Part One: The Bastards Who Killed the Black Panthers

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
What's accepted that this is the best introduction schema I'm
going to put together and I should just roll with it.
My Robert Evans me, Uh, pooh, boy, that was rough.
That didn't go well. Um. This is Behind the Bastards,
a podcast about terrible people. UM and today Uh, my

(00:22):
guest is uh rap artist musician propaganda. Say West West,
how you doing man? Man, I'm honored to be here.
You know, I'm toning down my fandom. This is Zoe.
You know. Well, I've been listening ever since you started
following me on Twitter and listen to your music a
number of times and I like it a lot, particularly

(00:44):
Board of Education. I think that's probably my my favorite
one of years that I've heard so far. UM And
I thought you'd be a good a good guest for
this episode, especially since you have some like family history
with the subject we're talking about. UM. Before we're gonna
do you want to introduce yourself differently than I introduced you.
I think it was great? Yeah? No, I um yeah,

(01:04):
hip hop artists. UH do a pod A couple of
pods now, UM once called hood politics, which maybe we'll
talk about that later. But uh and UM one with
my wife called the Red Couch and I yeah, I
do wrapping poetry for a living in l A native
two daughters and a cat. Now frustratingly anyway, I love cats. Yeah,

(01:30):
well you can have ours. Yeah, do you want to
should I call you for this episode? Should you want
to go by propaganda? Should I call you? Jason? It's
mostly has been shortened to prop that's but in the consensus. Yeah,
I'm trying to be cod with that. Yeah. All right. UM,

(01:51):
so today we're gonna talk about, um, the Black Panthers
and specifically the bastards who killed the Black panthers. Um. Yeah,
and that's going to involve a lot of talk about
what the black panthers did, what they believed, um, which
I is one of a subject I find really fascinating. Um.
And this was a frustrating episode to write, in part
because there's so much that I had to leave out

(02:13):
just because you know, this is an eleven thousand words script.
You can only you can only get in so much. Um.
This is going to be one we have a number
of episodes like this where like people will hit me
up after it, why didn't you bring up this? Why
didn't you bring up that? And it's like, yeah, that's
one of the when you can cover something as complex
as the Panthers, You're you're going to leave stuff out
just because we have about two hours two and a half,

(02:36):
you know. Um, but yeah, you have some family history, yes,
and I thought it might be good to go into
that first. Yeah. Yeah. So my father was a member
of the you know, South the like I guess they
call it South erely now, but it was we called
it South Central, um chapter of the Black Panther Party,
uh in the sixties or at the end of the

(02:57):
six And my father Vietnam war Vett. Essentially as a
matter of fact, when we say we're gonna do this,
I like I called him to make sure I had
my storyline right and back straight. I don't want to
get up here and embarrass myself, you know. Um. But yeah,
so he essentially landed from Vietnam back in Los Angeles
and almost made a bee line of like forty one
and Central and enjoined the joined the Black Panther Party

(03:21):
and um yeah, so he was a part of the
sort of after school tutoring part program. He also um
was like basically they all took turns as far as
like the which I'm I'm we're gonna get to like
the policing the streets. So he was just you know,
standing behind as like, you know, interactions with the police
were there because you know, police brutality was such a

(03:42):
big deal. So he was a part of that. Um
he was at the u c L a event that
got shot up. He was, yes, and the he said
it was the span of time he was at was
by the time that like FBI got involved, so his
office got bombed, you know, he was at shootings. Yeah.
So and at that point my grandmother was like, baby,
you can't do this some more associated she kind of

(04:04):
pulled the card on him. But you know, but yeah,
he's he stayed involved in Uh yeah. So I've been
hearing bits and pieces of those stories as he like
unpacks his trauma, you know what I'm saying. Um, And
I just grew up without with those stories in my life,
you know, and paintings of African princesses and kings on
our way, had no Disney in my house at a

(04:27):
picture of Mark Martin and Malcolm and Marcus Garvey like
lining our walls and Geronimo Pratt and just I had
that in my house. Yeah, you know, that's that's that's
fascinating perspective to have had in a fascinating like way
to learn about this. But like for me, like obviously
it's like a white kid who grew up in um
a pretty mixed suburb, but a suburb that didn't have

(04:48):
a very a huge black population. Um, I learned almost
nothing about the Black Panthers. I guess a lot of
our listeners are kind of in that the boat where
like there's about three things you know about them. Obviously,
they were a alexivil rights organization. They did that thing
where they put their fists in the air, and some
of them carried guns, and there's pictures of them carryings.
And I think when I got out of high school,

(05:08):
that's about all I knew about the Black Panthers, right, Like,
there wasn't really anything else UM I was aware of.
I think I caught the name Huey P. Newton for
the first time in the lyrics of some hip hop
songs like and, and didn't really know who he was. UM.
So for the longest time, I had no real understanding
about the organization, and I think they kind of blended
into the general wallpaper of the civil rights movement for

(05:29):
me until I started reading about them specifically. And I've
come to the conclusion and I say this a lot
um that it's like an unforgivable failing of our education system,
that this isn't a bigger part of like standard American history. Absolutely,
and like so I know you'll get into, but the
importance I know my father did put on and the

(05:53):
party put on of like knowing the Constitution, knowing the
billow Rights. Like I felt like I was so well
versed in American civics because my father was a panther,
you know what I'm saying, And which was funny because
I was like, I just didn't understand that. I thought
every house was like this because it was just this
was normal for me. So when then you'd bring up

(06:14):
I'm like, well, you know, the fourteenth a moment say YadA, YadA, YadA,
you know, seventh graders and kids are like what you know,
It's just I just knew this because that's how that's
what you learned as a panther. Like you need to
know your rights, man, you know. Yeah, yeah, it's critical.
Yeah yeah, um so uh we' we yeah, I think
we've we've introduced this well enough, I'm gonna start get

(06:34):
into the episode at uh, not the beginning, but I
guess a beginning um. On February seventeenth, nineteen forty two.
Hughey P. Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, the youngest
child of Walter and Armilia Newton's seven children. His dad, Walter,
was I would say, pretty badass guy. He worked two
jobs his entire life. He served as the minister for

(06:56):
the Bethel Baptist Church in Monroe on Sundays, and Walter
was very infamous in his community for not taking any
ship from white folks. Um. And there's a story about
him getting into an argument with one of his employers,
a young white guy who yells at him that he
whips colored men for arguing with him, and Walter shot
back that nobody. Basically, nobody whips me unless they're a
better man than me, unless they can beat me up.

(07:19):
And this guy, this guy backs down, proving that he
was not um. Yeah. Yeah, basically, if you want to
whip me like you gotta you gotta be able to
kick my ass like you want to try that. Yeah. Now,
in the nineteen forties in Louisiana, saying that sort of
thing could get you murdered as a black guy. But
Walter had a strange and somewhat unique ability um to

(07:42):
stand up to white folks in his community without being killed.
And hue later theorized that this is because his dad
was mixed race. His father's father, he was grandpa was
a white man who had raped his mother. Um, and
Walter's neighbors knew his white family and didn't want to
shed part white blood. This was Huey's theorist. White's ad
was able to do this. Um, there is there is

(08:04):
something to be said that, like unless you're in like
communities of color, just how colorism does like in a
lot of ways police, how we treat each other and
how we see you other. So, yeah, someone that's a
little more fair skin we would say like they would
say passing, like he passes as something else. So like
a few things you can get away with, you know. Um,
And at least in the psyche of you know, a

(08:26):
person of color like myself who's not light skinning. Yeah.
In when he was a toddler, the Newton family moved
to Oakland, California. UM. Now, Walter always managed to bring
in a very stable income. The family was still very poor,
but like they weren't ever sort of like starving or
anything like that. Um. Their most common meal was kush,

(08:48):
which is I guess a fried cornbread dish, which they
often ate for every meal of the day. Um. Heh.
We grew up watching his father work eighty hour weeks
and still constantly be like stressed out over bills. Um.
And this was like really had a big impact on
him growing up, this kind of constant economic anxiety. UM.
He didn't have an easy adolescence. School was difficult for him,
and he seems to have had I think we probably

(09:10):
would would have today have diagnosed him with a learning
disability because he was incredibly intelligent. He just I think
teachers had a difficulty reaching him, is how I would
It seems like what was going on. By the time
he was in eleventh grade, he was still illiterate, and
his teachers assumed that he was just not intelligent. UM.
And this was obviously not the case, because Huey's hobby
outside of school was memorizing poetry with his brother. UM.

(09:31):
But it was not until his high school counselor told
him that he was too dumb for college that Hui P.
Newton decided he had to prove them all wrong. So
for two straight years he studied like a madman, teaching
himself to read and write, and eventually to graduate high
school UM. In nineteen fifty nine, he enrolled at Merritt College,
where he joined the Afro American Association and became well
known for his debate skills. All thought that he might

(09:52):
not be college material fell out the window as he
began a meteoric path of scholastic excellence and he would
eventually receive a PhD. Um. Yeah, this seems to me
to be a clear case of a kid that maybe
just had like his teachers didn't know how to reach him,
but like he was, he was brilliant. Um. So do
you know it's funny because it's like I thought about
the my credibility I'm putting on danger here by you

(10:13):
saying stuff that I didn't know Joe saying and being like,
oh wow, I didn't I didn't know that, you know,
and it's kind of already started. I was like, I didn't,
I didn't know you couldn't read till you till eleventh
grade because I've only known him as like you said,
the sports ur you know, that was able to articulate
the feelings and the sentiment of lack America in that time.
That's crazy. I didn't know that well. And I think

(10:35):
one of the one of the reasons it's important is
that from a very early age he gets this lesson
that like the system clearly failed him because he didn't
know how to treat him properly, and he had to
build a system for himself to elevate himself. Um. And obviously,
like I didn't know any of this until I read
a couple of weeks ago. I read a book, a
really good book called Black Against Empire by Joshua Bloom
and Waldo Martin. Um. That's a really fascinating history of

(10:58):
the Black Panther Party. UM. And I it's it's very readable,
I would say, compulsively readable. It's a really good history. UM.
And it's like one of the major sources of this episode. Um.
It's very comprehensive and detailed. And I didn't know almost
any of this stuff until I read it. So yeah,
I hugely recommend that. Yeah. And I'm gonna actually I'm
gonna I'm gonna read a quote from it now discussing

(11:19):
what set Hughey P. Newton apart from his academic colleagues quote,
he had a side that most of the budding intellectuals
around him lacked. He knew the street. He could understand
and relate to the plight of the swelling ranks of unemployed,
the brothers on the block, in his words, who lived
outside the law. Newton street knowledge helped put him through
college is he covered his bills through theft and fraud.
But when Newton was caught, he used his book knowledge

(11:41):
to study the law and defend himself in court and
pressing the jury and defeating several misdemeanor charges. So I mean,
I'm I'm on board with this guy. Yeah, it's that
dual consciousness that w boys talk about, Like you just
your street knowledge and your book knowledge. Is like you
got them both rock and you're unfathable. You know. It's

(12:02):
this thing that you brought up earlier, where like it's
so important and this is like something the Panthers always
emphasized to under have an understanding of the law in
your rights. Yeah yeah, in a nineteen I'm sorry, no, no, no, no,
I was gonna say, yeah, I firmly believe this, Like
and and like I said, like we're we were built
an entire show around it. That like, especially when it

(12:24):
comes to like politics, specifically geopolitics, Like I have this understood.
Like my belief is, like if you came from any
sort of like neighborhood environment, I don't care if it's
like rural Oklahoma or you know, inner city Detroit. If
you come from a city and you had to navigate
you know, tribes in the city, you understand geopolitics. You

(12:46):
just don't. You ain't got the language for it, you
know what I'm saying. So so being able to use
your own what we would call like hood antennas to
figure out what's happening in you know, dominant culture world.
Like if you have a grasp on both of those, dude,
you're under you're undefeatable. Yeah. That that does make me,
like I think maybe one of the major issues we

(13:08):
have diplomatically and like the international stage is that number one,
so many of our diplomats are guys who like donated money,
rich kids who donated get the job. But like also
nobody who I do feel like somebody with that sort
of street experience would do a better job, for example,
of doing diplomacy in a place like Baghdad, because you
just have a deeper understanding of like, yeah, kind of

(13:29):
the interpersonal relationships necessary to make if you had to
convince a bully to not give you a swirlie, if
you had to, if you went through that, you know
how to come to a negotiation table. You know what
I'm saying, especially especially like if your bagh dad, you
know what I'm saying, and the bully is you know

(13:49):
the G six you know what I'm saying, or you
know what I'm saying. Bullies America, It's like, well, I
know how to deal with bullies. So here, here's here's
how I think we can handle this. You know what
I mean? Yeah? Now. Um. In nineteen sixty two, Hue P.
Newton met a guy named Bobby Seal at a protest
opposing the U. S blockade of Cuba. Um Now. Bobby
had been born in nineteen thirty six, about five years

(14:10):
before Hughie, and while Hughie was the youngest of seven,
Bobby was the oldest child of three. He'd grown up
in Oakland, where both his mother and father worked. Bobby's
dad was profoundly abusive, and Bobby grew up kind of
accepting that random violence from authority was a regular fact
of life, which again would have you know, be obviously
influential in his worldview as he grew up. Now, obviously,

(14:31):
when people go through that, there's a number of different
ways they react to it, and I think Bobby is
sort of dealt with it in the healthiest way you can. UM,
and became sort of obsessed with fighting bullies wherever he
found them. UM. At one point when he was a
little kid, he saw another child shove his sister out
of a swing. Bobby pushed that kid out of the
swing and declared that now everyone had on the playground
had a right to use the swing. Um. Justice. Yeah.

(14:56):
So Bobby joined the Air Force as a young man,
both to get out of the house and so he
could learn how to use firearms. UM. He was given
a dishonorable discharge three years in when he hunted down
a man who stole from him and beat that guy
very badly with a pipe. UM. You can read the
story in Bobby's biography, Seize the Time The Story of
the Black Panther Party, which is available for free online.
I'll have a link to it. UM. Personally, I think

(15:18):
the dude that he attacked had it coming. Um. Bobby
bounced around for a long time after this, getting whatever
jobs he could for a few months at a time
before they found out about his dishonorable discharge. By nineteen
sixty two, he was down and out in California, and
he took the refuge taken by all such men in
that situation. He became a stand up comedian. I didn't

(15:40):
know this about his back story, yeah, he later wrote.
He later wrote this that year I worked as a
comedian in two or three clubs around Oakland and at
private parties. I think comedians know a hell of a lot.
They know a lot of things that are oppressive and wrong. Um, yeah, yeah,
I like that that attitude. Huey and Bobby Seal met

(16:02):
at that protest against the blockade of Cuba, and they
were both members of the Afro American Association together. The
leader of that group, Donald Warden, was a confusing man
who really liked castro but was also a major believer
in the power of black capitalism to fix societal injustice. Um.
He was a bitter critic of mainstream civil rights organizations.
Hui P. Newton was initially enthralled by Donald's ideology, but

(16:24):
he grew frustrated when, over the course of months it
became clear that that this like talk was basically all
that he felt Donald was good for. UM. He also
grew critical of Donald's focus on black capitalism, which he
didn't think would do a very good job of liberating
black people from the hole that he felt capitalism had
dug for them. And again, Huey's this guy growing up
with all this economic anxiety. Not a pro capitalism dude.

(16:45):
I mean we're still debating this, yeah, you know, in
community and UM. During this episode, I think we're going
to discuss at length a group of people who were
distinctly on the fringes of the civil rights movement and
often very critical of the men and women in like
kind of mainstream civil rights movement who worked to alleviate
American racism through more traditional legal means. UM, and I

(17:06):
feel like we should pause right now to talk a
little bit about what legally and acceptably working towards equality
looked like in this period, because I think we get
a sanitize at least I think as a white kid,
I got a very sanitized version of the civil rights movement.
You got, you got nice MLK yeah, well yeah and
socialist mL and his couch mL k um. But even

(17:31):
more to the point where we're going to talk about now,
what I think I got a sanitized version of more
than anything, was the sanitized version of how white people
reacted to mlka um and how people like lb J
reacted to MLK. And so we're gonna talk a little
about now that now. So then as now, most black
people in America voted Democrat um. But this should not
lead people to believe that the Democratic Party at the

(17:53):
time embraced black people is like equal comrades. Um. They
were just moderately less racist than the Republicans, and not
always moderately less racist than the Republicans. Some state Democratic parties,
including the one in Mississippi, banned black people from membership.
Members of that state's Democratic Party regularly beat and even
murdered black people who tried to register to vote. So

(18:13):
black Mississippians developed their own party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,
which focused on registering black people to vote. Three of
the party's activists were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in nineteen
sixty four, which is the year that the Civil Rights
Act gets signed into law by President Johnson. Um So
Johnson at the time was again, you know, the man
who signed the Civil Rights Act. In the law, um

(18:35):
played a what I would describe as a profoundly cynical
and gross game of political brinksmanship with the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party, and he kind of yielded to the civil
rights movement and a couple of areas, but also tried
to maintain the Democratic Party's Southern dominance by throwing bones
to the racists in the Democratic Party. And in doing so,
he was engaging in like a proud tradition that goes

(18:55):
back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, because during the Great Depression,
FDR successfully won the black vote for the first time
for did the Democratic Party by involving black people in
the New Deal and giving them access to social programs
and even appointing several black men as advisers. But he
kept southern racist Democrats on board by refusing to take
any action against segregation. Um So, lb J was kind

(19:17):
of engaging in what at that point was a decades's
old tradition within the Democratic Party. UM yeah, yeah, And
and again these are still the conversations we're having, you
know to this day, like uh we yeah, I'm my
thought here, like yeah, there's the idea of like, um,

(19:38):
I know you're only helping me because it's expedient for you, right.
And then you have which you'll see in the in
the Black Panther Party, to like these two two two
sides of this coin of like the like like yeah,
like the Marcus Garvey's of the world that are like
they're never gonna treat us fairly. We will never get
a shake here. It's never gonna work. Let's just sleeve right.

(20:01):
And then you have the other side that says like no,
like my grandparents, my ancestors, like built the built the damnation,
Like you know what I'm saying, that's our blood in
this soil, Like we we picked this. You know why
you were superpower because you ain't pay the workers, you
know what I'm saying. So like that's why you were superpossed.
So so it's like, no, I'm just as much American
as you are. You gonna include me in your documents,

(20:21):
you know what I'm saying. So like that that two
sides and then and then and then you're and then
it's like I remember the the pain and hurt in
my eye and my my parents, my father, and my
grandmother's eyes. When I got so disillusioned early on that
I was just like, man, it's like, hey, you're gonna
go vote today. And I was like, man, I don't know,
you know what I'm saying. I'm like, was sitting in
this traffic, man, you know what I'm saying. I was like,

(20:43):
I don't even I don't know you know what I'm saying,
And just like how hard they fought just for me
to have the right to do it, you know what
I'm saying. Like made me be like, dog, I can't
but yeah, just that that like just how hard they
fought for me to be able to do that, you know,
it really gave me pause. But it's still yeah, that
same for us raction where it's just like I just
these people don't love us, and we just will never

(21:05):
know unless it's like expedient for them, you know that
if you pass a civil rights loss, like, oh, I
don't know if you really like me though, you know, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah, And it's that that's that's um. That's kind
of where lb J finds himself in this issue. He's
a guy who's racist, and he's willing to count out

(21:27):
a racist. He's also not so racist that he's unwilling
to push for progress when he thinks it advantages him electoral.
Not exactly pragmatic racist. That's a fair way to refer
to Lyndon Baynes Johnson. Um and I'm I'm gonna read
a quote from Black Against Empire again kind of describing
how this all comes to a head at the Democratic
Party State Convention in Jackson, Mississippi in nineteen six four. Quote.

(21:51):
The MFDP held a state convention in Jackson in early
August and selected sixty eight delegates to attend the upcoming
Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. President Johnson
was determined to maintain white Southern support and worked to
undermine the m f DP. On August twelve, Mississippi's Democratic Governor,
Paul B. Johnson told the all white Dixiecrat delegation that
President Johnson had personally promised him not to seat the

(22:13):
m f d P. The President refused to discuss the
m f DP with civil rights leaders and instructed FBI
Director Hoover to monitor the renegade party closely and provide
regular updates on its activities to the White House. It's
not gonna be the last time we hear about the
FBI and the story she so yeah. Basically, the m
f DPS goal was to try and make enough noise

(22:34):
at this assembly um that the Credentials Committee would have
to call a vote about whether to seat the delegation
from the m f d P at the convention that year.
And they called a number of people to testify before
the committee, including a woman named Fannie Lou Hamer who
is a black activist with the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee. Now,
she was fired from her job and beaten in jail

(22:54):
by black prisoners who were being ordered by probably under
the threat of death from white policeman to attack her. UM.
So basically she gets thrown in jail for registering people
to vote, and the cops tell other people who are
in prison or who are in jail with her, like
beat the ship out of this lady, or will deal
with you. And this is what Fanny lu Hamer says

(23:15):
at the Jackson Convention quote, the first Negro began to beat,
and I was beat until I was exhausted. After the
first Negro was exhausted, the state highway patrolman ordered the
second Negro to take the black jack. The second Negro
began to beat I began to scream, and one white
man got up and began to beat me on my
head and tell me to hush. One my white man,
my dress had worked up high. He walked over and

(23:36):
pulled my dress down, and he pulled my dress back up.
All of this on account we wanted to register to
become first class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party
is not seated, now I question America. Yeah, yeah, ah, yeah, yeah.
It's just this onion of pain. Every time and more
you dig, you're just like, oh, yep, yeah that happened. Yeah,

(23:59):
you know what's not an onion of pain? Geez? Most
likely the other pod that's about to be advertised. I'm
just saying. If I'm if I'm running y'all's random things,
usually it's another pod, yeah, or the Koke Brothers. Let's
hope it's an oil refining. Yeah. Anyway, here it is.

(24:25):
There's not going to be a single good ad transition.
We're back. So we just talked about, um, we just
talked about Fannie Hamer and her her speech at the
Mississippi Democratic Conference UM, and it caused enough of an uproar,

(24:46):
and it gained enough national sympathy because it was televised
that lb J couldn't just completely ignore the m FDP.
So she gets up and kind of pulls it people's
human heart strings, like even people, most people are pretty
racist back then, but they're not inhuman and something like
that makes them feel terrible, and so they're like, yeah,
maybe we should seat this delegation, which lb J feels

(25:06):
he can't do because again he's trying to cow tow
to the racist contention to the Democratic Party. So he's
put in this situation where he has to deal with them,
but he also is not willing to actually deal with them.
So instead he brings in his vice president, History's greatest monster,
Hubert Humphrey UM, and Hubert Hubert's job is to deal
with this problem, which is again, the problem is black

(25:28):
people wanting to vote without being murder them. Is the
constitution anyway? On the problem is the Constitution that pesky document? Yet,
So Humphrey meets with the m f DP delegation and
he tells them that they're not going to be seated,
but that the president is willing to compromise by letting
what he called educated professionals from the group, one of

(25:50):
whom was white, sit with the Mississippi delegation at the convention.
Humphrey refused to let miss Hammer sit with the delegation, saying,
the President will not allow that a literate woman to
speak from the floor of the conventions. So that's yeah. Now,
the m FDP, to their credit, refuses to compromise. But
that wound up not mattering because this was all a

(26:11):
scheme in the first place. While they were meeting with
Humphrey l b J. Had the party announced that the
m f DP had reached a compromise with the Democratic Party,
the whole thing had been a double cross, so he'd
put them in that meeting so they wouldn't know that
this was going on, and then by the time it
was announced, they have to either spoil the whole convention
and the election, which obviously matters to them because civil
rights is on the docket, or like, just let him

(26:34):
get away with this ship. Um. So l b J
kind of wins this round. Um yeah, and it sucks, um.
But what happened there, like the double cross in nineteen
sixty four, was really widespread knowledge, particularly in the black community,
and it infuriated many people who felt the civil rights
movement had mainly achieved cosmetic victories. Malcolm X addressed these

(26:55):
people when he said, quote, now you're facing a situation
where the young negro is coming up. They don't want
to hear that turn the other cheek stuff. No, there's
a new deal coming, there's new thinking coming in, there's
new strategy coming in. It'll be molotov cocktails this month,
hand grenades next month, and something else next month. It'll
be ballots or it'll be bullets. It'll be liberty or
it will be death. The only difference about this kind

(27:16):
of death it'll be reciprocal. Yep. Yeah, very famous speech,
very famous quote. Yeah, ballot and bullets speech man. Yeah,
resonates too deep. It resonates. And if we're you know there,
like obviously the story of the white sort of people

(27:37):
generally referred to as the Founding Fathers, almost all of
them um were deeply racist. But there is still there
is this one thing that's really interesting me. There's this
similarity in sort of the language um, anyone fighting for
what they perceive as liberty tends to use because Malcolm
X's ballot of the bullet speech very similar to Nathan
Hale's liberty or Death speech, um, which is fascinating to me. Yeah,

(28:01):
that's a good catchman. You're really astute young man. So
February six, sixty five, we're going back to Bobby Sealing
and Hughie Pine Newton. Now, I just wanted to give
that sort of context of what kind of how frustrating
and feudal it would have felt to try to do
this legally and respectably by kind of the mainstream attitudes.

(28:23):
So February six, nineteen sixty five was a very key
day for Bobby Seal and Hue P. Newton. That is
the day that Malcolm X was assassinated by a member
of the Nation of Islam. Um. This made Bobby so
angry that he grabbed a bunch of bricks from his
mother's garden, broke them in half, and started tossing them
at the cars of any white people who drove by.
He vowed to make himself into a motherfucking Malcolm X.

(28:43):
Millions of black folks across the country were incensed by
Malcolm X's death, and six months after his assassination, the
Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles was host to something that
looks very close to a civil war, the Watts Riots. UM.
And I think riot might even be an unfair term,
Like legally that's what they were declared. Um, it was
an uprising. Um. The most direct cause of this was

(29:05):
the mass murder of black people by the l A. P.
D UH. Sixty five black men had been murdered by
Los Angeles cops from January of nineteen sixty two to
July of nineteen UM. In twenty seven cases, the victim
was shot in the back. Only one of these murders
was actually ruled an unjust homicide, though, and this was
a case where two cops were literally playing cops and
robbers with real guns and accidentally murdered a newspaperman. Um. Yeah,

(29:31):
so so no, no, no, I wasna saying, I see
it's crazy, like today's just one of those heavy days.
I just left my my great aunt's house, like my
grandma's sister, and she was just now right before I
got here, talking about the Watts Riots, and it was
so it's like the stuff that she's never said, well
because I never really asked, but like you know, my

(29:51):
family has been in Los Angeles since the fifties, you
know what I mean. So Um, when she was describing
the moment of riots, she started dropping these other gems like, hey,
you know when Jim Crow, because my family's originally from Texas,
then they moved here. Um said the that LAPD was
like recruiting from like disgruntled, like Southern once Jim Crow ended,

(30:17):
Like they were recruiting these like disgrunt old Southern men
that were like frustrated about Jim Crow and wanted to
do something about America. So they were coming to be
a part of law enforcement. So if you feel Compton
Watts l a with these men who are mad that
Jim Crow's over, it's a powder keg. Yeah it's gonna explode. Yeah,
it's going to explode. Um and it does. Um in

(30:41):
in during the Watts riots, and the most direct cause
of the riot itself for the uprising itself was the
traffic stop of Marquette and Ronald fry Um. Both men
were pulled over by a highway patrol cop and a
crowd gathered while they argued with him. Um. The crowd
got very angry when the police started beating Rena fry
Their mother with a black act when she came in
to intervene. So they started beating this this middle aged

(31:04):
woman with black jack's. Basically, it's like a big leather
beat stick, I guess is the best way to describe it.
Um uh yeah, So the Watts riots deserve an episode
of their own. UM for now. What's worth noting is
that large numbers of the police would call them rioters.
I would prefer to call them protesters fired on police
helicopters with rifles. Um. Huge numbers of guns were stolen.

(31:27):
The police chief compared the violence to Vietnam, and so
did black activists on the street who were interviewed by
journalists at the time. Thirty four people, most of whom
were black, were killed in the violence, and mostly by police. Now,
all of this, the failures of conventional politics to provide
an effective remedy to racism, the death of Malcolm X,
and the Watts Riot, all of this helped spurge a
massive surge and revolutionary black activism in the United States

(31:50):
in the mid nineteen sixties. UM. Now, Huey P. Newton
and Bobby Seal were already very politically radical UM when
this happened, and they'd flirted over the years with a
series of different groups, and including one called the Revolutionary
Action Movement. Um RAM argued that black people were a colony,
UM had basically been colonized by American white people, and
that the struggle for black liberation was part of the

(32:12):
global struggle against colonialism, which was then happening. You know,
we're in the post World War two period. All these
different colonies around the world are starting to either fight
for their freedom or protest for it. Um and Huey's
brother Melvin joined RAM, but Hui was kind of frustrated
by the fact that he felt the organization preferred posturing
and intellectual discussion to direct action. He became convinced that

(32:35):
none of these ideological organizations could reach black people on
the street who didn't have like a thorough grounding in
political theory. Basically, like what you're talking about I agree with,
but all you're doing is talking, and you're talking about
theory that's at such an intellectual level that you're not
able to reach people who are just like you know,
living and working sort of at a street level that
aren't academics. UM and Bobby Seal actually joined RAM for

(32:58):
a while but he developed basic the same frustrations that
Hughie did with them, and he wrote about it in
his autobiography quote, I got very frustrated with those cats.
I didn't think they were going to do anything, and
I became very discouraged about being able to work with them.
They had a lot of paranoid hangups, and they began
to accuse me of things. They had so many bull
crap suspicions. I couldn't deal with them, and I broke
loose from those cats. I got mad at them one

(33:19):
night and busted down their door. All of them hid
behind their damn beds. At that point, I couldn't deal
with them anymore because they wouldn't defend themselves even against
one little old me. There were four or five of
them in the pad, but they ran hiding. I just
didn't respect them anymore. I was thinking to myself later,
for these dudes, I'm going to find myself a righteous
partner to righteously run with. See this is terrible, but

(33:40):
I as right as that is, and as serious as
this moment is, I only hear that in like my
dad's friends voices, just like man, I was looking for
some righteous dudes you know. Yeah, man, these cats they
weren't even back to revolution. Yeah. Like I said, I'm Dad.
I would say it. He's like, man, I just need
to look for dudes I can run. Would be real bad,
Like all right, Yeah, my dad still talks like that,

(34:03):
Like what does that mean? Pop? Put that on plane
and split it Jack? Like what what what does that mean? Dad? Anyway,
the whole his whole lot of biograph, he's written that way,
and it's part of way. I really enjoy it because
it's not something I had much exposure to UM, and
I enjoy that sort of like the language he uses,
I like it a lot. Yeah, there's almost poetic cadence

(34:26):
to it. Yes, yes. Uh So. The partner that Bobby
Seal wound up finding was Hughey P. Newton. Now, the
two had known each other for a while and they'd
always gotten along, but they drifted politically and slightly different
activist circles UM. But now after the Watts Riots, they
decided to create a new organization together, the Soul Students
Advisory Council, and they were the only people who created it,

(34:48):
but they were two of the founding members UM. Now
they organized protests against the draft for black students um
because they felt it like without sort of being treated equally,
that they shouldn't be expected to fight for the country
without consenting to in the same way. And they also
worked to have black studies courses added to Merit college curriculum,
and in this last one they were successful. He we

(35:09):
suggested the group should next get involved in fighting police brutality,
But before this project could really get off the ground,
Huey and Bobby wound up running straight into some police
brutality of their own. On Thursday, March seventeenth, nineteen sixty six,
and around nine pm, Bobby and hue and their friend
Weasel were hanging out in Berkeley, walking to the University
of California campus. Bobby was reciting an anti war poem

(35:31):
he liked. Uncle Sammy called me fulla lucifer. They drew
a small crowd to themselves, who urged Bobby to recite
it more loudly, and a police officer arrived right as
Bobby sang out these lines, You school my naive heart
to sing red white and blue stars and stripes songs.
You school my native heart to sing red, white and
blue stars and stripes songs, and to pledge eternal allegiance
to all things blue, true blue eyed, blonde, blonde haired, white,

(35:54):
chalk white skin with USA tattooed all over, and the officer,
an off duty cop named George Williamson, tried to arrest
Bobby Um for this. His justification was that Bobby had
been blocking the street. This caused a fistfight, which brought
in more cops, which led to both Bobby and Huie
being arrested. So from poetry, yaw, yeah, alright, artists write

(36:16):
the poems. It's it's interesting like that. It says a lot, yeah,
about the power of poetry that like this scares a
cop enough that he has to on his off hours,
he has to get involve more country God darted. Yeah
what yeah? Uh so next, According to the book Black

(36:38):
Against Empire quote, a few weeks later, Newton and Seal
saw a policeman pushing around a black man for no
apparent reason. The officer arrested the man and took him
to the station. Following Mark Comfort's example, Newton and Seal
went to the station and bailed the man out using
money from their organization's treasury. The brothers started to cry
and it touched Bobby deeply. Bobby was fed up with
armchair intellectualizing and wanted to stand up against the police,

(36:58):
recalling I was filled with a staunch belief of the
need for brotherhood and revolution and rebellion against the racist system.
So it was Hughie who first suggested that the s
s a C Members should arm themselves with rifles and
shotguns and host an armed rally for Malcolm X's birthday.
The guns were explicitly to honor Malcolm X's call for
black people to engage in armed self defense. Um and uh.

(37:22):
Bobby Seal would write in his autobiography quote who he
was running Down, that the law says every man has
the right to arm himself by the Second Amendment of
the Jyvass Constitution of the United States. He says that
we are going to exhaust that because in the end
the man will say, we don't have a second Amendment
of the Constitution. So Hue saying that, like, we should
arm ourselves in protest because we have the right to
do that, but also they're going to strip us of

(37:44):
our right to carry guns once we start doing it.
History like and it's that brilliant, Like, um, I know
the word is so it's such a pregnant word. But
just like the co opting of language that you you
same thing Frederick Douglas did with this like fourth of
July speech of like, he homie, you said, you built

(38:05):
this thing for liberty and freedom, and this ain't my celebration.
I don't know what you're talking about. You know know what
I'm saying. He was like, these are your words. You
said that film that I started this nation because it is.
And he's like, well, okay, that's those are your words.
You said all men were created equal. That's what you said.
You know what I'm saying. And then right here you
said every man has the right to bear arms. That's

(38:25):
what you said in my I mean, what am I
a martian? Like I have a right to bear arms? Yeah?
Yeah yeah, And he we uh thought that the presence
of firearms would also help to draw in the people
he called the brothers on the block um more than
you know, waving protest signs and placards, because a lot
of those guys were involved with like different like gangs
and stuff, and they understood guns, and you know, they

(38:48):
weren't political theorizers. And he was like, this is something
that I think I can get them on board with UM.
The other members of the s s a C thought
this was too risky. Bobby Seal was the only person
who backed Huey's plan UM, so he and Huey quit
the s a C And formed a new organization, the
Black Panther Party for Self Defense in October of nineteen
sixty six. And during his studies WHO he had done

(39:10):
research into the state of California's laws, and he'd learned
that it was actually legal for Californians to openly carry
firearms in public, even loaded ones, provided those weapons were
not pointed at anyone in a threatening manner. And it's
interesting when you read modern stories about this by like
mainstream news sources like the Chicago Tribune, they always say
it was a loophole in the law. It's not a loophole.
It was just legal law. It was just the law.

(39:34):
He didn't find a loophole. This is the law. Was
the law. This is me putting my hands up as
if I'm holding an actual paper. That's the law. Now.
This was not entirely Hughey's idea. He'd also read about
the actions of a group called the Community Alert Patrol
or CAP over in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.

(39:55):
After the Uprising, cap had been formed to watch police
in black neighborhoods, and capps efforts were incredibly important, but
their activists were often victimized and abused by the l
a p D. And some of them had started talking
about carrying guns during their patrols. So as the Black
Panthers came together, Hughey's plan evolved. He decided that the
Panthers would organize armed patrols to follow police officers around

(40:17):
and observe them during traffic stops. The new Black Panthers
started doing just this. In February of nineteen sixty seven,
a group of them, including Newton and Seal, were stopped
in a car loaded down with rifles and handguns. And
I'm going to quote now from a great article in
The Atlantic titled The Secret History of Guns. Quote. When
one officer asked to see the guns, Newton refused, I

(40:37):
don't have to give you anything but my identification, name
and address. He insisted this too, he had learned in
law school. Who the hell do you think you are?
An officer responded, Who in the hell do you think
you are? Newton replied, indignantly, he told the officer that
he and his friends had a legal right to have
their firearms. Newton got out of the car, still holding
his rifle. What are you going to do with that gun,
asked one of the stunt policemen. What are you going

(40:58):
to do with your gun? Newton applied. By this time,
the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer
told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at
them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a
right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so
long as they didn't interfere. Newton played it up for
the crowd in a loud voice. He told the police officers,
if you try to shoot at me, or if you
try to take this gun, I'm going to shoot back

(41:20):
at you, swine, which is the balls on him. Y'all
wonder why that man on everybody's T shirts talk about
him all the time, goddamn right, because it's like, I mean,
like straight up, I mean it's it's I love that
you're painting the picture of like the totality of the
cultural moment. A lot of times we see history is

(41:42):
like these like single file line events that aren't like interact,
like you're all living the same moment just like now,
you know what I'm saying. So he put all those
moments together like nothing. I mean, I grew up in
I'm l A in the eighties and nineties. I'm like,
you won't talk to police like that, you know I'm saying, right,
you feel me? Like this week, you know the streets,

(42:03):
we was a gang injunctions, like you'll talk to police
like that, you know. So just seeing that type but
like these are my right, tell me, like, it's just amazing.
I mean, I'm a tall white guy, so I have
a certain degree of police shield and I would be
terrified of talking about police like that. Crazy. Yeah, so

(42:25):
fucking incredibly, Huey, Bobby and their comrades were allowed to
continue on without arrest because they hadn't broken the law. Um.
The whole event left everyone in the car and all
of the onlookers who had gathered to watch the altercation stunned,
as we're stunned just talking about it today. Um, it's
it's just hard to imagine even this happening without bloodshed. Um. Yeah,

(42:49):
So the whole event made Bobby Seal decide that Huey P.
Newton was, in his words, the baddest motherfucker in the world.
It convinced Huey of something important too. The gun is
where it's at and about in Yeah. So uh. This
spreads through the community like wildfire, and young men begin
joining the Black Panthers in droves. They're armed. Patrols of

(43:09):
the police become a regular thing. Um. And you know,
they have a lot of strict rules about this. You're
never supposed to be closer than ten feet to the
officer or the person being stopped. You have law books
on you at the time. You're quoting directly from them.
Like they're not just like like there to intimidate the police.
They're there to give information on rights to the person
being stopped. Um. Yeah, and so yeah, whenever a black

(43:32):
person was stopped by the police, observing Panthers would both
be an armed presence there and would be providing legal advice. Um.
And as their notoriety spread, so too did the Black
Panthers UM all across the country. UM and firearms were
a central facet of their identity. From the beginning, new
recruits were taught the gun is the only thing that
will free us. The group purchased rifles by selling copies

(43:53):
of Mousey Dung's Little Red Book to students in Berkeley.
Over the years, their arsenal grew to include machine guns
as well as tens of thousands of unds of ammunition.
New recruits received training on black nationalism, socialism, and how
to clean and handle and use firearms. It's also worth
noting during this period that we talk in my audiobook
The War and Everyone, we talked a bit about how

(44:13):
KKK groups, white supremacist groups are easily able to buy
and smuggle machine guns and other military grade weaponry from
the army from like racists in the army at this point,
and the Black Panthers do the same thing from black
people in the army, Like they're getting machine guns and
weaponry directly from the military. If I shouldn't share, I
probably shouldn't share this, but I'm going to all trillion

(44:35):
of your followers. But like I just found this out
on Thanksgiving, that like my uncle Charles was like doing that,
Like he was like he was like selling. First of all,
he was, like he said, he was selling, like he
was selling like engine parts in like Munich when he
was hit. He just like to like civilions, like just
sell it parts. You're just like selling selling guns out

(44:56):
of San Francisco, like Uncle Charles. It's like I was
like what He's like, Yeah, he discharge because he was
selling weapons. Sorry, sorry is listening? Uh? I mean, statute
is over. It's Um, it's a situation where there's there's

(45:17):
a lot going on here. But both the panthers in
the KKK, not that there's any moral equivalency between the groups,
but they both suspect that a massive civil war is coming.
Either it's going to break out or the bombs are
going to fall in the wake of the nuclear apocalypse,
there's going to be fighting between um, you know, like
racists and non racists or black and white, depending on
your your perspective. Um. And so there's this belief that,

(45:40):
like we are arming ourselves for a war of survival, um.
And considering there are thousands of heavily armed racist people
like Louis Beam who are specifically talking about wars waging
award extermination against America's blacks, like that's not an unreasonable
thing to one arm yourself against. And now, yeah, that's
the part that like I really wish people could like
understand like the tone and ire of the moment, that

(46:04):
this stuff is not imaginary, Like this is with like
elected officials you know in certain states or just people
like him are just like, no, our plan is to
wipe y'all out. Yeah do you said? Yeah? Oh, you're
not You're not like you're not like ambiguously racist. You're
not like kind of Nazi light you know what I'm saying.

(46:24):
It's like, nah, now we try to wipe y'all out. Yeah,
and you It's like, this is something I come to
a lot in the modern day. It's like, you can
your opinions on gun control. Um, there's a lot of
different attitudes on that. I will listen to them, but
I can tell you from experience talking to a lot
of people in a lot of parts of the world,

(46:45):
when someone wants to exterminate you, there's nothing you'd rather
have in your hands asolutely, absolutely as again, like for
like the the invention of the modern day I say
modern with quotes as a historian of crip and blood,
like the invention of the street gang is specifically growing

(47:05):
up in Los Angeles put such a different taste in
your mouth about guns. You know what I'm saying. So
it's like, you know, so, like it's hard for me
to like, you have my father, that's like, no, you're
what are you talking about? Your civil rights? Man? These
people finda you know what I'm saying, it's like, look,
look white, you're gonna come get you, you you know what
I'm saying. And then and then you got the streets

(47:25):
where that's like, if you pull a gun out, then
that means that, like, yo, I'm not a civilian. Like
so when somebody stops you and it's like, hey, where
you from. You know, I'm saying, if I got a
weapon on me, it's like, oh, oh, you signed up
for this gang life, you know. But if you don't
have one, it's like, man, look I'm a square. I'm
on my way at basketball practice. You know. So with
that sort of like juxtaposition, it's sometimes it's hard for

(47:45):
myself to get my brain around it, you know what
I'm saying. But at the same time, if knowing again
the context that these people are living in Syria, Mazul,
you know what I'm saying, Like, these people who live
in these contexts, it's like, no, this is not an option.
And it is also yeah, yeah, it's also like the
difference between just individual self defense and this idea which

(48:07):
there's a lot of you know, flaws behind a lot
of the thinking that occurs in the United States on
this this subject. You can say statistically like actually, you're
more likely to be harmed if you have a gun
in the home. The difference between that individual self defense
and collective self defense, which is yeah, um, too deep
a subject to really delve into, very while we're trying
to delve into the Panthers. But you know what's not

(48:29):
too deep a subject to delve into? Right now? Here
we go? What is products? I'm gonna set it, I'm
gonna do, I'm gonna do the best set up? What
is that Robert product? Uh? And a service which which
I think we can explain in the context of this episode.
Off we go. We're back, all right. Um, So, as

(48:59):
we before, we had our little disgression about community self defense.
We were talking about the Black Panthers start their civilian
patrols of the police, armed patrols of the police, um,
which are very popular, um and very revolutionary. And of
course the man as embodied by the Republican Party and
the governor of the state of California and Ronald Reagan

(49:19):
was not in any fucking way about to let a
bunch of black men exercise their right to bear arms
and legally observed the police. And I shouldn't just say
black men, because there were black women involved at this
point too. Of the black panther party was really the
ladies because they locked up, autom or killed us. Yeah
so yeah, yeah, yeah so yeah. Like the the the

(49:42):
white Republicans, particularly who governed the state, although it's not
like the white Democrats in the state provided in the
opposition to this um decide that action needs to be
taken um. And the guy to do this was a
ship heel named Don Mulford. A ship heel. I love it.
I gotta tell you guys, this is another digression. I

(50:03):
feel like, I don't know, nobody cusses more poetically than
black people are old black man. Nobody cuss is more
poetic than him. But the most creative and innovative things
to call someone come out of the mouth of middle
aged white man. I just don't know anyone that's just

(50:23):
fucked hard, like I'm telling you, man, shit stick, like
what yes, yeah, touchet man. I see, that's why that
This is why intersectionality is so important. You used to
learn the best way to cuss. Oh, multiculturalism really improves
the use of obscenities. It's critical, yes, um so uh yeah.

(50:48):
Don Don Mulford. Mulford was the community assemblyman for Oakland,
and in April of nineteen sixty seven, he proposed the
Mulford Act, a build that would strip Californians of their
right to carry firearms in public. The Mulford Act was
a pure act of legal targeting against the black panthers.
I'm gonna quote again from that Atlantic article. Quote. Republicans
in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told

(51:10):
reporters that afternoon that he saw no reason why on
the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.
He called guns a ridiculous way to solve problems that
have to be solved among people of goodwill. Doesn't read
that the Republicans now tell that to a cop, right, So,
I mean that's so funny to me. I'm just like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, no,

(51:31):
not even thirty years ago, not even thirty years ago,
thirty four years ago. You're saying literally the opposite of
what you're saying right now, yeah, yeah. In a In
a later press conference, Reagan says he he doesn't know
of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun
to go out into the field or to hunter for
target shooting who carries that gun loaded. Uh. And he
says the Mulford Act should work no hardship upon the
honest citizen. And of course the n r A completely

(51:54):
backs the Mulford Act. No problem with it at all. All,
all on board this ship. Appreciate that. I appreciate you.
Take a second to appreciate that. Somebody dropped some like
some like spa music right now to appreciate the n
I was for gun control, to make sure you can't

(52:14):
carry a loaded weapon. I don't know. I just thought,
like where you go get the thing is? You know
what I'm talking about. That's the best part, exactly what
Hughie Hughey's furious about this, but he's not surprised. As

(52:34):
I read that quote from him earlier, he'd immediately predicted
this is going to happen once we start doing this. Um.
But he carries out a protest. He organizes a group
of panthers armed to the gills to go march on
the Capitol Building in Sacramento. Twenty four men and six
women showed up, led by Bobby Seal. They walked up
the capital steps guns in hand, and Bobby read a
speech quote, The American people in general, and the Black

(52:57):
people in particular, must take careful note of the racist
California legislature aimed at keeping black people disarmed and powerless.
Black people have begged, prayed, petition, demonstrated, and everything else
to get the racist power structure of America to right
the wrongs which have historically been perpetrated against black people.
The time has come for black people to arm themselves
against this terror before it is too late. M After this,

(53:19):
Seal and the others went inside the building bearing loaded
firearms the Capitol Building. UM. And they were allowed to
do this because they were abiding by the law entirely
in the day proceeded peacefully. UM. And before we move on,
I think it's worth dedicating a little bit of time
to how the mainstream media covered all this, and the
short of it is they were not fans of the panthers. Um.

(53:40):
The New York Times is coverage of the event which
I can only read in my old timey white man
voice om Negros protest gun bill Sorry response to that? Yeah,
um and now I did find in some credit to
the New York Times a modern day New York Times

(54:00):
article that quotes Jane Rhodes, which is a very like
admitting like, we fucked up and we're very unfair in
our coverage. Um. And it quotes Jane Rhodes, a professor
of African American studies, as saying the newspaper was dubious
and skeptical of them. It also gave them a tremendous
amount of coverage. The media, like most of white America,
was deeply frightened by their aggressive and assertive style of protest,
and they were offended by it. And that October two

(54:23):
thousand sixteen Times article I found analyzing this by Giovanni Rossinello,
it leans into acknowledging how unfair the coverage was, and
he writes about the Times his first articles on the
Black Panthers. What the article did not explicitly say, though
it was reported later by others, was that the Panthers
had read a statement that afternoon calling upon the American
people in general, not just African Americans, to help them
in their push for rights. The Time sent its own

(54:45):
reporter a few days later to write a profile of Mr. Newton,
the party's young co founder. That article was no more
measured than the first. It barely mentioned police brutality, instead
lavishing attention on the fact that the Panthers had weapons.
Political power comes through the barrel of a gun. Newton
was quoted as saying, so, the journalists who cover this
ignore police brutality, ignore that, Like, there's a self defense

(55:06):
narrative here. What do you expect us to do when
we're being shot. That's one of our rights. Our nations
founded on the idea that that human beings can arm
themselves in self defense. That's what we're doing. They ignore
that necessarily. Look at these black men carrying god, oh
my god. Yeah. Um so. On July, the racist California

(55:27):
legislature passed the Mulford Act with the n r as
enthusiastic approval, and Governor Ronald Reagan signed it in the law,
so the Black Panthers were thwarted, at least in the
state of California, from carrying out armed patrols any longer,
but the organization continued to grow, spreading across the country
and drawing in thousands upon thousands of members, and as
the group grew, Huey and Bobby and the other leaders

(55:48):
expanded the sort of things the Black Panthers did. It
was not enough to just advocate armed protests in police patrols.
They needed to mobilize their community and that they felt
meant helping their community. In the early years, the Black
Panthers developed a concept they called revolutionary intercommunalism, which is
something I really think the modern day left needs to
get it ship together. Oh my god, if you do it,

(56:10):
yes um PBS describes this as the strategy of building
community service programs or survival programs. Programs meant to develop
positive institutions within the community to help individuals meet their needs.
The Panthers developed over sixties such community programs. Now, these
community survival programs ranged from the People's Freeshoe and Clothing Program,

(56:32):
to the Free Plumbing and Maintenance Program, to the Free
Pest Control Program, to the Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation
and the People's Free Ambulance Service. Well, the news breathlessly
covered the Panthers armed marches and their confrontations with police,
they ignored most of these other programs. One member later,
a guy named Roger Smith said this. You don't read
about the survival programs we're doing for the people. The

(56:53):
free children's breakfast program, trying to feed some of these
hungry kids before they go off to school in the morning.
The educational programs we had going on for these kids,
for the older folks as well. You don't read about that.
The shoe giveaway, the clothing giveaway, the code giveaway we
had going on back East so these people don't freeze
to death during the winter months. The free prison bussing
program where we bust people from the community out to
the prison the penitentiary so the people can visit their

(57:14):
loved ones who are incarcerated. You don't read about that.
You don't read about the free ambulance service that we
had going on in Winston Salem, North Carolina, because black
people in Winston Salem, Carolina were denied basic emergency healthcare.
You don't read about that. You don't read about the
free sickle cell anemia testing program, where we tested over
five hundred thousand, half a million people before the US
government ever realized that sickle cell anemia was a threat

(57:35):
to the well being of black people in America. You
don't read about that. Why because there's no sensationalism, There
no dramatic value. It doesn't sell newspapers, it doesn't boost
the television ratings. It's just some black people getting organized
to help some other black people. Yeah, that's so, that's
the panthers, I know. Yeah, you know the like which

(57:55):
I mentioned at the top of the show, that's what
my father was part of the after school tutor program.
So like I just know them as people that fed
us in the morning. I mean obviously not us because
I wasn't around them, but like fed kids in the morning,
helped him with their homework after school. And the attitude
even to this day was like you can't look out,

(58:19):
you can't look for a handout from your oppressor. Like
these people ain't gonna help you, you know what I'm saying,
Like why would you take their money, why would you
take their services? Because they they they are you're oppressor.
Therees don't make no sense, you know what I'm saying.
So like that was his that was always his attitude
was like, man, find it on your own, Like, man,
you don't don't look uk owe these people not to

(58:40):
find it on take care of your own. That was
always an attitude. Yeah yeah, yeah, that makes a ton
of sense. Um, there's still sorry, but there's there's a
few still like like leftover things where just generationally speaking,
there's like we still have a generational like like gap,

(59:00):
Like you know, when when I started doing music full time,
like the label I was a part of was like
one of my best friends and you know he's white dude, right,
so my dad still had this like I like, I
like that boy, but you know, you you you got
you gotta watched them white men. Now you know. I
was like, okay, pop, Okay, I mean I get it
with like I mean it's for instance, high school man,

(59:23):
like you know what I'm saying, Like I think we're good,
you know, but but still like he still has a
little bit of that. I mean he's definitely not the
same man he was, but he still has that like
how do you know you gotta you gotta you gotta
watch them you know what I'm saying that, and they
don't they really take care of you, you know. I
mean it's it's not unfair. Yeah, yeah, not unreasonable considering

(59:44):
like yeah, the time and place and experiences he had,
you know. Um, and uh, I do think like you
have to open the story of the Black Panthers by
talking about armed self defense. The past controls the guns,
because that is how it it really started. But I
do think even a lot of like people on the
left who admire, like particularly white people left to admire
the Panthers, they focus a lot on that part because

(01:00:07):
it is again the most and and not enough on
what really is the most revolutionary part of the Panthers,
which is the survival program. Yeah, the the I don't
know if the book got into it that or maybe
we'll get to it later, but just the actual like
provable success rate, you know what I mean of, like
the provable results like this actually worked. I mean blood

(01:00:28):
testing half a million Black people for sickle cell anemia,
like before the government realizes it's a problem for black
Like that's huge. That's an enormous effort. That's like a
state level effort that is is all community volunteer driven.
It's amazing now by some accounts, the most influential of
the survival programs was the Free Breakfast for Children program.

(01:00:49):
While students were guaranteed a free lunch was part of
their public education. In nineteen sixty seven, the US government
spent only six dollars a year on breakfast for students.
The Black Panthers saw this whole the social safety net
and realized it was harming Black children more than any
other group in the country, and so they took action
to fix this. Now, the communities in which they provided
free breakfast for children were not all instantly on board.

(01:01:10):
The Black Panthers were a revolutionary organization famous for confronting
police with firearms. People like Minister Bridges of the St.
Augustine Church in Oakland were initially suspicious when the group
asked to start meeting and distributing breakfast there, but gradually
the Panthers won them over and the community rallied to
provide them with donations of grits, eggs, toast, and milk
to feed hungry school children. Much of the food was
donated by local businesses from a mix of ultruism and

(01:01:33):
fear of social reprisals by the Black Panthers, and I'm
gonna quote from Black Against Empire again. At times the
Panthers cajoling blended into harassment and strong arming. Far more
common were boycotts and pickets of businesses that refused to
assist the programs equally common with the tactic of calling
out or publicly shaming those who refused to help. Churches
and other community based organizations that refused to help, notably
those who refused to sponsor or allow breakfast programs on

(01:01:56):
their premises, face similar treatment for starters. The Panther newsletter
and Panther representative railed against the non supportive business person
or community leader as a capitalist pig. Other epithets included
religious hypocrites, lying creatures and merchants, and avaricious businessmen. Dang
cancel cultured since yeah sixties, canceling fools. I mean, you

(01:02:18):
know it's I think that's perfectly fair, um, because the
ultimate goal here is to get kids food, and you've
got you've got plenty of extra food, Like why are
these kids starving in the morning, and then you're probably
complaining about them staying kid, yeah, you know, running your streets.
It's like, well, they're hungry and you can fix that. Yeah. Yeah. Now,
the free breakfast program itself was a mix of pure altruism,

(01:02:40):
poor kids needing good food, and also clever propaganda. The
program highlighted the fact that the richest nation on Earth
then waging a brutal and expensive war in Vietnam could
not provide a simple breakfast for all of its children.
The leadership of the Panthers, who suspected or outright hoped
in some cases that they might one day wind up
in an armed revolutionary struggle with the US government, new
there was a tactical benefit in winning hearts and minds

(01:03:02):
this way. One of them noted, well, we might not
need their direct assistance in waging armed revolution. We were
hedging our bets that if we did, they would respond
more favorably to a group of people looking out for
their children's welfare. Yeah. Yeah. Uh. In November nineteen sixty nine,
the Black Panthers announced that their program had spread to
twenty three cities and distributed free breakfast to more than
twenty children. That number wound up being more like fifty

(01:03:24):
thou in minimum um. The law took notice. In Baltimore,
the police called this program a front for indoctrinating children
with Panther propaganda. They responded as only law enforcement came.
And I'm going to quote again from Black Against Empire.
Police and federal agents regularly harassed and intimidated program participants,
supporters and party workers and sought to scare away donors

(01:03:45):
and organizations that housed the programs, like churches and community centers.
Sophia Abukari's discovered that participation in one of the Harlem
free breakfast programs fell off after the police spread a
false rumor among black parents that the children were being
fed poisoned food. Police disinformation campaign in Richmond, California suggested
that the Party used free Breakfast for Children program to
spread racism and foment school riots. Student participation began to decline,

(01:04:08):
forcing local Panther leaders to combat the official disinformation. The
police were not above raiding breakfast look program locations even
while the children were eating. In The Baltimore Panther branch
was comparatively small, but as Judson L. Jeffrey's demonstrates, the
branch and dirt an excessive amount of violent repression, and
not even children were spared harassment by the police. One morning,
the Baltimore police disrupted the children's breakfast, barging menacingly onto

(01:04:30):
the premise. A witness recalled they walked around with their
guns drawn and looked real mean. The children felt terrorized
by the police. The police were like gangsters and thugs.
Day yeah, just getting breakfast, homie, just trying to feed
kidst breakfast. Yeah a while now. Yeah. Eventually the state

(01:04:51):
decided that the danger of this propaganda of the deed,
as I think Bacunan would have called it, was so
great that the only reasonable response was to start providing
American children with free breakfasts. By nineteen seventy two, the
US government free breakfast program had reached more than one
point one eight million children. The massive upswing and funding
for this program proceeded directly from Panther activism. Normamat, a

(01:05:12):
former Panther, said this in an interview with eater dot com.
I really do believe that the government expanded their program
because of the work we were doing. I don't think
the government wanted to be outdone by a community based organization,
especially the Panthers. I really think we were very instrumental
in school food programming. Yo, I'm positive positive that's what happened. Yeah, yeah,

(01:05:34):
hey man, what do we It's like, hey, hey guys,
are these at these are these poor three fists of
a humans? People out humanizing us? Like what do we
what do we do it? What are we doing? Yeah? Yeah,
and it's it's remarkable the amount of fear that was
generated by the Panther Breakfast program, and in some cases

(01:05:56):
it was more than the fear they had as a
result of the armed confrontations by the Panthers. Yeah, there
sizeable evidence of this putting ideas in their brains and
getting in the old skull alister thinking they don't need
the government at all, saying yeah, we shouldn't have navigated more.
On nineteen sixty nine, j Edgar Hoover, director of the

(01:06:17):
FBI and gigantic piece of Ship, wrote this in a memo.
One of our primary aims and counterintelligence as it concerns
the Black Panther Party is to keep this group isolated
from the moderate black and white community which may support it.
This is most emphatically pointed out in their Breakfast for
Children program, where they are actively soliciting and receiving support
from uninformed whites and moderate blacks. So yeah, I like

(01:06:40):
they immediately assume they're uninformed. Yeah, it's like, oh, you
must not know. It's like not, I know, I know
what they're doing. Yeah, I know what they're doing. They're
feeding our kids, feeding the kids. It's just it's just
feed the kids. Well, you know they're socialists. Well, if
socialists means means socialism means my kid doesn't start, maybe

(01:07:00):
I like socialism. Here's the thing, here's the thing. I
can't pay for purkfast, and y'are not helping me get it. Yeah,
so you caught him. Whatever they want, You got whatever
you want. I'm gonna come and get some breakfast with
my children. But you know, it says a lot about
the state of the government, about the nature of capitalism,

(01:07:21):
about the nature of law enforcement that the free breakfast
program was one of the things that scared the FBI
director the most. Um. And in part two we're going
to talk about j Edgar Hoover's plan uh in the
nationwide law enforcement campaign to take down the Black Panthers.
Made for you guys to learn this stuff. Yeah, so

(01:07:41):
this is a behind the behind the Bastards episode. We're
not talking mostly about bastards in this one, but you
need the set up to really understand how shitty the
bastards are. Yeah. So prop has been the end of
part one. Um, you want to drop a couple of
plugs at the end, and we will sail out until Thursday.
Oh my ad. Yeah. So website is prop hip Hop,

(01:08:04):
which is also all of my sort of social media
handles prop hip Hop. Um, that's for tour dates for
my own podcast again callhood Politics. I believe politics is
just gang banging in nice suits. So we just kind
of like explain your headlines just in gang terms to
help you understand what's going on. Um and uh yeah

(01:08:24):
and yeah, I just hit me on the website and
the social medias prop hip Hop. And I'm sure folks
who are listening who are really knowledgeable of the Panthers
will notice there's some crucial stuff we left out from
this period we we haven't talked about. Um, some important
figures we haven't talked about, like the ten point program.
We're gonna get to a lot of that in part two.
It's kind of impossible to like do this all chronologically.

(01:08:45):
I just kind of had to set it up the
way it makes I was. I was prepared to before
you've asked to be on, So I was prepared to
have like mercy for you because it's such a big thing,
you know what I'm saying. And it's like, I'm pretty
sure there's other episodes where there were other people that
were like grossly well familiar with like whatever you're gonna
talk about it. I just didn't know nothing about you
know what I'm saying, So like, like like the R

(01:09:05):
Kelly episode, I was like, you didn't grow up on
nineties R and B. You're not gonna know some deep
cut things that I know, like man cut the guys
some slack you know what I'm saying. Anyway, So I
was prepared to give you. So I'm telling I'll listen
to to man cut the some slack dag like you
have saying can't cover everything. Yeah, and we'll we'll get
to I think a lot of it, uh in part two. Um,

(01:09:26):
you know as much as as possible in eleven thousand
words and two hours and change. But that's gonna be
on Thursday. You can find all the sources for this
h on Behind the Bastards dot com. You can find
me on Twitter at I right, okay, you can find
this podcast on Twitter and the gram at at Bastards
pod and that you can buy shirts on Team Public.
And that's that's the damn episode. Um, We'll be back

(01:09:47):
with part two. Oh. I have another podcast that exists
on the internet called Worst Year Ever. And if you
want to learn about another community of people who have
been ignored by law enforcement in the media, react, acting
to violence, and using community self defense to protect themselves.
We just did a two part episode UM on a
chlorine gas attack on a furry convention and everything that

(01:10:10):
resulted from that, So I was listening to it on
the way. That's really good. It's really good. Yeah, that's
really good. Plug. Yeah, it's it's it's really good. Is
my plug? Yes, it's really good. Double plug. Plug's good.
Now the episode is actually over.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: The Bastards Who Killed the Black Panthers