programs going, and these are eventually called survival programs,
Speaker 1: they don't actually start that way. The first one, I
Speaker 1: believe is the pre Breakfast program, and the concept here
Speaker 1: is survival pending revolution because one of the things I
Speaker 1: actually don't want to leave out of it is that
Speaker 1: they are their Marxist organization. They're a communist organization. Not
Speaker 1: everyone involved has the same ideological headspace, but the organization
Speaker 1: is structured in that way and actively pushing for this.
Speaker 1: And so they are pushing to have a revolution in
Speaker 1: the United States, and they're part of the New Left,
Speaker 1: which is fighting for a revolution in the United States.
Speaker 1: But they realize that's not going to be overnight, Like
Speaker 1: what kind of we're just talking about. They're fighting for
Speaker 1: survival pending revolution. Is there? The way that they phrase
Speaker 1: the survival programs basically, it does no good to overthrow
Speaker 1: capitalism if everyone's debt already, right, And they did so
Speaker 1: many things. They led blood drives for local hospitals. They
Speaker 1: opened free medical centers. They did door to door sickle
Speaker 1: cell anemia testing. They did free grocery delivery, they did
Speaker 1: prescription delivery services, especially for like older folks. They had
Speaker 1: the free Shoes for Kids program. They had volunteer ambulance services. Like, fuck,
Speaker 1: we got to bring that back.
Speaker 3: No one, I like, I mean, good lord, that would
Speaker 3: be helpful.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Do you ever see the like the thing where
Speaker 1: they at like a camera person from the US like
Speaker 1: asks a random British person like how much they think
Speaker 1: an ambulance costs?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And they're always just completely bowled over. They're like,
Speaker 3: what my favorites. When they get to like, and how
Speaker 3: much you think it costs to have a baby in America,
Speaker 3: they're like four point fifty oh sweet summer child. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so much higher?
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh god. Soon they start their own schools, and
Speaker 1: I started, I think with after school programs, but eventually
Speaker 1: they have what they call Liberation schools. One of their
Speaker 1: elementary schools. In nineteen seventy seven, the governor and the
Speaker 1: legislator legislature of Hell Tifornia gave it an award for
Speaker 1: quote having set the standard for the highest level of
Speaker 1: elementary education in the state. And it's worth a.
Speaker 3: Horrible organization that will bring America to his knees. Yeah,
Speaker 3: just get oh yeah boy, yeah.
Speaker 1: Exactly If America's brought to this knees by teaching kids
Speaker 1: the truth.
Speaker 3: Best educated, why do you not want to duplicate this?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: That is wow? All right, here we go.
Speaker 1: And so this is like literally the state of California
Speaker 1: being like, oh, actually, y'all fucking rule and needed really well.
Speaker 1: And nineteen seventy seven is after the Panthers had mostly
Speaker 1: collapsed as an organization. Yet the survival programs actually often
Speaker 1: outlived the organization that spawned them, which is another thing
Speaker 1: that gets forgotten about about activism is that everything you
Speaker 1: do has knock on effects. Right. Yeah, in Oakland, the
Speaker 1: Panthers started this is one of my favorites. That they
Speaker 1: started Seniors against a fearful environment or safe And what
Speaker 1: was happened was that older folks would go to cash
Speaker 1: their pension checks and kept getting mugged. I think at
Speaker 1: the time it was like almost half of the people
Speaker 1: getting mugged were senior citizens Jesus Christ. So the Panthers
Speaker 1: escorted them to and from the bank. And that's an
Speaker 1: example of community defense if I've ever seen one.
Speaker 3: You know, such a lovely act. It's so simple and helpful,
Speaker 3: and you get to meet an old person who always
Speaker 3: have great stories. You know, Oh that is wonderful. You
Speaker 3: like that one.
Speaker 1: And then one of the things, now i'll script again
Speaker 1: one of the things that the Panthers did. And actually
Speaker 1: some of this I run across from like the right
Speaker 1: wing people hate them because you find out different shit
Speaker 1: by reading the people who support them and the people
Speaker 1: who hate them. And obviously both of them are biased
Speaker 1: as shit, right, yes, and I'm bias as shit. I'm
Speaker 1: overall like them. I have organizational critiques of their structure
Speaker 1: whatever anyway, but like it's just be upfront my own biases.
Speaker 1: But they they were often recruiting from what in Marxist
Speaker 1: terms you'll call the lump and proletariat rather than like
Speaker 1: the workers, you're recruiting like the criminals and the like
Speaker 1: unemployed and the people who don't exist very well within
Speaker 1: the existing economic system. And so like the fact that
Speaker 1: you're getting all of these people who like sort of
Speaker 1: just like used to run around and do crime are
Speaker 1: now escorting folks to the bank. And they're using all
Speaker 1: the same skill sets right like they might have used
Speaker 1: to mug people, you know, and like what an what
Speaker 1: a clearly better system than prisons is like get all
Speaker 1: the people who do this to use their skills, like
Speaker 1: keep people safe.
Speaker 3: You know, when you can empower, especially when we know
Speaker 3: most crime happens at a like destitution, like absolutely to eat,
Speaker 3: I need to believe myself, I am yeah, need of
Speaker 3: mental services whatever, when you can empower someone to say, hey,
Speaker 3: I see you, I see your skill set. I'll employ
Speaker 3: you or give you a purpose, and like you invite
Speaker 3: them back into society, which is such a beautiful way
Speaker 3: of healing. If I may just plug. Oya Sharill's who
Speaker 3: is a community activist and a survivor of crime, has
Speaker 3: this amazing true crime podcast called Survivor's Heel. Instead of
Speaker 3: focusing on the crime and the perpetrators, focuses on survivors
Speaker 3: and what healing actually looks like. And in it, I
Speaker 3: think one of her very first episodes, like her first
Speaker 3: or second one, she has the sister of a murderer
Speaker 3: victim talk to her brother's murderer. They have a full conversation.
Speaker 3: It's so powerful, and they talk about way she's like,
Speaker 3: you going to prison and does not heal the hurt
Speaker 3: I have. It doesn't do anything for me. And so
Speaker 3: it's yeah, And I also think that's the core of
Speaker 3: all great activisms is we are a community. We are
Speaker 3: not looking for stand out individuals or superstars or people
Speaker 3: like none of that matters. We're all people. What skills
Speaker 3: you can tribute and how can you help essentially or
Speaker 3: how can we help you, whatever the case may be. Yeah, Oh, Lorias.
Speaker 1: There's this thing again. I'm completely on script now, so
Speaker 1: if I get details wrong, I'm sorry. There's this book
Speaker 1: I really like called Angels with Dirty Faces by Wilita
Speaker 1: and Marisha, and it's an abolitionist perspective on you know,
Speaker 1: it's conversations with three different prisoners, and in it she
Speaker 1: talks about like, as she did the work, you know,
Speaker 1: like many black like almost all black people in America,
Speaker 1: she was robbed of her knowledge of her ancestry and
Speaker 1: all of those things. And she's done a lot of
Speaker 1: work around that. And I don't remember the name of
Speaker 1: the culture that she comes from. And I'm sorry Wilda
Speaker 1: if you're listening, but she talks about this thing that
Speaker 1: really stuck out to me is like when when someone
Speaker 1: did something wrong in the culture that she learned she
Speaker 1: was from, you know, they would take the person who
Speaker 1: had done wrong and they set them up against a tree,
Speaker 1: and then one by one people would come up and
Speaker 1: say really nice things about that person and basically just
Speaker 1: shame them into being better. Being like you can be
Speaker 1: your best self instead of your worst self.
Speaker 3: You know, talk about healing. I mean, pray people hurt,
Speaker 3: people like and you give them space to lift them
Speaker 3: up and show a whole community people hate and we
Speaker 3: see you, we see all of the good. They like,
Speaker 3: why did this happen? Happen? We help so it doesn't
Speaker 3: happen again. You don't have to do these things to
Speaker 3: feel love or be seen or have what you need. Uh.
Speaker 3: I love community so.
Speaker 1: Much, but you know this isn't Ana transition. You know
Speaker 1: hates community.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: The FBI, Oh, they really fucking do. So they flip
Speaker 1: out about the survival program, especially the breakfasts, and they
Speaker 1: go crazy overboard into as much as they can. They
Speaker 1: spread rumors that the food is poisoned. They regularly rated
Speaker 1: the feedings as an intimidation tactic. And the thing to
Speaker 1: remember about that that means their goal, their specific goal
Speaker 1: is to traumatize children. Yeah, the Panther's goal was to
Speaker 1: feed children. And so yeah, anyway, so the FBI would
Speaker 1: forge letters to send to food donators to get them
Speaker 1: to stop. I don't entirely know what these look like.
Speaker 1: If FBI would forge all kinds of letters during this period, right,
Speaker 1: it could be like, hey, we don't need you anymore,
Speaker 1: or like fuck you, we hate you. Signed the Black
Speaker 1: Panthers your number one enemy. They went door to door
Speaker 1: telling parents that the Panthers were going to turn their
Speaker 1: kids into racists. And like, I think that this is
Speaker 1: again I'm going to talk about their multiracial organizing minute,
Speaker 1: the Panthers. I believe that the way we've currently defined
Speaker 1: racism as like involving both bigotry and societal like systemic advantage, right,
Speaker 1: means but like, the Panthers were really explicitly not anti white. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were anti white power, which is what we live
Speaker 1: in right now. M So this is just completely a lie,
Speaker 1: right and whatever. Anyway, in Chicago, the cops to quote
Speaker 1: one Panther quote. The night before the first Breakfast program
Speaker 1: in Chicago was supposed to open, the Chicago police broke
Speaker 1: into the church, mashed up all the food and urinated
Speaker 1: on it.
Speaker 3: It's impossible to imagine holding that much hate for children, Yeah,
Speaker 3: in your heart. Yeah, he on the food that was
Speaker 3: meant in your ash then, like it's I can't I
Speaker 3: literally couldn't imagine doing that to like my if I
Speaker 3: had an enemy and they had a child that I
Speaker 3: just it's impossible to house. And you understand uh Tupac's
Speaker 3: thug life mentality so much more when you think about
Speaker 3: that being an environment in which he grew up, When
Speaker 3: you think about seeing that up close and personal from
Speaker 3: a very young age. I am both glad I was
Speaker 3: shielded from it and uh set it took so long
Speaker 3: to learn about it, and it makes I feel like
Speaker 3: it makes things a lot clearer unfortunately.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just how much the FBI hated the Black community, you.
Speaker 3: Know, our children, our feet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And this reminds me of how the Border Guard
Speaker 1: today regularly goes and slashes up water drops left for
Speaker 1: people dying of thirst in the desert.
Speaker 3: Goddamn razors on booies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the fucking like, was it yesterday or something that
Speaker 1: we learned that the murder booies, which we're already murder booies,
Speaker 1: and then we have like random circular saw blades on them, like,
Speaker 1: which is just like it's like when you put a
Speaker 1: skull on your mad maximobile, you know, yeah, like it's
Speaker 1: just a way. Yeah, and by the way, this is
Speaker 1: to murder.
Speaker 3: Also, we really really hate you, like just so you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is I just.
Speaker 3: Again, I just can't I can't fathom, uh, feeling so
Speaker 3: entitled that I would be like it is worth your life,
Speaker 3: which essentially makes me a murderer. I'm sorry. If you
Speaker 3: install these things, you are complicit in murder.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I mean that's true. In legally, if you set
Speaker 1: up a booby trap in your house, you are responsible
Speaker 1: for the harm caused by that booby trap, Like it
Speaker 1: is not legal to set up booby traps that hurt people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is an existing legal structure, oh.
Speaker 3: Boy, and just for people trying to find some clearer,
Speaker 3: some place safe to be. Uh, that's cool. I don't
Speaker 3: understand how you don't see that makes you the devil,
Speaker 3: Like I, yeah, I don't understand that you can be like, no,
Speaker 3: I'm definitely right for this. It's fine if you're like, no,
Speaker 3: I am the devil and I enjoyed. Okay, yeah's who
Speaker 3: you are, and I'm glad we're all aware of it.
Speaker 3: You're like, this is the best thing we can do
Speaker 3: as human beings. This is the best possible solution to
Speaker 3: the problem as I see it. Insane, insan.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this did not stop the free breakfast programs.
Speaker 3: Of course, it fucking didn't. We have to feed children.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they didn't stop until the panthers themselves were stopped,
Speaker 1: and in some cities the programs outlived the panthers themselves.
Speaker 1: And then one of the major lasting impacts of the
Speaker 1: program is that it embarrassed the federal government into setting
Speaker 1: up their own They had in nineteen sixty six. They
Speaker 1: like originally set up like maybe we should feed kids thing,
Speaker 1: but they didn't like do it.
Speaker 3: They follow through. They're like, we should do that, but
Speaker 3: how and where would that money come from? And we'll
Speaker 3: get a committee to figure it out. In five years,
Speaker 3: it's fine.
Speaker 1: It took them nine years. In nineteen seventy five, Shit,
Speaker 1: the federally funded school breakfast program was launched.
Speaker 3: Mother fucker not we had a teenpoint and these things
Speaker 3: set up in less than a year. What do you
Speaker 3: take seventy thousand kids fed in a single year, and
Speaker 3: they're like, it'll take us nine damn you government, What
Speaker 3: the fuck?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Oh my god. But if you want not free breakfast,
Speaker 1: you could buy it. If one of the ads you
Speaker 1: hear is for a meal kid, Yum yum, o's get you.
Speaker 3: Some's back to Cereal.
Speaker 1: Here's some ads.
Speaker 2: And we're back. Okay.
Speaker 1: So there's another part of the Panthers organizing that I
Speaker 1: don't think has talked about enough because of the the
Speaker 1: story gets told of the like, oh, there's some like
Speaker 1: gun wielding people who are like pretty cool in some
Speaker 1: ways and bad in other ways, and they all like
Speaker 1: and I don't know whatever this is. This very simplified
Speaker 1: story doesn't talk about another thing that scared the shit
Speaker 1: out of the government, which was interracial and cross cultural organizing.
Speaker 1: And this is exemplified most clearly in the Chicago chapter,
Speaker 1: and specifically it's leader Fred Hampton. Whether or not that's like,
Speaker 1: truly well, Fred Hampton fucking ruled. I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: downplay that. Obviously, other people working were also all part
Speaker 1: of this and sometimes only individuals are remembered. But it's
Speaker 1: not like he's trying to accrouve social credit spoil alert.
Speaker 1: He dies, but he was murdered. Yes. Yeah. On April fourth,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, three groups came together and started the
Speaker 1: Rainbow Coalition. It was the Black Panthers who are the
Speaker 1: most established group and so they provide a lot of
Speaker 1: the leadership in organizing models. And then the Young Lords
Speaker 1: see our four part are on them, representing Puerto Rican radicals.
Speaker 1: And then the always fun to mention Young Patriots. Have
Speaker 1: you ever heard of the Young Patriot Organization?
Speaker 3: Okay, so coming out of a tea party era, that's
Speaker 3: the first thing I think of. I imagine they are
Speaker 3: so amazing and they sound so bad.
Speaker 1: They are white, self identified Hillbillies who fly the Confederate flag,
Speaker 1: who are revolutionary socialists, who are part of a coalition
Speaker 1: with the Black Panthers, the Young Lords and several other
Speaker 1: organizations to try to overthrow the government and capitalism and
Speaker 1: end racism.
Speaker 3: Here's why I love this. There's many reasons. One, I
Speaker 3: love Hillbilly. I was taught by one. We literally called
Speaker 3: him Hillbilly. He was great. He's a redneck if he
Speaker 3: sit out in the sun for two seconds, he called
Speaker 3: himself that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yes, but hillbillies, by their very nature are just people
Speaker 3: who live in hills and want to eat good and
Speaker 3: make some music and chow with their family. Very cool people.
Speaker 3: I love the misguidedness of being like the rebel flags, like,
Speaker 3: oh so close, buddies, I want to get you. Let's
Speaker 3: design a new one for you know, man. But that
Speaker 3: is really Oh, that's so wonderful. I had no clue
Speaker 3: that they were part of the Rainbow Coalition.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they're one of the founding members. And their
Speaker 1: thing they were Appalachian migrants, white Appalachian migrants to Chicago
Speaker 1: who faced classism and bigotry from the rest of the
Speaker 1: white establishment, right, I mean because they had accents, because
Speaker 1: they didn't do things right, because they were lower class
Speaker 1: instead of middle class. And so soon the Rainbow Coalition
Speaker 1: is joined by Students for a Democratic Society, which is
Speaker 1: mostly but not exclusively white, the Brown Berets who are
Speaker 1: latinos So socialists, the American Indian Movement, and the Red
Speaker 1: Guard who are Chinese American socialists.
Speaker 3: What a powerful group of people.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Around this time, the Panthers also committed themselves publicly
Speaker 1: to support of the feminist movement and the gay liberation movement.
Speaker 3: And did not know the Black Panthers were for the Gaze.
Speaker 1: Oh they were so for the Gaze. It's a mighty Besides,
Speaker 1: of course, Tupac's mom was gay ast shit. Yes, a
Speaker 1: bunch of the others were quasi as gayest shit. We'll
Speaker 1: get to him again in a minute. But Fred Hampton
Speaker 1: like specifically has this great speech that's just like, the
Speaker 1: gays are oppressed, they shouldn't be fuck this, And they
Speaker 1: did a lot of the Gay Liberation Front and a
Speaker 1: lot of it's early organizing at a Rainbow Coalition like
Speaker 1: radical conference that happened I think at Philly. Again, I'm
Speaker 1: going off of memory of old scripts I wrote. I
Speaker 1: think I wrote more about that conference in the Gay
Speaker 1: Liberation Front episode. And then I also want to point
Speaker 1: out there's an East West split that's coming, and a
Speaker 1: lot of it's very cultural, but both sides of the
Speaker 1: split were pro gay, even though the East Coast side
Speaker 1: was like more visibly so with Fred Hampton's statements and
Speaker 1: a lot of the gay New Yorkers right, but also
Speaker 1: the original folks totally down with the gays.
Speaker 3: My heart feels so good. I really love hearing that.
Speaker 1: No, they like they also threw down with religious groups
Speaker 1: like religious radicals. In Chicago, they occupied Catholic churches alongside
Speaker 1: white and black Catholics after the Catholic Church was denying
Speaker 1: black priests in black neighborhoods, and in return, a black
Speaker 1: priest regularly sheltered them from police in the Catholic churches.
Speaker 3: That's so beautiful, no wonder. And then I'm just I'm
Speaker 3: from Chicago. We're here talking about the era my parents
Speaker 3: being young. It's interesting to think my mother is Roman
Speaker 3: Catholic and went to church in Chicago. And I'm like,
Speaker 3: were these things happening around you? Did you hear about them?
Speaker 3: I know my father was a beneficiary of the free
Speaker 3: breakfast program. I'm gonna see if he leave me a
Speaker 3: voicemail about it, and I could send it to you
Speaker 3: if he has any like direct memories about being bet there.
Speaker 3: And I've never asked about any of the other programs,
Speaker 3: if he like, did he get free shoes ever? I
Speaker 3: know there were some struggle years in his youth. I
Speaker 3: don't know where that overlap is, but yeah, it's just
Speaker 3: their ability to just be so open and just be like,
Speaker 3: if all of the people are good, then we could
Speaker 3: all be good with each other and it could be great.
Speaker 3: I'm not against you trying to live that is a yeah.
Speaker 3: And especially considering how many of these movements got their
Speaker 3: start in the church and the way churches have often
Speaker 3: been last safe havens for a lot of these folks,
Speaker 3: it makes sense that they would be like, we should
Speaker 3: bring these people into our fold as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it like, you know, obviously the church is
Speaker 1: doing a lot of bad stuff honestly, like the Black
Speaker 1: priest too regularly sheltered them from the police. I didn't
Speaker 1: end up puting his name in it because it did
Speaker 1: more research and he was accused of inappropriate sexual contact
Speaker 1: child the Lord later, which is why he can't have
Speaker 1: nice things.
Speaker 3: Never give a man praise. What did I say?
Speaker 1: I know it was like the church found him not guilty,
Speaker 1: but the way that it was defined as real, I'm
Speaker 1: not buying it. That's why his name isn't in here.
Speaker 1: I had a whole section written about him, and then
Speaker 1: I'm like, Eh, this guy doesn't need to be in here.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's like all kinds of complication. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: the specifically, the thing was that he he was supposed
Speaker 1: to become whatever, the priest of a churches or whatever, right,
Speaker 1: and then the archbishop or whatever was like, naw, fuck you.
Speaker 1: And and it was pretty much completely because he was
Speaker 1: like trying to be in charge of black a church
Speaker 1: with a primarily black congregation, and they shouldn't just be
Speaker 1: white fucking priests in charge of And you have this
Speaker 1: whole thing going on actually in the we talk about
Speaker 1: in the Catholic Workers episode anyway, whatever, and so I
Speaker 1: probably sold this anecdote on this show before. But one
Speaker 1: time I was talking to this old white coal miner
Speaker 1: in West Virginia about his time in the sixties, and
Speaker 1: he said, basically, we used to go protest the Vietnam War,
Speaker 1: and there were us on one corner, another corner with
Speaker 1: the gay activists, another corner with the Black power folks,
Speaker 1: and pretty soon we figured out we were all a
Speaker 1: hell of a lot stronger. We all stood on the
Speaker 1: same corner.
Speaker 3: I love that.
Speaker 1: Yes, that was a man who he got arrested in
Speaker 1: his like seventies or eighties fighting against mountaintop removal, where
Speaker 1: they just blow up the Appalachian Mountains in order to
Speaker 1: get the coal out. And he was just a retired
Speaker 1: coal miner guy who fucking ruled.
Speaker 3: He sounds like a legend.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The Rainbow Coalition was a clear statement of solidarity.
Speaker 1: Everyone's showing up to everyone else's shit. They also started
Speaker 1: a free health clinic because that's just what late sixties
Speaker 1: radicals do. That was like like the Young Patriots. Whole
Speaker 1: thing was that they like would come with you to
Speaker 1: your medical appointment, right if you're being mistreated by your
Speaker 1: doctors and stuff. They also the Rainbow Coalition brokered gang
Speaker 1: piece because that's also what late sixties radicals did. Yes,
Speaker 1: and if you read right wing accounts the Rainbow Coalition,
Speaker 1: it is a collection of street gangs. This is not inaccurate,
Speaker 1: but it is also not accurate, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And the Young Lords in particular started as a street gang.
Speaker 3: If we think about gangs again, do just a fundamental
Speaker 3: misunderstanding of like, what is the cause of the creation
Speaker 3: of a gang? Yeah, ches, community and support and safety. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it makes sense that they would move bilatterly with these
Speaker 3: types of movements. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile, the Panthers are also somewhat regularly involved in
Speaker 1: shootouts with police. I don't want to whitewash them out
Speaker 1: of their militancy against the US government and out of
Speaker 1: police in general. But j Edgar Hoover, he's like staying
Speaker 1: late at night, rocking back and forth in his chair,
Speaker 1: muttering a Messiah, a Messiah, because specifically he was worried
Speaker 1: that the Panthers might offer up a quote Messiah, a
Speaker 1: leader uniting the masses, which is like not actually how
Speaker 1: movements work, I think, but like they think it is,
Speaker 1: and that's why they murdered Malcolm X. But that didn't well,
Speaker 1: Nation of Islam technically did. But you know whatever, they
Speaker 1: fucking helped out.
Speaker 3: I mean, they offt MLK, so you know, yeah, he
Speaker 3: was like, I got it. I'm gonna have to murder
Speaker 3: a new one. How do I stop it?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Exactly, my god.
Speaker 1: So they they did. They assassinated Fred Hampton.
Speaker 3: Horrifying and horifying, horrifying shootout.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this isn't blurry. The government murdered him while he
Speaker 1: slept on December fourth, nineteen sixty nine. An informant provided
Speaker 1: the FBI with a map of Fred Hampton's apartment and
Speaker 1: like where his mattress was on the floor and the
Speaker 1: room or on a bed. I don't know whatever where
Speaker 1: the mattress was. I think it was on the floor.
Speaker 1: I've seen photos now, I don't remember. This is a
Speaker 1: completely meaningless detail. I'm using to distract myself from the
Speaker 1: emotional content of what I'm saying. So he provided the
Speaker 1: FBI with the map of fred Hampton's apartment, and then
Speaker 1: he almost certainly dosed fred Hampton with sleeping pills. This
Speaker 1: was confirmed by the Cook County investigation that found drugs
Speaker 1: in a system. But the FBI was like, no, we
Speaker 1: looked too and there was like no drugs in his system.
Speaker 1: But the Cook County Coroner was like, I stand by
Speaker 1: my statement. There were drugs in his system. There were
Speaker 1: habituates in this system, and Fred Hampton did not use
Speaker 1: I believe drugs at all. But it's certainly not this
Speaker 1: type of drug. It was like a thing that was
Speaker 1: known about him. He fell asleep at one thirty am
Speaker 1: while mid sentence talking to his mother on the phone.
Speaker 1: And it makes me happy that the last person he
Speaker 1: got to talk to at four am, which is the
Speaker 1: time of every police rate ever. Police stormed the place.
Speaker 1: They killed a man named Mark Clark, who was on
Speaker 1: security duty, who had a shotgun in his lap. As
Speaker 1: he died, he fired one shot into the ceiling. This
Speaker 1: is the only round fired by the panther side during
Speaker 1: this And it gets used as like, see, it's a shoot,
Speaker 1: it's a two way samey, samey. You know, a literal warning.
Speaker 3: Shot, like you couldnot the actual definition of a warning shot.
Speaker 1: I think he actually pulled the trigger, like I think
Speaker 1: he was dead, like he got shot.
Speaker 3: As he died, just up in the air. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: if it's up in the air and it's as he's dying,
Speaker 3: then he never pointed the gun at them, Yeah, goes Yeah.
Speaker 3: I thought I had always heard that it was like
Speaker 3: a trying to alert everybody. Might I guess if guns
Speaker 3: were already firing, what would they need to be alerted for.
Speaker 1: No, I mean I don't know, you know, I could,
Speaker 1: I could see it either way. I read a couple accounts,
Speaker 1: but not like super in depth accounts of this, you know.
Speaker 1: And Mark Clark was twenty two years old when he died.
Speaker 1: He had once gone door to door, from church to
Speaker 1: church to find one willing to host the Chicago Breakfast program.
Speaker 1: I just want him to have a life. I want
Speaker 1: him to be known as having done more than this
Speaker 1: one thing. Cops shot up the apartment. They fired between
Speaker 1: eighty two and ninety nine shots. They killed Fred Hampton
Speaker 1: while he was drugged in bed next to Deborah Johnson,
Speaker 1: who is nearly nine months pregnant with their child. Mark
Speaker 1: and Fred and were the only two who were killed.
Speaker 1: No one fired around at the police. No cops were
Speaker 1: indicted for what happened. Five thousand people came to his funeral,
Speaker 1: which again goes to the like, yeah, sure, the Panther
Speaker 1: membership is five thousand people in nationwide. They clearly have
Speaker 1: a lot more support than that.
Speaker 3: Fred Hampton was like twenty two, he was twenty one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I wouldn't have known that except I
Speaker 1: just wrote it down. I'm not like being like, oh I.
Speaker 3: Know, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, it's fine. I just
Speaker 3: he was young, like so young, and had done so
Speaker 3: much already in such a short time, and his mind
Speaker 3: was just so clear about the direction he wanted to move.
Speaker 3: It's horrifying to consider that. I mean, the person who
Speaker 3: most likely drugged him, and you know, they were friends,
Speaker 3: their colleagues, and there's a lot of evidence that they
Speaker 3: were coerced, and like, yeah, for a lot of whatever
Speaker 3: it seems I would say, either coursed or manipulated into
Speaker 3: this position, like really kind of bullied into it. And
Speaker 3: it's it's devastating to consider that these things frequently were
Speaker 3: coming from inside the house. I mean, well, I know
Speaker 3: the trial we're getting to, and we could talk more
Speaker 3: about it there.
Speaker 1: Oh we're actually not going to talk to him much
Speaker 1: about that trial. Now you could.
Speaker 3: Talk about I'll just say, well, do you want to
Speaker 3: do you want to introduce the child? I don't know
Speaker 3: if you have anything.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: I actually like, honestly, at this point, I'm going to
Speaker 1: go down to like just kind of some of the
Speaker 1: stuff about how the Panthers fell apart. Now you should
Speaker 1: totally talk about it.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, so finish a kur when she is
Speaker 3: on trial with the Black Panthers, theres.
Speaker 1: A I now know what try are you talk about?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, continue yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: So it like most of the cases brought against Black
Speaker 3: Panthers total sham, like crazy Affinny is such a good
Speaker 3: public speaker that the Black Panther Party raises enough money
Speaker 3: to get one of them out of prison. They've all
Speaker 3: been arrested. Halloway taking to prison uh, they get enough money,
Speaker 3: they're like, Afinniya should go out because when she speaks,
Speaker 3: people listen and she can bring more people in so
Speaker 3: that they become aware of our case. Not only is
Speaker 3: she out there giving like orienting at like these big
Speaker 3: black rallies and stuff, at concerts, like pretty much anywhere
Speaker 3: black people gather, she's like in order telling them like,
Speaker 3: this is what's happening in your communities. People are in prison.
Speaker 3: We need to do something. She's simultaneously reading every document
Speaker 3: like she's basically also a lawyer. Yeah, she's not a lawyer,
Speaker 3: but she was like so smart and thinking so far ahead,
Speaker 3: and she decides to.
Speaker 1: Herself, yeah, she wrepres herself.
Speaker 3: She gets cross examined a fucking pig excuse me who
Speaker 3: infiltrated the Black Panther Party. She gets him on the
Speaker 3: stand and the guy's talking about, oh, Black Panther Party
Speaker 3: is training kids to be racist and to be violent,
Speaker 3: and she's like, you were in the party. I think
Speaker 3: it's oh gosh, guys, it's off the top of the dome,
Speaker 3: but I think it's like five or six years. Like
Speaker 3: he's heavily into the Black Panther Party. A leader in
Speaker 3: the Black Panther Party, and she gets him cornered and
Speaker 3: basically starts trying to figure out when you did this
Speaker 3: for the Black when you were handing out guns for
Speaker 3: the Black Panther Party, do that as a Black Panther
Speaker 3: as a cop when you were having sex with members
Speaker 3: of the Black Panther Party. Were you a Black Panther
Speaker 3: Party member then or were you a cop? It is
Speaker 3: for like an absolute tear down for her to just
Speaker 3: be a citizen, not somebody who has been trained in
Speaker 3: the theater of law to be able to do this
Speaker 3: to somebody who easily knows his rights, probably knows this
Speaker 3: case backwards and forwards. I mean, she's beyond brilliant. And
Speaker 3: I swear to God, I'll stop plugging this out. But
Speaker 3: it's called Dear Mama. Is a series, and you learn
Speaker 3: just as much about Tupac as you do about his mother.
Speaker 3: And as you're learning about his mother and her time
Speaker 3: in the Black Party and all of these things she's
Speaker 3: done while in the Black Panther Party and post Black
Speaker 3: Panther Party. It's such an interesting dichotomy when you think
Speaker 3: about the direction Tupac's life took and where his life ends.
Speaker 3: When you think about all of the wonderful things the
Speaker 3: Black Panther Party was trying to do for and with
Speaker 3: the youth. It's just an incredib black I learned so much.
Speaker 3: But if any, she's bomb And if you don't know
Speaker 3: anything about her, like you should research her. She's an
Speaker 3: incredible woman.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's come up like in a bunch of these episodes.
Speaker 1: She was basically part of the Stonewall revolt because stop,
Speaker 1: she's in the Women's House of Detention, which is on
Speaker 1: stone Wall, right, and all of these people seeing the
Speaker 1: rioting outside, they start rioting and it's all of these
Speaker 1: gay women in prison. And it was actually in prison
Speaker 1: that she realized that she was gay. And she's like
Speaker 1: fucking like twenty one or something that I'm making up
Speaker 1: the age I don't remember, but she's young as hell
Speaker 1: and so like the women revolting in the Women's House
Speaker 1: of Detention, deserve to be included in the like original
Speaker 1: Stonewall veterans.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh iconic, Yeah, oh gosh, what a life she's changed. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so much, and eventually did start a school in tupacxany
Speaker 3: too or to continue to educate black children.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to, like Honestly, if I ever do
Speaker 1: some then specifically on the Panther twenty one, and it'll
Speaker 1: probably center around her because and the New York Panthers
Speaker 1: are like my favorite of them because of whatever. We'll
Speaker 1: get to it.
Speaker 3: A lot happened with those guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so uh oh. And then the other thing is
Speaker 1: I remember, I remember she represented herself and it was
Speaker 1: like something I don't have the quote. She got the
Speaker 1: guy to admit he sucked. She got him to be like,
Speaker 1: you're a trader and he's like, yeah, I'm a trader
Speaker 1: to the black community, like something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Again, she just grilled this guy. It's cool for
Speaker 3: us so that there's video, there's an audio tape of
Speaker 3: a cross examination, and yeah, she's just got him so
Speaker 3: panned because you can't at this point, when you've committed
Speaker 3: crimes as a black panther, you cannot then stand behind
Speaker 3: your police uniform on this stand and call yourself a
Speaker 3: just human being. And she drills that so acutely. By
Speaker 3: the end, he's just he's defeated because it's not a
Speaker 3: quick examination. It's not that I think he's on the
Speaker 3: stand for like two or three hours. Just fucking suck.
Speaker 3: You're a horrible person. Why did you do this?
Speaker 2: Gosh?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Yeah, I need to watch that documentary.
Speaker 1: That's like a whole period where I know less about
Speaker 1: and like I don't know.
Speaker 3: In it, you learned Tupac once shot two cops in
Speaker 3: the ass and got away with it because they were
Speaker 3: violently arresting a black man and he was driving by
Speaker 3: saw it and was like, not on my fucking watch,
Speaker 3: got that? Hell? Yeah? Oh god, the.
Speaker 1: Start of the Panthers too, you know, yes, exactly. It
Speaker 1: takes both. It takes the like parishioner who just wants
Speaker 1: to feed kids and the person who's like, man, fuck
Speaker 1: this cop, Like you can't get that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not gonna watch you arrest some dude, Yeah,
Speaker 3: just for driving, Like, no, get the fuck out of here,
Speaker 3: not on our watch. Beautiful, yeah, beautiful. All right.
Speaker 1: So an awful lot canon has been said about what
Speaker 1: tour part of the Panthers. The most common version you hear,
Speaker 1: which is generally true, but it's not all of it,
Speaker 1: I think, based on a lot of what I've been
Speaker 1: reading and my own biases. Okay, but overall, federal oppression
Speaker 1: destroyed the Panthers. Co Intel pro which we've covered on
Speaker 1: the show before, is the counterintelligence program that was more
Speaker 1: or less designed from the ground up to destroy the Panthers,
Speaker 1: as well as any other socialist and anti war types.
Speaker 1: We know about co intel Pro because some Jewish radicals
Speaker 1: associated with the Catholic left. Can you tell that I
Speaker 1: love coalitions across cultural, political, and religious lines. They broke
Speaker 1: into an FBI office and then covered all the documents
Speaker 1: about co intel Pro.
Speaker 3: What's so brave?
Speaker 1: Yeah, we had a whole episode about them. They're fucking
Speaker 1: cool too, and co intel pro pro played dirty. They
Speaker 1: widened every divide in the movement they could find, and
Speaker 1: if they couldn't find one, they would make one. They
Speaker 1: infiltrated there's like something like seven hundred infiltrators total possibly
Speaker 1: in the fucking Panthers. They forced people to snitch like
Speaker 1: you know, they would I don't know to what degree blackmail,
Speaker 1: And I didn't write all this stuff down enough. And
Speaker 1: they literally terrorized children out of their breakfast. As the
Speaker 1: seventies got going, most of these movements fell apart. The
Speaker 1: Panthers are not unique in this regard. The in fighting
Speaker 1: turned violent. Panthers and other black nationalist groups were getting
Speaker 1: into gunfights with each other Panthers and other Panthers were
Speaker 1: at each other's throats too. But according to at least
Speaker 1: two books that I've been reading from two different perspectives,
Speaker 1: that's not all there was to it. The other thing
Speaker 1: that tore apart the Panthers was hero worship, authoritarianism, and
Speaker 1: those things being held up by Marxist Leninism and specifically
Speaker 1: Marxist Leninism isn't what Marx and Lenin believed. Ironically, you
Speaker 1: would think that based on the name, Marxist Leninism is
Speaker 1: an ideology crafted and named by the enemy of the
Speaker 1: pod At, Joseph Stalin, And it was this whole thing
Speaker 1: where he wanted to prove he was the true ideological
Speaker 1: successor to Lenin after Lenin's death, in order to like
Speaker 1: be different from Trotsky or whatever. So he wrote about
Speaker 1: Marxist Leninism and it was his stuff. And the Panther
Speaker 1: Party was always inspired by Marxism and Maoism, but it
Speaker 1: seems to have been just as inspired by, say, the
Speaker 1: Black nationalist Islam of Malcolm X right and in its origin.
Speaker 1: The Panthers were organized using a Leninist idea called democratic centralism,
Speaker 1: which is basically a one party state kind of thing.
Speaker 1: This is obviously not true of all of the different
Speaker 1: smaller groups and right and people are doing a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff autonomously, but this is the formal structure of
Speaker 1: the Panthers, and essentially, democratic centralism can look a lot
Speaker 1: of different ways. Essentially, the idea is like folks vote
Speaker 1: on something and then whatever side loses like shuts the
Speaker 1: fuck up and toes the line. This is an efficient
Speaker 1: way to accomplish certain things. Lenin called it freedom of discussion,
Speaker 1: unity of action. In practice, it means usually whoever's in
Speaker 1: charge is in charge, kind of an elective monarchy, and
Speaker 1: it makes no accountability for leadership. So now we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about the new When we talked about how the
Speaker 1: Panthers fell apart, I think it's we're talking about New York.
Speaker 1: We've talked a bit on the show about New York
Speaker 1: City Panthers in the episode about the Young Lords, and
Speaker 1: the episode about Up against the Wall Motherfuckers, the episode
Speaker 1: about Stonewall, and the episode of Gay Liberation Front. The
Speaker 1: euro Panthers are just like making everything happen in the city. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And actually some of those groups, like the Young Lords
Speaker 1: like kind of took up the slack once The Panther
Speaker 1: twenty one the case that we'll talk about once it
Speaker 1: derailed the Black Panther movement because they had to move
Speaker 1: into prison support, right, So then you know, Puerto Rican
Speaker 1: radicals were like, we got you, and they would do
Speaker 1: many of the same programs and do all this amazing stuff.
Speaker 1: There is famously a cultural divide between the West Coast
Speaker 1: and the East Coast in the radical black community. In
Speaker 1: the early seventies. One of the ways that expressed itself
Speaker 1: was people's relationship to Africa itself. By and large, East
Speaker 1: Coast radicals were into Pan Africanism, into African religion and style.
Speaker 1: Folks were taking African and Suslim names, flying the Pan
Speaker 1: African flag, the red, black and green flag, which is
Speaker 1: I think Marcus Garvey made that in the nineteen ten teens,
Speaker 1: and a lot of them start wrapping New Africa, which
Speaker 1: God would be so fucking interesting if they pulled it off.
Speaker 1: New Africa Africa spell with a K if people want
Speaker 1: to look it up, is a black secessionist movement that
Speaker 1: basically said, look, as reparations for slavery, we want the
Speaker 1: following like four or five states, and it's like deep
Speaker 1: South states that are like often majority black anyway, right.
Speaker 3: Yes, and.
Speaker 1: So this is the East Coast is am using rude exaggerations,
Speaker 1: but these are the exaggerator. This is this is the
Speaker 1: way it's framed by the Panthers that I'm reading. The
Speaker 1: West Coast wasn't into any of this shit. Out west,
Speaker 1: you've got names like Don Cox and Huey Newton. Out
Speaker 1: east you've got a Fenny Shakur and quasi Ballagoon and
Speaker 1: central leadership banned the Panthers from flying the red, black
Speaker 1: and Green flag. Furthermore, the New York branch in particular,
Speaker 1: was excited about militant struggle at a time when the
Speaker 1: West Coast leadership decided to shift focus and then expected
Speaker 1: everyone to toe the line.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: There was a two combat tour Vietnam vet named Geronimo
Speaker 1: Pratt later Geronimo ji Jaga, and he was running around
Speaker 1: Panther groups teaching people to arm up and shit. The
Speaker 1: West Coast leadership kicked him out of the party for
Speaker 1: being counter revolutionary, for not following their change of style,
Speaker 1: and they did this while he was awaiting trial for
Speaker 1: a murder frame up that sent him to prison for
Speaker 1: decades before eventually the court was like, oh, whoops, it
Speaker 1: turns out he was probably innocent. Sorry about old new
Speaker 1: in prison for fucking decades.
Speaker 3: Ugh, I mean, and what a time for your party
Speaker 3: to leave you too, Yeah, like the ideal time when
Speaker 3: you could use us.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And Geronimo Pratt was a hero to the New
Speaker 1: York's City contingent and I believe other chapters as well,
Speaker 1: so they didn't take it well. They were also the
Speaker 1: New York City chapter was the largest chapter in the country,
Speaker 1: and they were like pretty tired of California telling them
Speaker 1: what to do. And of course whenever we talk about
Speaker 1: these divisions, co Intel pro is meanwhile like rubbing its
Speaker 1: hands together going like yes, yes, yes, and then making
Speaker 1: the divisions worse and like sending fake letters and like
Speaker 1: publishing articles, just doing everything they can to make this
Speaker 1: divide bigger. And you've got the Panther twenty one, who
Speaker 1: I keep bringing up on the show, just what we
Speaker 1: talked about, right, And this is where twenty one Panthers
Speaker 1: were framed on this like wild bombing murder spree thing
Speaker 1: where they were like, well, they're going to blow up
Speaker 1: all in New York, like fucking like Bane out of
Speaker 1: Batman or whatever, you know. And this is a frame up,
Speaker 1: and it's like really obviously a frame up, but it
Speaker 1: works because it makes several of them, you know, many
Speaker 1: of them spend years in jail awaiting trial. Eventually all
Speaker 1: of them get set free, except our guy, Quasi Ballagoon,
Speaker 1: who was already in jail for some bank robbery shit.
Speaker 1: So he didn't get out of jail just because he
Speaker 1: got indicted and then the case was dropped. He did
Speaker 1: actually plead guilty to planning to kill a cop. I
Speaker 1: don't know whether the situation that case was. And with
Speaker 1: everything happened in the party, Quasi Ballagoon wounded up adding
Speaker 1: another thing to his list of oppressive forces that he
Speaker 1: wanted to fight against, and that was authoritarianism. He, alongside
Speaker 1: other Panthers and former Panthers, wound up an anarchist. I
Speaker 1: don't mean to imply the majority of them did or
Speaker 1: this is like what the New York West Coast split
Speaker 1: was about, but authority was a huge part of it.
Speaker 1: He alongside some other people later found later ended up
Speaker 1: starting the Black Liberation Army, which basically declared for in
Speaker 1: the American government, we'll talk about them some later time. Basically,
Speaker 1: as all the as all the big public new left
Speaker 1: groups got crushed, a lot of the more hardcore elements
Speaker 1: were like fuck it and went underground and kept fighting
Speaker 1: as you do. Yeah, like what, You've dedicated your life
Speaker 1: to this, You're not going to stop.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And clearly the straightlad in bright daylight is not
Speaker 3: as effective as one would hope they understand why they
Speaker 3: were like, well, I'm taking this shit under crowd.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And basically the anti authoritarian critique that emerged in
Speaker 1: the Panthers, not just from the anarchist Panthers, was less
Speaker 1: that the East Coast methods like better, but rather that
Speaker 1: each area can have its own culture and work together
Speaker 1: and that is stymied by central leadership. And now I'm
Speaker 1: kind of projecting, but it's like the whole thing that
Speaker 1: they managed with the Rainbow Coalition and coalition building right,
Speaker 1: is about having these groups of equals with differences without
Speaker 1: erasing those differences, work together towards the same goal. National
Speaker 1: leadership got to pick who was being worth being bailed out,
Speaker 1: and this didn't include many New Yorkers. This is a
Speaker 1: complaint that a lot of folks had about what happened
Speaker 1: in New York twenty one. So in nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: the New York Branch wrote an open letter to the
Speaker 1: Weather Underground, which is one of these underground groups that's
Speaker 1: blowing it up, and they state their solidarity with the
Speaker 1: Weather Underground and they critique the self proclaimed Vanguardists or
Speaker 1: the self proclaimed any self proclaimed vanguard that dismisses armed struggle.
Speaker 1: And this is a clear dig at West Coast leadership.
Speaker 1: So this leads to the Panther twenty one and I
Speaker 1: think the New York branch being expelled from the official
Speaker 1: Panther Party a.
Speaker 3: Huge blow when you only have five thousand members.
Speaker 1: I know here and you kick out literally the largest
Speaker 1: group secked.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's some ego playing into that, unfortunately.
Speaker 1: Exactly, I want to go back to Quasi because he's
Speaker 1: so cool, just in case I don't do the Black
Speaker 1: Liberation Army episodes any time soon. In nineteen seventy, while
Speaker 1: Quaysy was in prison, he and other folks, including a
Speaker 1: bunch of Black Panthers, staged a rebellion. They took seven
Speaker 1: hostages and held them for five days October fifth to
Speaker 1: first to fifth, nineteen seventy true grassroots Panther style. This
Speaker 1: was black, Latino and white prisoners working together. Their slogan
Speaker 1: was all power to the people, free all oppressed people,
Speaker 1: and their main demand for this rebellion was speedier trials. Right,
Speaker 1: a lot of people just get held for years who
Speaker 1: are supposedly innocent until proven guilty and quazy. He's one
Speaker 1: of the central organizers, but instead of playing the vanguard
Speaker 1: and telling the rebels what they should want, he instituted
Speaker 1: a collective process for all the inmates to participate in
Speaker 1: the decision making about what their demand should be and
Speaker 1: like what the rebellion should look like. And when he
Speaker 1: realized that everyone was listening to the Panthers more than
Speaker 1: anyone else, the Panthers skipped the rest of the meetings
Speaker 1: and we're like, look, we'll go with whatever you decide.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It makes me say we are not here for power,
Speaker 3: We're not power hungry. We just want what's best. Yep,
Speaker 3: y'all talk about yourselves and we'll just back your play. Lovely.
Speaker 1: We started it, and you all can figure out out
Speaker 1: how to finish it, and we'll support you.
Speaker 3: Yes, teach Amanda Fish.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the rebellion in the end failed most prison
Speaker 1: rebellions do, but they they still it gave everyone experience
Speaker 1: at holding the state at bay, and it also gave
Speaker 1: the most powerless people in our society power for a moment. Right,
Speaker 1: So Quasi Ballagan wound up finding anarchism while he was
Speaker 1: in prison, and it provided a lens with which he
Speaker 1: understood what was going wrong with the Panthers as central
Speaker 1: leadership became more and more estranged from rank and file.
Speaker 1: And basically he got really annoying about it, like most
Speaker 1: people do when they get their new ideology. One former Panther,
Speaker 1: Kim kitt Holder said, quote, At first he insulted us,
Speaker 1: calling us robots, but at the same time he gave
Speaker 1: us a voice articulating our problems with the leadership structure
Speaker 1: and the people in it. I was just a kid
Speaker 1: in New York City when I joined the party. But
Speaker 1: remember one of the things that pissed me off was
Speaker 1: that when we are in five cents for every Panther
Speaker 1: newspaper that we sold, West Coast folks got ten cents
Speaker 1: from the sale.
Speaker 3: Now, okay, I don't.
Speaker 1: Know, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: And if we are fighting for equity and liberation, how
Speaker 3: are we paying people different amounts for doing the same
Speaker 3: that seems in affront to your core tenants West Coast.
Speaker 1: The hell yeah. And it's around this time that you
Speaker 1: get allegations of embezzlement from low West Coast leadership. I
Speaker 1: don't know one way or the other, because they're everyone
Speaker 1: has so no one is looking at this clearly, and
Speaker 1: no one can, right because this is the defining moment
Speaker 1: of your life if you are part of the Black
Speaker 1: Panther Party in a lot of ways, you know, not
Speaker 1: whatever I'm not trying to say, like the rest of
Speaker 1: people's lives is meaningless, but like this is clearly a
Speaker 1: peak experience. You're not going to come out of it
Speaker 1: with like a clear objective take, you know. And and
Speaker 1: so like these are just people. People are fallible hands
Speaker 1: someone a ton of power and access to money. An
Speaker 1: awful lot of people will crack under that pressure. Sure,
Speaker 1: And just to close up with Quazy real quick in
Speaker 1: case I don't do the Black Liberation episode soon. He
Speaker 1: loved punk rock, He was queer. He was once arrested
Speaker 1: with his trans lover named CHICKI. And yeah he's coolsh
Speaker 1: hicky amazing name. Yeah. He went on to keep on
Speaker 1: the struggle. He broke out of prison twice. He gave
Speaker 1: amazing speeches and courts that were all just basically like, look,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't recognize You're right to try me
Speaker 1: like I am a New African because he was an anarchist,
Speaker 1: but he's also a new African. Right. He believed very right.
Speaker 1: And as a man who has sex with men in
Speaker 1: the eighties, he died of AIDS in prison.
Speaker 3: Showed queazy, what a hero, what icon, what a visionary.
Speaker 3: I know I said I wouldn't celebrate any men, but
Speaker 3: you know I'm gonna make a little room. Jimmy Hendrix
Speaker 3: can get some love, and so can you crazy make.
Speaker 1: He had a trans lover named Chicky, and also everyone
Speaker 1: writing about him. I know that there's a book, Oh god,
Speaker 1: I can't remember the name of it. It's like one
Speaker 1: of the main books I read or whatever, and has
Speaker 1: all of these reflections of people who knew him, and
Speaker 1: it's all like, look, you didn't even have to ask
Speaker 1: him to volunteer. As soon as you were like, man,
Speaker 1: I need someone to do something, before you even say
Speaker 1: it out loud, He's just there. He's like all right.
Speaker 1: And he also would always watch the kids play with
Speaker 1: the kids. Like he was like, just I I haven't
Speaker 1: read anything bad about him yet, is what I was saying.
Speaker 1: And I've read a fair amount.
Speaker 3: About this man that is so great. I hope that
Speaker 3: he lived the life his legacy is telling. Yeah, he
Speaker 3: sounds so wonderful, Like I mean, yeah, real Saul to
Speaker 3: the Earth kind of guy, real love the people.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And so it wasn't just the anti authoritarianism, like anarchist,
Speaker 1: of course is going to be mad at central leadership, right.
Speaker 1: Part of central leadership also recognized this. The guy Don
Speaker 1: Cox that we talked about the field Marshal showed up
Speaker 1: to his daughter's school who wrote the book, just another
Speaker 1: he he he lays out what he thinks went wrong,
Speaker 1: and what he thinks went wrong was that they fucking
Speaker 1: read Stalin. I'm going to paraphrase it. This is apparently
Speaker 1: I timed the break between the episodes unevenly. But he's like, look, well, actually,
Speaker 1: I'll read part of the quote. The ideological basis for
Speaker 1: the internal destruction of Black Panther Party was laid with
Speaker 1: the first book we studied. It was Joseph Stalin's The
Speaker 1: Foundation of Leninism. To be clear, not the first book
Speaker 1: they studied as panthers. But they had this thing in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine where they're like, let's do a study
Speaker 1: group to figure out how we're going to run this
Speaker 1: large organization. Now that we have a large organization, you know,
Speaker 1: that text was used to instill love for the party
Speaker 1: above everything else, even eventually the struggle. As it turned out,
Speaker 1: we didn't know then that Stalin had massacred millions in
Speaker 1: the name of the party, and I must admit at
Speaker 1: the time, I'm not sure it would have mattered. As
Speaker 1: the ideas of Marxist Leninism spread throughout the party, it
Speaker 1: quickly became afflicted with avant gardism and elitism. Considering itself
Speaker 1: the sole possessor of the truth. Anyone who didn't adhere
Speaker 1: to the Marxist Leninist ideas were treated as an inferior
Speaker 1: being worthy of being despised. Adopting the Marxist Leninist structure
Speaker 1: of the party with democratic centralism as its sole all
Speaker 1: party was then confiscated in the name of the Central Committee,
Speaker 1: which in reality meant just David Hilliard and Bobby Seal
Speaker 1: in name. I was a member of the Central Committee,
Speaker 1: but there was never one meeting of the Central Committee,
Speaker 1: Nor were there ever points at which members of the
Speaker 1: Central Committee were asked to vote on any proposition, or
Speaker 1: if there was, I was never told about it. Whenever
Speaker 1: David or Bobby thought up anything, it was simply sent
Speaker 1: down through the organization as a directive from the Central Committee. Hey,
Speaker 1: any the reason he I mean, it's not the reason
Speaker 1: he wrote his memoir, although this quote I'm about to
Speaker 1: read is a big part of it, right, because a
Speaker 1: lot of the memoirs of the Black Panthers are even
Speaker 1: like the Panthers ruled or the Panthers sucked right, And
Speaker 1: I didn't. I didn't finish reading his. I don't know
Speaker 1: everything about it yet. But he has another quote as
Speaker 1: to why he made this critique. Those of us with
Speaker 1: experiences in the struggle have a historical responsibility to pass
Speaker 1: them on. Mistakes are the nursery of new ideas, so
Speaker 1: we must share them too. If we continue to hide
Speaker 1: and distort our errors, those coming after us will be
Speaker 1: condemned to repeat them. We cannot afford the luxury of
Speaker 1: leaving it up to historians to reveal what we did
Speaker 1: after fifty or one hundred years have passed. Present conditions
Speaker 1: demand we tell our stories now.
Speaker 3: Through yes, absolute word, absolute word.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I I find it so interesting because it's
Speaker 1: like he's not like fuck the Panthers. He's like, oh,
Speaker 1: here's how I track some mistakes we made, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a person who understands. I mean, he
Speaker 3: sounds like an actual leader. You know, we set goals,
Speaker 3: we strove for them. Where did we fall short? And
Speaker 3: what would we not do again? Is the basis of
Speaker 3: what you need to continue a movement, I would think,
Speaker 3: And I mean he sounds like an incredible human being
Speaker 3: and I definitely see, yeah, see an issue with two
Speaker 3: people being like, now we control everything and you'll do
Speaker 3: as we say and don't push back. That is egregious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And like I mean, most people, it seems like
Speaker 1: most people just like did what they were going to
Speaker 1: do anyway, right, like yes, and then so then they
Speaker 1: got real mad about it. But so the Panthers lingered
Speaker 1: throughout the seventies, even though they had started to fall apart. Right,
Speaker 1: But again, every movement during this time did I'm not
Speaker 1: The last branch closed its doors in nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: and their legacy is astounding. They had problems, There were
Speaker 1: a bunch of kids, for the most part, getting together
Speaker 1: and saying we have an idea of what's wrong, and
Speaker 1: we have an idea of how to make it better.
Speaker 1: And they made some mistake, and they did more than
Speaker 1: almost anyone can dream of. They inspired not only their generation,
Speaker 1: but every generation that has come since. They directly fed, clothed,
Speaker 1: house protected, and gave medical care to tens of thousands
Speaker 1: or hundreds of thousands of people. They brought together marginalized
Speaker 1: people without erasing the differences between those marginalized people, just
Speaker 1: focusing on common enemies like capitalism and the police. And
Speaker 1: they forced reform after reform, not by asking for reform,
Speaker 1: but by using direct action to force the state to
Speaker 1: play catch up with them. They lived adventurous lives. Many
Speaker 1: of them wound up dead or in prison for decades.
Speaker 1: Some of them are still behind bars, and actually, if
Speaker 1: people want to look into it, the Jericho Project is
Speaker 1: a project that works to trying to fight for things
Speaker 1: like compassionate release for people who've been in prison for
Speaker 1: fifty fucking years. Others of them lived long and happy lives.
Speaker 1: Some lived in the States, and awful lot of them
Speaker 1: got the fuck out of the country, especially to Algeria,
Speaker 1: Don Cox to France, and I don't know. They were fucking.
Speaker 3: Cool, amazing. I mean truly the stuff of legends. And
Speaker 3: I think laid the ground work, like the blueprint for
Speaker 3: how we might merge the disparate sex of society that
Speaker 3: should be together to fight capitalism. You know, I think
Speaker 3: that's we're still trying to figure out how to get
Speaker 3: back to that space on a mass level. It's such
Speaker 3: a challenge. I think a thing our generation, our current
Speaker 3: living peoples frequently forget. It's like, if we look at
Speaker 3: our economic situation, where worse soft than literally every generation
Speaker 3: that's come before us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a great depression. We've got nothing on what's happening now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the actual hindrance and it's crazy and it's
Speaker 3: wild because again it's so distorted. Folks will say such
Speaker 3: brash things like they went to zoos in killed animals
Speaker 3: to eat, and it's like, well, we've figured out how
Speaker 3: to make very cheap food and get it to people quickly,
Speaker 3: so we don't have the same food supply problems. But
Speaker 3: look at the number of people who we're literally seeing
Speaker 3: major stars be like, yeah, I have to sell my
Speaker 3: house because of non strike for two months. What. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's crazy. That is crazy that you can have an active,
Speaker 3: visible career in Hollywood and still be living show paycheck
Speaker 3: to paycheck. And I think, you know, as we continue
Speaker 3: to see the rise of the workers Revolution, I hope
Speaker 3: we all continue to think back on the work the
Speaker 3: Black Panthers have done. I really think we're on the
Speaker 3: cusp of a general strike. It's kind of bold to say,
Speaker 3: but we're getting closer every day. We'll see how some
Speaker 3: of these next negotiations go, especially at the city level.
Speaker 3: But you know, I think we're all very tired and
Speaker 3: very poor and ready for changes we know can be
Speaker 3: made pretty easily and have massive impact. So shout out
Speaker 3: to Black Panthers who lay the ground where hopefully we
Speaker 3: can conclude some of your beautiful mission statements that we
Speaker 3: have not achieved yet as a society.
Speaker 1: I know, God, that was heartbreaking when you pointed out
Speaker 1: they were like, oh, we haven't gotten those, Like fuck,
Speaker 1: I was.
Speaker 3: Hoping for one. You started reading and I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: well maybe we have one. No, no, we have nothing.
Speaker 1: How does how do juries compare this? Are they still
Speaker 1: like is it still really regular that like black folks
Speaker 1: are tried by all white juries and shit.
Speaker 3: I don't have stats on that, but I would imagine
Speaker 3: not much better, particularly for heavily redlining places, because where
Speaker 3: you're committing crimes, you know often when where you're getting
Speaker 3: caught is not the same place where you live. Like
Speaker 3: I think a lot about like in Chicago, where there's
Speaker 3: a great transit system, So you might go downtown to
Speaker 3: steal a pair of jeans because it's easier to get
Speaker 3: away with stealing from like the gap there than you know,
Speaker 3: like your local store or whatever. Out in the birds
Speaker 3: there's a lot of heavy foot traffic. Those people know, like, hey,
Speaker 3: you don't go after a thief because you know who cares.
Speaker 3: The store is insured.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm saying this because I remember a very specific case. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he sold a pair of jeans and was in prison
Speaker 3: for like four months, no trial.
Speaker 1: Oh God, like someone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's a homeless guy who had no other clue.
Speaker 3: He just wanted a clean pair of pants to wear.
Speaker 3: And the article was like, it's crazy how much we've
Speaker 3: spent on this guy when all we could have just
Speaker 3: given him the twenty bucks for jeans. And I was like,
Speaker 3: it's crazy that we just can't give that guy some
Speaker 3: clothes and a house when we have more than enough
Speaker 3: of both.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like I can't can see.
Speaker 3: I don't understand why we operate this way. They literally
Speaker 3: zero sentence. It helps no one to be like, hey,
Speaker 3: I want to make sure you have nothing. It hurts
Speaker 3: all of us.
Speaker 1: The world is literally on fire because of the economic
Speaker 1: system that we live in.
Speaker 3: How we are, we are close to drowning. We have
Speaker 3: so many issues, and people just let it up. Just
Speaker 3: gotta make sure capitalism stays strong. There's no way any
Speaker 3: other system could possibly work. That's the thing, dude. Talking
Speaker 3: to people like usually over forty five, it is so excutse.
Speaker 3: They're like, there's nothing else we could possibly do. I'm like,
Speaker 3: that's so sad that you feel this way. I don't
Speaker 3: know how to help you understand that revolutions happen any things.
Speaker 3: When people are like, oh, general strike can ever occur?
Speaker 3: I was like, don't let the price of bread become
Speaker 3: too expensive? Yeah, we can track every revolution by the
Speaker 3: price of bread.
Speaker 1: Every single one.
Speaker 3: Do some history, bro. It won't be hard, crazy, but yeah,
Speaker 3: I have some history.
Speaker 1: Bro.
Speaker 3: Bro. They will come and eat you if they cannot
Speaker 3: feed their children. I just want to let you know
Speaker 3: that's people's breaking point. Yeah, when your child, that's when
Speaker 3: the guns and the knives and the burning of houses
Speaker 3: comes out.
Speaker 1: And we don't want time. We did it before then,
Speaker 1: so we can minimize the.
Speaker 3: Car What if you just gave it to them and
Speaker 3: you still were richer than all of us. I mean,
Speaker 3: you could still keep the majority of your power. We're
Speaker 3: asking for so little, so just a fragment just to survive,
Speaker 3: and we'll be happy with it too. Margaret, I love
Speaker 3: talking to you. This was amazing. I loved hearing so
Speaker 3: many I love the Black Panther Party already, just and
Speaker 3: especially there's so many women survivors who have sort of
Speaker 3: in the cracks of stories told their story, you know
Speaker 3: what I mean, and interview here a random podcast there
Speaker 3: like not nameless but not named, if that makes sense, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, And and and hearing the good they got
Speaker 3: to do and knowing they were for the gays. It
Speaker 3: was so beautiful. I'm enraged. I hope everyone listenings enraged.
Speaker 3: I hope we can make some of these Black Panther
Speaker 3: goals true. Yeah, I agree, you got anything to plug here.
Speaker 3: At the end of our longest episode that we've done,
Speaker 3: which the pathers deserve to be clear. But I also
Speaker 3: I fucked up putting the split in scripts. I think
Speaker 3: I'm honored to this is my legacy as a podcaster
Speaker 3: is to always make an episode way too long. I
Speaker 3: love it. I hope everyone listening enjoyed the ride very quickly.
Speaker 3: I talked about it last time, so I'll keep it
Speaker 3: short this time. I am making a film. It's called Dinner.
Speaker 3: You can support it on a website called Seed and Spark.
Speaker 3: It's seed and s p a r k dot com.
Speaker 3: If you type in Dinner in the search bar, I
Speaker 3: film will show up. Our goal is to recreate the
Speaker 3: way we make films in Hollywood, to make it safe
Speaker 3: and equitable. One coold thing I'll tell you that I
Speaker 3: didn't tell you before. We're doing a Favorite Nations approach.
Speaker 3: So when we get funded, because we will get funded,
Speaker 3: you're gonna say everybody who operates on the film the
Speaker 3: same amount of money. You're a PA, he gets to
Speaker 3: the same amount of editor. This is a way to
Speaker 3: make sure sure we can contribute financially to everyone on set,
Speaker 3: because as it is now, everyone's donating their time, but
Speaker 3: we really want to support them. Financially and to do
Speaker 3: it in a way that keeps cost down for the
Speaker 3: production so instead of the film made, but makes everyone
Speaker 3: feel like a fair and equal part of the production.
Speaker 3: We think it's a really great way for Hollywood to
Speaker 3: think about how movies are made in the future, because
Speaker 3: we don't think any job is less than another job.
Speaker 3: So yeah, Also, if you don't want if you're just
Speaker 3: like fuck you do, I don't want to support your film,
Speaker 3: but you like independent cinema, you could still go to
Speaker 3: Seeden Spark and support another film. There's so many great films.
Speaker 3: And what I love about this organization is they do
Speaker 3: a lot of work to help sustain independent career. So
Speaker 3: it's not about getting this film funded, It's about creating
Speaker 3: a community for a filmmaker so that you can constantly
Speaker 3: be creating art for your community in a sustainable way
Speaker 3: so you can have a career and a life. And
Speaker 3: I just think it's beautiful that anybody thought to try
Speaker 3: to make that happen. And I'm really glad to be
Speaker 3: a part of the experiment. So yeah, check out Steed
Speaker 3: and Spark.
Speaker 1: Awesome. I am excited for this. I'm excited to see Dinner.
Speaker 3: Thank you I'm excited to show way. It's a tirical horror.
Speaker 3: It's great, one of my favorite genres.
Speaker 1: What do I have to plug? Do I do things?
Speaker 2: You have another podcast? Oh?
Speaker 1: I have another podcast. It's called Live Like the World
Speaker 1: Is Dying. It comes out every Friday and it is
Speaker 1: a individual and community preparedness podcast. Or our tagline is
Speaker 1: your podcast for it feels like the end times, I
Speaker 1: may drop the feels like.
Speaker 3: Depressing but okay, dark but accurate.
Speaker 1: I started it before the pandemic. Things have escalated since then.
Speaker 1: I also want to I don't have it in front
Speaker 1: of me. There is a fundraiser for the bailing out
Speaker 1: the black people who defended themselves in a viral video
Speaker 1: on a doc in I really didn't put this in
Speaker 1: the Scriptah, okay, cool, and so shout out to the
Speaker 1: inventor of the full lean chair, who was a black man.
Speaker 1: And it's it's worth bailing out. It's worth supporting people
Speaker 1: who practice community defense, whether it is structured and organized
Speaker 1: or whether it is like people being like no, that's
Speaker 1: not going to happen.
Speaker 3: Absolutely impromptu performance of greatness. Yeah, make sure these folks
Speaker 3: don't spend time in prison. That's so fucking dumb. I
Speaker 3: help them get out. That is whoa. I hate that
Speaker 3: they're in prison. I love their action on a former
Speaker 3: sleeve selling doc. They used to sell black people there
Speaker 3: and then there was liberation. Even in a small, short
Speaker 3: lived epic experience as it was, it was beautiful.
Speaker 1: So I don't have in front of me which fundraiser is,
Speaker 1: like the one or whatever, but you can google it,
Speaker 1: and I just it's on my mind. So that's what
Speaker 1: I want to shout out.
Speaker 2: Sophie and Robert did a crossover hood politics and it
Speaker 2: could happen here episode about the exactly what you just
Speaker 2: talked about, Margaret, so people can check out.
Speaker 1: I am going to check that out tomorrow while I'm driving,
Speaker 1: which is.
Speaker 2: He will not be out by then, but it'll be
Speaker 2: out by time this episode comes out. I'm sorry, it's coming.
Speaker 1: Time anyway. Yeah, I'll wait, huh okay, as.
Speaker 2: Soon as soon as I have it, I will send
Speaker 2: it to you.
Speaker 1: Thanks.
Speaker 2: That's called producer privilege. A friend your local producer, unless
Speaker 2: they're creepy than walk the other way.
Speaker 1: Also, if you are listening, don't ask Sophie for this favor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that this is a this is a Margaret
Speaker 2: only privilege. Anyways, Follow me on Instagram. My post pictures
Speaker 2: of my dog and she is right behind me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, hi kitty, all right, see you next Monday with
Speaker 1: more Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
Speaker 2: Bye. By The Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is
Speaker 2: a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
Speaker 2: cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or
Speaker 2: check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 2: wherever you get your podcasts.