Part Two: The Black Panthers & Breakfast

In part two of this week's episode, Margaret continues her conversation with Joelle Monique about how a few thousand Black radicals scared the government by feeding kids, building coalitions, and organizing armed community defense.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. It's
the show that you listened to on as a podcast,
but no one has iPods anymore. Helloa, that you'll never
thought about that.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Well. There was a unnamed celebrity that I who I
had to work with on a podcast at one point
in time, that kept calling her podcast her iPad and
I was okay with that.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
I love it for me, it would be my phone cast.
The voices you've heard include our guests this week, Juan Monique, hooray.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Hey, I'm still here and I'm really excited because we
can talk more about breakfast.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
I know. But Okay, before we started recording, you mentioned
that you say, Joel writes for a bunch of God,
You've written for everything.

Speaker 3 (00:59):
A lot of places.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Yeah, but you used to write for home improvement shows.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Okay, so I didn't write for home improvement shows. I
was a production assistant and an office assistant. Did I
start an NDA, I don't think so.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, that was what I was thinking as I'm about
to ask you this.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
I was like, I'll just say it's one of the
major ones where everyone seems to have no job but
a budget of a million dollars. So if you know,
if you know the show, you know the show. But yeah,
so I worked for them for years. It was not.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
But what I'm saying, it's chaotic. People should ask Joelle
for home improvement and redecoration advice.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
I have many thoughts and if I don't know, I
know somebody who does know. I'll get you the hook up.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Hell yeah. I finally introduced house plants to my house recently.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
Lovely, do you have a name?

Speaker 1 (01:54):
Some So I always thought I had an opposite of
a green thumb because when I was an elementary school,
they were like, it's plant a Tree Day, and they
like just give you a pine tree and then you
like take home and you plant it and mine died
and so then I was like, I don't know how
to get that stuff for me. Yeah, and I like
never did it ever again. And then now I'm like
a prepper and live in the woods and I'm like,
I need to grow food. Yeah, so right now I

(02:17):
have some like beans growing and some I think spearmint
and some other stuff, but I have house plants. Finally,
I really random shit, I grew some potatoes last year
because I felt like i'd be a poser if I didn't,
because we used to like do this whole potato bit
on the show A lot.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
Potatoes are great. They're they're survivalists. Uh, they will not
die and they're delicious in many, many, many forms. An
excellent plant to cheese to grow.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
Yeah, what are your house plants? I can't even remember
the name one spider plant?

Speaker 2 (02:52):
You can't you can't.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yeah, I got like, can't kill ones.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
Okay, industrial strength plants. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
But I'm like because I was like, I have a
I have an anti green thumb, and I'm going to
kill them. And then I'm like, I actually don't. I'm
like a reasonably responsible person. I have like a pretty
set schedule. I don't have a problem watering my plants
once a week. Like, uh, what if I convinced myself,
I've convinced myself that I'm incapable of taking care anyway.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Your your spider plant will be fine. My spider plant
currently lives on top of my freezer, getting no light
and I barely water it and remember it's there and
it looks great.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
Yeah, next time we talk, Margaret, I bet you have
like nine plants. That's what happened, Like mist missed I
don't know those miss disperser things are in special lights
and amazing. I can't wait.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
The other voice that you're hearing is so fie me.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Now, if you want to talk plants, you you can
talk to me on the internet about that. I would
love to talk to you about plants.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
I think that people like because like people like randomly
tech podcasters to be like, I want to talk to
you about these very specific things, and they're always the
wrong specific things. Yeah, yes, especially when people get mad
at me about mispronouncing. I mispronounced the name of an
Irish town last week, and no one will let me
live my life.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
Leave Margaret all about that.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
But Irish love to do that across it. There's multiple
podcasts I've heard from where they're like trying to say
something from an Irish space, and inevitably here comes the
whole school of people be like, that's not it. Your
language is tricky and we're doing our best.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
Okay, Yeah, I look up so many pronunciations before I
write these scripts. But I have one week to write
these scripts, and since I like give myself weekends because
my my heroes fought and died for those things. Yeah, like, anyway,
I don't remember why we're talking about that. Oh, but

(04:52):
you can message us about plants, yes.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
Speaking people who have plants Ian, our editor. I remember
the first the first time when I interviewed him to
be like, please work for us. Mostly it was mostly
me being please pick me, uh and not and then
not actually interviewing him out he had a plant and
he knew how to take care of it, and I
was like, that's what we need.

Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah, that was all I tend to convince you didn't
take much graduation.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
Do you understand my basketball jokes? You do? That's the
life plant anyways are theme songs by un Woman.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yeah, thanks Sophy. He's like, Margaret, you're fucking dropping the ball.
Also Hien hi Ian Oh yeah, everyone's say it has
to say hien before we.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
So fun, so fun.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
Okay, So this is part two on a two parter
about the Black Panther Party and particularly about their survival programs,
although you can't talk about those without talking about the
larger movement that they came out of, right, and so
that's that's what we're talking about today. And if you
didn't hear part one, then part of part two will
make sense. But honestly, your life will be better served

(06:11):
if you go back and listen to part one.

Speaker 3 (06:13):
We had some hot cereal takes, y'all, Like, I mean,
you really don't want to miss that conversation.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
It's Virus's true. I have I mostly eat oatmeal now,
well just as fast because I use instant oatmeal because
I I am not picky. And then like cereal, you
can put like a banana in right, but oatmeal you
can put a banana or peanut, butter or nut.

Speaker 3 (06:39):
Your golden raisins in there. You can do extra cinemon
if that's your dive. Oatmeal is great, especially I think
when you live in wilderness. I used to live in
wilderness and you have a hot bowl oatmeal, you feel
very connected to the land of the people who lived here.
For this is a meal we've been eating for a
long time and it still hits. Add a little apple

(07:03):
in there in the fall stop it amazing good.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
So the survival programs of the Black Panther Party, these
are their most successful programs, and they started because their
connections to black religious communities. When I first started this podcast,
I kind of thought I'd be like, oh, I'm going
to like write back in all of the like women
and anarchists and other people who are written out of
all this history, right, Hell yeah, and I still do that,

(07:28):
and I'm going to do that here a little bit
because we're going to talk about both women and anarchists
and the Panthers. But but the thing that keeps coming up,
at least as much as anything else, is that religious
religiosity is also written out of a lot of these histories,
especially if you're reading it from like a radical point
of view. A lot of the radical points of view
are like more atheistic, right, and so like people are like, oh, well,

(07:50):
the Panthers had this survival program, and if they mentioned
it's out of church, it's just like ah, because that's
where there's a building.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
That was the location that would do it.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, there were religious aspects of the Panthers. This is
not like a majority thing. I'm not claiming there's a
religious movement. There are religious people who are involved in it,
whether you have Protestants in Oakland, Black Catholics in Chicago,
or Yoruba in Islam and the New York Panthers, the
religious aspects are absolutely a part of it. And Reverend

(08:17):
Earl A. Neil is a Black episcopal pastor. He's still around.
I think he lives in South Africa now. He moved
there in the nineties to help fight apartheid, and he
walked his first picket line when he was seven years old.
He was all over the civil rights movement. He went
to the South to register voters. I think I forgot
to writ where he's from. He's from the Upper Midwest somewhere,

(08:38):
maybe Minneapolis, but I didn't write that down. And he
ends up going to Chicago for a while, and he
ends up organizing marches. He works to root out racism
in the episcopal hierarchy. And then he moves to Oakland
in the late sixties and pretty quickly starts throwing down
with the Panthers. He never joined formally, but he let

(08:58):
the panthers meet at his church and they would come
unarmed in deference to the church right. And one night
he sheltered some panthers. And I actually think, this is
my conjecture, I think he saved their lives because cops
came in force to arrest the Panthers at one of
their meetings. This is the day before Martin Luther King
Junior was assassinated, and it is three days before Bobby

(09:21):
Hutton was murdered, right, it is entirely possible that the
cops are there to murder the panthers. That does not
feel outside of the realm of possibility to me at all.
Reverend Neil went outside and basically it's like you can't
come in, and they're like, ah, drat, and then they

(09:43):
leave again.

Speaker 3 (09:44):
They've they met the line of I have to respect
this figure. The head of a church. God would not
like that, no matter what the color. It's a bad
look for me. Wow, what a brave person, because you
never know some people may not adhere to that that ideal.
It's crazy.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Yeah, he went out alone and he'd like talked them
down and like had them go away. You know, there's
like I read his take on the whole thing, and yeah,
it's just like first he gets first, he's like, you
don't need all these cops here if you're just here
because the cops were like, oh, we're here because we
heard there was a black man with a gun around, right,
and like this is just literally not true.

Speaker 3 (10:23):
Right, of course they don't need to tell it.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
They came on it invested. Yeah. A few days later,
his church held a joint memorial service from Martin Luther
King Junior and Bobby Hutton and Earl Neil has been
called the spiritual advisor to the Black Panthers, and he
wrote about religion for their newspaper. He wrote like four
different front page articles over the years for them. In

(10:46):
January nineteen sixty nine, his church, Saint Augustine's Episcopal Church
in West Oakland started the first free breakfast for children
program that the Panthers ran. They feeding kids before they
went off to school, and he helped some write He
was like part of it. But a parishioner named Ruth
Beckford Smith gets the real credit is the woman who

(11:09):
started the most successful program that the Panthers did. I
actually don't know one way or the other whether she
was like a registered Panther. But one of the things
that's kind of interesting, right is the Panthers they peaked
at about five thousand members, but their newspaper's going, Yeah,
their newspaper is going to a quarter of a million people,
and there are like it is a larger thing than

(11:32):
just the core membership, you know.

Speaker 3 (11:36):
Yeah, the wow yea. Their impact was literally everywhere. At
some point, I don't know how much longer after this
they like, spread to New York and really go house national.
But wow, to do that with just five thousand people
is very impressive.

Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah no. And that's with all of the different all
of the different chapters. Yeah no. And they changed the
world with five thousand people. Like m H and so
Ruth Beckford Smith and Reverend Neil they draw up a
meal plan. The thing I read didn't tell me what
was on it. I'm kind of sad for that. They
cleaned the place so it would pass health inspections, and

(12:15):
then they opened the doors and the first day they
had eleven kids. By the end of the week they
were feeding one hundred and thirty five kids.

Speaker 3 (12:23):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (12:24):
A couple months later, another church in San Francisco opened
its doors for another breakfast program on the other side
of the Bay. Before too long, there's thirty six free
breakfast programs across the country and they're feeding ten thousand
children a day. That's so beautiful, I know. And these
programs fucking ruled. They were generally in black neighborhoods, but

(12:47):
they were open to kids of all races. We're going
to talk more about their multiracial organizing a little bit.
When we talk about Chicago one thing that kind of
blew my mind. A lot of these kids had literally
never eaten breakfast before.

Speaker 3 (13:00):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
That is like wow, it's like every now and then.
It's like like poverty looks different in different times, in
different places with different people. Right, But like reading about
some of the Panther stuff where they're like, these kids
don't have shoes and have never eaten breakfast, you know, like.

Speaker 3 (13:17):
Yeah, it's the line we're often sold this stuff happens
in other countries and how sad that is for them. Yeah,
this is our backyard. It happens here as well. It
is an issue, it could be easily solved. It sounds like,
I mean, obviously maximum effort was put in, but it
was done quickly and efficiently and helped so many people

(13:39):
so quickly. The bar was not that high. Yeah, that's that. Wow,
you're giving it their first breakfast. And also when you
start thinking about the way real community activism creates chain
reactions of success. You know, we in the last episode
we talked about the benefits of a breakfast and how

(14:00):
how much that can just change a kid's ability to
learn within a day. So you've not only done that,
but you've also removed a burden from a parental figure
who probably didn't have the money, who probably knows their
kid is hungary who you know for whatever, or you know,
now they don't have to cook it. They don't have
to like that's in maybe an hour. They get back
in their day, which you know is vital to caregivers.

(14:22):
That's amazing.

Speaker 1 (14:24):
Yeah, yeah, I'm really glad you point all that out,
because there's just so many effects of this instead of
just being like, oh, it's like some free food, right,
and people are like, oh, it's some freefes's cool, free
food's great, you know, and then being like, no, this
is a this matters, you know. Yeah, And most of

(14:46):
these free breakfast programs are run by women, both Panthers
and non party volunteers. At this point, membership of the
Panthers is about two thirds women. One thing that I
read was that basically like the Panthers started of mostly men, right,
and then they very quickly became majority women. And part

(15:08):
of that apparently is like different people have just different
takes on it. But one part is that early male
leadership was on the run in jail or killed, and
so women came in and got shit done.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
This makes a lot of sense too. I told you
in the previous episode. I've been reading a lot about
slaver volts. We know from mostly contextual history, which Margaret,
I'm sure you're familiar with. But it's trying to read
between the lines of historical documents to figure out the truth.
But you know, most of them were led by women.

(15:39):
And the theory is because, to be honest, they were
being used for sex and often not chained up, they
had access to tools, and because they were women, they
were not considered threats well banned. Now you're shot, what
you gonna do? You got a revolt on your head? Brilliant.
So this is not surprising to me at all. If
we think got the history of black women in this
country that you know, they took the lead when there

(16:04):
was an opportunity too, that's amazing.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
Yeah, yeah, no it. And there's like and there's like
complicated conversations that women and the panthers were having around
like well, why are we in the fucking kitchen right,
but also like, well, we're going to get this shit
done because it needs to get done, you know, and
so like there's this complicated back and forth about like

(16:27):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
Yeah, I mean, listen, it's so interesting to hear if
you listen to a second wave feminists, particularly second with
black feminists struggling with black liberation and women liberation and
trying to educate the men in their lives while also
liberating themselves while also dealing with white supremacy. Like it's
it's such a complex space to exist in. And here

(16:53):
we have babies that need to be fed. They need food.
We have the resources to do so why are there
no men here? The babies have to get fed. We
don't have time. Totally, what a difficult situation to.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
Be in, totally, And so the way that they spread
this across the country, they wrote up a manual of
how to run a kitchen with the stuff that they've
been learning, and each one of their kitchens at least,
I don't know if everyone was exactly the same, but
in the manual, at least it takes ten volunteers and
including crossing guards outside. Because they took this shit seriously.

(17:26):
It was like, how do we get kids safely? Like
there's like people on crowd control and stuff. There's two cooks,
but it takes ten people to build up everything else
around that, and the crossing guards was the touch where
I was like, yeah, these people fucking thought it through.

Speaker 3 (17:40):
Yeah yeah, food.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
And or money for food was donated by various black
owned businesses. And this is a I think this part's
kind of funny. It's the part like there's a lot
of stuff that gets like left out of the histories
because people want to whitewash something. But like some of
the things that are a little bit like sketchier, I
think are just as yeah, you know, like yes, of course,
so many of the black owned businesses gave super voluntarily.

(18:06):
Other ones. The panthers were like, man, everyone else around
here is help and feed the kids who live here.
Should would be a shame if no one came to
your store anymore because they knew that you weren't helping out.

Speaker 3 (18:17):
A reasonable and decent threat if I've ever heard one,
because all you're really saying is I'm going to tell
people you don't support your community. Yeah, let's find out
what happens then. That is I mean, that's just justice.
Like either this is such a good program is actively working,
and you can come off a few dollars to help
the kids who were going to come back here and
frequent your store. At some point get out of here. Amazing.

Speaker 1 (18:39):
Yeah. I read this one like right wing account of
the survival programs and it was like talking about this
like boycott of Bob's liquor store. I don't remember what
city was in. And it was actually specifically that he
wouldn't donate to the like shoes for Kids program, so
they organized a boycott against him. And you know, it's like,
see they're like a trying to suppress this good entrepreneur

(19:03):
or whatever. And I'm like no, I mean, like, it's
one thing if someone's like, hey, I need a new car,
you better give us some money, and it's another guy,
the kids in this neighborhood don't have shoes. You make
a lot of money in this neighborhood, maybe you can
help out. And if you don't, that's fine. No one's
gonna shop here.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
Yeah, they're not bringing baseball bats to breaking knees, Like, yeah,
calm down. I'm also infinity perplexed by the idea that
somehow being a business owner makes you any kind of good.
I know, it's such a weird bar for people to
be like, yeah, you know, he's got a business.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
I can trust that guy. Yeh Neil Okay, yeah, upstanding
member of the community. Like, all right, whatever you mean.
He has a nicer house than some of the other
people in your neighborhood. And the carrot to match the
Boycott stick was that they gave advertising to their the
donators in the Panther newspaper. And one thing I got
really excited about. I really like Jimmy Hendrix when I

(19:59):
was younger kid. He regularly supported the Seattle program. Like
I don't think he just like gave them money once.
I think he was like, he gave regularly. The implication
is that he's supported the Seattle Free breakfast program.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
That's oh, man, you love you love to hear your
heroes doing dope shit. Yes, Like when you talk to
women who hung around Jimmy, they're like, no, he was
a sweetheart. He just loved He just loved women, and
they just loved him. And he had survived a bunch
of horribly abusive men and so he just loved women.
And I was like, what an.

Speaker 1 (20:35):
Ica, that makes me so happy. That's the like, whenever
there's like a man I look up to, I'm like,
do I want to know? Do I want to read
about what women think of him?

Speaker 3 (20:45):
It's definitely closed eyes in mouse situation where you're just like,
I don't want to look. If it's presented to me,
I will observe, but I would just can I I
just really want to believe you're a good person. But
also I'll just never support a man verbally. I'll never
be out here being like and this guy you can trust,
No trust you, but.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
You know what you can trust as well as you
can trust it a random stranger, eh is good Advertisers,
We're brought to you today by breakfast. Eat breakfast. If

(21:28):
you don't eat breakfast, maybe you have reasons and you
don't want to hear about why you should. And I maybe.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
Definitely eat yeah one of my favorite meals.

Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah, but eat food when you're hungry. That's the only advertiser.
And if any others slip in, that is a mistake.
And you can write to our complaint department at I write,
Okay on.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
X, I'm gonna keep calling it Twitter.

Speaker 3 (21:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
I feel like I'm almost like being ruder to it
by calling it X because I'm like, this fucking bullshit thing.

Speaker 3 (22:03):
Here's zero SEO for your website. I was gonna type
in X. Yeah, you still have to type in Twitter
dot com endlessly confusing.

Speaker 1 (22:12):
Yeah, andlessly confusing. Anyway, here's breakfast and we're back. So
all the cop watching an arms standoffs and shit. They
appealed to one chunk of the black population, the more
confrontational chunk. The free breakfast program made a much wider
group of people into panthers and their supporters. One in

(22:36):
three black kids in the city of Minneapolis ate their breakfast.
There about twelve thousand kids total.

Speaker 3 (22:43):
Oh yeah, oh my little heart.

Speaker 1 (22:46):
School administrators immediately noticed students doing better, and they didn't
have to wait decades. Now we have science to back
this up. But like administrators would just like come in
and be like, you all are doing the fucking lord's work.
I guess most people don't say fucking lord's work. People
usually say one or the other.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
The real ones do, Marge, the real.

Speaker 1 (23:09):
They were like, the kids aren't falling asleep in class anymore,
and like not everyone's grouchy all the time. Right, And
I'd heard about this program time and time again. Right,
this looms very large in the radical history of the
United States, and for very good reason. I actually skirted
around the panthers and like probably a dozen episodes at

(23:29):
this point. So, and there were some things that people
would say about the breakfast program that I wasn't sure
if we're true. People were like, oh, the free breakfast
program was really what scared the government way more than
the armed marches. So I looked it up. Yep, that's true.
Women's work scared the shit out of the FBI because

(23:51):
it made the panthers look good. It showed that very
clearly that the existing system was not functioning. Right to
quote FBI Director j Edgar Hoover, who'd already announced that
the panthers were the number one domestic threat to US security,
which is impressive, five thousand people, right, he said about

(24:13):
the breakfast programs, quote, the program represents the best and
most influential activity going for the BPP, and as such
is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to
neutralize the BPP to and destroy what it stands for.

Speaker 3 (24:29):
Feeding black children. I hate it, Yeah, so evil, definitely
the thing that could bring this great nation to her knees. Yeah, well,
fed children in school? You yeah, cowardly bitch. Just oh,
it's so. It's so. When you there's a TUPAC documentary,

(24:52):
it's a series on Hulu Stay with Me his mother
as I'm sure you know, maybe we get into her later,
member of the Black Panther.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
She's come up a couple of times, and she's going
to be in one of the court cases I'm gonna
talk about.

Speaker 3 (25:03):
Later, Okay, so i won't get into her, but there's
a clip she is fucking epic and was still her
dying day, like amazing human being. She raised her son
in the Black Panther Party. He was sort of being
raised to be a leader in the Black Panther Party.
This documentary explores a lot of that, but within it,
there's this clip of them, a bunch of like young dudes,

(25:27):
teachers maybe in their mid thirties, talking to very young boys,
like seventy nine macs, and they're asking them how old
are you? Maybe I'm six, No, you're not five. You
know I'm six, And they're like, no, you're five, okay five.

(25:51):
They're like don't no, no, They're like, don't let someone
change the way you think. Don't let someone. They're teaching
them about how they're going to be conditioned and giving
them tools so early to navigate, like a system that
they like. It's crazy to be a black parent. I
can't imagine doing it myself to like, know, you don't

(26:11):
have to send your kids out into a society that
actively hates them. To have a Black Panther Party that
is doing a lot of the work that is often
left to parents. Be like, here's how you think your
way out of racism actively in a moment, Because when
you experience an act of hate or prejudice, a lot
of times your system shuts down. You really have to

(26:32):
be trained to use the tools to survive. And the
Black Panther Party by creating a space like the Breakfast
program that could allow children to gather safely before school,
and then having these people in there who are educated
and prepared to teach them about how to navigate those systems.
I mean it, it's so crazy to think about how

(26:53):
that was demonized, how efficiently and effectively that was demonized,
and to see it so happening lely across this country.
The way they're trying to rewrite the laws of what
can be taught at school and things like that. Oh,
it's sickening and it's hard. It's hard to hear about
all these lovely things knowing you're still fighting these fights

(27:13):
and trying to get these very basic programs that clearly worked.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
I know, like instilled. And it's like, if teaching people
the truth about race relations in America destroys America, then
America deserves to be destroyed.

Speaker 3 (27:28):
Two thousand percent. If you have to hide the truth
to be comfortable, then what have you sacrificed? It's not
worth it. And also it's only creating comfort for you.
Literally nobody else is comforted by information. It's so damning
and hurtful. It is trying to imagine being an educator

(27:48):
or an institution of learning in Florida right now, and
my heart is just with them. Whatn'n uphill battle?

Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah, I honestly can't imagine. And then there's like everyone's
being like, oh, if you'r trends, you got to get
out of Florida. And it's like most of us are poor,
and like, do you know an awful lot of us
like not me, I'm a good family that loves me.
A lot of us are like kicked out of our
families and don't have like things to fall back on,
Like how the fuck do you think all the trans
kids are supposed to like leave Florida?

Speaker 3 (28:15):
You know, I also think, fuck you if you tell
people to leave the South is of a the problem
is consistently it's only congregated there. This is a national problem,
not a specific Southern problem. And on top of that,
we know that like Florida has a huge queer population,
a huge queer population of people. Yeah, you're just loving

(28:35):
and having families down there, and many of them have
been redlined out of existence in the same way that
they do with black, brown indigenous people. So to tell
people like, oh, just leave, like the problems won't follow them,
Like they haven't made a home here, Like they don't
deserve to stay in Texas or Louisiana or wherever they
feel like is their home. It's just crazy to me
to be like huge change, not those fuckers change.

Speaker 1 (28:57):
Yeah, Like, and if people do you know, like I've
always been like, look, if you feel like you gotta
leave for safety, leave for safety. If you feel like
you're going to stay and fight because you have no
choice or because you want to full support support people
who stay, support people who go. Just support people who
are fucking dealing with oppression, you know, And like yeah,

(29:18):
but like, no teaching the actual truth about history in
this country it's just like if.

Speaker 3 (29:26):
You slavery had a positive effect.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
Oh my god, and then like everyone that they list
with like learned their trades after whatever.

Speaker 3 (29:35):
Anyway, I just yeah, no, just the lack of logic,
the lie. Does you want people to swallow?

Speaker 1 (29:41):
Do you think that they'd be okay with it? You know,
like being like, oh, okay, then like let's say people
get mad of me no matter what I say about this,
but like you know, like, oh, let's enslave you. Then
would you want to be enslaved? No, you wouldn't. Then
shut the fuck up if you.

Speaker 3 (29:56):
Right right, there's you can't spin being owned. There's they
have spin on it. It is a crazy thing to
tell someone, Hey, it was fine that we owned people
they liked it, wasn't. I have a statement from a
white person about his black slaves, because we have actual
tapes from actual people, most of whom were enslaved as children,
who were telling the stories about how they grew up

(30:18):
in slavery, and even the ones who were like yeah,
he was all right, We're still like it was a
horrible institution to have to live under, and I fucking
hated it. And you can't get past the idea that
someone owns every decision. You can't move past it, you
can't do anything like that is a bananas thing to
try to sell. It is them so absurd, it is
beyond and it's like, and you, what's really mannening is

(30:42):
like I hate middle the real white folks who are
like they're learning or that just happens over there, or
they don't know what they're saying. They know exactly what
the fuck they're saying. It's like there's not any confusion here.
It's being done very on purpose. They're not stupid. This
is what they want. It is so infuriating. I can't

(31:02):
believe we don't. I can't. I don't know how we
get the Black Panthers back in working shape. It's just,
I really, community activism is so hard. It's so it's
such uphill battle.

Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yeah, because I think that a lot of the systems
that they use to crush the early seventies movements, like
I think that capitalism is like really good at recuperating things,
and it's really good at like finding and patching its weaknesses,
you know, and so like often the same kind of
thing is not necessarily effective. Although there's so much we

(31:35):
can still like learn and like, you know, keep trying,
because even like things like the Black Panthers, people kept
trying them over and over and over again. It wasn't
like huey Phwton and Bobby Seel were the first people
who were like, hey, what if we just get some shotguns.
It's our phone cops around right now, and.

Speaker 3 (31:50):
We see activism frequently. The other problem I think is
activism has horrible pr like like trying to show people
like it's weird. People are like, oh, we had a
movement in twenty twenty and now it's over. And I
was like, I would just like you to know there
are people actively fighting on your behalf. Many of them

(32:10):
have gotten into small and local government. Call yeers and
find out who's working there, looking about like active work
is happening all around you. But it's just it's so
hard to see and progress is so egregiously slow that
it's yeah, I think it gets missed a lot, but
I do think a lot of positive things are happening.

Speaker 1 (32:28):
It's slow and then it's fast, right sure, And it
can't do the fast if you're not also putting in
the work. Like it's like every time you go out
and do some activist thing, whatever type of organization. Most
of the time you live a quiet, poorly paid life
where you do harm reduction in your community. And every

(32:52):
now and then it's the spark of that changes everything,
you know. Yeah, yeah, and yeah, okay, so I want
to figure out where I'm at my script. But so
this is the most successful of They have about sixty
different survival programs going, and these are eventually called survival programs,

(33:14):
they don't actually start that way. The first one, I
believe is the pre Breakfast program, and the concept here
is survival pending revolution because one of the things I
actually don't want to leave out of it is that
they are their Marxist organization. They're a communist organization. Not
everyone involved has the same ideological headspace, but the organization
is structured in that way and actively pushing for this.
And so they are pushing to have a revolution in

(33:34):
the United States, and they're part of the New Left,
which is fighting for a revolution in the United States.
But they realize that's not going to be overnight, Like
what kind of we're just talking about. They're fighting for
survival pending revolution. Is there? The way that they phrase
the survival programs basically, it does no good to overthrow
capitalism if everyone's debt already, right, And they did so

(33:56):
many things. They led blood drives for local hospitals. They
opened free medical centers. They did door to door sickle
cell anemia testing. They did free grocery delivery, they did
prescription delivery services, especially for like older folks. They had
the free Shoes for Kids program. They had volunteer ambulance services. Like, fuck,

(34:17):
we got to bring that back.

Speaker 3 (34:18):
No one, I like, I mean, good lord, that would
be helpful.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
Yeah. Do you ever see the like the thing where
they at like a camera person from the US like
asks a random British person like how much they think
an ambulance costs?

Speaker 3 (34:32):
Yeah, And they're always just completely bowled over. They're like,
what my favorites. When they get to like, and how
much you think it costs to have a baby in America,
they're like four point fifty oh sweet summer child. Yeah,
so much higher?

Speaker 1 (34:45):
Yeah, oh god. Soon they start their own schools, and
I started, I think with after school programs, but eventually
they have what they call Liberation schools. One of their
elementary schools. In nineteen seventy seven, the governor and the
legislator legislature of Hell Tifornia gave it an award for
quote having set the standard for the highest level of
elementary education in the state. And it's worth a.

Speaker 3 (35:09):
Horrible organization that will bring America to his knees. Yeah,
just get oh yeah boy, yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:14):
Exactly If America's brought to this knees by teaching kids
the truth.

Speaker 3 (35:21):
Best educated, why do you not want to duplicate this?

Speaker 1 (35:25):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (35:25):
That is wow? All right, here we go.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
And so this is like literally the state of California
being like, oh, actually, y'all fucking rule and needed really well.
And nineteen seventy seven is after the Panthers had mostly
collapsed as an organization. Yet the survival programs actually often
outlived the organization that spawned them, which is another thing
that gets forgotten about about activism is that everything you
do has knock on effects. Right. Yeah, in Oakland, the

(35:52):
Panthers started this is one of my favorites. That they
started Seniors against a fearful environment or safe And what
was happened was that older folks would go to cash
their pension checks and kept getting mugged. I think at
the time it was like almost half of the people
getting mugged were senior citizens Jesus Christ. So the Panthers

(36:15):
escorted them to and from the bank. And that's an
example of community defense if I've ever seen one.

Speaker 3 (36:22):
You know, such a lovely act. It's so simple and helpful,
and you get to meet an old person who always
have great stories. You know, Oh that is wonderful. You
like that one.

Speaker 1 (36:35):
And then one of the things, now i'll script again
one of the things that the Panthers did. And actually
some of this I run across from like the right
wing people hate them because you find out different shit
by reading the people who support them and the people
who hate them. And obviously both of them are biased
as shit, right, yes, and I'm bias as shit. I'm
overall like them. I have organizational critiques of their structure

(36:57):
whatever anyway, but like it's just be upfront my own biases.
But they they were often recruiting from what in Marxist
terms you'll call the lump and proletariat rather than like
the workers, you're recruiting like the criminals and the like
unemployed and the people who don't exist very well within

(37:19):
the existing economic system. And so like the fact that
you're getting all of these people who like sort of
just like used to run around and do crime are
now escorting folks to the bank. And they're using all
the same skill sets right like they might have used
to mug people, you know, and like what an what

(37:41):
a clearly better system than prisons is like get all
the people who do this to use their skills, like
keep people safe.

Speaker 3 (37:50):
You know, when you can empower, especially when we know
most crime happens at a like destitution, like absolutely to eat,
I need to believe myself, I am yeah, need of
mental services whatever, when you can empower someone to say, hey,
I see you, I see your skill set. I'll employ
you or give you a purpose, and like you invite
them back into society, which is such a beautiful way

(38:13):
of healing. If I may just plug. Oya Sharill's who
is a community activist and a survivor of crime, has
this amazing true crime podcast called Survivor's Heel. Instead of
focusing on the crime and the perpetrators, focuses on survivors

(38:35):
and what healing actually looks like. And in it, I
think one of her very first episodes, like her first
or second one, she has the sister of a murderer
victim talk to her brother's murderer. They have a full conversation.
It's so powerful, and they talk about way she's like,
you going to prison and does not heal the hurt

(38:58):
I have. It doesn't do anything for me. And so
it's yeah, And I also think that's the core of
all great activisms is we are a community. We are
not looking for stand out individuals or superstars or people
like none of that matters. We're all people. What skills
you can tribute and how can you help essentially or
how can we help you, whatever the case may be. Yeah, Oh, Lorias.

Speaker 1 (39:22):
There's this thing again. I'm completely on script now, so
if I get details wrong, I'm sorry. There's this book
I really like called Angels with Dirty Faces by Wilita
and Marisha, and it's an abolitionist perspective on you know,
it's conversations with three different prisoners, and in it she
talks about like, as she did the work, you know,

(39:43):
like many black like almost all black people in America,
she was robbed of her knowledge of her ancestry and
all of those things. And she's done a lot of
work around that. And I don't remember the name of
the culture that she comes from. And I'm sorry Wilda
if you're listening, but she talks about this thing that
really stuck out to me is like when when someone

(40:04):
did something wrong in the culture that she learned she
was from, you know, they would take the person who
had done wrong and they set them up against a tree,
and then one by one people would come up and
say really nice things about that person and basically just
shame them into being better. Being like you can be
your best self instead of your worst self.

Speaker 3 (40:24):
You know, talk about healing. I mean, pray people hurt,
people like and you give them space to lift them
up and show a whole community people hate and we
see you, we see all of the good. They like,
why did this happen? Happen? We help so it doesn't
happen again. You don't have to do these things to
feel love or be seen or have what you need. Uh.

(40:45):
I love community so.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
Much, but you know this isn't Ana transition. You know
hates community.

Speaker 3 (40:52):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (40:53):
The FBI, Oh, they really fucking do. So they flip
out about the survival program, especially the breakfasts, and they
go crazy overboard into as much as they can. They
spread rumors that the food is poisoned. They regularly rated
the feedings as an intimidation tactic. And the thing to

(41:15):
remember about that that means their goal, their specific goal
is to traumatize children. Yeah, the Panther's goal was to
feed children. And so yeah, anyway, so the FBI would
forge letters to send to food donators to get them
to stop. I don't entirely know what these look like.
If FBI would forge all kinds of letters during this period, right,

(41:38):
it could be like, hey, we don't need you anymore,
or like fuck you, we hate you. Signed the Black
Panthers your number one enemy. They went door to door
telling parents that the Panthers were going to turn their
kids into racists. And like, I think that this is
again I'm going to talk about their multiracial organizing minute,

(42:01):
the Panthers. I believe that the way we've currently defined
racism as like involving both bigotry and societal like systemic advantage, right,
means but like, the Panthers were really explicitly not anti white. Yeah,
they were anti white power, which is what we live

(42:23):
in right now. M So this is just completely a lie,
right and whatever. Anyway, in Chicago, the cops to quote
one Panther quote. The night before the first Breakfast program
in Chicago was supposed to open, the Chicago police broke
into the church, mashed up all the food and urinated

(42:44):
on it.

Speaker 3 (42:46):
It's impossible to imagine holding that much hate for children, Yeah,
in your heart. Yeah, he on the food that was
meant in your ash then, like it's I can't I
literally couldn't imagine doing that to like my if I
had an enemy and they had a child that I

(43:09):
just it's impossible to house. And you understand uh Tupac's
thug life mentality so much more when you think about
that being an environment in which he grew up, When
you think about seeing that up close and personal from
a very young age. I am both glad I was
shielded from it and uh set it took so long

(43:33):
to learn about it, and it makes I feel like
it makes things a lot clearer unfortunately.

Speaker 1 (43:40):
Yeah, just how much the FBI hated the Black community, you.

Speaker 3 (43:44):
Know, our children, our feet.

Speaker 1 (43:47):
Yeah, And this reminds me of how the Border Guard
today regularly goes and slashes up water drops left for
people dying of thirst in the desert.

Speaker 3 (43:57):
Goddamn razors on booies.

Speaker 1 (43:59):
Yeah, the fucking like, was it yesterday or something that
we learned that the murder booies, which we're already murder booies,
and then we have like random circular saw blades on them, like,
which is just like it's like when you put a
skull on your mad maximobile, you know, yeah, like it's
just a way. Yeah, and by the way, this is
to murder.

Speaker 3 (44:17):
Also, we really really hate you, like just so you know.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
Yeah, that is I just.

Speaker 3 (44:28):
Again, I just can't I can't fathom, uh, feeling so
entitled that I would be like it is worth your life,
which essentially makes me a murderer. I'm sorry. If you
install these things, you are complicit in murder.

Speaker 1 (44:41):
Absolutely, I mean that's true. In legally, if you set
up a booby trap in your house, you are responsible
for the harm caused by that booby trap, Like it
is not legal to set up booby traps that hurt people. Yeah,
that is an existing legal structure, oh.

Speaker 3 (45:00):
Boy, and just for people trying to find some clearer,
some place safe to be. Uh, that's cool. I don't
understand how you don't see that makes you the devil,
Like I, yeah, I don't understand that you can be like, no,
I'm definitely right for this. It's fine if you're like, no,
I am the devil and I enjoyed. Okay, yeah's who
you are, and I'm glad we're all aware of it.

(45:21):
You're like, this is the best thing we can do
as human beings. This is the best possible solution to
the problem as I see it. Insane, insan.

Speaker 1 (45:33):
Yeah, this did not stop the free breakfast programs.

Speaker 3 (45:38):
Of course, it fucking didn't. We have to feed children.

Speaker 1 (45:40):
Yeah, they didn't stop until the panthers themselves were stopped,
and in some cities the programs outlived the panthers themselves.
And then one of the major lasting impacts of the
program is that it embarrassed the federal government into setting
up their own They had in nineteen sixty six. They
like originally set up like maybe we should feed kids thing,
but they didn't like do it.

Speaker 3 (46:01):
They follow through. They're like, we should do that, but
how and where would that money come from? And we'll
get a committee to figure it out. In five years,
it's fine.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
It took them nine years. In nineteen seventy five, Shit,
the federally funded school breakfast program was launched.

Speaker 3 (46:16):
Mother fucker not we had a teenpoint and these things
set up in less than a year. What do you
take seventy thousand kids fed in a single year, and
they're like, it'll take us nine damn you government, What
the fuck?

Speaker 1 (46:31):
Yeah? Oh my god. But if you want not free breakfast,
you could buy it. If one of the ads you
hear is for a meal kid, Yum yum, o's get you.

Speaker 3 (46:48):
Some's back to Cereal.

Speaker 1 (46:52):
Here's some ads.

Speaker 2 (46:57):
And we're back. Okay.

Speaker 1 (46:59):
So there's another part of the Panthers organizing that I
don't think has talked about enough because of the the
story gets told of the like, oh, there's some like
gun wielding people who are like pretty cool in some
ways and bad in other ways, and they all like
and I don't know whatever this is. This very simplified
story doesn't talk about another thing that scared the shit

(47:21):
out of the government, which was interracial and cross cultural organizing.
And this is exemplified most clearly in the Chicago chapter,
and specifically it's leader Fred Hampton. Whether or not that's like,
truly well, Fred Hampton fucking ruled. I'm not trying to
downplay that. Obviously, other people working were also all part

(47:43):
of this and sometimes only individuals are remembered. But it's
not like he's trying to accrouve social credit spoil alert.
He dies, but he was murdered. Yes. Yeah. On April fourth,
nineteen sixty nine, three groups came together and started the
Rainbow Coalition. It was the Black Panthers who are the
most established group and so they provide a lot of

(48:03):
the leadership in organizing models. And then the Young Lords
see our four part are on them, representing Puerto Rican radicals.
And then the always fun to mention Young Patriots. Have
you ever heard of the Young Patriot Organization?

Speaker 3 (48:17):
Okay, so coming out of a tea party era, that's
the first thing I think of. I imagine they are
so amazing and they sound so bad.

Speaker 1 (48:29):
They are white, self identified Hillbillies who fly the Confederate flag,
who are revolutionary socialists, who are part of a coalition
with the Black Panthers, the Young Lords and several other
organizations to try to overthrow the government and capitalism and
end racism.

Speaker 3 (48:49):
Here's why I love this. There's many reasons. One, I
love Hillbilly. I was taught by one. We literally called
him Hillbilly. He was great. He's a redneck if he
sit out in the sun for two seconds, he called
himself that.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:02):
Yes, but hillbillies, by their very nature are just people
who live in hills and want to eat good and
make some music and chow with their family. Very cool people.
I love the misguidedness of being like the rebel flags, like,
oh so close, buddies, I want to get you. Let's
design a new one for you know, man. But that

(49:24):
is really Oh, that's so wonderful. I had no clue
that they were part of the Rainbow Coalition.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
Oh yeah, they're one of the founding members. And their
thing they were Appalachian migrants, white Appalachian migrants to Chicago
who faced classism and bigotry from the rest of the
white establishment, right, I mean because they had accents, because
they didn't do things right, because they were lower class
instead of middle class. And so soon the Rainbow Coalition

(49:53):
is joined by Students for a Democratic Society, which is
mostly but not exclusively white, the Brown Berets who are
latinos So socialists, the American Indian Movement, and the Red
Guard who are Chinese American socialists.

Speaker 3 (50:05):
What a powerful group of people.

Speaker 1 (50:07):
Yeah. Around this time, the Panthers also committed themselves publicly
to support of the feminist movement and the gay liberation movement.

Speaker 3 (50:15):
And did not know the Black Panthers were for the Gaze.

Speaker 1 (50:19):
Oh they were so for the Gaze. It's a mighty Besides,
of course, Tupac's mom was gay ast shit. Yes, a
bunch of the others were quasi as gayest shit. We'll
get to him again in a minute. But Fred Hampton
like specifically has this great speech that's just like, the
gays are oppressed, they shouldn't be fuck this, And they

(50:42):
did a lot of the Gay Liberation Front and a
lot of it's early organizing at a Rainbow Coalition like
radical conference that happened I think at Philly. Again, I'm
going off of memory of old scripts I wrote. I
think I wrote more about that conference in the Gay
Liberation Front episode. And then I also want to point
out there's an East West split that's coming, and a
lot of it's very cultural, but both sides of the

(51:06):
split were pro gay, even though the East Coast side
was like more visibly so with Fred Hampton's statements and
a lot of the gay New Yorkers right, but also
the original folks totally down with the gays.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
My heart feels so good. I really love hearing that.

Speaker 1 (51:23):
No, they like they also threw down with religious groups
like religious radicals. In Chicago, they occupied Catholic churches alongside
white and black Catholics after the Catholic Church was denying
black priests in black neighborhoods, and in return, a black
priest regularly sheltered them from police in the Catholic churches.

Speaker 3 (51:44):
That's so beautiful, no wonder. And then I'm just I'm
from Chicago. We're here talking about the era my parents
being young. It's interesting to think my mother is Roman
Catholic and went to church in Chicago. And I'm like,
were these things happening around you? Did you hear about them?
I know my father was a beneficiary of the free
breakfast program. I'm gonna see if he leave me a

(52:05):
voicemail about it, and I could send it to you
if he has any like direct memories about being bet there.
And I've never asked about any of the other programs,
if he like, did he get free shoes ever? I
know there were some struggle years in his youth. I
don't know where that overlap is, but yeah, it's just

(52:27):
their ability to just be so open and just be like,
if all of the people are good, then we could
all be good with each other and it could be great.
I'm not against you trying to live that is a yeah.
And especially considering how many of these movements got their
start in the church and the way churches have often
been last safe havens for a lot of these folks,

(52:49):
it makes sense that they would be like, we should
bring these people into our fold as well.

Speaker 1 (52:54):
Yeah, and it like, you know, obviously the church is
doing a lot of bad stuff honestly, like the Black
priest too regularly sheltered them from the police. I didn't
end up puting his name in it because it did
more research and he was accused of inappropriate sexual contact
child the Lord later, which is why he can't have
nice things.

Speaker 3 (53:14):
Never give a man praise. What did I say?

Speaker 1 (53:17):
I know it was like the church found him not guilty,
but the way that it was defined as real, I'm
not buying it. That's why his name isn't in here.
I had a whole section written about him, and then
I'm like, Eh, this guy doesn't need to be in here.
But yeah, it's like all kinds of complication. Yeah, And

(53:38):
the specifically, the thing was that he he was supposed
to become whatever, the priest of a churches or whatever, right,
and then the archbishop or whatever was like, naw, fuck you.
And and it was pretty much completely because he was
like trying to be in charge of black a church
with a primarily black congregation, and they shouldn't just be
white fucking priests in charge of And you have this

(54:00):
whole thing going on actually in the we talk about
in the Catholic Workers episode anyway, whatever, and so I
probably sold this anecdote on this show before. But one
time I was talking to this old white coal miner
in West Virginia about his time in the sixties, and
he said, basically, we used to go protest the Vietnam War,
and there were us on one corner, another corner with

(54:20):
the gay activists, another corner with the Black power folks,
and pretty soon we figured out we were all a
hell of a lot stronger. We all stood on the
same corner.

Speaker 3 (54:28):
I love that.

Speaker 1 (54:29):
Yes, that was a man who he got arrested in
his like seventies or eighties fighting against mountaintop removal, where
they just blow up the Appalachian Mountains in order to
get the coal out. And he was just a retired
coal miner guy who fucking ruled.

Speaker 3 (54:46):
He sounds like a legend.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Yeah. The Rainbow Coalition was a clear statement of solidarity.
Everyone's showing up to everyone else's shit. They also started
a free health clinic because that's just what late sixties
radicals do. That was like like the Young Patriots. Whole
thing was that they like would come with you to
your medical appointment, right if you're being mistreated by your
doctors and stuff. They also the Rainbow Coalition brokered gang

(55:10):
piece because that's also what late sixties radicals did. Yes,
and if you read right wing accounts the Rainbow Coalition,
it is a collection of street gangs. This is not inaccurate,
but it is also not accurate, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah,
And the Young Lords in particular started as a street gang.

Speaker 3 (55:28):
If we think about gangs again, do just a fundamental
misunderstanding of like, what is the cause of the creation
of a gang? Yeah, ches, community and support and safety. Yeah,
it makes sense that they would move bilatterly with these
types of movements. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:44):
And meanwhile, the Panthers are also somewhat regularly involved in
shootouts with police. I don't want to whitewash them out
of their militancy against the US government and out of
police in general. But j Edgar Hoover, he's like staying
late at night, rocking back and forth in his chair,
muttering a Messiah, a Messiah, because specifically he was worried

(56:08):
that the Panthers might offer up a quote Messiah, a
leader uniting the masses, which is like not actually how
movements work, I think, but like they think it is,
and that's why they murdered Malcolm X. But that didn't well,
Nation of Islam technically did. But you know whatever, they
fucking helped out.

Speaker 3 (56:25):
I mean, they offt MLK, so you know, yeah, he
was like, I got it. I'm gonna have to murder
a new one. How do I stop it?

Speaker 1 (56:32):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (56:32):
Exactly, my god.

Speaker 1 (56:34):
So they they did. They assassinated Fred Hampton.

Speaker 3 (56:39):
Horrifying and horifying, horrifying shootout.

Speaker 1 (56:43):
Yeah, this isn't blurry. The government murdered him while he
slept on December fourth, nineteen sixty nine. An informant provided
the FBI with a map of Fred Hampton's apartment and
like where his mattress was on the floor and the
room or on a bed. I don't know whatever where
the mattress was. I think it was on the floor.
I've seen photos now, I don't remember. This is a

(57:04):
completely meaningless detail. I'm using to distract myself from the
emotional content of what I'm saying. So he provided the
FBI with the map of fred Hampton's apartment, and then
he almost certainly dosed fred Hampton with sleeping pills. This
was confirmed by the Cook County investigation that found drugs
in a system. But the FBI was like, no, we
looked too and there was like no drugs in his system.

(57:28):
But the Cook County Coroner was like, I stand by
my statement. There were drugs in his system. There were
habituates in this system, and Fred Hampton did not use
I believe drugs at all. But it's certainly not this
type of drug. It was like a thing that was
known about him. He fell asleep at one thirty am
while mid sentence talking to his mother on the phone.
And it makes me happy that the last person he

(57:51):
got to talk to at four am, which is the
time of every police rate ever. Police stormed the place.
They killed a man named Mark Clark, who was on
security duty, who had a shotgun in his lap. As
he died, he fired one shot into the ceiling. This
is the only round fired by the panther side during
this And it gets used as like, see, it's a shoot,

(58:14):
it's a two way samey, samey. You know, a literal warning.

Speaker 3 (58:18):
Shot, like you couldnot the actual definition of a warning shot.

Speaker 1 (58:22):
I think he actually pulled the trigger, like I think
he was dead, like he got shot.

Speaker 3 (58:27):
As he died, just up in the air. Yeah, but
if it's up in the air and it's as he's dying,
then he never pointed the gun at them, Yeah, goes Yeah.
I thought I had always heard that it was like
a trying to alert everybody. Might I guess if guns
were already firing, what would they need to be alerted for.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
No, I mean I don't know, you know, I could,
I could see it either way. I read a couple accounts,
but not like super in depth accounts of this, you know.
And Mark Clark was twenty two years old when he died.
He had once gone door to door, from church to
church to find one willing to host the Chicago Breakfast program.

(59:09):
I just want him to have a life. I want
him to be known as having done more than this
one thing. Cops shot up the apartment. They fired between
eighty two and ninety nine shots. They killed Fred Hampton
while he was drugged in bed next to Deborah Johnson,
who is nearly nine months pregnant with their child. Mark
and Fred and were the only two who were killed.

(59:30):
No one fired around at the police. No cops were
indicted for what happened. Five thousand people came to his funeral,
which again goes to the like, yeah, sure, the Panther
membership is five thousand people in nationwide. They clearly have
a lot more support than that.

Speaker 3 (59:49):
Fred Hampton was like twenty two, he was twenty one.

Speaker 1 (59:51):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I wouldn't have known that except I
just wrote it down. I'm not like being like, oh I.

Speaker 3 (59:56):
Know, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, it's fine. I just
he was young, like so young, and had done so
much already in such a short time, and his mind
was just so clear about the direction he wanted to move.
It's horrifying to consider that. I mean, the person who

(01:00:22):
most likely drugged him, and you know, they were friends,
their colleagues, and there's a lot of evidence that they
were coerced, and like, yeah, for a lot of whatever
it seems I would say, either coursed or manipulated into

(01:00:43):
this position, like really kind of bullied into it. And
it's it's devastating to consider that these things frequently were
coming from inside the house. I mean, well, I know
the trial we're getting to, and we could talk more
about it there.

Speaker 1 (01:00:57):
Oh we're actually not going to talk to him much
about that trial. Now you could.

Speaker 3 (01:01:01):
Talk about I'll just say, well, do you want to
do you want to introduce the child? I don't know
if you have anything.

Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
No.

Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
I actually like, honestly, at this point, I'm going to
go down to like just kind of some of the
stuff about how the Panthers fell apart. Now you should
totally talk about it.

Speaker 3 (01:01:14):
Okay, all right, so finish a kur when she is
on trial with the Black Panthers, theres.

Speaker 1 (01:01:21):
A I now know what try are you talk about?

Speaker 3 (01:01:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:01:24):
Yeah yeah, continue yeah yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:26):
So it like most of the cases brought against Black
Panthers total sham, like crazy Affinny is such a good
public speaker that the Black Panther Party raises enough money
to get one of them out of prison. They've all
been arrested. Halloway taking to prison uh, they get enough money,
they're like, Afinniya should go out because when she speaks,
people listen and she can bring more people in so

(01:01:49):
that they become aware of our case. Not only is
she out there giving like orienting at like these big
black rallies and stuff, at concerts, like pretty much anywhere
black people gather, she's like in order telling them like,
this is what's happening in your communities. People are in prison.
We need to do something. She's simultaneously reading every document

(01:02:09):
like she's basically also a lawyer. Yeah, she's not a lawyer,
but she was like so smart and thinking so far ahead,
and she decides to.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
Herself, yeah, she wrepres herself.

Speaker 3 (01:02:21):
She gets cross examined a fucking pig excuse me who
infiltrated the Black Panther Party. She gets him on the
stand and the guy's talking about, oh, Black Panther Party
is training kids to be racist and to be violent,

(01:02:41):
and she's like, you were in the party. I think
it's oh gosh, guys, it's off the top of the dome,
but I think it's like five or six years. Like
he's heavily into the Black Panther Party. A leader in
the Black Panther Party, and she gets him cornered and
basically starts trying to figure out when you did this
for the Black when you were handing out guns for
the Black Panther Party, do that as a Black Panther
as a cop when you were having sex with members

(01:03:04):
of the Black Panther Party. Were you a Black Panther
Party member then or were you a cop? It is
for like an absolute tear down for her to just
be a citizen, not somebody who has been trained in
the theater of law to be able to do this
to somebody who easily knows his rights, probably knows this
case backwards and forwards. I mean, she's beyond brilliant. And

(01:03:26):
I swear to God, I'll stop plugging this out. But
it's called Dear Mama. Is a series, and you learn
just as much about Tupac as you do about his mother.
And as you're learning about his mother and her time
in the Black Party and all of these things she's
done while in the Black Panther Party and post Black
Panther Party. It's such an interesting dichotomy when you think
about the direction Tupac's life took and where his life ends.

(01:03:51):
When you think about all of the wonderful things the
Black Panther Party was trying to do for and with
the youth. It's just an incredib black I learned so much.
But if any, she's bomb And if you don't know
anything about her, like you should research her. She's an
incredible woman.

Speaker 1 (01:04:04):
Yeah, she's come up like in a bunch of these episodes.
She was basically part of the Stonewall revolt because stop,
she's in the Women's House of Detention, which is on
stone Wall, right, and all of these people seeing the
rioting outside, they start rioting and it's all of these
gay women in prison. And it was actually in prison

(01:04:27):
that she realized that she was gay. And she's like
fucking like twenty one or something that I'm making up
the age I don't remember, but she's young as hell
and so like the women revolting in the Women's House
of Detention, deserve to be included in the like original
Stonewall veterans.

Speaker 3 (01:04:44):
Yeah, oh iconic, Yeah, oh gosh, what a life she's changed. Yeah,
so much, and eventually did start a school in tupacxany
too or to continue to educate black children.

Speaker 1 (01:04:57):
Yeah, I want to, like Honestly, if I ever do
some then specifically on the Panther twenty one, and it'll
probably center around her because and the New York Panthers
are like my favorite of them because of whatever. We'll
get to it.

Speaker 3 (01:05:10):
A lot happened with those guys.

Speaker 1 (01:05:11):
Yeah, so uh oh. And then the other thing is
I remember, I remember she represented herself and it was
like something I don't have the quote. She got the
guy to admit he sucked. She got him to be like,
you're a trader and he's like, yeah, I'm a trader
to the black community, like something like that.

Speaker 3 (01:05:29):
Yeah. Again, she just grilled this guy. It's cool for
us so that there's video, there's an audio tape of
a cross examination, and yeah, she's just got him so
panned because you can't at this point, when you've committed
crimes as a black panther, you cannot then stand behind
your police uniform on this stand and call yourself a

(01:05:49):
just human being. And she drills that so acutely. By
the end, he's just he's defeated because it's not a
quick examination. It's not that I think he's on the
stand for like two or three hours. Just fucking suck.
You're a horrible person. Why did you do this?

Speaker 2 (01:06:04):
Gosh?

Speaker 1 (01:06:04):
Oh my god, Yeah, I need to watch that documentary.
That's like a whole period where I know less about
and like I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:06:13):
In it, you learned Tupac once shot two cops in
the ass and got away with it because they were
violently arresting a black man and he was driving by
saw it and was like, not on my fucking watch,
got that? Hell? Yeah? Oh god, the.

Speaker 1 (01:06:30):
Start of the Panthers too, you know, yes, exactly. It
takes both. It takes the like parishioner who just wants
to feed kids and the person who's like, man, fuck
this cop, Like you can't get that.

Speaker 3 (01:06:43):
Yeah, I'm not gonna watch you arrest some dude, Yeah,
just for driving, Like, no, get the fuck out of here,
not on our watch. Beautiful, yeah, beautiful. All right.

Speaker 1 (01:06:51):
So an awful lot canon has been said about what
tour part of the Panthers. The most common version you hear,
which is generally true, but it's not all of it,
I think, based on a lot of what I've been
reading and my own biases. Okay, but overall, federal oppression
destroyed the Panthers. Co Intel pro which we've covered on
the show before, is the counterintelligence program that was more

(01:07:11):
or less designed from the ground up to destroy the Panthers,
as well as any other socialist and anti war types.
We know about co intel Pro because some Jewish radicals
associated with the Catholic left. Can you tell that I
love coalitions across cultural, political, and religious lines. They broke
into an FBI office and then covered all the documents
about co intel Pro.

Speaker 3 (01:07:32):
What's so brave?

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
Yeah, we had a whole episode about them. They're fucking
cool too, and co intel pro pro played dirty. They
widened every divide in the movement they could find, and
if they couldn't find one, they would make one. They
infiltrated there's like something like seven hundred infiltrators total possibly
in the fucking Panthers. They forced people to snitch like
you know, they would I don't know to what degree blackmail,

(01:07:55):
And I didn't write all this stuff down enough. And
they literally terrorized children out of their breakfast. As the
seventies got going, most of these movements fell apart. The
Panthers are not unique in this regard. The in fighting
turned violent. Panthers and other black nationalist groups were getting
into gunfights with each other Panthers and other Panthers were

(01:08:15):
at each other's throats too. But according to at least
two books that I've been reading from two different perspectives,
that's not all there was to it. The other thing
that tore apart the Panthers was hero worship, authoritarianism, and
those things being held up by Marxist Leninism and specifically
Marxist Leninism isn't what Marx and Lenin believed. Ironically, you

(01:08:39):
would think that based on the name, Marxist Leninism is
an ideology crafted and named by the enemy of the
pod At, Joseph Stalin, And it was this whole thing
where he wanted to prove he was the true ideological
successor to Lenin after Lenin's death, in order to like
be different from Trotsky or whatever. So he wrote about
Marxist Leninism and it was his stuff. And the Panther

(01:09:01):
Party was always inspired by Marxism and Maoism, but it
seems to have been just as inspired by, say, the
Black nationalist Islam of Malcolm X right and in its origin.
The Panthers were organized using a Leninist idea called democratic centralism,
which is basically a one party state kind of thing.
This is obviously not true of all of the different

(01:09:22):
smaller groups and right and people are doing a lot
of stuff autonomously, but this is the formal structure of
the Panthers, and essentially, democratic centralism can look a lot
of different ways. Essentially, the idea is like folks vote
on something and then whatever side loses like shuts the
fuck up and toes the line. This is an efficient
way to accomplish certain things. Lenin called it freedom of discussion,

(01:09:43):
unity of action. In practice, it means usually whoever's in
charge is in charge, kind of an elective monarchy, and
it makes no accountability for leadership. So now we're going
to talk about the new When we talked about how the
Panthers fell apart, I think it's we're talking about New York.

(01:10:04):
We've talked a bit on the show about New York
City Panthers in the episode about the Young Lords, and
the episode about Up against the Wall Motherfuckers, the episode
about Stonewall, and the episode of Gay Liberation Front. The
euro Panthers are just like making everything happen in the city. Yeah,
And actually some of those groups, like the Young Lords
like kind of took up the slack once The Panther
twenty one the case that we'll talk about once it

(01:10:26):
derailed the Black Panther movement because they had to move
into prison support, right, So then you know, Puerto Rican
radicals were like, we got you, and they would do
many of the same programs and do all this amazing stuff.
There is famously a cultural divide between the West Coast
and the East Coast in the radical black community. In

(01:10:46):
the early seventies. One of the ways that expressed itself
was people's relationship to Africa itself. By and large, East
Coast radicals were into Pan Africanism, into African religion and style.
Folks were taking African and Suslim names, flying the Pan
African flag, the red, black and green flag, which is
I think Marcus Garvey made that in the nineteen ten teens,

(01:11:10):
and a lot of them start wrapping New Africa, which
God would be so fucking interesting if they pulled it off.
New Africa Africa spell with a K if people want
to look it up, is a black secessionist movement that
basically said, look, as reparations for slavery, we want the
following like four or five states, and it's like deep
South states that are like often majority black anyway, right.

Speaker 3 (01:11:34):
Yes, and.

Speaker 1 (01:11:38):
So this is the East Coast is am using rude exaggerations,
but these are the exaggerator. This is this is the
way it's framed by the Panthers that I'm reading. The
West Coast wasn't into any of this shit. Out west,
you've got names like Don Cox and Huey Newton. Out
east you've got a Fenny Shakur and quasi Ballagoon and

(01:11:58):
central leadership banned the Panthers from flying the red, black
and Green flag. Furthermore, the New York branch in particular,
was excited about militant struggle at a time when the
West Coast leadership decided to shift focus and then expected
everyone to toe the line.

Speaker 3 (01:12:15):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:12:17):
There was a two combat tour Vietnam vet named Geronimo
Pratt later Geronimo ji Jaga, and he was running around
Panther groups teaching people to arm up and shit. The
West Coast leadership kicked him out of the party for
being counter revolutionary, for not following their change of style,
and they did this while he was awaiting trial for
a murder frame up that sent him to prison for

(01:12:39):
decades before eventually the court was like, oh, whoops, it
turns out he was probably innocent. Sorry about old new
in prison for fucking decades.

Speaker 3 (01:12:46):
Ugh, I mean, and what a time for your party
to leave you too, Yeah, like the ideal time when
you could use us.

Speaker 1 (01:12:56):
Yeah. And Geronimo Pratt was a hero to the New
York's City contingent and I believe other chapters as well,
so they didn't take it well. They were also the
New York City chapter was the largest chapter in the country,
and they were like pretty tired of California telling them
what to do. And of course whenever we talk about
these divisions, co Intel pro is meanwhile like rubbing its

(01:13:18):
hands together going like yes, yes, yes, and then making
the divisions worse and like sending fake letters and like
publishing articles, just doing everything they can to make this
divide bigger. And you've got the Panther twenty one, who
I keep bringing up on the show, just what we
talked about, right, And this is where twenty one Panthers
were framed on this like wild bombing murder spree thing

(01:13:39):
where they were like, well, they're going to blow up
all in New York, like fucking like Bane out of
Batman or whatever, you know. And this is a frame up,
and it's like really obviously a frame up, but it
works because it makes several of them, you know, many
of them spend years in jail awaiting trial. Eventually all
of them get set free, except our guy, Quasi Ballagoon,

(01:14:01):
who was already in jail for some bank robbery shit.
So he didn't get out of jail just because he
got indicted and then the case was dropped. He did
actually plead guilty to planning to kill a cop. I
don't know whether the situation that case was. And with
everything happened in the party, Quasi Ballagoon wounded up adding
another thing to his list of oppressive forces that he

(01:14:23):
wanted to fight against, and that was authoritarianism. He, alongside
other Panthers and former Panthers, wound up an anarchist. I
don't mean to imply the majority of them did or
this is like what the New York West Coast split
was about, but authority was a huge part of it.
He alongside some other people later found later ended up

(01:14:43):
starting the Black Liberation Army, which basically declared for in
the American government, we'll talk about them some later time. Basically,
as all the as all the big public new left
groups got crushed, a lot of the more hardcore elements
were like fuck it and went underground and kept fighting
as you do. Yeah, like what, You've dedicated your life
to this, You're not going to stop.

Speaker 3 (01:15:04):
Yeah. And clearly the straightlad in bright daylight is not
as effective as one would hope they understand why they
were like, well, I'm taking this shit under crowd.

Speaker 1 (01:15:17):
Yeah. And basically the anti authoritarian critique that emerged in
the Panthers, not just from the anarchist Panthers, was less
that the East Coast methods like better, but rather that
each area can have its own culture and work together
and that is stymied by central leadership. And now I'm
kind of projecting, but it's like the whole thing that
they managed with the Rainbow Coalition and coalition building right,
is about having these groups of equals with differences without

(01:15:39):
erasing those differences, work together towards the same goal. National
leadership got to pick who was being worth being bailed out,
and this didn't include many New Yorkers. This is a
complaint that a lot of folks had about what happened
in New York twenty one. So in nineteen seventy one,
the New York Branch wrote an open letter to the

(01:16:00):
Weather Underground, which is one of these underground groups that's
blowing it up, and they state their solidarity with the
Weather Underground and they critique the self proclaimed Vanguardists or
the self proclaimed any self proclaimed vanguard that dismisses armed struggle.
And this is a clear dig at West Coast leadership.
So this leads to the Panther twenty one and I

(01:16:20):
think the New York branch being expelled from the official
Panther Party a.

Speaker 3 (01:16:26):
Huge blow when you only have five thousand members.

Speaker 1 (01:16:29):
I know here and you kick out literally the largest
group secked.

Speaker 3 (01:16:34):
Yeah, there's some ego playing into that, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 (01:16:38):
Exactly, I want to go back to Quasi because he's
so cool, just in case I don't do the Black
Liberation Army episodes any time soon. In nineteen seventy, while
Quaysy was in prison, he and other folks, including a
bunch of Black Panthers, staged a rebellion. They took seven
hostages and held them for five days October fifth to
first to fifth, nineteen seventy true grassroots Panther style. This

(01:17:02):
was black, Latino and white prisoners working together. Their slogan
was all power to the people, free all oppressed people,
and their main demand for this rebellion was speedier trials. Right,
a lot of people just get held for years who
are supposedly innocent until proven guilty and quazy. He's one
of the central organizers, but instead of playing the vanguard

(01:17:25):
and telling the rebels what they should want, he instituted
a collective process for all the inmates to participate in
the decision making about what their demand should be and
like what the rebellion should look like. And when he
realized that everyone was listening to the Panthers more than
anyone else, the Panthers skipped the rest of the meetings
and we're like, look, we'll go with whatever you decide.

Speaker 2 (01:17:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:17:47):
It makes me say we are not here for power,
We're not power hungry. We just want what's best. Yep,
y'all talk about yourselves and we'll just back your play. Lovely.

Speaker 1 (01:17:58):
We started it, and you all can figure out out
how to finish it, and we'll support you.

Speaker 3 (01:18:02):
Yes, teach Amanda Fish.

Speaker 1 (01:18:04):
Yeah, And the rebellion in the end failed most prison
rebellions do, but they they still it gave everyone experience
at holding the state at bay, and it also gave
the most powerless people in our society power for a moment. Right,
So Quasi Ballagan wound up finding anarchism while he was
in prison, and it provided a lens with which he

(01:18:27):
understood what was going wrong with the Panthers as central
leadership became more and more estranged from rank and file.
And basically he got really annoying about it, like most
people do when they get their new ideology. One former Panther,
Kim kitt Holder said, quote, At first he insulted us,
calling us robots, but at the same time he gave
us a voice articulating our problems with the leadership structure

(01:18:50):
and the people in it. I was just a kid
in New York City when I joined the party. But
remember one of the things that pissed me off was
that when we are in five cents for every Panther
newspaper that we sold, West Coast folks got ten cents
from the sale.

Speaker 3 (01:19:02):
Now, okay, I don't.

Speaker 1 (01:19:04):
Know, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:19:07):
And if we are fighting for equity and liberation, how
are we paying people different amounts for doing the same
that seems in affront to your core tenants West Coast.

Speaker 1 (01:19:18):
The hell yeah. And it's around this time that you
get allegations of embezzlement from low West Coast leadership. I
don't know one way or the other, because they're everyone
has so no one is looking at this clearly, and
no one can, right because this is the defining moment

(01:19:40):
of your life if you are part of the Black
Panther Party in a lot of ways, you know, not
whatever I'm not trying to say, like the rest of
people's lives is meaningless, but like this is clearly a
peak experience. You're not going to come out of it
with like a clear objective take, you know. And and
so like these are just people. People are fallible hands

(01:20:01):
someone a ton of power and access to money. An
awful lot of people will crack under that pressure. Sure,
And just to close up with Quazy real quick in
case I don't do the Black Liberation episode soon. He
loved punk rock, He was queer. He was once arrested
with his trans lover named CHICKI. And yeah he's coolsh
hicky amazing name. Yeah. He went on to keep on

(01:20:22):
the struggle. He broke out of prison twice. He gave
amazing speeches and courts that were all just basically like, look,
I don't I don't recognize You're right to try me
like I am a New African because he was an anarchist,
but he's also a new African. Right. He believed very right.
And as a man who has sex with men in
the eighties, he died of AIDS in prison.

Speaker 3 (01:20:44):
Showed queazy, what a hero, what icon, what a visionary.
I know I said I wouldn't celebrate any men, but
you know I'm gonna make a little room. Jimmy Hendrix
can get some love, and so can you crazy make.

Speaker 1 (01:20:57):
He had a trans lover named Chicky, and also everyone
writing about him. I know that there's a book, Oh god,
I can't remember the name of it. It's like one
of the main books I read or whatever, and has
all of these reflections of people who knew him, and
it's all like, look, you didn't even have to ask
him to volunteer. As soon as you were like, man,
I need someone to do something, before you even say

(01:21:18):
it out loud, He's just there. He's like all right.
And he also would always watch the kids play with
the kids. Like he was like, just I I haven't
read anything bad about him yet, is what I was saying.
And I've read a fair amount.

Speaker 3 (01:21:32):
About this man that is so great. I hope that
he lived the life his legacy is telling. Yeah, he
sounds so wonderful, Like I mean, yeah, real Saul to
the Earth kind of guy, real love the people.

Speaker 1 (01:21:50):
Yeah. And so it wasn't just the anti authoritarianism, like anarchist,
of course is going to be mad at central leadership, right.
Part of central leadership also recognized this. The guy Don
Cox that we talked about the field Marshal showed up
to his daughter's school who wrote the book, just another
he he he lays out what he thinks went wrong,

(01:22:12):
and what he thinks went wrong was that they fucking
read Stalin. I'm going to paraphrase it. This is apparently
I timed the break between the episodes unevenly. But he's like, look, well, actually,
I'll read part of the quote. The ideological basis for
the internal destruction of Black Panther Party was laid with
the first book we studied. It was Joseph Stalin's The

(01:22:33):
Foundation of Leninism. To be clear, not the first book
they studied as panthers. But they had this thing in
nineteen sixty nine where they're like, let's do a study
group to figure out how we're going to run this
large organization. Now that we have a large organization, you know,
that text was used to instill love for the party
above everything else, even eventually the struggle. As it turned out,
we didn't know then that Stalin had massacred millions in

(01:22:53):
the name of the party, and I must admit at
the time, I'm not sure it would have mattered. As
the ideas of Marxist Leninism spread throughout the party, it
quickly became afflicted with avant gardism and elitism. Considering itself
the sole possessor of the truth. Anyone who didn't adhere
to the Marxist Leninist ideas were treated as an inferior
being worthy of being despised. Adopting the Marxist Leninist structure
of the party with democratic centralism as its sole all

(01:23:15):
party was then confiscated in the name of the Central Committee,
which in reality meant just David Hilliard and Bobby Seal
in name. I was a member of the Central Committee,
but there was never one meeting of the Central Committee,
Nor were there ever points at which members of the
Central Committee were asked to vote on any proposition, or
if there was, I was never told about it. Whenever
David or Bobby thought up anything, it was simply sent

(01:23:38):
down through the organization as a directive from the Central Committee. Hey,
any the reason he I mean, it's not the reason
he wrote his memoir, although this quote I'm about to
read is a big part of it, right, because a
lot of the memoirs of the Black Panthers are even
like the Panthers ruled or the Panthers sucked right, And
I didn't. I didn't finish reading his. I don't know

(01:24:00):
everything about it yet. But he has another quote as
to why he made this critique. Those of us with
experiences in the struggle have a historical responsibility to pass
them on. Mistakes are the nursery of new ideas, so
we must share them too. If we continue to hide
and distort our errors, those coming after us will be
condemned to repeat them. We cannot afford the luxury of

(01:24:21):
leaving it up to historians to reveal what we did
after fifty or one hundred years have passed. Present conditions
demand we tell our stories now.

Speaker 3 (01:24:30):
Through yes, absolute word, absolute word.

Speaker 1 (01:24:35):
Yeah, And I I find it so interesting because it's
like he's not like fuck the Panthers. He's like, oh,
here's how I track some mistakes we made, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:24:48):
Yeah, this is a person who understands. I mean, he
sounds like an actual leader. You know, we set goals,
we strove for them. Where did we fall short? And
what would we not do again? Is the basis of
what you need to continue a movement, I would think,
And I mean he sounds like an incredible human being

(01:25:10):
and I definitely see, yeah, see an issue with two
people being like, now we control everything and you'll do
as we say and don't push back. That is egregious.

Speaker 1 (01:25:23):
Yeah, And like I mean, most people, it seems like
most people just like did what they were going to
do anyway, right, like yes, and then so then they
got real mad about it. But so the Panthers lingered
throughout the seventies, even though they had started to fall apart. Right,
But again, every movement during this time did I'm not

(01:25:46):
The last branch closed its doors in nineteen eighty two,
and their legacy is astounding. They had problems, There were
a bunch of kids, for the most part, getting together
and saying we have an idea of what's wrong, and
we have an idea of how to make it better.
And they made some mistake, and they did more than
almost anyone can dream of. They inspired not only their generation,
but every generation that has come since. They directly fed, clothed,

(01:26:09):
house protected, and gave medical care to tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands of people. They brought together marginalized
people without erasing the differences between those marginalized people, just
focusing on common enemies like capitalism and the police. And
they forced reform after reform, not by asking for reform,
but by using direct action to force the state to
play catch up with them. They lived adventurous lives. Many

(01:26:33):
of them wound up dead or in prison for decades.
Some of them are still behind bars, and actually, if
people want to look into it, the Jericho Project is
a project that works to trying to fight for things
like compassionate release for people who've been in prison for
fifty fucking years. Others of them lived long and happy lives.

(01:26:53):
Some lived in the States, and awful lot of them
got the fuck out of the country, especially to Algeria,
Don Cox to France, and I don't know. They were fucking.

Speaker 3 (01:27:04):
Cool, amazing. I mean truly the stuff of legends. And
I think laid the ground work, like the blueprint for
how we might merge the disparate sex of society that
should be together to fight capitalism. You know, I think

(01:27:27):
that's we're still trying to figure out how to get
back to that space on a mass level. It's such
a challenge. I think a thing our generation, our current
living peoples frequently forget. It's like, if we look at
our economic situation, where worse soft than literally every generation

(01:27:48):
that's come before us.

Speaker 1 (01:27:49):
Yeah, a great depression. We've got nothing on what's happening now.

Speaker 3 (01:27:52):
Yeah, and the actual hindrance and it's crazy and it's
wild because again it's so distorted. Folks will say such
brash things like they went to zoos in killed animals
to eat, and it's like, well, we've figured out how
to make very cheap food and get it to people quickly,
so we don't have the same food supply problems. But
look at the number of people who we're literally seeing

(01:28:15):
major stars be like, yeah, I have to sell my
house because of non strike for two months. What. Yeah,
that's crazy. That is crazy that you can have an active,
visible career in Hollywood and still be living show paycheck
to paycheck. And I think, you know, as we continue
to see the rise of the workers Revolution, I hope
we all continue to think back on the work the

(01:28:36):
Black Panthers have done. I really think we're on the
cusp of a general strike. It's kind of bold to say,
but we're getting closer every day. We'll see how some
of these next negotiations go, especially at the city level.
But you know, I think we're all very tired and
very poor and ready for changes we know can be

(01:29:00):
made pretty easily and have massive impact. So shout out
to Black Panthers who lay the ground where hopefully we
can conclude some of your beautiful mission statements that we
have not achieved yet as a society.

Speaker 1 (01:29:13):
I know, God, that was heartbreaking when you pointed out
they were like, oh, we haven't gotten those, Like fuck,
I was.

Speaker 3 (01:29:19):
Hoping for one. You started reading and I was like, oh,
well maybe we have one. No, no, we have nothing.

Speaker 1 (01:29:25):
How does how do juries compare this? Are they still
like is it still really regular that like black folks
are tried by all white juries and shit.

Speaker 3 (01:29:34):
I don't have stats on that, but I would imagine
not much better, particularly for heavily redlining places, because where
you're committing crimes, you know often when where you're getting
caught is not the same place where you live. Like
I think a lot about like in Chicago, where there's
a great transit system, So you might go downtown to

(01:29:56):
steal a pair of jeans because it's easier to get
away with stealing from like the gap there than you know,
like your local store or whatever. Out in the birds
there's a lot of heavy foot traffic. Those people know, like, hey,
you don't go after a thief because you know who cares.
The store is insured.

Speaker 1 (01:30:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:30:14):
I'm saying this because I remember a very specific case. Yeah,
he sold a pair of jeans and was in prison
for like four months, no trial.

Speaker 1 (01:30:22):
Oh God, like someone.

Speaker 3 (01:30:23):
Yeah, he's a homeless guy who had no other clue.
He just wanted a clean pair of pants to wear.
And the article was like, it's crazy how much we've
spent on this guy when all we could have just
given him the twenty bucks for jeans. And I was like,
it's crazy that we just can't give that guy some
clothes and a house when we have more than enough
of both.

Speaker 1 (01:30:42):
Yeah, like I can't can see.

Speaker 3 (01:30:45):
I don't understand why we operate this way. They literally
zero sentence. It helps no one to be like, hey,
I want to make sure you have nothing. It hurts
all of us.

Speaker 1 (01:30:54):
The world is literally on fire because of the economic
system that we live in.

Speaker 3 (01:30:58):
How we are, we are close to drowning. We have
so many issues, and people just let it up. Just
gotta make sure capitalism stays strong. There's no way any
other system could possibly work. That's the thing, dude. Talking
to people like usually over forty five, it is so excutse.

(01:31:20):
They're like, there's nothing else we could possibly do. I'm like,
that's so sad that you feel this way. I don't
know how to help you understand that revolutions happen any things.
When people are like, oh, general strike can ever occur?
I was like, don't let the price of bread become
too expensive? Yeah, we can track every revolution by the
price of bread.

Speaker 1 (01:31:38):
Every single one.

Speaker 3 (01:31:40):
Do some history, bro. It won't be hard, crazy, but yeah,
I have some history.

Speaker 1 (01:31:48):
Bro.

Speaker 3 (01:31:50):
Bro. They will come and eat you if they cannot
feed their children. I just want to let you know
that's people's breaking point. Yeah, when your child, that's when
the guns and the knives and the burning of houses
comes out.

Speaker 1 (01:32:03):
And we don't want time. We did it before then,
so we can minimize the.

Speaker 3 (01:32:07):
Car What if you just gave it to them and
you still were richer than all of us. I mean,
you could still keep the majority of your power. We're
asking for so little, so just a fragment just to survive,
and we'll be happy with it too. Margaret, I love
talking to you. This was amazing. I loved hearing so

(01:32:28):
many I love the Black Panther Party already, just and
especially there's so many women survivors who have sort of
in the cracks of stories told their story, you know
what I mean, and interview here a random podcast there
like not nameless but not named, if that makes sense, Yeah,
you know, And and and hearing the good they got

(01:32:50):
to do and knowing they were for the gays. It
was so beautiful. I'm enraged. I hope everyone listenings enraged.
I hope we can make some of these Black Panther
goals true. Yeah, I agree, you got anything to plug here.
At the end of our longest episode that we've done,
which the pathers deserve to be clear. But I also
I fucked up putting the split in scripts. I think

(01:33:14):
I'm honored to this is my legacy as a podcaster
is to always make an episode way too long. I
love it. I hope everyone listening enjoyed the ride very quickly.
I talked about it last time, so I'll keep it
short this time. I am making a film. It's called Dinner.
You can support it on a website called Seed and Spark.
It's seed and s p a r k dot com.

(01:33:36):
If you type in Dinner in the search bar, I
film will show up. Our goal is to recreate the
way we make films in Hollywood, to make it safe
and equitable. One coold thing I'll tell you that I
didn't tell you before. We're doing a Favorite Nations approach.
So when we get funded, because we will get funded,
you're gonna say everybody who operates on the film the
same amount of money. You're a PA, he gets to
the same amount of editor. This is a way to

(01:33:59):
make sure sure we can contribute financially to everyone on set,
because as it is now, everyone's donating their time, but
we really want to support them. Financially and to do
it in a way that keeps cost down for the
production so instead of the film made, but makes everyone
feel like a fair and equal part of the production.
We think it's a really great way for Hollywood to
think about how movies are made in the future, because
we don't think any job is less than another job.

(01:34:21):
So yeah, Also, if you don't want if you're just
like fuck you do, I don't want to support your film,
but you like independent cinema, you could still go to
Seeden Spark and support another film. There's so many great films.
And what I love about this organization is they do
a lot of work to help sustain independent career. So
it's not about getting this film funded, It's about creating
a community for a filmmaker so that you can constantly
be creating art for your community in a sustainable way

(01:34:44):
so you can have a career and a life. And
I just think it's beautiful that anybody thought to try
to make that happen. And I'm really glad to be
a part of the experiment. So yeah, check out Steed
and Spark.

Speaker 1 (01:34:55):
Awesome. I am excited for this. I'm excited to see Dinner.

Speaker 3 (01:35:01):
Thank you I'm excited to show way. It's a tirical horror.
It's great, one of my favorite genres.

Speaker 1 (01:35:07):
What do I have to plug? Do I do things?

Speaker 2 (01:35:10):
You have another podcast? Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:35:11):
I have another podcast. It's called Live Like the World
Is Dying. It comes out every Friday and it is
a individual and community preparedness podcast. Or our tagline is
your podcast for it feels like the end times, I
may drop the feels like.

Speaker 3 (01:35:29):
Depressing but okay, dark but accurate.

Speaker 1 (01:35:32):
I started it before the pandemic. Things have escalated since then.
I also want to I don't have it in front
of me. There is a fundraiser for the bailing out
the black people who defended themselves in a viral video
on a doc in I really didn't put this in

(01:35:52):
the Scriptah, okay, cool, and so shout out to the
inventor of the full lean chair, who was a black man.
And it's it's worth bailing out. It's worth supporting people
who practice community defense, whether it is structured and organized

(01:36:15):
or whether it is like people being like no, that's
not going to happen.

Speaker 3 (01:36:19):
Absolutely impromptu performance of greatness. Yeah, make sure these folks
don't spend time in prison. That's so fucking dumb. I
help them get out. That is whoa. I hate that
they're in prison. I love their action on a former
sleeve selling doc. They used to sell black people there
and then there was liberation. Even in a small, short

(01:36:42):
lived epic experience as it was, it was beautiful.

Speaker 1 (01:36:46):
So I don't have in front of me which fundraiser is,
like the one or whatever, but you can google it,
and I just it's on my mind. So that's what
I want to shout out.

Speaker 2 (01:36:57):
Sophie and Robert did a crossover hood politics and it
could happen here episode about the exactly what you just
talked about, Margaret, so people can check out.

Speaker 1 (01:37:08):
I am going to check that out tomorrow while I'm driving,
which is.

Speaker 2 (01:37:10):
He will not be out by then, but it'll be
out by time this episode comes out. I'm sorry, it's coming.

Speaker 1 (01:37:18):
Time anyway. Yeah, I'll wait, huh okay, as.

Speaker 2 (01:37:21):
Soon as soon as I have it, I will send
it to you.

Speaker 1 (01:37:23):
Thanks.

Speaker 2 (01:37:25):
That's called producer privilege. A friend your local producer, unless
they're creepy than walk the other way.

Speaker 1 (01:37:33):
Also, if you are listening, don't ask Sophie for this favor.

Speaker 2 (01:37:37):
Yeah, no, that this is a this is a Margaret
only privilege. Anyways, Follow me on Instagram. My post pictures
of my dog and she is right behind me.

Speaker 1 (01:37:46):
Yeah, hi kitty, all right, see you next Monday with
more Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:37:56):
Bye. By The Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or
check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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