South End Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 2004, ISBN 0-89608-718-2.
Mumia gennemgår partiets opståen og historie. Han beskriver
partiets program, dels 10-punkts
programmet, dels de mange lokale hjælpeprogrammer og
det, de er mest kendte for, deres bevæbnede
overvågning af politiet. (I henhold til et tillæg til den amerikanske forfatning
og lovgivningen i California, har man lov
at færdes bevæbnet, bare man ikke skjuler sit våben). 040970 afholdt partiet
i Philadelphia en forfatningskonference,
hvor man ville udarbejde en forfatning, der også tager hensyn til de grupper,
der ellers står udenfor. Det er noget i strid med Huey P Newtons
opfattelse, at det ikke nytter at kæmpe for nye borgerrettigheder, så længe
de rettigheder, man allerede har, bliver trådt under fode. Allerede i 1859
havde John Brown deltaget i udarbejdelsen af en ny amerikansk "Constitution", the
Chatham Convention, in Chatham, Ontario. Denne forfatning fordømte slaveri. (Harpers
Ferry - oprøret).
Bogen er baseret på Mumias eksamensopgave til en MA ved California State University, Dominquez Hills. Han tog den eksamen, mens han sad i dødscelle. Han vil bl.a. imødegå det falske billede af De sorte Pantere, som Earl Anthony gav i 1969 i sin bog: Picking Up the Gun. I mellemtiden har Anthony indrømmet, at han arbejdede som stikker/agent provocateur for FBIs COINTELPRO program. (xv-xvi).
Han beskriver Seminole-krigene som også et sort oprør.
Det første kapitel har et antal eksempler på tidlige slaveoprør. Her optræder også en beskrivelse af forskellen mellem husslaver og markslaver. Der deltog sorte soldater i den amerikanske borgerkrig - på begge sider.
Mumia citerer Martin Luther King for, at slummen er en form for indre koloni, hvor indbyggerne domineres, udnyttes økonomisk, isoleres og ydmyges. Raceoptøjer er næsten altid startet af HVIDE.
Kapitel 6 gennemgår FBIs COINTELPRO kampagne. Og beskriver FBIs hyring af agenten Earl Anthony.
Black Panther Party arbejdede i et ganske kvindeundertrykkende land, USA. Som altid er kvindeundertrykkelsen værst i de mest trængte grupper - og det var netop der BPP arbejdede. Derfor er det imponerende, at kvinderne spillede så stor en rolle i partiet, som Mumia beskriver i kapitel 7, A WOMAN'S PARTY.
Han beskriver et antal kvinder af betydning for partiet - en enkelt af dem måske mest af negativ betydning. Elaine Brown, (levede sammen med Huey P Newton) Safiya Bukhari, Kathleen Cleaver, Afeni Shakur, Assata Shakur, Janet Cyril, Tarika Lewis, Regina Jennings, Audrea Jones, Brenda Hyson, Peaches, Sister Rivera, Barbara Easley Cox, Ericka Huggins, Naima Major, Rosemari Mealy.
Bogen har et godt index, så det er enkelt at finde personerne.
Politiets overgreb medførte ofte, at de, der så det, oplevede det, blev udsat for det, reagerede ved at radikaliseres. (Det var også en overordnet politimands - helt verbale - magtdemonstration på sessionen, der fik mig til at sætte spørgsmålstegn ved det danske samfunds demokratiske karakter - den slags er ikke specifikt for USA. Små mænd med magt vil gerne demonstrere den - uanset hvor i verden. Der findes også sådanne kvinder, Mumia beskriver en p. 167. Måden at gøre det på, er det, der afhænger af samfundets struktur).
J Edgar Hoover får fortjent en særlig behandling. Bemærk, der er 2 links.
Panthernes afdeling i New York udmærkede sig ved også at organisere Latinos, en el Partido Pantero Negro. p. 199.
Jean Genet besøgte Pantherne i 1970 og holdt en tale på Yale, 020570. p. 203.
Tænker du på at starte - eller bare arbejde i - et antiimperialistisk, antikapitalistisk, antiracistisk, antiglobaliserings-parti (alle delene eller bare en af dem) så vil du have gavn af at læse Mumias bog, både for det positive fra partiets opbygning, der fortæller noget om, hvad der virker og for det negative, COINTELPRO-nedbrydningen. Diskuter så, hvordan man modvirker nedbrydningen/den gensidige mistro og hvilke af opbygningsideerne, der er relevante i jeres sammenhæng.
Huey P. Newton citeres for: "He went on to say that the laws already on the books weren't even serving them [de sorte] in the first place, and what's the use of making more laws when what we needed was to enforce the present laws?" p. 2
"...the martyred Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. elevated by white and Black elites to the heights of social acceptance...To Americans bred for comfort. Dr. King was, above all, safe....The Black Panther Party.... did not preach nonviolence, but practiced the human right of self-defense." p. 7
"...the Black Panthers represented the "field slaves" of the American plantation who did not disguise their anger at the oppressive institution of bondage; Dr. King's sweet embrace of all things American was typical of the "house slave"...The origins of that resistance may be dated (on the North American landscape) to 1526, when Spaniards maneuvered a boat-load of captive, chained Africans up a river (in a land now called South Carolina) and nearly one hundred captives broke free, slew several of their captors, and fled into the dense, virgin forests to dwell among the aboriginal peoples there in a kind of freedom that their kindred would not know for the next 400 years....Republic of Liberia, established on Africa's West Coast in 1822 by US Black freedmen and -women under the aegis of the American colonization societies." p. 8
"The inborn instinct for national Black independence found various forms of expression: For example, in 1807, in Bullock County , Blacks organized their own "negro government" with a code of laws, a sheriff, and courts. Their leader, a former slave named George Shorter, was imprisoned by the US Army. As early as 1787 a group of "free Africans" petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for leave to resettle in Africa, because of the "disagreeable and disadvantageous circumstances" under which "free Africans" lived in post-Revolutionary America. The petitioning delegation was led by Black Masonic leader, Prince Hall." p. 9
"The period of the 1730s and 1740s has been seen by some historians as an era of incessant resistance. One contemporary observer described the period, almost as if he were referring to a prevalent disease, as "the contagion of rebellion" sweeping the colonies. Indeed, this spirit of rebellion flashed up and down the coasts of the British colonies and encircled the isles claimed by tribes of Europe." p. 14
"[S]ome 5,000 Blacks were eventually integrated into the Army of the Continental Congress, although General George Washington, a slaveholder from Virginia, initially opposed their enlistment. The First Rhode Island Regiment, an elite regiment of Black enlisted men and white officers, carried the day against the British at Yorktown, playing a pivotal role in forcing the surrender of Cornwallis.......Britain's Lord Dunmore offered freedom to all "negroes' who would fight for the Crown, and tens of thousands leapt at the opportunity. Dunmore organized a corps of Black former slaves into the Ethiopia Regiment, who wore the motto "Liberty to Slaves" on their tunics. This regiment helped the British capture and torch Norfolk, Virginia, on New Year's Day, 1776." p. 16
"Many Americans are generally familiar with the long history of US-"Indian" warfare, but how many know that the hardest fought battles were the three US-Seminole Wars? Or that these Black, white, and red wars were regarded as essentially wars fought for Black liberation?" p. 22 "Three wars and a number of smaller battles demonstrate a practice of armed resistance. The Seminole Wars were as much Black wars for freedom as they were Indian wars against white expansion into their lands and against their removal to reservations....No tale of a radical people would be complete absent mention of the raid on Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, by John Brown and his small yet intrepid cadre of Black and white freedom fighters." (1859) John Brown havde deltaget i udarbejdelsen af en ny amerikansk "Constitution", the Chatham Convention, in Chatham, Ontario. Denne forfatning fordømte slaveri. Her fra forordet(preamble): "Whereas slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion - the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination - in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence." p. 24-5.
King citeres for: "'The purpose of the slum is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness...." He would further declare, "The slum is little more than a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated and humiliated at every turn." p. 32
Raceopgør startedes ofte af hvide. Joe R. Feagin, a past president of the American Sociological Association, skriver: "One of the most serious riots occurred in 1917 in East St. Louis. There white workers viewing, black immigrants from the South as a job threat, violently attacked a black community. Thirty-nine black residents and nine white attackers were killed. This was followed in 1919 by a string of white riots from Chicago to Charleston.... In Black historical literature, notably in the writings of Du Bois, 1919 is known and remembered as Red Summer, for the explosions of violence against Black life throughout the US. ...There were twenty-six white riots in 1919 alone, with major ones in Chicago, Illinois; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; Omaha, Nebraska; Phillips County, Arkansas; and Washington, DC.'' p. 33
"In 1863, the so-called Draft Riots of New York City left at least one hundred people dead (the majority of them Black). That event, sparked by Irish who opposed both the aims and the necessity of the Civil War, marked the deadliest riot in US history.
...
In early September 1851, Edward Gorsuch, a Maryland slave owner, backed by his family, friends, and a US deputy marshal, descended on the little hamlet of Christiana, in southern Pennsylvania, to seize several escaped captives and to return them to slavery." p. 34 Men de flygtede var forberedte. "Her alarm brought out some forty-five Black men and women and some neighboring white, Quaker farmers."p.36 (Quakere har ofte støttet de sorte, f.eks. p. 53) "The Christiana Resistance was waged a year after the government's ignoble passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (FSA) of 1850, which threatened the lives and liberty of all Black people whether slave or "free.".....By the provisions of this bill, the colored people of the United States are positively degraded beneath the level of whites - are liable at any time, in any place, and under all circumstances, to be arrested - and upon the claim of any white person, without the privilege, even of making a defence, sent into endless bondage. Let no visionary nonsense about habeas corpus, or a fair trial, deceive us; there are no such rights granted in this bill," p. 37. Slaverne jager slavejægerne bort, nogen dræbes, og nogen af slaverne klarer at flygte ad the Underground Railroad.
"Those previous riots were often mass upheavals of whites attacking Black life or Black property. They therefore served the needs of white nationalism.", p. 65.
"Riots, by their very nature, are disorganized and incoherent. The Black Panther Party wanted to signal an end to this disorganization and introduce the revolutionary alternative: organisation, discipline, purpose, self-defense." p. 42
"Newton had studied the California penal codes (he suggests, in Revolutionary Suicide, that such knowledge made him a better thief) and learned that weapons possession was protected by state statute, and guns could be carried in public as long as they were not concealed. The Party therefore developed the nation's first armed police monitoring patrols." p. 43
"[H]e (hverken Mumia eller Newton) went to the historically Black college, Lincoln University, with the revered Kwame Nkruma, the first President of the independent West African nation of Ghana", p.60
"Watts was different in that it reflected Black urban anger at the white power structure and was a rebellion against a racist status quo.", p. 65.
"the Black Panther Party ..... did not believe that the country would, or ever could, embrace the claims of its Constitution." p. 66
"When leading Party members began organizing and agitating for the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention (RPCC) to be held in Philadelphia, it was, in a sense, a very real, conscious attempt to subvert the history of the colonials, by creating a new historical icon: A constitution in which all ignored segments of the American polity could be heard. leard, and be represented." p. 72 (040970).
"It is fitting that one of the Party's first programs was the Police-alert Patrols, where members trailed cop cars in the Black neighborhood, armed with guns, tape recorders, cameras, and law books." p. 67
"[W]e had hit on something unique. By standing up to the police as equals, even holding them off, and yet remaining within the law, we had demonstrated Black pride to the community in a concrete way." p. 68
"By 1968 the Seattle chapter had instituted its Free Breakfast for Children Program, where Panthers gathered food (often from supportive neighborhood merchants), assembled the necessary personnel, and cooked breakfasts for neighborhood kids. The average breakfast, though nothing fancy, filled the belly and was far more than most could find at home. It consisted of fried eggs, toast, a few slips of bacon, and grits. Oftentimes, community members would volunteer to help with these efforts. Due to its popularity in the community and strong support by the Party, demonstrated by an order issued by Chairman Seale, every chapter or branch had a breakfast program by 1969. ....Getting up early to serve neighborhood kids ' and spending some time with them before they were bundled up for school gave many Panthers a real example of what we were working for - our people's future." p. 69
"Among these programs were the Intercommunal News Service (1967); the Petition Drive for Community Control of Cops (1968); Liberation Schools, later called Intercommunal Youth Institutes, (1969); People's Free Medical Research Health Clinic (1969); Free Clothing Program (1970); Free Busing to Prisons Program (1970); Seniors Against Fearful Environment (SAFE) Program (1971); Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation (1971); and Free Housing Cooperative Program (1971).
In later years, the Party would initiate other programs including Free Shoe Programs, Free Ambulance Services, Free Food programs, and Home Maintenance Programs." p. 70
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
2, We want full employment for our people.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalist* of our Black Community. [*in the original text, the term "white man' was used; it was changed shortly thereafter to "capitalist"]
We believe that the racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million black people; therefore, we feel this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American Society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.
7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.
We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for selfdefense.
8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical ind racial background.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny. (p. 97 - 100)
"En konkurrent i begyndelsen var United Slaves (US) organization, headed by the Black Scholar Maulana "Ron" Karenga." p. 102
"M. Wesley Swearingen, an FBI agent who worked in the Los Angeles racial squad, was told that the FBI used two of its informants, George and Larry Stiner, who were members of the US organization, to kill Bunchy and Jon." p. 103 "...the Stiner brothers, who were convicted and sent to jail in 1969, and their subsequent escape in the 1974 prison break from San Quentin, were engineered by the FBI. I then discovered the unthinkable, that FBI informants had actually been instructed by FBI agents to assassinate several other Black Panther members." p.104
"Newton did more than offer a POW exchange with the Vietnamese. He offered an undetermined number of Black Panther troops to aid the Vietnamese in their struggle against the US Empire.", p. 107
"The FBI directed agents to "enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and... get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox." p. 110
"The Algerian government, its memory still fresh of its own brutal struggles under French colonialism, looked on the Cleaver delegation with favor. An official international headquarters was established in 1970 which had all the trappings of an embassy." p. 114
"In july of 1969, the deeply negrophobic director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, called the Panthers "the greatest threat to internal security of the country and those words were having a chilling effect." p. 115 "
Bogens kapitel 6 gennemgår partiets ødelæggelse ved FBIs COINTELPRO program. En beskidt historie, som gentages, for ofte, for mange steder i verden. Der gennemgås et antal tidlige sager, der især ramte lærere.
"Hoover skillfully utilized not only the powerful bureaucracy that he built and controlled, but also the vast powers of the predominantly white corporate press to demonize the Black Panther Party in the eyes of most of America." p. 117
Citat fra Church Comittee, US Senate: "Q: The same methods were brought home?
A: Yes; brought home against any organization against which we were targeting. We did not differendate. This is a rough, tough business.
Q: Would it be safe to say that the techniques we learned in fighting Bundists and Silver Shirters, true espionage in World War II, came to be used, the techniques came to be used against some of our own American Citizens?
A: That would be the correct deduction." p. 132
"In 1943, during the later years of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's term, Attorney General Francis Biddle wrote a memorandum commanding his young subordinate, J. Edgar Hoover, to cease compiling security classifications of American citizens, asserting that the agency had no legal basis to prepare such lists. Biddle also called the records unreliable. In clear, unambiguous terms, the Attorney General directed the Bureau's director to cease and desist from such record-keeping. Words like "compiling" and "records" serve to obscure the true nature of the activity whose initial use was the basis for determining whether to place people in secret internment camps duringWWII. Biddle, examining the program, found there was no statutory basis for it. Biddle's edict removes any serious question of the clarity of his cease and desist order: I am satisfied that they serve no useful purpose....There is no statutory authorization or other present authorization for keepng a "custodial detention" list of citizens. The Department fulfills its proper functions by investigating the activities of persons who may have violated the law. It is not aimed in this work as to classitying persons as to dangerousness. What was Hoover's response? He directed his underlings to simply change the labels on the "Custodial Detention" files to "Security Matter" files." p. 133 "Hoover directed his subordinates to only share security index data with authorized agents of military intelligence groups, who were known for their ability to keep secrets (even from other sectors of the executive branch)." p. 134
Earl Anthony beskriver, hvordan han blev hyret som FBI-agent: "A couple of weeks later, near the end of August, I was paid a surprise visited [sic] to my San Francisco apartment by Robert O'Connor and Ron Kizenski. No longer were we playing the "buddy buddy" rules. They were all business this time. They came right to the point: I was under investigation for the bombing of the Van Nuys draft board. I was stunned. Not only did I know nothing about the bombing, I hadn't even been told or heard on the news that the place had been bombed. Of course they said they didn't believe me, but would offer me a deal. They would not charge me if I would become an informant for the FBI inside the Black Panther Party. I started laughing, and instantly O'Connor threw a right fist upside my jaw, knocking me against the wall. Kizenski grabbed me, and O'Connor threw a series of rights and lefts, knocking me unconscious." p. 138-9.
George Sams (a.k.a."Madman"). "According to scholar and playwright Donald Freed, Sams's mysterious appearances across the nation seemed to presage predawn raids by heavily armed city, state, and federal police forces." p. 140
"The American media plays a somewhat similar role by supporting the status quo, no matter what. When the State commits crimes, such acts are not so described, but are referred to as "excesses."", p. 154....."..which reveals the government's utter disregard for the Constitution and other laws. The Senate, with all its pomp and ceremony, didn't stop it." p. 155-6. "The group, calling itself the Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI, shared an edited representation of their files with an antiwar periodical called WIN magazine, which devoted an entire issue to the files, reprinting many of them verbatim. These acts, more than anything else, opened the window of light on the repressive nature of the FBI, the megalomania of Hoover, and the government's secret war against peace and antiwar activists, civil rights organizations, feminists, socialists, Black nationalists, and other social groups." p. 156
"Senator Walter Mondale put things in frighteningly clear perspective when he opined in the midst of the Church Committee hearings: We heard that the FBI, to protect the country against those it believed had totalitarian political views, employed the tactics of totalitarian societies against American citizens. We heard that the FBI attempted to destroy one of our greatest leaders in the field of civil rights and then replace him with someone of the FBIs choosing.
From the evidence the committee has obtained, it is clear that the FBI for decades has conducted surveillance over the personal and political activities of millions of Americans. Evidently, no meeting was too small, no group too insignificant to escape their attention ... the FBI created indexes, more commonly called enemies lists, on thousands of Americans, targeted many of the Americans on these lists for special harassment." p 157-8
"
Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention (RPCC)
"Not content with forcing a scramble for a new venue, the police, as armed agents of the ruling class, went out of their way to sabotage the event by raiding three local Panther offices less than a week before the convention was to begin.....On September 4, 1970, the convention went off without a hitch, with at least six thousand participants (far more than in 1787!) from all across the country." p. 73
"Sometimes our work routine would change if we were relayed orders that originated from National. Such was the case in the fall of 1970, when the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention was planned for Philadelphia, and thousands of radicals and revolutionaries were expected to attend. This was supposed to be the Party's clarion call to all radicals to converge in a convention to write a new egalitarian, liberational Constitution for a Revolutionary New America." p. 195
"Each cop took an individual Panther and placed their pistol up back of our neck and told us to walk down the street backward. They told us if we stumble or fall they're gonna kill us. Then they lined us up against the wall and a cop with a .45 sub would fire over our heads so the bricks started falling down. Most of us had been in bed, and they just ripped the goddamn clothes off everybody, women and men. They had the gun, they'd just snatch your pants down and they took pictures of us like that. Then they put us in a wagon and took us down to the police station. We were handcuffed and running down this little driveway; when we got to the other end of it, a cop would come by with a stick and he'd punch us, beat us. Some of us were bleeding; I know I was bleeding, but really I thought it would be a whole lot worse. Rizzo had his photo op: embarrassed, naked Panthers. But it had the opposite effect he intended. Support for the Panthers was wide and deep." p. 196 [Abu Ghraib kom ikke ud af den blå luft !]
Newton wrote in 1972:
"Russia's first mistake came in the form of an incorrect analysis: that socialism could co-exist peacefully with capitalist nations. ....Remember, the capitalists claim that as soon as you agree to accept their trade and fall under their economic ideology, then they will agree to have peaceful co-existence. ....With the high quality of Soviet development at a time when the United States was less advanced than it is today, the Russians could have built up the necessary force to oppose imperialism." p. 87
Safiya A. Bukhari's oplevelser og reaktion bekrives, p. 168 - 171
"Their intervention, though petty and minor, shocked her. As she volunteered for the free breakfast program, she was dismayed to see attendance begin to diminish and couldn't understand why. When the trend continued, she went out into the community and talked to parents and learned that many of them were told by police that the people at the breakfast program were "feeding them poisoned food", p 169
"Shortly after her unsettling experience with the cops regarding the breakfast program, she and a friend were walking down 42nd Street in Midtown when they noticed a crowd gathering. Rushing to see what was happening, they came upon a dispute between two cops and a Panther with a bundle of newspapers under his arm. ...The sober, conservative sorority sister chimed in instinctively, informing the cops that the guy had a constitutional right to disseminate political literature anywhere. Instead of responding to the young lady's legal argument, the cops demanded identification and, moments later, arrested her, her friend, and the Panther selling papers." p. 171 Og ordene undervejs og behandlingen på stationen er heller ikke helt i overensstemmelse med bøgerne. Så hun bliver en engageret, flittig og skarp Panther.
"Ironically, as we fed hungry children breakfast, and later gave out bags of groceries to the poor, oftentimes Panthers themselves had little food and certainly little money. We lived mostly off paper sales." p. 187
"The slaughters of the sleeping Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in a Panther pad in Chicago on December 4,1969....In 1968, a sixteen-year-old Panther named Flores Forbes was stopped by the LAPD while selling Black Panther newspapers almost every single day. The cops insulted me, beat me, and, usually, dislodged my papers from under my arm, causing them to fly all over the streets of South Central Los Angeles. Even when I invoked the principles and guidelines of the Pocket Lawyer of Legal First Aid, the cops would bristle. "Nigger, you, your mama, and them other Black motherfuckers in the country have no constitutional fights that we recognize."" p.189
"In Forbes's account, the late September day in 1971 was unremarkable. ....Forbes further explained that as the OD made his daily rounds of the property he was seized and surrounded by six to eight cops, who trained their weapons on him and disarmed him. A Panther sister inside witnessed Jones's seizure and alerted the others:...The Panthers reported to their Defense Captain, who unlocked the gun cabinet and distributed weapons to disciplined Panthers standing in line....It was the LAPD's chopper descending slowly and then drawing to a hover over the office." p. 190-1 "The cops pulled back, and before long the order to stand down was given....But as Forbes explains, these raids had a draining effect on the Party. A week after the raid four Panthers deserted. The LAPD managed to hurt the LA chapter without firing a single shot....Ironically, the Panthers suffered most when the public and media showed up and they surrendered to the police. Many, both men and women, were brutally beaten by the cops. The cops had their special targets of vengeance, like Paul Redd, the chapter's youthful Deputy Minister of Culture, a gifted artist whose work earned the praise of those who saw it in the national Black Panther newspaper and regional party publications. It earned him as well the enmity of the State. When he was arrested and his name learned, the members of the LAPD brutally broke the fingers of his right hand. Undaunted, Redd learned to draft art with his left." p. 192
[Det ligner jo, det der overgik Victor Jara på stadion i Santiago Chile efter kuppet mod Allende i sept. 1973. Det er som om den amerikanske underklasse har et had til kultur, OJ].
"The other serious, and certainly anticipated, effect of such insidious operations as FBI snitch-jacketing was that it frayed and eroded trust between comrades. This aura of distrust was one of Hoover's prime objectives, for amidst such widespread distrust and incipient paranoia, no organization could meaningfully function." p. 207
"If someone had suggested that the government, the American government, was involved in writing poison pen letters pretending to be who they were not, most would have laughed, ridiculing the person as a fan of James Bond films or as paranoid." p. 208. Vi er opdraget til at tro for godt om vore regeringer, trods viden og skepsis.
"One day Chief Hilliard came up to me and in a low voice, drew my attention to a littk white guy standing around the office, s. . hu back. The Chief told me ... Show this motherfucker around, ok?" I readily agreed, and he handed me a slim worn paperback with the title The Blacks emblazoned on its cover, written by someone named ]ean Genet. ...He seemed more honored to be in the company of the Black Panthers than if he were accorded an honorguard by the president of the United States. I later learned that he had entered the US illegally and toured on the Party's behalf both in the States and abroad. Refused a visa by the United States, Genet spent several weeks in the US, even attending the murder trial in New Haven, Connecticut, of Chairman Bobby Seale and Captain Ericka Huggins, and he gave speeches at Yale, Columbia, and other colleges.
Genet: "As for Bobby Seale, I repeat, there must not be another Dreyfus Affair. Therefore, I count on you, on all of you, to spread the contestation abroad, to speak of Bobby Seale in your families in the universities, in vour courses and classrooms: vou must contest and occasionally contradict your professors and the police themselvcs." p. 202-3
"The tone set by the State, and subsequently carried by much of the white press, may be seen in the following quote from the House Subcommittee on Internal Security Report on the Black Panther Party:
On May 2, 196y, twenty-four members of the Black Panther Party invaded the California State Assembly at Sacramento while it was in session. The invaders were armed with rifles, shotguns, and pistols, and claimed they were there to protest a gun registration law. Security guards seized the weapons, unloaded them, and returned them to the panthers, who then walked out of the building.
The account also doesn't give the slightest hint that these men were behaving in ways that were legal in California, in regard to both arms possession and their open display. In fact, had their actions not been legal they would not have been at the state house protesting, for the purpose of the new law they were opposing was to outlaw such behavior." p. 209-10
"What was quite unknown at the time was that the FBI held secret files on some two million Americans, from the paranoid, drug-addicted Elvis Presley to the absent-minded Albert Einstein." p. 211
På side 211-12 citeres et brev FBI sendte i Elbert Howards navn til Eldridge Cleaver i Algeriet om Huey P Newton. Et konkret eksempel på COINTELPRO-metoder. Den slags breve holdt også Cleaver fra at deltage i RPCC. Og da han var en meget bedre taler end Newton fik det en (skæbnesvanger ?) betydning for mødets forløb.
"It was maddening. Letters from the FBI to leading Party members sparked increased paranoia and higher spirals of instability and danger. Who knew who was writing to whom ?" p. 214
"It [the closing of all chapters outside California] was a major mistake. I [Audrea Jones] think that it was a major mistake. It was a national organization with viable structures in communities. I think people felt abandoned by that. There was great support for the Party in local chapters and branches. People had... put themselves out to be part of that. To just close down clinics and close down breakfast programs. I mean the whole idea was to organize these things to the extent that things could be taken over. But there was a hole left."
''The 1972-73 centralization of the Party in Oakland had another impact that was perhaps unforeseen by the Central Committee: it communicated to many common people that the Party was in decline. Why else, people wondered, would the Panthers close down their community programs? Therefore the centralization contributed to the Party's own demise." p. 224
"Within weeks of the Newton/Cleaver breach, Panthers began to die, this time not from the fire of the class enemy, the State, but by the hands of their erstwhile brothers." p.225
"The BPP, perhaps proving the veracity of the old adage that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, had a global impact that moved radicals, nationalists, and revolutionaries worldwide to emulate some of their more positive attributes." p. 243
"In the early morning hours of December 9,1981, Mumia was critically shot and beaten by police and charged with the murder of officer Daniel Faulkner. Put on trial before Philadelphia's notorious "hanging judge," Albert Sabo, he was convicted and sentenced to death on July 3,1982." p. 294
Orla Jordal, 2007
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