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| Sundiata Acoli on the BPP | |
| THE COMMEMORATOR 4432 Telegraph Ave., PO BOX 62 Oakland, Ca 94609 |
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There is a good book available that gives a fairly nonbiased look at the
Black Panther Party, it's called "Shadow of the Panther" by Hugh Pearson.
I'm about halfway through it and it's been decent. "This Side of Glory"
by David Hilliard is pretty good for getting an inside look into the Party
and it's development. However, Pearson's book pokes a lot of holes in the
story Hilliard tells.
-- walk21@aol.com 4/5/95
I'm writing my Ph.D dissertaiton on the Black Panther party and I have to
say this in response to you comments about Hugh Pearson's book...If you
think his book is unbiased, you MUST be reading a deffernt book than I
read!!
-- Mike Jennings <phinupi@aol.com>
Dept. of Political Science
UNC-Chapel Hill
I am a fourth year graduate student in History at Columbia University
whose dissertation is on the Black Panther Party, 1966-1982. I am focusing
on how the BPP conceptualized black liberation: What ideologies guided
their actions? What strategies and tactics did they employ over time and
why? How did different segments of the black community respond to the
Panthers at different time periods? These seemingly small questions,
with huge answers!!!!
I know that there must be brothas and sistas out there,
scholar/ACTIVISTS, who are committed to reclaiming the history of the
Black Panther Party not as an academic endeavor, but as a political act. I
would like to dialogue with you about everything from locating source
material, to the current state of the grassroots struggle to raise
awareness about political prisoners, to your opinions on the contemporary
commercialization of the BPP image that is underway. Please reply to me
directly at my e-mail address: rcs11@columbia.edu.
-- R.Spencer <rcs11@columbia.edu> 4/4/95
In response to the request for this info I am posting this, the basic
tenets of the 10 point program, verbatim. As you can guess the originators
went much deeper in their breakdown and their teachings (I'm just too lazy
to type it all out). If you want more info I suggest you write to:
- We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black and oppressed communities.
- We want full employment for our people.
- We want and end to the robbery by the Capitalist of our black and oppresed communities.
- We want decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings.
- We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
- We want completely free Health Care for all Black and oppressed people.
- We want an immediate end to Police brutality and murder of Black people, other people of color, all oppressed people in the United States.
- We want an immediate end to all wars of aggression
- We want freedom for all Black and oppressed people now held in US Federal, State, County, City and Military prisons and jails. We want trials by a jury of peers for all persons chared with so-called crimes under the laws of this country.
- We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people's community control of modern technology.
The rapper PARIS does an excellent musical breakdown of the 10 pt program
on the song "Escape From Babylon" from the lp THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT. I
find that his version is a useful tool for teaching it to youngstas.
You could also find Bobby Seales book SIEZE THE TIME and/or Assatta Shakurs
book ASSATTA (both are in print)
-- adisa@sirius.com (blackman@ghetto.com) 3/95
In article <3lvr9p$g6k@newsbf02.news.aol.com>, phinupi@aol.com (PHI NU PI)
wrote:
> I'm writing my Ph.D dissertaiton on the Black Panther party and I have to
> say this in response to you comments about Hugh Pearson's book...If you
> think his book is unbiased, you MUST be reading a deffernt book than I
> read!!
>
In response to this I must say that I agree wholeheartedly. Pearson claims
that he started this book with the intention of showing the glorious
history of this much maligned group but he found that the 'real' story was
foul and corrupt...
Well I had been reading Pearsons articles in a San Francisco weekly paper
before he got deep into the book and I find it hard to believe that he had
any benevolent intentions. His articles (IMO) were week kneed and
apologetic to the White masses to the point of decrying our youngsters as
the enemy (my interpretation)
When I saw, in that same paper, that he had written a book on the Panthers
I turned to the article with great reservation and found exactly what I
expected. Yet another destructive account of the Panther Party.
I came to Oakland to be close to where the Panthers once stood. I have
spent much of the past 4 years meeting and speaking to those who were and
were not involved. Basically anyone with an opinion and I can say that this
untrained ethnographer (me) has found NOTHING but praise by the 'lumpen
proletariat'. There are those with Political bias that malign them. There
are those who correctly criticise there political naivete on some issues.
But I have yet to find the amount of disdain that pearson claims.
Now he may have some connections that I am missing out on and he is
obviously more 'scholarly' than I am ;) but I believe my analysis. and I
think he has a hidden agenda.
And I know someone will say "dont we all?"
From: Bernardo Manuel Vasquez <bvasquez@WPI.EDU>
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1993 19:34:39 -0500
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No Justice, No Mercy For The Panthers
by Terry Bisson
When Katherine Ann Power surrendered last month after almost
25 years underground, a generation of '60s activists watched in
sympathetic fascination. But some watched from behind bars. The
African-American radicals of the era, exemplified by the Black
Panthers, were motivated by the same high ideals, victim to the
same youthful errors and subject to the same excesses as the
white radicals. The difference is that many have spent the
intervening decades not underground, not on probation, but in
prison; and this is a difference that marks, with black-and-white
precision, the line between justice and racism.
At least eight former Black Panthers are still imprisoned in
New York state, some of them since the early 1970s, for the same
sort of politically motivated acts for which Power was hunted.
They are among 25 to 30 Panthers imprisoned nationwide. Some were
members of the original "Panther 21", a target of police
entrapment. Some were with the Black Liberation Army, formed
after the Panthers were decimated by the FBI's covert COINTELPRO
program. Some, like California's Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt and New
York's Dhoruba Bin Wahad (whose conviction was overturned in 1991
after 19 years in prison), were framed; others were convicted on
tainted evidence, all were sentenced far too harshly.
Robert "Seth" Hayes has been in jail the longest, since
1971. Teddy "Jah" Heath has been in jail since 1973 for a
kidnapping in which no-one was injured. Herman Bell, Albert "Nuh"
Washington, and Anthony Bottoms are still in prison for killing a
policeman, even though a federal judge recently concluded that
important testimony was perjured. Abdul Majid and Bashir Hameed,
convicted on killing a policeman in 1981 after two mistrials, are
now appealing their third trial because the prosecution used its
challenges to exclude black jurors. Most of these men, who have
already been in prison for decades, will not be eligible for
parole until long after Katherine Ann Power has returned to
freedom.
It's not fair. The Panthers are not America's only political
prisoners; there are scores of American Indians, MOVE militants,
Puerto Rican Indpendentistas and white radicals serving draconian
sentences for what can only be deemed "political" crimes. But I
single out the Panthers because they have been in jail the
longest; because many veterans of the '60s, black and white, were
inspired by the courage and commitment of these politicized
ghetto youth; and because their treatment is so transparently, so
cruelly, so shamefully vengeful.
These Panthers are still being punished for the violence of
a decade of struggle in which crimes were committed on both
sides. Policemen were killed, it is true (though far more
Panthers were killed by police). But it is not secret that
violence and criminality on the part of police was a desperate
issue in the black community, then as now. The Mollen Commission
itself admitted that its hearings revealed nothing new. Rodney
King was not the first African-American man beaten unmercifully
by the police; he was only the first on prime-time TV. And
COINTELPRO was only the most notorious of many illegal government
operations aimed at preventing the rise of what J. Edgar Hoover
termed a "Black Messiah."
Whatever our positions today on these issues, it dishonours
no one to recognize that the Panthers were not criminals out for
personal gain. The injustices they struggled against and the
contributions they made are recognized by many. It is time for
the U.S. government to show the same capacity for mercy that even
the bitterest of enemies can, on occasion, exhibit. It is ironic
that at the very time when Israel was releasing its longest-held
political prisoner, Salim Hussein Zerai, after 23 years, former
Black Panther Sundiata Acoli, captured with the Black Liberation
Army leader Assata Shakur in 1973, was turned down for parole
after 20 years in prison.
Regardless of the merits of each individual case, what these
Black Panthers all had in common was their willingness to take a
stand and even to take up arms to defend what they perceived as a
community under seige. We don't have to agree with their actions
to recognize their commitment, to acknowledge that the injustices
they fought against were real (and still prevail today), and to
admit that they deserve at least the grudging portion of mercy
that was extended to Katherine Ann Powers. The wounds of the '60s
cannot be completely healed until the militants of the '60s are
given justice.
Black as well as white. It's only fair.
What You Can Do:
* Write to the New Jersey State Parole Board and demand that
Sundiata be released on parole immediately.
New Jersey State Parole Board
CN 862
Trenton, NJ
08625 USA
Tel: (609) 292 4257
Fax: (609) 984 2190
For more more information write to:
Sundiata Acoli Freedom Campaign
P.O. Box 5538, Manhattanville Station
Harlem, NY
10027 USA
Tel: (203) 966 9048
Write to Sundiata:
Sundiata Acoli #39794-066
P.O. Box 1000
Leavenworth, KS
66048 USA
Arm The Spirit Arm The Spirit
PO Box 6326, Stn. A c/o Autonome Forum
Toronto, Ontario PO Box 1242
M5W 1P7 CANADA Burlington, Vermont
05402-1242 USA
FAX for Canadian address: 416 516 4847
E-mail for U.S. address: aforum@moose.uvm.edu
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 1995 18:33:11 -0500 (CDT)
From: "C. Kapp" <ckapp@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
X-Sender: ckapp@black.weeg.uiowa.edu
To: mellow mike <mbowen@panix.com>
Subject: Re: FAQ #25 - Black Panther Party
X-UIDL: 798254908.018
This may be useless info but here goes anyway.
Last semester I was working on a project that tried(unsuccessfully) to
sort out personal questions concerning identity politics that I have
been fretting over for 25 years, give or take. As a very young white man
in the late sixties and early seventies, I idolized the Black Panthers
and equated them with selfless courage. This notion over the years was
tempered by reality but only slightly. At any rate, part of the project
involved interviewing people I have come to know over the years who
are/were involved in the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement,
the anti-war movement, gay rights, etc,. The part that might interest
you came from an interview with a friend of mine who was working for SNCC
in Louns County in 1965 or 1966. He (also white and small-town Iowan to
boot) found that the locl blacks he worked with and who tended to
mistrust him (as an outsider who would only make things more difficult and
then leave) found that the appearance and subsequent moving on of Black
Panthers served to greatly strengthen the bonds he had with the local
community. He could only explain it in terms of, "Where'd they go. At
least you're still here." The point, such as it is, being that those
inthe greatest need of the style of struggle that he associated with the
BP's resented and even, on occasion, rejected them(the BP's) in favor of
his own efforts about which he harbored great doubts and questions.
I interpreted this as an example of identity politics functioning at odds
with itself but I wasn't able to fully convince even myself. Good luck
with your work and forgive me taking up your time.
Charley Kapp