Revolution in Our Time: Chapters 18–21

At the Central Committee level, the concept of community-building versus insurrection was an ideological debate, colored by the leaders’ individual needs and perspectives.

Safely ensconced in Algeria, it was easy for Eldridge to advocate open revolution on American streets.

Cisco Torres, who joined the Party in Denver, said they called it "‘expropriating funds’ from banks." In this view, robbing a bank was a political act, not a criminal one.

The shift encompassed minor changes, like adjusting the Black Panther newspaper masthead (“Community News Service” became “Intercommunal News Service"), and bigger changes, like planning a Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention to bring together people from all sides of the struggle.

First, they held plenary sessions in Philadelphia. The plenary sessions allowed anyone who wanted to participate in the convention to come share ideas.

I was receiving a great deal of flak from police.

“But a one-sided race war with Black people as the targets and white people shooting the guns is worse. We will be criminally negligent...if we do not prepare to defend ourselves against it.”

The demands included higher wages, better food, better medical care, religious and political freedom, and amnesty for the uprising itself.

It was either play by the rules of society and accept a course of gradualism, or live as outlaws and fugitives and expect to be imminently destroyed.

They’d sacrificed everything short of their lives for the Panther movement—and most of them believed it was only a matter of time before they died in service to the cause. Seeing Huey living an extravagant lifestyle was disillusioning at best, and a betrayal at worst.

“But then that mercurial personality of his and the drug abuse led to some God-awful decisions.”

“Preparing the bags of groceries was a huge logistical feat,” said Aaron Dixon, who came down from Seattle to help the campaigns. Volunteers gathered in a church basement, while others drove up in giant freezer trucks full of whole chickens, cartons of eggs, canned goods, bread, and potatoes.

“Everything just stopped, the meetings, the teaching. Everybody just dissipated and went their own route.”

In Oakland, new initiatives burgeoned. The Panthers understood what a challenge health care was to Black people, and they initiated an unprecedented level of health care advocacy on behalf of Black communities.

In Oakland, new initiatives burgeoned.

They provided food and other services for the students, taking a holistic approach to education.

The Panthers had been intent on capturing Oakland, creating a bastion of Black-controlled land somewhere within the American empire.

“The expansion and consolidation of U.S. economic, political, and military force and power abroad has made the president of the United States more powerful than any king or tyrant in history. It has tricked the American people in to becoming coconspirators with the U.S. empire builders.”

“The executive branch has swollen, steadily usurping power from the courts. The kinglike executive has preempted the decision-making process inherent in the original checks and balances plan.”

“The executive branch has swollen, steadily usurping power from the courts. The kinglike executive has preempted the decision-making process inherent in the original checks and balances plan.”

With Elaine and Ericka at the helm, the Panthers became arguably more effective and certainly more sustainable than they had ever been.

Several historians have argued that the U.S. government made concessions to these interest groups partly to disrupt the Panthers’ extraordinarily effective coalition-building.

We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

Americans’ ingrained racial biases and fervent belief in the “innocent until proven guilty” stated value of the justice system make it hard for many to believe that the system can really be this unfair to Black people.

Many people are employed based on the expectation that crimes will occur: police officers, defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, administrators, prison guards and wardens, prison doctors, prison administrators, parole officers, and all the other staff involved from arrest to imprisonment. People in these jobs often have financial incentives to keep the system going.

When two hijacked airplanes hit New York City’s World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, killing three thousand people, white middle-class Americans were shaken out of their complacent bubble.

The proliferation of law enforcement television shows, where police often break the law for “good” reasons, failed to acknowledge how damaging this illegal behavior can be in real life.

In some white communities, explicit racist propaganda surfaced, bringing to light the presence of deep-seated racism that hadn’t been so widely recognized by white Americans in decades.

This represented a shocking degree of wealth disparity in a country designed as a democratic republic in which any citizen theoretically has the right and ability to pursue success and build wealth.

Unlike previous candidates, he also used overtly racist language.

Collective action by a very small number of Black people who planned to act only in self-defense was perceived as a significant enough threat to literally change the laws of the state. However, the same government struggles to see collective action by a growing number of young white men as anything more than a series of anomalies.

When white Americans felt scared in the civil rights era, the country went after civil rights organizers and Black radicals, to the point of infringing their rights, to the point of imprisoning hundreds and killing dozens.

The word immigrants as used today is sometimes a euphemism for people with national or ethnic origins outside of western Europe.

Just as the complex and intertwined forces of law, media, politics, economics, and bias combined to build the prison industrial complex, similarly insidious forces of white nationalism, the global war on terror, and even pop culture representations of Black people and law enforcement alike combine to create an atmosphere in which Black lives are systematically devalued and white people are given the benefit of the doubt.

The hard, painstaking work of changing ourselves into new beings, of loving ourselves and our people, and working with them daily to create a new reality—this is the first revolution, that internal revolution.

Former Panthers have gone on to do many great things to uphold the values they were willing to give their lives for in the heyday of the Party.

Fred Hampton’s gravestone bears a spate of massive pockmarks, from bullets that have been fired at his final resting place.

As sure as it died a bloody death, the Panther movement helped bequeath to a new generation of Black Americans the opportunities and education and knowledge we are afforded today.

“At this time more than ever we need...creative Black youth who know our history and who understand that Black Unity is the catalyst to help humanize this racist world.”

We must create a world of decent human relationships where revolutionary humanism is grounded in democratic human rights for every person on earth.