Black Panthers History Quotes

I'm not quite sure what freedom is, but i know damn well what it ain't. How have we gotten so silly, i wonder.

On Slavery: The saddest slap in the face is we have NO monument, no real statues or memorials, no special day of Atonement or Remembrance (NOT ONE), no thanks for 400+ years of free labor, forced servitude across the Trans-Atlantic, ass beatings, buying ourselves and families out of slavery, rape and plunder...but everyone else has monuments, special museums, and even movies. This is what America thinks of black people, so-called black president and all, who has been largely silent on this subject...we'll even celebrate Leprechauns, Easter Bunnies, and Secretary's Day before we acknowledge our history.

The Panthers saw black communities in the United States as a colony and the police as an occupying army.

The Black Panther Party may indeed be history, but the forces that gave rise to it are not. “They wait, for the proper season, to arise again.

How do you fight white supremacy in the era of “color blindness”?

It was not simply what the Black Panthers did—but what they did in the conditions in which they found themselves—that proved so consequential

A’ight, so what do you think it means?” “You don’t know?” I ask. “I know. I wanna hear what YOU think.” Here he goes. Picking my brain. “Khalil said it’s about what society feeds us as youth and how it comes back and bites them later,” I say. “I think it’s about more than youth though. I think it’s about us, period.” “Us who?” he asks. “Black people, minorities, poor people. Everybody at the bottom in society.” “The oppressed,” says Daddy. “Yeah. We’re the ones who get the short end of the stick, but we’re the ones they fear the most. That’s why the government targeted the Black Panthers, right? Because they were scared of the Panthers?” “Uh-huh,” Daddy says. “The Panthers educated and empowered the people. That tactic of empowering the oppressed goes even further back than the Panthers though. Name one.” Is he serious? He always makes me think. This one takes me a second. “The slave rebellion of 1831,” I say. “Nat Turner empowered and educated other slaves, and it led to one of the biggest slave revolts in history.” “A’ight, a’ight. You on it.” He gives me dap. “So, what’s the hate they’re giving the ‘little infants’ in today’s society?” “Racism?” “You gotta get a li’l more detailed than that. Think ’bout Khalil and his whole situation. Before he died.” “He was a drug dealer.” It hurts to say that. “And possibly a gang member.” “Why was he a drug dealer? Why are so many people in our neighborhood drug dealers?” I remember what Khalil said—he got tired of choosing between lights and food. “They need money,” I say. “And they don’t have a lot of other ways to get it.” “Right. Lack of opportunities,” Daddy says. “Corporate America don’t bring jobs to our communities, and they damn sure ain’t quick to hire us. Then, shit, even if you do have a high school diploma, so many of the schools in our neighborhoods don’t prepare us well enough. That’s why when your momma talked about sending you and your brothers to Williamson, I agreed. Our schools don’t get the resources to equip you like Williamson does. It’s easier to find some crack than it is to find a good school around here. “Now, think ’bout this,” he says. “How did the drugs even get in our neighborhood? This is a multibillion-dollar industry we talking ’bout, baby. That shit is flown into our communities, but I don’t know anybody with a private jet. Do you?” “No.” “Exactly. Drugs come from somewhere, and they’re destroying our community,” he says. “You got folks like Brenda, who think they need them to survive, and then you got the Khalils, who think they need to sell them to survive. The Brendas can’t get jobs unless they’re clean, and they can’t pay for rehab unless they got jobs. When the Khalils get arrested for selling drugs, they either spend most of their life in prison, another billion-dollar industry, or they have a hard time getting a real job and probably start selling drugs again. That’s the hate they’re giving us, baby, a system designed against us. That’s Thug Life.

The black panther is an animal that when it is pressured it moves back until it is cornered, then it comes out fighting for life or death. We felt we had been pushed back long enough and that it was time for Negroes to come out and take over.

Hoover’s program aimed to drive a wedge between the Party and its nonblack allies. Today, the popular misconception persists that the Black Panther Party was separatist, or antiwhite. Many current internet postings mischaracterize the Party in this way. 28

Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau observed, “The masses of poor Negroes remain an unorganized minority in swelling urban ghettos, and neither SNCC nor any other group has found a form of political organization that can convert the energy of the slums into political power.

Huey Newton was able to go down, and to take the nigger on the street and relate to him, understand what was going on inside of him, what he was thinking, and then implement that into an organization, into a PROGRAM and a PLATFORM, you dig it? Into the BLACK PANTHER PARTY—and then let it spread like wildfire across this country.

As Michelle Alexander observes in The New Jim Crow, there are more black people under carceral control today than there were slaves in 1850. By 2000 the median white family owned ten times the assets of the median black family. Today, a decade and a half later, the median white family owns almost twenty times the assets of the median black family.

The Black Panther Party sustained disruption as a source of power by leveraging broad political cleavages to draw widespread black, antiwar, and international support in resistance to repression. The Party became repressible only once the state made sweeping concessions to its allies—namely affirmative action, repeal of the draft, and international diplomatic reconciliation.

A good Facebook brawl or Twitter mobbing might be the political equivalent of Huxley’s Violent Passion Surrogate, delivering all the tonic effects of joining the Weathermen or the Black Panthers or Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome with none of the physical inconveniences. The Internet might be bringing back the dramas and tragedies of history, only as a stage production, a costumed farce.

On April 5, 1967, six weeks after the Black Panther Party’s well-publicized confrontation with police while escorting Betty Shabazz, Assemblyman Mulford introduced a bill, AB 1591, in the California legislature proposing to outlaw the carrying of loaded firearms in public.29 In response to the “increasing incidence of organized groups and individuals publicly arming themselves,” Mulford argued, “it is imperative that this statute take effect immediately.

were listening to Tupac right before . . . you know.” “A’ight, so what do you think it means?” “You don’t know?” I ask. “I know. I wanna hear what you think.” Here he goes. Picking my brain. “Khalil said it’s about what society feeds us as youth and how it comes back and bites them later,” I say. “I think it’s about more than youth though. I think it’s about us, period.” “Us who?” he asks. “Black people, minorities, poor people. Everybody at the bottom in society.” “The oppressed,” says Daddy. “Yeah. We’re the ones who get the short end of the stick, but we’re the ones they fear the most. That’s why the government targeted the Black Panthers, right? Because they were scared of the Panthers?” “Uh-huh,” Daddy says. “The Panthers educated and empowered the people. That tactic of empowering the oppressed goes even further back than the Panthers though. Name one.” Is he serious? He always makes me think. This one takes me a second. “The slave rebellion of 1831,” I say. “Nat Turner empowered and educated other slaves, and it led to one of the biggest slave revolts in history.” “A’ight, a’ight. You on it.” He gives me dap. “So, what’s the hate they’re giving the ‘little infants’ in today’s society?” “Racism?” “You gotta get a li’l more detailed than that. Think ’bout Khalil and his whole situation. Before he died.” “He was a drug dealer.” It hurts to say that. “And possibly a gang member.” “Why was he a drug dealer? Why are so many people in our neighborhood drug dealers?” I remember what Khalil said—he got tired of choosing between lights and food. “They need money,” I say. “And they don’t have a lot of other ways to get it.” “Right. Lack of opportunities,” Daddy says. “Corporate America don’t bring jobs to our communities, and they damn sure ain’t quick to hire us. Then, shit, even if you do have a high school diploma, so many of the schools in our neighborhoods don’t prepare us well enough. That’s why when your momma talked about sending you and your brothers to Williamson, I agreed. Our schools don’t get the resources to equip you like Williamson does. It’s easier to find some crack than it is to find a good school around here.

In the weeks leading up to the Detroit rebellion, three incidents exacerbated racial tensions. On June 12, a mob of more than eighty whites waged a miniriot and smoke-bombed the house of an interracial married couple—a black man and a white woman—who had moved into a suburban white neighborhood. On June 23, a black couple—Mr. Thomas, who worked at a local Ford plant, and Ms. Thomas, his pregnant wife—went to Rouge Park in a white neighborhood. A mob of more than fifteen whites harassed them, threatened to rape Mrs. Thomas, cut the wires on their car so they could not leave, and then shot Mr. Thomas three times, killing him and causing Ms. Thomas to miscarry. Six of the whites were arrested, but only one was charged, and he was eventually let off by a jury. In fact, at that time, no white had ever been found guilty of murdering a black person in Detroit.

The 120 social scientists and investigators hired by the Kerner Commission, working under the guidance of Research Director Robert Shellow, provided a much more perceptive political analysis of the rebellions that the commission never published. In the concluding chapter of the analysis, “America on the Brink: White Racism and Black Rebellion,” the social scientists argued that racism pervaded all U.S. institutions and that blacks “feel it is legitimate and necessary to use violence against the social order. A truly revolutionary spirit has begun to take hold . . . an unwillingness to compromise or wait any longer, to risk death rather than have their people continue in a subordinate status.” Shellow and his team were subsequently fired, and their analysis was removed from the report.46 Powerful evidence supported the Shellow team’s view that many black people in Detroit saw the unrest as political action—that is, as a rebellion. In the Campbell-Schumann survey several months after the incident, 56 percent of the black respondents in Detroit characterized the incident as a “rebellion or revolution,” whereas only 19 percent characterized it as a “riot.”47 In

At its height, the rebellion can best be described as an insurrection. Large crowds of looters in the early part of July 23 gave way to roving bands of looters and fire bombers, who were much harder to control. Some coordinated their tactics by shortwave radio. Apparently, the rebels saw all government officials as the enemy, and they attacked firemen as well as policemen. By 4:40 P.M. on July 24, rebels had stolen hundreds of guns from gun shops. As police began to shoot at the looters, black snipers started shooting back. Hubert Locke, executive secretary of the establishment Committee for Equal Opportunity, called it a “total state of war.” Police officers and firemen reported being attacked by snipers on both the east and west sides of the city. Snipers made sporadic attacks on the Detroit Street Railways buses and on crews of the Public Lighting Commission and the Detroit Edison Company. Police records indicate that as many as ten people were shot by snipers on July 25 alone. A span of 140 blocks on the west side became a “bloody battlefield,” according to the Detroit News. Government tanks and armored personnel carriers “thundered through the streets and heavy machine guns chattered. . . . It was as though the Viet Cong had infiltrated the riot blackened streets.” The mayor said, “It looks like Berlin in 1945.”55 The black uprisings in Detroit and Newark were the largest of 1967 but by no means the only ones. Urban rebellions rocked cities large and small all across America. According to the Kerner Commission, 164 such rebellions erupted in the first nine months of the year.56

Radical or revolutionary consciousness . . . is the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed—and finally it is the discovery of oneself as one of the oppressed who must unite to transform the objective conditions of their existence in order to resolve the contradiction between potentiality and actuality. Revolutionary consciousness leads to the struggle for one’s own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of oppression.

The Party attracted large numbers of members and supporters, from various classes and races, who wanted to be part of a dynamic liberation movement rooted in the day-to-day struggles of ordinary black people, most of whom were poor and working class.

Rebellion reemerged as a political avenue precisely because of the limitations of the civil rights victories. These victories left untouched the economic and material dimensions of black subordination.

By the time the New Left and the Civil Rights Movement came on the scene, Zinn had left the party’s ranks, but he was toying with the Maoist Progressive Labor Party and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers party and “gave his support to young black militants” of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers.29 Actually, Zinn radicalized the students, turned them into militants, and helped found and guide the radical SNCC.

Law enforcement did a lot of shooting during the weekend. They shot looters and also fired at random into crowds, hitting uninvolved bystanders on the sidelines and even some in their homes.

His sense of community with other blacks is affirmed as he addresses them as “brothers” and “sisters,” a community built not on rational self-interest (as in the American political community) but on affective bonds. His new heroes are Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Angela Davis—and Frantz Fanon. He also prepares for political mobilization in accordance with his new self-image. Although he recognizes that violent revolution on the total scale preached by Fanon is not feasible in America, he will forthrightly adopt a rhetoric that involves “confrontation, bluntness, and directness” in dealing with his former white oppressors and asserting his new and vital self-image. Verbal violence as a form of cultural vitality overlaps with physical violence as part of the same black anti-Western Kultur . Turning the pages of Eldrige Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, or the poetry of LeRoi Jones, one meets with a delight in violence both as a cleansing, purifying process (as in Frantz Fanon’s “holy violence”) and as an affirmation of vital cultural identity. The black inner-city criminal thug took on the glamorous image of Frantz Fanon’s fellah or revolutionary guerrilla cadre, as urban street gangs reorganized themselves as the Black Panthers. In a notorious passage, Norman Mailer had even praised the vitalism and “courage” of these hoodlums when they murder neighborhood store owners. “For one murders not only a weak fifty-year-old man,” he wrote, “but an institution as well,” namely, private property. Mailer concluded that “the hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly.

She seemed sad and wise beyond her years. All the giddy experimentation with sex, recreational drugs, and revolutionary politics that was still approaching its zenith in countercultural America was ancient, unhappy history to her. Actually, her mother was still in the midst of it—her main boyfriend at the time was a Black Panther on the run from the law—but Caryn, at sixteen, was over it. She was living in West Los Angeles with her mother and little sister, in modest circumstances, going to a public high school. She collected ceramic pigs and loved Laura Nyro, the rapturous singer-songwriter. She was deeply interested in literature and art, but couldn’t be bothered with bullshit like school exams. Unlike me, she wasn’t hedging her bets, wasn’t keeping up her grades to keep her college options open. She was the smartest person I knew—worldly, funny, unspeakably beautiful. She didn’t seem to have any plans. So I picked her up and took her with me, very much on my headstrong terms. I overheard, early on, a remark by one of her old Free School friends. They still considered themselves the hippest, most wised-up kids in L.A., and the question was what had become of their foxy, foulmouthed comrade Caryn Davidson. She had run off, it was reported, “with some surfer.” To them, this was a fate so unlikely and inane, there was nothing else to say. Caryn did have one motive that was her own for agreeing to come to Maui. Her father was reportedly there. Sam had been an aerospace engineer before LSD came into his life. He had left his job and family and, with no explanation beyond his own spiritual search, stopped calling or writing. But the word on the coconut wireless was that he was dividing his time between a Zen Buddhist monastery on the north coast of Maui and a state mental hospital nearby. I was not above mentioning the possibility that Caryn might find him if we moved to the island.

Through the nonprofit Zinn Education Project (ZEP)—a collaborative effort with Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change—Zinn’s book and dozens of spin-off books, documentaries, role-playing activities, and lessons about Reconstruction, the 1921 Tulsa race riot, taking down “racist” statues, the “FBI’s War on the Black Freedom Movement,” the “Civil Rights Movement” (synonymous with the Black Panthers), the Black Panther Ten Point Program, “environmental racism,” and other events that provide evidence of a corrupt U.S. regime are distributed in schools across the country. According to a September 2018 ZEP website post, “Close to 84,000 teachers have signed up to access” ZEP’s history lessons and “at least 25 more sign up every day.” Alison Kysia, a writer for ZEP who specializes in “A People’s History of Muslims in the United States” and who taught at Northern Virginia Community College, used Zinn’s book in her classes and defended it for its “consciousness-raising power.”64 ZEP sends organizers to give workshops to librarians and teachers on such topics as the labor movement, the environment and climate change, “Islamophobia,” and “General Approaches to Teaching People’s History” (with full or partial costs borne by the schools!). In 2017, workshops were given in six states, Washington, D.C., and Vancouver, Canada.

there are more black people under carceral control today than there were slaves in 1850.

Black Power meant widely different things to different people. Despite

In an early proposal for the book in 2000, we elaborated a method of “strategic genealogy” to conduct this analysis. Rather than center our analysis on particular individuals or on dissection of the Party’s organization, we uncovered the political dynamics of the Party by studying the evolution of its political practices.34

The Revolutionary Action Movement advanced a pivotal idea that would become central to the politics of the Black Panther Party. Drawing on a line of thought reaching back at least to the mid-1940s and the black anticolonialism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Alpheaus Hunton, RAM argued that Black America was essentially a colony and framed the struggle against racism by blacks in the United States as part of the global anti-imperialist struggle against colonialism.47 Max Stanford defined the politics of revolutionary black nationalism this way in 1965: “We are revolutionary black nationalist, not based on ideas of national superiority, but striving for justice and liberation of all the oppressed peoples of the world. . . . There can be no liberty as long as black people are oppressed and the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America are oppressed by Yankee imperialism and neo-colonialism. After four hundred years of oppression, we realize that slavery, racism and imperialism are all interrelated and that liberty and justice for all cannot exist peacefully with imperialism.

In the summer of 1966, Seale was hired to run a youth work program at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center funded by the federal War on Poverty. Through his role as a social service provider, he came to understand even more clearly the economic and social needs of black youth. Beyond delivering services, Bobby brought his revolutionary nationalist theory to the job and used the opportunity to push up against the ideological bias in the government program. Rather than merely guiding young blacks into a government-prescribed path, he used his authority to help them stand up against oppressive authority, particularly against police brutality. One day Seale’s boss instructed him to take a group of young black men and women on a tour of the local police station. When the group arrived, the police officers pulled out notepads and pencils and started to interview the teenagers about the character of gangs in the neighborhood. Seale protested, instructing his group to remain silent and announcing that his program would not be used as a spy network to inform on people in the community. The officers claimed that they simply wanted to foster better relations with the community. In response, Seale turned the conversation around, creating an opportunity for the teenagers to describe their experiences with police brutality in the neighborhood. It was the first time the young people had had the opportunity to look white police officers in the eye and express their anger and frustration. One teenager berated the police for an incident in which several officers had thrown a woman down and beaten her in the head with billy clubs. “Say you!” said a sixteen-year-old girl, pointing at a policeman. “You don’t have to treat him like that,” Seale said to the girl. “I’ll treat him like I want to, because they done treated me so bad,” she replied. Bobby sat back as the girl grilled the officer about whether he had received proper psychiatric treatment. The officer turned red and started to shake. “The way you’re shaking now,” she said, “the way you’re shaking now and carrying on, you must be guilty of a whole lot! And I haven’t got no weapon or nothin.’”69 The poverty program provided a paycheck, some skills, and an opportunity to work with young people. But Newton and Seale were still searching for a way to galvanize the rage of the “brothers on the block.” They wanted to mobilize the ghetto the way that the Civil Rights Movement had mobilized blacks in the South. They dreamt of creating an unstoppable force that would transform the urban landscape forever. The problem was now clear to Huey and Bobby, but they did not yet have a solution. Huey and Bobby were not the only ones looking for answers.

Carmichael also criticized the student peace movement and argued that if peace activists wanted to be relevant to most people, they needed to start organizing to resist the draft: The peace movement has been a failure because it hasn’t gotten off the college campuses where everybody has a 2S [draft deferment] and is not afraid of being drafted anyway. The problem is how you can move out of that into the white ghettos of this country and articulate a position for those white youth who do not want to go. . . . [SNCC is] the most militant organization for peace or civil rights or human rights against the war in Vietnam in this country today. There isn’t one organization that has begun to meet our stand on the war in Vietnam. We not only say we are against the war in Vietnam; we are against the draft. . . . There is a higher law than the law of a racist named [Secretary of Defense] McNamara; there is a higher law than the law of a fool named [Secretary of State] Rusk; there is a higher law than the law of a buffoon named Johnson. It’s the law of each of us. We will not allow them to make us hired killers. We will not kill anybody that they say kill. And if we decide to kill, we are going to decide who to kill.89

The master’s room was wide open. The master’s room was brilliantly lighted, and the master was there, very calm . . . and our people stopped dead . . . it was the master . . . I went in. “It’s you,” he said, very calm. It was I, even I, and I told him so, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slave of slaves, and suddenly his eyes were like two cockroaches, frightened in the rainy season . . . I struck, and the blood spurted; that is the only baptism that I remember today. —Aimé Césaire excerpted in Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, Black Panther Party booklist

Newton points out that military and political power are inextricably linked: without military power, there can be no political power. “Politics is war without bloodshed,” and “war is politics with bloodshed.” He criticizes black politics as toothless and thus powerless. Only by developing a force with real destructive capacity can black people obtain political power: When black people send a representative, he is somewhat absurd because he represents no political power. He does not represent land power because we do not own any land. He does not represent economic or industrial power because black people do not own the means of production. The only way he can become political is to represent what is commonly called a military power—which the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls Self-Defense Power. Black People can develop Self-Defense Power by arming themselves from house to house, block to block, community to community, throughout the nation. Then we will choose a political representative and he will state to the power structure the desires of the black masses. If the desires are not met, the power structure will receive a political consequence. We will make it economically nonprofitable for the power structure to go on with its oppressive ways. We will then negotiate as equals. There will be a balance between the people who are economically powerful and the people who are potentially economically destructive.

Cleaver came across a picture of the white woman that Till had flirted with in a magazine and found her attractive. He saw himself in Till’s shoes, and it distressed him. “It intensified my frustrations,” Cleaver later explained, “to know that I was indoctrinated to see the white woman as more beautiful and desirable than my own black woman.” Cleaver’s emotional turmoil about his attraction to white women was not unusual. While white men often took liberties with black women, a black man who flirted even mildly with a white woman was considered to be making the gravest violation of white supremacy, one that was all too often punished by death. In this context, it is not surprising that many black men associated a sexual desire for white women with a desire to be recognized as human and free.

As reported in the New York Times that May, the committee’s final report determined that “FBI headquarters approved more than 2,300 actions in a campaign to disrupt and discredit American organizations ranging from the Black Panthers to Antioch College,” and that the Bureau “may have violated specific criminal statutes” in pursuing actions that “involved risk of serious bodily injury or death to targets.” The Church Committee noted that COINTELPRO

Fred Hampton was instrumental in setting the terms of the relationship. Guerra continues, “Hampton was a very humble person and didn’t walk around like he was God’s gift to the movement, although he was an eloquent public speaker; he was also a great organizer. He was a person who came in an old car, got out, shook people’s hands, wanted to really talk to people. I remember him saying, ‘I’m glad to have met you. I’m glad to have met you.’ ”146 Hampton’s talents as organizer and public speaker and his radical coalition politics made him one of the most effective members of the Black Panther Party.

Thus did African American men at Ionia [Hospital] develop schizophrenia, not because of changes in their clinical presentations, but because of changes in the connections between their clinical presentations and larger, national conversations about race, violence, and insanity. And thus did the men develop schizophrenia not because of symptoms, but because of civil rights.

In New York, thirteen Black Panthers were unanimously acquitted on charges of conspiring to bomb department stores and police stations and murder cops in what history has come to call the Panther 21 Trial. One of those thirteen was an eight-months-pregnant woman born Alice Faye Williams, known now as Afeni Shakur. She decided to represent herself throughout the trial after reading Fidel Castro’s History Will Absolve Me, and as a three-hundred-year prison sentence hung over her head, Shakur spent eleven months in prison before being acquitted.

There was a black cat before Black Panther. He was Lion Man and he was created, written and published by black people.

But another social movement, the civil rights movement, alarmed Manson. Used to the highly segregated world of prison culture, Manson saw the civil rights movement as a direct threat to what he saw as legitimate white supremacy. The Black Panthers frightened Manson, and he came to believe that a civil race war was on the horizon.

By the summer of 1969, Manson was so desperate to get some cash together to kick-start Helter Skelter and his family’s escape to the desert that he decided to start a drug-dealing operation. Manson set up a bad deal, promising $2,500 worth of weed to a dealer known as Lotsa Poppa in exchange for the cash. Manson took the cash but had no weed. Poppa threatened Manson, saying that he was a member of the Black Panthers, and if his money were not returned, he and his fellow Panthers would come to Spahn Ranch and kill everyone there. In retaliation, Manson drove to Poppa’s home and shot him in the chest.

At the same time, Beausoleil got into trouble with a biker gang who hung out at Spahn Ranch. Beausoleil had sold mescaline manufactured by Gary Hinman to the bikers, who reported that the drugs were actually poison. They wanted their money back. Manson convinced Beausoleil to confront Hinman and demand from him not only the drug money but anything else of value he possessed. Beausoleil drove with Bruce Davis, Susan Atkins, and Mary Brunner to Hinman’s house on July 25, 1969. At the house, Beausoleil pulled a gun on Hinman when he refused to give back the money. There was nothing wrong with the mescaline, Hinman said. Susan kept the gun on Hinman while Beausoleil searched the house, but Hinman managed to overpower her, causing Beausoleil to beat him. Eventually, Davis drove back to Spahn Ranch to pick up Manson, who wanted to take part in what was to follow. Manson brought a sword and used it to slash Hinman’s face and cut off part of his ear. After Manson left, Beausoleil continued to beat Hinman over the course of the night and into the next day, with Susan and Mary still present. Hinman maintained that he had no money and threatened to call the police as soon as they left. Beausoleil called Manson to tell him about Hinman’s threat, and Manson ordered him to kill Hinman, making the murder look as though the Black Panthers did it in retaliation for the murder of Lotsa Poppa. Beausoleil stabbed Hinman to death and used his blood to write the phrase “political piggy” on the wall. Beausoleil, Susan, and Mary tried to remove their fingerprints from Hinman’s home before they drove away in his cars. It took two weeks before anyone found Hinman’s body.

was Sharon Tate’s maid, Winifred Chapman, arriving to work at 8 am on August 9, who found the bodies and alerted the police. Police booked the house’s 19-year-old caretaker, William Garretson, immediately. No one believed that Garretson could have been in the guesthouse the entire time and not have heard anything. Garretson was booked on five counts of murder and taken to the police station. This was a disaster for Manson. No one had put together the pieces that Manson thought he had clearly laid, linking this murder with that of Gary Hinman and to the Black Panthers. The whole thing had been a failure, Manson said. The group was going to have to out a second night and do it all over again.

And so in the 1960s organizations like the Black Panther Party were created. (And I should say the Black Panther Party was founded in 1966, which means that there should be a fiftieth anniversary celebration coming up!) I wonder how we are going to address, for example, the Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther Party. I’ll just summarize the Ten-Point Program and you might get an idea why there are not efforts under way to guarantee a large fiftieth anniversary celebration for the Black Panther Party. Number one was “We want freedom.” Two, full employment. Three, an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black and oppressed communities—it was anticapitalist! Number four, we want decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings. Number five, we want decent 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 present-day society. And number six—which is especially significant in relation to the right-wing effort to undo the very small efforts made by the Obama administration to produce health care for poor people in the US—we want completely free health care for all Black and oppressed people. Number seven, we want an immediate end to police brutality and the murder of Black people, other people of color, and all oppressed people inside the United States. Number eight, we want an immediate end to all wars of aggression—you see how current this still sounds. Number nine, 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 charged with so-called crimes under the laws of this country. And finally, number ten: we want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace, and people’s community control of modern technology.

He speculated that Manson was never arrested “because our department thought he was going to attack the Black Panthers.