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Banned
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Originally Posted by analog
.....Paranoid anti-establishment conspiracy retards are the dirty cunts of the world....
....That's exactly the type of "twisting of words" you've used to complain, once again, about the police. It's like tabloid journalism, only dumber and fueled by paranoid delusions of persecution......
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analog, despite the fact that I agree completely with you that dksuddeth picked a bad example to use to showcase what he perceives to be "the problem", I found your reaction to be too dismissive. This is our history, and authority in the US is alive and kicking today. Whether you're a "blue blood" who graduated from the same prep school that our current president and his father both are graduates of, or you are a minority from an economically segregated, blighted area in an urban California jurisidiction, if you publicly embrace and unwaveringly adhere to a doctrine that authority is prejudiced against, and thus has demonized to the point that it's own ranks react to any defense of it with shock, disbelief, and then belligerence, you are fucked. Much more intensely if you happen to be a minority who frustrates sworn officers' perceived "performance of their duties".... It has nothing to do with "conspiracy theories". Authority is edgey and defensive and has definite ideas of what is appropriate behavior exhibited by "the rest of us", and what is not. That does not make it's decisions correct or lawful.
"The public" has a right to observe and question authority in the course of it "performing it's duties". It's reaction to people doing just that is irrelevant, but the consequences it metes out anyway, are real, sometimes illegal, and do shocking damage to those exercising their rights while acting within the law:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corliss_Lamont
Corliss Lamont (March 28, 1902–April 26, 1995), was a humanist and Marxist philosopher, and advocate of various left-wing and civil liberties causes. He is the great-uncle of 2006 Democratic Party nominee for the United States Senate from Connecticut, Ned Lamont[1].
...Lamont was born in Englewood, New Jersey. His father, Thomas W. Lamont, was a Partner and later Chairman at J.P. Morgan & Co.. Lamont graduated as valedictorian of Phillips Exeter Academy in 1920, and magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1924. In 1924 he did graduate work at New College University of Oxford while he resided with Julian Huxley. The next year Lamont matriculated at Columbia University, where he studied under John Dewey. In 1928 he became a philosophy instructor at Columbia and married Margaret Hayes Irish. He received his Ph.D. in 1932. Lamont taught at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and the New School for Social Research . In 1962 he married Helen Elizabeth Boyden.[2]
[edit] Political views
Lamont's political views were Marxist and socialist for much of his life. During the 1930s he was openly Marxist. In 1934, Corliss Lamont identified himself to former communist Max Eastman as a 'Truth Communist', saying according to Eastman, that he “did not accept the policy of political lying to the masses practiced by the official communist parties under Stalin.”
Activism
He served as a director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1932–1954, and chairman until his death, of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which successfully challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy's senate subcommittee and other government agencies. In the process Lamont was cited for contempt of Congress, but in 1956 an appeals court overturned his indictment. From 1951 until 1958, he was denied a passport by the State Department.
In 1965 he secured a Supreme Court ruling against censorship of incoming mail by the U.S. Postmaster General. In 1973 he discovered through Freedom of Information Act requests that the FBI had been tapping his phone, and scrutinizing his tax returns and cancelled checks for 30 years. His subsequent successful lawsuit set a precedent in upholding citizens' privacy rights. He also filed and won a suit against the Central Intelligence Agency for opening his mail....
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<h3>The following should be mandatory reading in high school US history and civics class, and in every LE recruit training program. Malcolm X, Dr. Newton, and Mr. Seale should be as honored and as higly regarded as Rosa Parks. J. Edgar Hoover and Richard M. Nixon should be regarded as Booth and Oswald are:</h3>
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http://lemming.mahost.org/library/seize/seize2.htm#d
[From Bobby Seale's book, "Seize the Time"]
HUEY: GETTING THE PARTY GOING
THE PANTHER PROGRAM
One day Huey said, "It's about time we get the organization off the ground, and do it now."
This was in the latter part of September 1966. From around the first of October to the fifteenth of October, in the poverty center in North Oakland, Huey and I began to write out a ten-point platform and program of the Black Panther Party. Huey himself articulated it word for word. All I made were suggestions.
Huey said, "We need a program. We have to have a program for the people. A program that relates to the people. A program that the people can understand. A program that the people can read and see, and which expresses their desires and needs at the same time. It's got to relate to the philosophical meaning of where in the world we are going, but the philosophical meaning will also have to relate to something specific."....
..."Don't come in the office high or drunk," Huey told him, "because all you can do is be destructive to the Party because you don't know what you're doing in the first place." We found out that John Sloane had been in the military service and that he was the best man to teach brothers field stripping and shooting of the M-1 rifle. He did that for two or three months. He was out of sight on the weapons and rifle in terms of getting the brothers down. He wasn't jiving. He was with us.
Then other brothers began to come in. We had a Saturday night meeting about three-and-a-half weeks after we opened that office, and we had about twenty-five brothers there. It was me, Bobby Hutton, Huey, Mark Johnson, a brother I knew from the poverty program, John Sloane - we made John Sloane a captain - and then about four weeks later, Warren Tucker came in. We got another .38 from a brother up at Cal. He said he wasn't doing anything with it. We told him we wanted it, we needed it. We were going to defend our people. We said we weren't giving it back to him. He didn't raise any arguments about it. We said we weren't bullshitting. He gave us an old broke-up shotgun too. The next thing we knew, we had about thirty, maybe forty members of the Party. Richard Iokey came in - the Japanese brother who gave Huey and me the M-1 and 9mm - and he got to talking about how he had a .357 Magnum. We got the .357 Magnum from him and a couple more pistols, and the brothers got to getting money together, and started buying weapons.
Every Saturday, we opened up a community meeting in the office and Huey was teaching dudes, brothers, and people from the community the ten-point platform and program of the Black Panther Party, in that storefront office. It was a nice, clean office, too, but it didn't have any furniture in it. Sid Walton came down and gave us twenty, twenty-five chairs, but he never panned out to be much of anything close to the Party. He was too engrossed in a lot of abstract bullshit, although he did a lot of work at Merritt College in terms of furthering the things that Huey had already instituted there.1 But that's the way it all began, in that office on Fifty-sixth and Grove in North Oakland, the first official headquarters of the Black Panther Party.
RED BOOKS FOR GUNS.....
.....Huey said, "Let's go buy some shotguns." So we went to the B.B.B. department store where Virtual Murrell was working at the time, and we bought a shotgun. Huey bought a High Standard. (That's the brand name of the shotgun.) It holds six shots in a magazine after you take the plug out. And one in the chamber. Huey says, "Let's get some double 0 buckshot." I said, "What's double 0 buckshot?" And he said, "That's the same thing that the pigs use. Double 0 buckshot." I said, "Right on." I was right behind him. This brother was out of sight. He knew what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.
We walked up to the counter and were paying for the shotgun after we requested it from the back counter where the sports material was located. We were drunk admiring those pistols, shotguns, rifles, what have you. And the woman at the counter says, and you could tell she was lying, "You know, these FBI men have been coming around to request information and names on everyone who buys a gun in our store." Huey says, "We don't care. That don't make any difference. There is my money. I'm Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party. Here's my money. I want my shotgun." And the woman looked at him, amazed. I don't know who she thought she was tricking, because she wasn't tricking Huey P. Newton - he couldn't give two goddams about who she thought she was intimidating with some supposed FBI investigation.
That's very important about Huey's attitude and his personality and the way he's going and the way he knows he's going. That's very important. Because Huey said, "Here's my money. My name is Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party," and we picked up that shotgun.
So we sold the Red Books, made the money, and used that money to buy guns. Me and Huey and the brothers in the core organization used the Red Books and spread them throughout the organization, because Huey made it a point that the revolutionary principles so concisely cited in the Red Book should be applied whenever they could. That is, whenever they could be applied within the confines of this system. Huey would say, "Well, this principle here is not applicable to our situation at this time." Where the book said, "Chinese people of the Communist Party," Huey would say, "Change that to the Black Panther Party. Change the Chinese people to black people." When he saw a particular principle told in the Chinese terms, he would change it to apply to us. So, from there, we righteously used the Red Book, because we talked about it, and Huey had us practicing the principles. And we used Fanon and Malcolm X - his autobiography and other material on him. Huey integrated all these principles of the other revolutionaries. We taught from all these materials, and from Che Guevara, too. We had initially used the Red Book as a commodity. Huey P. Newton knew the brothers well enough to know that they would not pay a dollar for the Red Book. Huey did know that the radicals on the campus would pay a dollar for that Red Book if we had it. And we were the only ones who had it. I remember SWP's (Socialist Workers Party), CP's (Communist Party), and a lot of people, asking very inquisitively, "Where did you get those books?" And we would say, "That's for me to know and for you to find out. You wanna buy one? Only one dollar. Get your Red Book Quotations from brother Mao Tse Tung. Aw come on." I would holler, "I know you're wondering what in the world are those Negroes doing with those Red Books?" And I would sell three or four.
We knew that at first the guns would be more valuable and more meaningful to the brothers on the block, for drawing them into the organization; then in turn we taught them from the Red Book. Huey was something else. Huey was out of sight. He knew how to do it. Huey was ten motherfuckers. He would say, "Bobby, you and I know the principles in this Red Book are valid, but the brothers and the black folks don't, and they will not pay a dollar or thirty cents for that book. So what we have to do is to get the white radicals who are intellectually interested in the book, <h3>sell the book, make the money, buy the guns, and go on the streets with the guns. We'll protect a mother, protect a brother, and protect the community from the racist cops. And in turn we get brothers in the organization and they will in turn relate to the Red Book. They will relate to political, economic, and social equality in defense of the community."</h3>
That's the way the shit went. At the same time, Huey would go off into Fanon. He would get off into Malcolm X. Huey would relate these principles. He was a motherfucker. You couldn't get around Huey. He knew the Red Book sideways, backwards and forwards. There are brothers in the Party that got to know the Red Book cattycorner. The brothers know that book sideways, backwards, forwards, upside down. Turn that book any way you want to - they tell you in a minute. "The Red Book and what else? The gun! The Red Book and what else? The gun!" That's what Huey would say.
Our last major selling escapade of the Red Book to radicals, leftists, and liberals was many months later at that big, 65,000 strong march against the war in Vietnam that wound up at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. Huey and I had met Eldridge Cleaver by then. Eldridge spoke at that rally that day and the only time Huey and I took out time from selling the whole while we were there, was to listen to Eldridge's speech.
At the end, we made about $850 and had books left over. We had heard from the China Book Store man that he had received a shipment of 5,000 books, so we picked up about 1,200. They all could have been sold, but the manpower we had was short. Only about fifteen or sixteen brothers showed up that Saturday morning at the Black Panther Party office. First we followed the march up Market Street when it started that morning and followed it for about twenty-five blocks. All I could think of was books, dollars, then guns for us motherfuckers. "Get your Red Books, old liberal ladies." You know, the kind who decided to go against "Lynching" Baines Johnson because brother Martin Luther King finally went against the war.
The old broads, looking at me, amazed, couldn't figure it out. Probably asking themselves, "What are those colored boys doing with those 'communist books'?" As they walked along the street, I walked out into the ranks and held a Red Book up to them and said, "I know what you're thinking, so why don't you buy just one book and satisfy yourself." I gave one a slight smile, and she said, "OK." Her marching partner also wanted one. Hell, the first thing I know, ten books are gone and I'm working up a sweat running back and forth to the bundles that we had to keep moving.
Dollars for Red Books, and I mean those brothers who were working knew this meant more guns so we could defend ourselves and educate all black people to pick up the gun. Just like the Red Book itself says. The Party was in motion. Dollars for books to be able to get more guns.
HUEY BACKS THE PIGS DOWN
Huey was on a level where he was ready to organize the black brothers for a righteous revolutionary struggle with guns and force. It came to a point where, every day, we walked in and out of the Black Panther office, around to my house or around to Bobby Hutton's house, or somebody's house, with guns on our sides, and got in a car, or two or three cars, or four or five cars as it built up, and patroled the pigs on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes when we went to a meeting during the week we patroled the pigs. We had a camera or two, a law book, and were working on getting some tape recorders in patroling the pig cops.
One day, as we were walking out of the office (I guess we'd been there about a month or so), a pig passed by. He saw us coming out with shotguns and pistols on our sides. About six or seven of us came out of the office there, in the daytime, and we looked at the pig as he passed by, and he jumped on his radio because he saw us coming out of the office with those pieces and stuff. We had just finished field stripping weapons, learning about double 0 buckshot, learning about the 9mm and the .45, and having a political education session.
We had a .45 and a .357 Magnum in the group, and a couple of M-1's. We had three or four shotguns by then. We bought up guns like a son of a bitch then. The pig went down two blocks and turned around, came back up the other side of the street. They were building rapid transit, BART, right down Grove Street there, and he went up the other side of the boulevard and came back. We readily assessed that the pigs were ready to see what the fuck was happening, that this pig had radioed in, and he was running it down how he had "seen some niggers come out of a place here with some guns and blah blop de bloo, etc., etc., come out of this office with guns" and stuff. He was radioing to other pigs to help "get 'em."
Huey had his father's car that day. I think he had just finished paying some bills and he stopped by the office for about a half-hour. By the time we got in the car, the pig was back around down the street and he drove up behind us. And Huey told everybody to remember what he'd said - that nobody in the car should say anything. Only the driver should do the talking, and Huey happened to be the driver. He said, "I'm the driver. Nobody else say anything, and remember the legal first aid." This was the legal aid information that we had printed for the brothers in the Party, and we were teaching them thirteen points of basic, legal first aid, legal and constitutional rights.
Huey used to teach the brothers on that; he wouldn't let them get around it, because Huey understood that the brothers had no guidelines about how to deal with the pigs. So Huey went off in the area of law and he found out the brothers respected law. Huey knew something about law, and he could use it to make it serve him. That's all he was doing, he was bringing them basic things in everyday life about law. That's what Huey dug; he understood that shit. Huey would take those thirteen basic points and try to show a dude where he was fucked up at in the ghetto. That's very important in understanding how the Party first began to function.
So he said, "Nobody say anything, because the minute somebody says something the man is going to try to arrest you. And he's going to arrest you for some jive about interfering with an officer carrying out his duty. He's going to try to prove to all the people who are subject to gather around us here that we have no right with a gun. And he's going to arrest you on a traffic ticket and the people out in the community will think he arrested you because you've got the gun. We want to prove to the people that we've got a right to carry guns and they've got a right to arm themselves, and we will exhaust our constitutional right to carry these guns." That's what Huey was trying to exhaust. Boom. Which he did exhaust, ultimately, when we look at the power structure's moves against the Party over the years.
Huey got in the car and the pig came up to the window. "You have any driver's license?" So Huey rolled the window down. There wasn't more than about a three- or four-inch crack in the window.
Huey handed his license out the window. "Is this your true name?" the pig said. And Huey said, "Yes, that's my true name, Huey P. Newton." "Is this your true address, 841 Forty-seventh Street?" And Huey said, "That's my true address, 841 Forty-seventh Street."
"What are you doing with the guns?" And Huey said, "What are you doing with your gun?" This particular pig decided he wasn't going to argue, so he went back and got his little writing pad where they fill out shit.
"Your true name is Huey P. Newton?" Huey said, "That's right." The pig wrote this down.
"Your true address is 841 Forty-seventh Street?"
Huey said, "That's right." The pig then looked at his license. "What's your phone number?" And Huey said, "Five!" and stopped and wouldn't say anything else. And the pig said, "Five what?"
This is when all the shit between the Party and pigs began. Huey said, "The Fifth Amendment. You ever heard of it? Don't you know about the constitutional right of a person not to testify against himself? Five! I don't have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address so therefore I don't even want to talk to you. You can leave my car and leave me alone. I don't even want to hear you."
"What do you mean?" the pig said. And Huey said, "Just what I said. The constitutional right of any man is that he doesn't have to testify against himself." And Huey had a big M-1 sitting to his right with his hand on it. I had this 9mm sitting beside me, and Huey had this M-1 at his side. Huey was driving. Four other brothers were in the back seat, and one of them was Bobby Hutton. They were being quiet because Huey told them to be quiet. And the pig is going crazy. He's by himself and Huey had all these black niggers in the car going for a motherfucker.
Meanwhile, while the pig is trying to get bad, three cars drove up in back of us, and one in front. Some more were in the driveway. Blop, blop, Hop de bloo. Then another car came up in front of us. A pig jumped out of his car, walked up to our car, and said through the crack in the window, with a hogish voice, trying to sound intimidating, "What's going on here?" And Huey said, "The same basic procedures that are supposed to go on!" Huey rolled the window down another five or six inches. The pigs were looking at the guns in the car.
"Can I see that pistol there?" one of the pigs said. "No, you can't see it!" Huey told him. I was beginning to get skeptical about what was happening because he pointed to my 9mm pistol. Huey was on probation, and if they thought that this was Huey's pistol . . . I didn't know this law stuff the way Huey knew it, so I moved the pistol over beside me real close. It had been lying in the middle of the seat. I said, "No, you can't see it." Huey said, "No, you can't see the pistol, nor this (pointing to his rifle), and I don't want you to look at it. You don't have to look at it."
"Is that your pistol?" he asked Huey. And I said, "No, it's not his pistol, it's my pistol!" I said that because I was thinking the man's gonna jump on Huey because he already told me about the probation law - if he gets caught with a pistol he's burned. But if he gets caught with a rifle, the man can't mess with him because his probation officer told him he can carry a rifle or a shotgun, and he couldn't stop him. The pig said, "Can I see it, or not?" So Huey said to me, "I'll talk." And then to the pig, "No, you can't see the pistol. Get away from the car. We don't want you around the car and that's all there is to it."
"Well, I can ask him if I want to see his pistol or not," the pig says. So I said, "Well, you can't see the pistol!" The motherfuckers try to get indignant. They were blabbing and oinking to each other about who in the hell we thought we were and, "Constitution, my ass. They're just turning it around." Then a pig said to Huey, "Who in the hell you think you are?"
"Look, dammit," and Huey just opened the car door, and this is where Huey got mad. I mean you have to imagine this nigger. He got mad because these dogs were going to carry on and they were bracing up like they were bad. Huey didn't go for this at all. Huey got very mad. He opened up the door saying, "Who in the hell do you think you are? In the first place, this man (pointing at the pig) came up here and asked me for my license like he was citing me for a ticket or observation of some kind. This police officer is supposed to be carrying out his duty, and here you come talking about our guns." Huey put his hand around his M-1 rifle and continued, "We have a constitutional right to carry the guns, anyway, and I don't want to hear it."
The pigs backed up a couple of steps, and Huey was coming out of the car. Huey had his hand back in the car, getting his M-1, and you know, if you've ever seen Huey, he gets growly, but articulate. He came out of the car with his M-1. Huey knows his law so well that he wouldn't have the M-1 loaded inside the car. When he came out of the car, he dropped a round off into the chamber right away. Clack, clup.
"Who do you think you all are anyway?" Huey said to the pigs. And the other pigs are on the sidewalk harassing all the brothers and sisters who have gathered around: "You people move on down the street!" Huey started interrupting. "You don't have to move down the street! Don't go anywhere! These pigs can't keep you from observing. You have a right to observe an officer carrying out his duty." And these pigs, they listened to this shit. See, Huey's citing law and shit. "You have a right to observe an officer carrying out his duty. You have a right to. As long as you stand a reasonable distance away, and you are a reasonable distance. Don't go anywhere."
The pigs kept trying to move the people, saying, "You're gonna get under arrest." So Huey just went over and opened the door to the Panther office and said, "Come on in here. They can't move you out." He took his key, opened the door, and let the people go in. "Now, observe all you want to!" The pig said, "What are you going to do with that gun?"
"What are you going to do with your gun?" Huey said. "Because if you try to shoot at me, or if you try to take this gun, I'm going to shoot back at you, swine. Furthermore" - and he just got off into it - "you're nothing but a sharecropper anyway. You come from Georgia somewhere, you're downtown making $800 a month, and you come down here brutalizing and murdering black people in the black communities. They gave you some sergeant stripes and all I say is that you're nothing but a low-life, scurvy swine. A sharecropper from racist Georgia in the South somewhere.
"So if you draw that gun, I'll shoot back at you and blow your brains out!"
"You, you, you . . ." the pig was mad. "You're just turning the Constitution around." This is the pig trying to slough it off.
Huey said, "I'm not turning anything around. And I got my gun. What are you going to do with yours?" This blew the pigs' minds. They didn't know where to go, man. Huey just walked on around the front of the car. Got on around the front of the car, talking, then went on and opened the office door again, and let some more people in, telling the people they didn't have to go anywhere, citing their constitutional rights and all this stuff, then just jumped on out of the office again and said, "Now what are you going to do?"
Another burly kind of fat pig walked up to about five yards in front of Huey with his hands in his belt, the front of his belly falling over the belt. He asked Huey, "Are you a Marxist?" Huey asked him, "You a fascist?" "Are you a Marxist?" the pig asked in a louder tone of voice. Then Huey got louder. "Are you a fascist?"
Then the pig asked it in a very loud, demanding voice. Lifting his hand out of his belt, the pig said, "Are you a Marxist?" And Huey, louder, "Are you a fascist?" The pig asked three more times in a softer tone, and Huey repeated his question.
Then the pig said, like a stupid fifth-grade kid, "I asked you first."
Huey shook his head unbelievingly and said, "I asked you second. Are you a fascist?" Everybody laughed at the pig.
I was sitting in the car with the hammer of my 9mm cocked back. I said, "These pigs are going to be wild-eyed. I know they're gonna be crazy." I rolled the window down. "What's your name?" I say, "My name is Bobby Seale. Why?" "Want to check you out. Got any identification?" I laid my pistol down, gave them identification; I picked my pistol back up. I said, "My name is Bobby Seale, as it says in my identification. Want to check me out?"
"You were arrested for armed robbery at seventeen."
I said, "You're a goddamned liar. I've never been arrested in my life. I've never been arrested for armed robbery." They didn't even check me out. "You were arrested for armed robbery when you were seventeen. But since you were a juvenile, we can't arrest you for possessing a gun now." I said, "You damned liar. I've never been arrested for armed robbery. I don't want to hear it. Fuck it."
And Huey out there, man, he's calling the pigs swine, dogs, sharecroppers, bastards, motherfuckers, with his M-1 in his hand. And daring them, just daring them! "You don't pull your gun on us." And that's where Huey began to show us. You tell some motherfucker, and you mean it. This is what I remember. Huey was relating to one thing. When he told me, a long time ago, to remember that we might not ever come back home one day, I said, "I'm with you, Huey." I remember that. I remember I might not ever come home one day. "Fuck it, I'm with you."
We were sitting in the car, and Huey made us all stay in the car and be quiet. He was out there, the baddest motherfucker in the world, man. Huey and ten pigs. Three or four of them trying to run off kids off bicycles and tell the people they didn't have the right to stand around, and Huey was going out there, interrupting, "No! Come in the office." Little kids on bicycles got inside the office. We had a big, wide, clear picture window. Niggers just got all over the front of the window, man. They were leaning on it, kissing the window just to listen to this shit. And they would holler, "Go 'head on brother," and "Run it on down. You know where it's at," and "I can dig it," all the while Huey was letting these pigs know where it was at. The brothers observing would see that those pigs were scared of that big gun that a bad black but beautiful nigger had in his hand! Every time Huey would say, "If you shoot at me, swine, I'm shooting back," niggers would have to holler something like, "Tell it, do it, brother." That would let Huey know that he was revolutionizing our culture; educating black people to be revolutionaries; that the gun is where it's at and about and in. A white man two doors down smiled. He was the only one around but he seemed to respect Huey.
Then some people came up after that, after Huey had made this display of going into the office. Other people were standing around and the pigs weren't even moving anymore. And Huey just daring them to do anything. Huey had an M-1 with him, one of the eight round clips in it. What do you do, man? All you do is back up a nigger like that. You do nothing else but that. Anything that happens, this nigger's the baddest nigger you ever seen. Because this nigger is telling ten pigs, "I don't give a damn what you do," and making us all shut up and be disciplined. And we have our shit ready, sitting in the car.
So I said to myself, this is the baddest motherfucker in the world! This nigger is telling pigs, "If you draw your gun, I'll shoot you." Telling this to the pigs standing there. When the pig says, "You're just turning the Constitution around," Huey says, "I'm turning nothing around. I'm exercising my constitutional right. I've got the gun to back it up!" And the pig sees the gun. The nigger told the pigs that if they act wrong or get down wrong, I'm going to kill you. I'll defend myself!
So what do you do? You say, this nigger is bad. This nigger is crazy. But I like this crazy nigger. I like him because he's good. He doesn't take bullshit. You back him up.
So that was the very major incident that happened with the Black Panther Party in front of the Black Panther Party office. And after that, we really began to patrol pigs then, because we got righteous recruits. I think ten or twelve, maybe thirteen extra members in the Party that day, just came and put applications in. We went down to the poverty office again - I was still working there - and drew up a formal application form for enrollment to get into the Black Panther Party. And from there, what did we do? We just patroled pigs.
BADGE 206
One night Huey, Little Bobby, and I were patroling this pig in North Oakland. We had been patroling him for a couple of hours. We'd be about a block away from him wherever he'd go. Sometimes we'd stop and lose the pig, but ten, twenty minutes later he'd make it around again, he'd be back where he was, and we'd patrol him some more. Little Bobby had an M-1, I had a .45. and brother Huey had a shotgun and a law book on the back seat. Brother Huey was driving my old '54 Chevy. I guess we patroled for quite a while, then on Fifty-eighth Street we saw the pig stop up at the corner. We stopped at the corner, and he backed up and parked right in front of the stop sign at the comer of Fifty-eighth and Grove. I remember us saying we were tired of patroling this pig, "Let's go in." It was about 8:30 or 9:30 when we drove down the street and stopped next to the pig. We were stopped at the stop sign. I looked over at the pig. Naturally we were carrying guns in Oakland in those days. The shotgun barrel was sticking up. I was holding on to the shotgun while Huey drove. I was on the right-hand side of the front seat and the shotgun was to my left, next to my left leg. It was standing straight up resting on its butt. I looked over at the pig, the pig looked back and looked over to me and to Little Bobby, who had his M-1 in the back seat between his legs, the barrel of it showing through the window, too.
Huey had completed his stop and he started off again and started turning right, right in front of the pig's car. As we were turning right, the pig flashed his lights on and he flashed his high beams on. Huey kept moving. He didn't stop and didn't speed up. See, those pigs don't shake Huey at all. I guess we drove no more than twenty feet when we could see the red light flashing. He was starting his engine up and pulling out of the spot where he was parked, making a right turn right behind us. Huey kept moving. He got ready to make a left turn right there at the next little corner. He made his left turn and said, "I'm not going to stop till he puts his damn siren on because a flashing red light really don't mean nothin', anything could be a flashing red light." Well, the pig cut his siren on as he was turning the corner following us and when he cut his siren on, Huey stopped. We'd been stopped by pigs a number of times, pigs who'd seen us with guns and didn't know what to do. We were down with it because Huey had put us together and knew how to handle the situation.
This pig surprised us because he stopped his car as soon as we stopped. He stopped his car about twenty-five feet in back of our car. Some pigs stop right up behind you, but he was twenty-five feet from us. He got out of his car and as soon as he did, and came walking from his door, we could hear this pig hollering, "What the goddam hell you niggers doing with them goddam guns? Who in the goddam hell you niggers think you are? Get out of that goddam car. Get out of that goddam car with them goddam guns."
I said, "Huey, this motherfucker's trying to get killed, man. Listen to him."
As he walked up to the car, he said, "Get out of that car."
Huey said, "You ain't putting nobody under arrest Who the hell you think you are?"
The pig snatched the door open. When he snatched it open, he said, "I said get out of that goddam car and bring them goddam guns out of there."
Huey said, "Man, what the hell?" By this time the pig came all the way up, his head inside the door, and he's reaching across Huey real fast. This all happened so fast. He was grabbing hold of the barrel of the shotgun, and I tightened up on it and pulled it away from him. At the same time I was pulling the shotgun away from him, Huey grabbed this pig by the collar, pushed his head back up against the roof of the car, then shifted around and got his foot and kicked him in the belly, shoving him all the way out of the car. The pig fell backwards about ten feet from the car but as he was going out, no sooner had Huey finished putting his foot in this pig's belly, kicking and pushing him out of the car - and the pig was being propelled and off balance, away from the car - than Huey was grabbing hold of the barrel of the shotgun. No sooner did brother Huey's feet hit the ground, but he was jacking a round off into the chamber, "Clack upp," and taking three quick steps.
The pig looked up and looked around, and Huey P. Newton was standing there saying, "Now, who in the hell do you think you are, you big rednecked bastard, you rotten fascist swine, you bigoted racist? You come into my car, trying to brutalize me and take my property away from me. Go for your gun and you're a dead pig." The pig folded his hands up. By this time I'd gotten out of the car on the other side, put the .45 in my hand, and pulled the hammer back. As soon as Huey finished saying what he had to say, Little Bobby jumped out on the back of our car and jacked a round off in the M-1. The pig heard these clicks and looked back at Huey, and the pig folded his hands up. In other words, he was taking his hands away from his gun. Huey had said, "Go for your gun and you're a dead pig. Don't you know by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that you can't remove a person's property from them without due process of law." Huey was mad, loud, and articulate click to show .
The pig began to walk and he kind of did a half-moon, walking around and away from Huey, .trying to walk back to his car. Huey just stepped back holding his gun on him and the pig came walking back to his car hollering, "They got guns. They got guns. They got guns." He got on his radio, "Niggers down here got guns. Get me some help down here. Niggers got guns, they got guns." This pig was scared.
Black people began to come out of their houses, wanting to know what was going on. Huey said, "Come on out, black people. Come on out and get to know about these racist dog swine who been controlling our community and occupying our community like a foreign troop. Come on out and we're going to show you about swine pigs." People got to coming out. It must have been around 9:30 because we were in the back of Merritt College and people in night school were coming out, and I guess seventy or eighty had gathered up there before the other pigs got there. They had about fifteen cars come down there - fifteen cars and pigs everywhere. So me and Huey and Little Bobby were there with our guns. The people were there. I think Little Bobby placed his gun right back on the back seat again. He was sitting in the seat and he shut the door and got back out. Huey and I had been warning Little Bobby about keeping in his possession the written permission he had, and to carry with him the written permission thing from his father to carry and keep the gun because he was still under eighteen at the time, and I think he didn't have it. He realized that he'd better lay the gun down.
Huey was talking to most of the people and running it down to the people about how racism was rotten. How these pigs were brutal and murderous racists. And every time Huey said something I'd say it right behind him, I'd say the same thing, I'd say, "That's right." And he would say, "Racist dogs pigs occupy our community, come down here to brutalize and kill and murder us. I'm tired of it," and I'd say, "That's right, racist dogs, pigs occupying our community like a foreign troop that occupies territory. Black people are tired of it." Every time Huey said something, I'd say something. The pigs must have thought that we was crazy niggers. A pig walks up and says, "Let me see that weapon!"
Huey says, "Let you see my weapon? You haven't placed me under arrest."
"Well, you just let me see the weapon, I have a right to see the weapon."
Huey says, "Ain't you ever heard of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States? Don't you know you don't remove nobody's property without due process of law?" Huey got loud at those last words. "What's the matter with you? You're supposed to be people enforcing the law, and here you are, ready to violate my constitutional rights. You can't .see my gun. You can't have my gun. The only way you're gonna get it from me is to try to take it."
Then another pig walks up to me, "Come over here by the car."
"I ain't going no goddam place. Who the hell you think you are? You ain't placed me under arrest." "But I have a right to take you over to the car." "You don't have no right to move me from one spot to another."
Huey P. Newton, the Minister of Defense, teaches us and runs it down to us that whenever a cop moves a person from one spot to another, then he's technically under arrest, and if the cop states that you're not under arrest, or doesn't say you're under arrest when you ask, then he has no right to ask you to move from one spot to another.
"You just got through telling me I wasn't under arrest, so I'm not moving nowhere, I'm staying right here."
"Well, you let me see that gun." "I said you can't see my gun," and I ran down the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution just like Huey had run it down. The pigs were frustrated, mad, and didn't know what to do. "Well, I got a right to look at the serial number."
"I already know what the serial number is," I said.
"I got to make sure it has a serial number." So I held my gun in my hand and he looked at it with his flashlight. "Hold it up, let me see."
"No, I ain't holding up nothing. You got a flashlight so you look at it from that distance right there, because you don't get near this gun." So I read the serial number, and I said, "There's the serial."
The pig took the serial number down and after that a police lieutenant came down, and he kept saying, "Well if we charge him, we'll probably lose the case, just for them having guns, we'll probably lose the case because they turn around the Second Amendment of the Constitution about them having a right to carry guns as long as they ain't concealed."
Then one big fat pig says, "Well, we gotta find something. We gotta find something to do to them." He was looking down, he started looking the car over and he said that the license plate was being held on by a coat hanger. It was secure all right, but it was just put together with a coat hanger. "Let's give them a ticket for this here, this here license plate is not adequately secure." He asked Huey for some identification and Huey handed him his license. They said his license looked kind of old so they gave him a ticket for not having a good new license.
The pigs jumped up and left the scene and the black people were asking what was happening. While Huey was calling the pigs all kinds of names and stuff, a lot of the brothers said, "Right on time, Huey. Tell it. Right. Run it down, Huey." Huey talked to the people some more and a lot of them said they were going to come down and join the Black Panther Party. And we did get some of the older brothers and sisters and some young brothers and sisters out there to join. Even a number of white people had a chance to watch that.
Badge 206 was the cop. The cop who almost got his head blown away that night. I kept telling him he was acting a fool. Badge 206. Badge 206. We never forgot his badge. I remembered his badge, Huey remembered his badge, and Bobby Hutton remembered his badge. We put his number on the front page of our newspaper.
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Last edited by host; 12-21-2007 at 03:44 AM..
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