The evening’s performance is about to wind up. The Lumpen have delivered the message and the show they came to present to their audience. Only one task remains: to groove the audience all the way home. Like any strong R&B act of the day, the Lumpen band starts its finale with a percussive groove jam that makes people feel the music and soak in the message that has been delivered for the past thirty-five minutes.
The JB-style groove was unmistakable and irresistible. Then came the scat-singing vamps of Calhoun that brought together the vibe over the background chants of the group:
1,2, 1, 2, 3 get it / ahhh get it
Revolution is the only solution
what you say
Revolution is the only solution
now if you want to be free
Revolution is the only solution
say pick up that gun and walk like me
Revolution is the only solution
say it now
Revolution is the only solution
Say it say it now
Revolution is the only solution
Say if you want to be free
Revolution is the only solution
say pick up that gun and walk like me
William Calhoun addresses the crowd with a dialogue spoken in the rhythm of the music, not unlike R&B headliners of the day:
Brothers and sisters as we close, we would like to thank everyone for coming out tonight / because without the spirit of the people, the Lumpen don’t exist.
And we’re going to take that spirit with us across the country, as we’ll be leaving tomorrow.
Before we go though, we want to say we love you. All Power to the People! (Audience replies) “All Power to the People!”
Lookie here, we’re going to leave with the spirit, everybody clap your hands one more time, everybody in this room, good god, we want you to sing with me now, everybody would you sing with us, everybody sing “revolution,” “revolution” everybody, good god, bring it on up …
As the audience chants revolution and claps along with the band, the Lumpen singers work the stage with dance steps and induce crowd participation in the form of soul claps (double-time clapping on the beat) and a variety of time-tested dance-routine techniques. The ad-libbing and audience chanting goes on for more than five minutes, as the extended song drives a rhythm home for the listeners. As the song crashes to an end to sustained applause and the chant “All power to the people,” the audience is energized and politicized in ways unlike any other rhythm and blues performance before or since.1
While their message was one of a kind, the Lumpen were a rhythm and blues act, and the show was not going to end mildly. Fans of black popular music know that a classic rhythm and blues performance typically concludes with as much energy and enthusiasm as it begins. Michael Torrence understood the purpose of a finale:
My uncle Bobby McClain sang doo-wop in the ‘50s and he always said, “If these people come to see you, make sure they’re glad they came.” So that was the same thing, we wanted that by the time you left that program, or Lumpen show, that you knew that you had seen something; that it was something you could feel, that you would talk about.
So it was all about leaving it all out there, don’t even give them a chance to catch their breath. Every now and then we slow it down. Calhoun had that experience too about how to pace a show, slow it down every now and then, but when you slow it down, the next time, bring you right back up on it.
So by the time we get to “Revolution Is the Only Solution” you always take them up on a big high on that one. We’d be stepping very hard on “Revolution Is the Only Solution,” we’d be high kicking and everything. It used to almost get dangerous if the stage was too small.
It was a lot of high energy a lot of hard work. We wanted everybody that came out of that to be talking about it. Be talking about it four days later. Telling people, “You should’ve been there; if you see they’ll be playing again, go see them, go see them.”2
If they performed their duties as rank-and-file Panthers properly that night, the Lumpen would have energized their audience, excited them, and introduced them to a new and visceral way to internalize the mission of the Black Panther Party. If the Lumpen members did their jobs, many new potential recruits would take seriously the opportunity to join the Party and sustain the revolution. Perhaps some would stay and read the literature, talk to the Panthers there, and get to know the soul brothers and soul sisters that made up the rank-and-file of the Party. Perhaps others would be strictly entertained by a righteous slice of Bay Area funk and keep with them an unforgettable experience. Regardless, for James Mott, Clark Bailey, Michael Torrence, and William Calhoun, the next day would be another day in the Black Panther Party.
As the program on this night concluded, the Lumpen members turned around and took down their equipment, loaded it, and prepared for their East Coast tour, which was about to begin. After the rousing concert, the group members were afforded little fanfare before taking on their Panther duties. No autographs, no interviews with interested media representatives, and certainly no money came their way. “We never saw a penny for what we did,” James Mott recalls.3
That night, a recording console was in the building and a truck was parked outside with recording equipment for the purpose of recording a state-of-the-art live performance of the Lumpen for public sale. They even announced, “We’re recording live tonight at Merritt College,” which was typical for bands to do at the time. (None of the Panthers I interviewed could recall who was recording the show or what happened to that concert tape.) The group then went on their chaotic national tour, after which most of the Freedom Messengers, the all-volunteer backup band, called it quits. Weeks later, the Lumpen singers, along with a new group of backing musicians, went to the Golden State Studios in San Francisco to record overdubs and rerecord some of the songs. The existing tape of the live concert features elements of live and studio-recorded songs. Mysteriously, the master tapes of that concert have disappeared and only a grainy cassette of the event has been recovered to this point.
With their high musical standards, and their effectiveness at their revolutionary mission, why were the Lumpen not afforded more status within the organization? “Some people didn’t want us to succeed,” James Mott recalls. Emory Douglas was in the mix when things began to unravel.
They were committed to the Party and the work that they were doing. But certain people didn’t want it to flourish or didn’t think it was gonna flourish the way it did, and when it did, they wanted to dictate to us how it was gonna go. And that was a frustration there.
You got people who felt they were getting too big, and they needed to put it [the band] in its place, or they felt that the Lumpen felt that they needed to practice too much and they needed to show their control by saying they had to come do this and do that, and do this work and do that work. I don’t get into names but that was the reality of the environment.4
The Lumpen, for some, had become too big for its place within the Black Panther Party. Structurally they were a traveling act with at least seven regular members that required upkeep. Ideologically, it appears that the BPP was struggling with a unified position toward the band’s very existence.
With the internal fissures throughout the Black Panther Party in late 1970, the public rift between Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver in February 1971, and with Bobby Seale still on trial in Connecticut, the Party was in its deepest crisis. Many projects were put on hold or eliminated. Huey Newton’s principled stances against violent confrontation were being challenged by many who wanted to start the revolution immediately and by those who wanted to simply watch the carnage. Newton himself had begun his personal dissolution, retreating into cocaine addiction, dispensing decrees by day and roaming the streets by night.
At his best, Huey Newton steered the Party into an enlightened new direction for the new decade. He issued proclamations denouncing sexism, denouncing homophobia in the revolution, and advanced social theories of intercommunalism and collective economic development. His loyal followers (including the Lumpen singers) followed his orders diligently. By mid-1971, however, things were unraveling, and it took a great deal of loyalty to continue to operate for a fractured leader in a fractured organization.
By the end of May 1971, William Calhoun had had enough. The pressures of Party life and the growing recognition that he actually had his own life responsibilities to consider had begun to change his outlook.
Sukari, my woman in the Party, was pregnant with Jamil, with James. And I was beginning to think about that. I had been on duty one night—on guard duty—one night at national headquarters. And there was a practice vamp. The police used to just do that all the time. About three or four o’clock in the morning they just come out of nowhere, be three or four rows deep, in their riot gear and the FBI patrol up and down in front, just trying to intimidate us. But one night when they did a practice vamp, I’m sitting there, my AK in my lap, looking at them looking at me and thinking about the fact that I have a baby coming. The thought came to me, What good would it do for me to die here tonight? What does that accomplish? What does that change? And that’s the first time I had a thought like that. A couple of months later, something came in my head and said leave, and I left.5
The Lumpen performed their final concert in Sacramento on May 23, 1971. Days later, Bobby Seale returned from New Haven to be reunited with Huey Newton and the Panthers. Bobby had been set free. But for Calhoun, it was time to move on.
After a few years, Calhoun, through his music industry connections, got a job at local radio station KSOL and became somewhat of a local celebrity as “Billy King.” By the mid-1970s KSOL was the number one FM radio station playing black music, and Billy King was one of their most popular radio hosts. Few if any of his fellow DJs knew of his past as a Black Panther.
William Calhoun continued on his life path of principle, and shortly after leaving the KSOL gig he pursued organized religion. “I don’t do anything casually. If I’m into something, I’m into it all the way.”6 In 1980 the Reverend William E. Calhoun, along with Minister Timothy Sowell, founded the Wo’Se community church in Oakland. The ministers were ordained Baptist, and the church community reflected the East Oakland neighborhood it was based in. The church was also involved in a number of efforts to support African-centered thought and helped to develop the African philosophy of Ma’at, which was an important method of giving black youth a sense of an ancient lineage of moral codes and higher consciousness that one could apply to the modern world.
Years later, Calhoun expanded his role as a counselor and advisor and took on a job it seemed that no one would take. He took on the task of helping some of the most troubled youth in Sacramento: violent sex offenders.
I was working with at-risk teenagers. Teenage sex offenders. The worst of the worst as far as society is concerned. Kids that people just throw away. And I don’t believe any human being should be thrown away. So yeah I spent ten years working with those kind of kids, training the staff, hiring the staff that works with those kids. So I taught the staff that worked with those kids, I saw that as a ministry; I saw that as a way to serve…. Because these were kids that had nothing. Many of them had nobody. So the only human contact they had was us. Their only contact with the world was us.7
Calhoun was working at the center when I first located him for this project in 2004. He has revealed himself to be a multifaceted individual, one who took on issues of social conscience throughout his days, and the black revolution was no exception.
In May 1971 Huey Newton, as the unquestioned leader of the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area, challenged a large black-owned business consortium to donate more goods for the breakfast program. The California State Package Store and Tavern Owners Association (Cal-Pak) had established itself in the East Bay as a successful black-owned operation that “was responsible for the creation of nearly 500 jobs for blacks in the beverage industry throughout California.”8 The group offered a one-time donation, but Newton demanded regular services in return for continued Panther support. Cal-Pak was resilient, and their leadership refused to capitulate to Newton. Newton replied by stating that “we can take you down” and set up a round-the-clock picket line outside one of the Grove Street liquor stores of Bill Boyette, then president of Cal-Pak. While the daily actions in front of the store provided some entertaining street theater, the taxing use of rank-and-file membership to maintain the picket line was enormous. The boycott lasted nearly a year, and it took the efforts of newly elected Congressman Ron Dellums to negotiate a deal whereby donations could be distributed to a variety of Oakland social work organizations, including the Party. While the entire affair put the business community on notice about its perceived one-way relationship with its patrons, the damage done to the relationship of the Party and local black-owned businesses was considerable.
Rank-and-file members pulled shifts at the picket line, continued to sell papers, made the breakfasts, and pulled security for BPP officers. They were then given the task of setting up the election campaigns of Bobby Seale for Oakland mayor and Elaine Brown for Oakland City Council. The enormous workload on the tested rank-and-file was taking its toll, and after the close elections, Michael Torrence felt it was time to leave the Party.
Michael Torrence had a harrowing experience trying to get out of the Party in 1973. As a trusted confidante, his loss would be felt by the inner circle of Panther leadership. At that time he was head of the Black Student Union at Laney College (formerly Oakland City College). Torrence, like Calhoun, had a child on the way, and determined that his work for the revolution had run its course. By 1973, however, everyone was wary of Huey’s mood swings. Torrence recalls that he approached Bobby Seale at the Panther after-hours club the Lamppost about leaving, and after a heartfelt discussion, Seale bid him well. However, before he could leave the building, Torrence was asked upstairs by Newton, who made a dramatic attempt to keep Torrence in the fold:
“Do you want to leave bad enough to die?” I said, I don’t understand the question. He said, “Brother, do you want to leave bad enough to DIE!” And I said, “Well—” and he said, to one of the other brothers, “Hey, show him what I mean,” and the guy pulled out a .357 and put it to my head. And at that point, you know, ain’t no shame in my game, I went down and I said, “No, brother, I don’t want to die.” I went down to my knees because, see, I knew these guys would do it. I had been trained to do it.
So I went to my knees and I said, “No, I don’t want to die.” He said, “Well, then you stay.” And then I said, “Yeah, but my daughter—” and he said, “Brother, you know, show this brother not to talk when I’m talking to him,” so the brother kicked me in the mouth. And I said, “I stand corrected.” He said, “Good, now this is what’s going to happen. We’re going to send your daughter fifty dollars a month and you going to stay. A’ight? So OK, all power to the people, right, OK, and that’s it.”9
Despite the madness in Huey’s brand of communication within the Party, Michael Torrence stayed on for about a year, until he was told by another Party member that the money for his daughter was going to stop and that he could leave the party.
For Michael Torrence, as it was for many of his age, it was time to move on and think about a career instead of a revolution. Torrence had experience in rhythm and blues, and he kept his networks together over the years. He started singing in a local group called Ladies Choice. On a tour through Oakland in late 1973, the legendary Motown singer Marvin Gaye’s group auditioned backup singers for an upcoming concert. Michael Torrence and Ladies Choice successfully passed the audition. Torrence was signed on and performed onstage with Gaye on the famous Marvin Gaye Live, recorded at the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum Arena on January 4, 1974. This live album was one of Gaye’s most successful, and that night’s rendition of “Distant Lover,” with the female audience screaming in pure passion throughout the song, is recognized as one of the greatest live soul music performances ever recorded. “That was an amazing night,” Torrence recalls. “To be on the stage with legendary musicians, and to touch so many people in that way. It was a powerful experience.”
However, the role of a backup singer on the road was anything but glamorous. Despite the fame of Marvin Gaye, or perhaps because of it, the backup singers were not treated with a great deal of respect. The singers were hastily shuttled to and from shows during tours and forced to wait on-call for weeks between gigs. Torrence effectively went from rank-and-file in the revolution to rank-and-file in rhythm and blues. From the daily struggle of the Black Panther Party to the nightly routine of R&B, Torrence went through both ends of it. After the Oakland concert, Ladies Choice had to audition yet again for the national tour:
Marvin’s brother [Frankie], he liked us. We locked up in a motel room, and he would come in with us every day. We were just working on choreography and learning all the songs and stuff off the records and stuff, and he would tell us, “Well, Marvin would like this, Marvin wouldn’t like this, and Marvin might like this, he might like that.” And so by the time we got a shot to see him, we had a full routine, steps and everything—and Frankie advocating for us—and we got the gig. So we toured with him for about a year and a half.10
Torrence toured and recorded with Marvin Gaye through 1976. The backup performers weren’t paid very well, and Marvin rarely spoke to the band. On the few occasions that he did, it involved keeping the supporting musicians off balance and dependent on the star rather than nurturing their talents. Torrence and the others were told repeatedly that at the end of the tour, their own group would be given the chance to record, but that did not come about. “He liked to play a mind game with you, which I found out later when I got to work with his wife and met Berry Gordy that this is what they’re teaching at Motown—you never tell a guy how good he is.”
Through a contact on the tour Torrence obtained a contract as a Motown staff writer, and for two years he wrote songs for Motown Records, some of which wound up on albums for Rare Earth and the little-known Motown girl group High Energy. Torrence also crossed paths with Elaine Brown once again, who was also writing and recording for Motown at the time. Relocating to Los Angeles in the late 1970s, Michael Torrence left the music industry and, through his contacts with the former Party minister of education, Ray “Masai” Hewitt, obtained work as a counselor for at-risk youth in urban Los Angeles. It is a job he has to this day.
James Mott continued to work at the Oakland Community School, the Panthers’ school, until 1978. After ten years of service, he felt it was time to get a “real job” and went into real estate, insurance, and other financial ventures. In the early 2000s he went to New Orleans to help start a progressive land-development project, but the project was washed out by Hurricane Katrina. He relocated to Oakland, and has reestablished himself as assistant pastor of Agnes Memorial Christian Academy in East Oakland, doing much of the community-based social work he did in the Party.11
Clark Bailey remained with the Party through the late 1970s, ostensibly working for the Panther Community School. However Bailey had other duties that involved maintenance of some of the Panther storehouses of weapons, equipment that was kept in preparation for the revolution that would never come. Bailey was lieutenant to Flores Forbes, a meticulous organizer who kept the Panther storehouses maintained, while also working at the Panther school. Panther work in the late 1970s took its toll on the rank-and-file: Aaron Dixon, in his memoir, My People Are Rising, muses upon the loss of Clark “Santa Rita” Bailey from the Party.
Flores called one morning to tell me that Santa Rita had left. Santa Rita, a member of the party’s vocal group the Lumpen, was a singer, a coordinator, an administrator, and a gunman; whatever needed to be done, he would try to accomplish it. And if he couldn’t, he would tell you so. We didn’t have too many brothers like him left. At one time we’d had scores of comrades like Santa Rita all across the country, but losing him just put more pressure on those remaining.
Santa Rita’s departure planted a seed in my mind. He had left because he was just plain tired and disenchanted, and I think many of us who had been working so long and so hard were quietly feeling the same way, despite the recent accomplishments [Panther supported candidate Lionel Wilson was elected Oakland mayor in 1977]. But the prospect of leaving something we’d devoted our lives to was extremely complicated, and there always some new development, some unexpected challenge to test and renew our commitment.12
After leaving the Party, Bailey settled in Sacramento and worked for the Regional Transit Authority, driving a public transit bus for twenty-five years.
It may be mere coincidence, but each of the leaders of the Lumpen engaged in their life pursuits while remaining consistent with their values and principles of public service and the uplift of their community. This is noteworthy in light of the tragedies that befell other dedicated rank-and-file members: Alex Rackley, Robert Webb, Samuel Napier, Lil’ Bobby Hutton, and others who were murdered; or Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, and the countless other political prisoners whose commitment to Party principles led to the tragedy of decades of incarceration. Further, the tales of drug addiction, ideological confusion, and self-destruction displayed by Party leaders Newton, Cleaver, and others left for some an unshakable impression that a commitment to the Panthers was destined for destruction and for some was a great, hollow mistake.
What the Panthers represented to a great many from all walks of life was that it was possible to live according to one’s own beliefs and that one’s ideals need not be crushed by the oppressive economic and social system afflicting so many in urban America today. One might say that the members of the Lumpen, rank-and-file dedicated revolutionaries, stand as an example of what a humble life lived upon these principles is all about.
The Lumpen members produced music that represented their values and beliefs at the time and were able to act on those beliefs through their dedicated participation in the revolutionary organization the Black Panther Party. They were not parroting a line for corporate consumption, nor were they seeking personal gratification through superstar stage dynamics. The essence of their dedication came through in their work.
It is not very often that black musicians are able to express their ideas without the constraints of an industry dictating that they compromise, tone down, or radically retreat from their own personal sensibilities simply to sell records. The implications for this are far-reaching on a personal and a societal level. Jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln perhaps put it best when she said, “I discovered that you become what you sing. You can’t repeat lyrics night after night as though they were prayer without having them come true in your life.”13 One might imagine that artists, at their best, write and perform the music that they most sincerely believe in. The current climate of corporate-controlled black popular music frequently dictates that artists must do just the opposite.
At the time of the Lumpen, black popular music was reaching a zenith in terms of its clarity in its portrayals of the state and the aspirations of black America. Much of the black popular music of the day was produced by artists who were writing and performing works that they themselves could believe in—redemption songs, love songs, songs of spiritual salvation, songs of revolutionary aspiration—and the range was broader than at any other time in the history of black American music and culture. This creative freedom was enabled, in essence, because of the level of street protest that made it clear that black aspirations, no matter how contradictory, would not be limited by white constraints.
Authenticity was a significant part of the ethos of black artistic expression at the time, and the musicians were engaging this ideal at its extreme. By engaging and beseeching their audience to take action—James Brown’s 1970 recording of “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved” as one such example—radical-minded musicians challenged both the artist and the audience to take action on behalf of the black community. For a brief moment, black musical entertainers were in large numbers invested in social issues and were beginning to be seen as artist-activists themselves.
At this flashpoint of outrage, one would find the radical jazz artists and poets who sought to spark the flame of uprising through their words and sounds. As revolutionary artists they took on an identity that transcended aesthetics as their art reached into the realm of activism. Abiodun Oyewole, one of the original Last Poets, found himself at a crossroads between his radical music and his personal politics:
I wasn’t happy being a poet. I began to feel that being a poet was a pitiful example of being a revolutionary. So, you write a poem, you get up onstage and you say it, you’re a revolutionary. Wow, I mean come on, give me a break. Especially when somebody down the block just fed about ten kids with food stamps. Come on, give me a break, there’s more to do here. So I decided to do more. I joined the Harlem Committee for Self-Defense, which was one of the many offshoots of the Black Panthers. My association with them led to the cops harassing me and caused me to leave New York City. I left tired of violence and fear, and fled to North Carolina where I got deep into Afrocentricism and African culture.14
Oyewole’s experience represents one of the fundamental conflicts of cultural activism. He makes clear an important issue of this book, that at some point it is ridiculous to speak of an artist simply rolling over in a loft, penning some stanzas of indignation, while others are risking their lives nightly with police mandates to harass and kill them with impunity. Yet at some level, there is a common motivation between the artist and the activist, between the radical artist and the revolutionary fighter, that moves each forward toward a change that may or may not come.
Another serious question emerges from Oyewole’s experience: how does one reconcile revolutionary fantasy with revolutionary work? To advocate for social change as an artist while performing and recording in pursuit of personal gain is a contradiction every conscious artist eventually must come to terms with. During the black power era, the situation was magnified. To advocate the militant overthrow of the US government while simultaneously seeking its bourgeois trappings was an insoluble contradiction that eventually served to drain the spirit of the struggle. Oyewole eventually “grew up” and out of his militancy. Yet the issues remained:
I was truly in line with my reality back then, which was that there was going to be a revolution and that all of this stuff was going to be ashes and we were going to have a brand-new world. I was truly on a mission in terms of just dealing with what I felt I must be about, and monetary things didn’t have very much to do with it. Now I’m grown, I’ve got children. I’ve got responsibilities, and I must try to fulfill them.15
Black power was a transformative movement in the lives of many young people. A spirit of change overtook a generation, as Oyewole recalled. Life went on, yet the issues that sparked the revolution remain. To what extent is the revolution a lifetime process? Angela Davis has stated that “when one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.” If one were to look at the overall arc of Abiodun Oyewole’s career, his life has been oriented toward social justice in some way. One does not need a political organization nor a musical group to work for social change.
In the current climate, there is another generation of young people seeking a radical restructuring of society, though they are living in a world entirely different from the one discussed here. While the daily lives of working-class youth of color today are fraught with the stark realities of economic oppression, police brutality, hostile health-care and educational institutions, and the emotional burdens of despair and constant danger, the sense of hope—the millenarian mythos of redemption so eloquently presented by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—remains for many a distant wisp of idealism.
Is there a concurrent creative musical response to the injustices occurring in modern times? Is there another Bob Dylan, another Marvin Gaye, another Lumpen laying in the wings? If so, it is likely to be a localized, decentralized phenomenon, as the corporate media market operatives have effectively hijacked the discourse of social justice, replacing it with a parade of the trivialities of pop culture.
The youth of today are not exposed to high-profile volunteer racial-justice organizations, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the US Organization, or the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Nation of Islam remains an established and respected institution of black self-help and community building, but its role and influence have diminished from its zenith in the 1960s. The youth today do not experience the cohesion of a geographically or economically self-contained black community. Class fractures and the glorification of individualism and “getting mine” have driven deep fissures into the once-salient notion of a black community. “We Shall Overcome” has succumbed to “Get Rich or Die Tryin’.” The increase of ethnic heterogeneity in urban areas has coerced many people into defensive self-definitions, into spurious claims of what type of community they are against, as opposed to what inclusive visions they are for.
The youth of today are also deprived of a sympathetic media, which no longer romanticizes the antiestablishment “rebel without a cause” as it had done in the past. Privileged children of the rich are given vast amounts of air time, reality television shows and endless gossip channels proliferate, while struggling, working-class rebel youth are caged, rendered invisible, or, in the case of rappers, are trivialized or demonized as sociopaths. Rebel youth of today must assert their own images into the world.
For young people who wish to find a channel for their natural inclination toward humanity, peace, and community, finding their own image in the media means in essence turning off the radio and the television and seeking out or creating their own progressive, interactive spaces. For the millions involved in the 2011 Arab Spring and Occupy movements, young people worldwide chose to build their own institutions of communication, and their actions have had an impact on global politics. For the African American community to build a collective consciousness, to build a foundation of resistance against their collective forces of submission, a marked change in the culture might be as important as economic reforms.
There have been moments when the methods of social control (now effectively operationalized as cultural control) are temporarily ruptured. During the rise of rap music in the mid-1980s, emergent cable companies did not exert sophisticated control over the messages that surfaced in rap videos. Consequently, there was a time in the late 1980s when conscious rap music had high visibility and the national cable companies gave time and space to Afrocentric, politically astute, positive rap videos. As a result, organizations such as Louis Farrakhan’s revamped Nation of Islam were given new prominence, as well as Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation, X-Clan’s Blackwatch, and other black political formations who were included in the chorus of rap voices witnessed on mainstream rap outlets such as Music Television (MTV), Black Entertainment Television (BET), and Video Hits One (VH1).
When Boots Riley of the rap group the Coup was starting his career in 1993, he discovered that he could get his edgy, anticapitalist rap videos aired on BET nationwide by producing on a shoestring budget and shipping his videos on a VHS tape directly to BET. In today’s climate of intense industry control, the radically anticorporate rap group, which consistently packs houses worldwide and ships records in the hundreds of thousands, has virtually no chance of being heard or seen on corporate-controlled radio or television.
As rap labels and artists went national, they gradually gave in to bottom-line ethics, and, whether deliberate or not, each appears to have conspired to eliminate all but their most superficial party music from their repertoire. To enjoy a mix of music with a variety of messages is one of the hallmarks of effective cultural production. However, the mainstream musical menu has eliminated nearly all vestiges of social critique. If but a few samples of antiestablishment music surfaced, they would go a long way toward balancing the thematic range of popular music, allowing people to make their own judgements about social consciousness, sacrifice, social change, or accommodation. If one were to eliminate 99 percent of the critical perspectives that one might be exposed to in the media environment, one’s own moral muscles would begin to atrophy. This is what has happened to the black popular music industry in its hegemony over the minds and aspirations of unsuspecting generations of party people. The rapper Paris made this explicitly clear in an April 2007 essay:
If Def Jam or Interscope or any of these other large culture-defining companies issued a blanket decree that they would only support material and artists with positive messages then 99% of those making music now would switch up to accommodate. That’s real talk. I’m not saying these labels should (or would), but if they did, gangstas would stop being gangstas and misogynists would stop being misogynists at the drop of a DIME. Many artists are like children, and most will say and do what is expected of them in order to benefit financially. And although there is definite self-examination that needs to take place within the artist community, the lion’s share of the blame falls on the enablers who only empower voices of negativity. Record labels and commercial radio often use the excuse that they are “responding to the streets” and that they are “giving the people what they want.” BULLSHIT. They dictate the taste of the streets, and people can’t miss what they never knew. The fact is that there are conscious decisions made by the big business and entertainment elite daily about what to present to the masses—and it is from those choices that we are allowed to decide what we do and do not like. Who presents the music that callers are invited to “make or break” on the radio? That callers are invited to “vote on” on T.V.? Who decides on what makes it to the store shelves or the airwaves at all? Like I said, life imitates art, and pseudo-black culture is determined by those other than us every day. Walk into any rap label or urban radio station and you can count the number of black employees on one hand.16
The dearth of industry executives with a working sensitivity to the realities and sensibilities of the working-class African American community has become a source of great frustration, miscommunication, and outrage in recent years. In 2007 the child star, actress, and recording artist Keke Palmer signed a major music deal with Atlantic Records. The African American teenager was already a veteran of film and television, with the lead role in the critically acclaimed Oprah Winfrey-produced 2006 film Akeelah and the Bee among her credits. However, once she was signed to the music label, she was told that her market was “urban” and that she would have to sing, dress, and perform in a sexually provocative way. As Palmer recalled, “From the very beginning Atlantic’s A&R representative tried to get me to record inappropriate music, and my parents and I resisted.” Palmer and her family were told by the label, “We will not promote her unless she records urban music.” As Bruce Banter wrote in a commentary on the subject, “Atlantic Records Tries to Pimp Out 14yr Old Actress”: “They knew her age when they signed her, they came to her after seeing Akeelah and the Bee and begged her to sign, so why did they not think that she could really be like Akeelah, a good girl?” As Palmer put it: “I am only a kid, my parents would kill me if I sang stuff like that.” Yet Atlantic A&R executive Mike Caren claimed that he knew what Keke Palmer’s market was, and refused to promote her teen-friendly, positive approach to pop R&B music. Her album’s worth of polished pop and R&B music has since died on the vine.17
The Palmer experience sheds light on the plight of so many younger entertainers of color who do not have the pedigree of Palmer yet would have preferred a more wholeseome (read: accurate) image in their media presence. They are subject to a pernicious process of artistic control based on narrow stereotypes of the behavior and priorities of people in communities of color. The established power brokers in the entertainment industry have little to worry about from outraged artists and their supporters, because the negative, violent, uncritical, materialist images of African Americans are selling so well. This has prompted one commentator to claim that “BET Has Become the New KKK” because of its incessant promotion of artists that advocate violence and self-destructive behavior in the black community. As Dr. Boyce Watkins, a self-proclaimed “hip-hop insider” writes about the 2011 BET Awards:
The executive committee for the BET Awards made the interesting decision to give the greatest number of award nominations to Lil Wayne, the man who said that he would (among other things) love to turn a woman out, murder her and send her dead body back to her boyfriend. Oh yea, he also said that he would kill little babies, have sex with every girl in the world, carry a gun on his hip and “leave a ni**a’s brains on the street.”
The music might be considered simple entertainment were it not for the fact that millions of Black youth who had their history stolen during slavery actually look to Hip-Hop music to tell them how to dress, talk, think, act and live. There is no high school speaker more popular than a Hip-Hop star.
The Ku Klux Klan has been regularly criticized for encouraging violence against African Americans and terrorizing our community. But the truth is that the Klan doesn’t have much power anymore, and their thirst for African American blood seems to have waned a bit. At the same time, Lil Wayne and artists like him have made a habit of encouraging Black men to shoot one another, to abuse or murder women, to consume suicidal amounts of drugs and alcohol and to engage in irresponsible, deadly sexual behavior.18
Dr. Watkins is making an important point about how out of touch the mass producers of African American culture have become from the communities that they serve. Until a popular movement—”a Resistance Culture”—emerges in which serious critiques of the process emerge in the mainstream, and strong, positive images of youth of color with morality, dignity, and courage are sustained, more and more Lil’ Waynes will be celebrated and more and more Keke Palmers will be pimped out. It may take a social movement on the scale of the late 1960s black awakening before such changes take place.
The whitewashing of the black entertainment industry of critical perspectives was done with a COINTELPRO-like efficiency. Clouded by the euphemisms of “market driven” and “regional tastes” and “freedom of speech,” negative music in the form of overused stereotypical black gangsterism has long since passed a point of minstrelsy. Young, ambitious blacks (and others) gleefully perform gangsta-face in order to procure marginal monies from corporate benefactors who thrive on perpetuating the adolescence of black cultural forms. Was black popular music deliberately whitewashed and left devoid of critical content by some racialist agenda to keep blacks perpetually disenfranchised and dysfunctional? Or was it simply a result of the market forces of capitalism? Often these two appear to be one in the same.
Some of the most charismatic and dedicated activist-artists are doing the work of entertaining as well as serving their community. Despite their millions of record sales and potential for sustained mainstream popularity, they do their political work under the mainstream radar.
In the contemporary context, the urge for antiestablishment music is as strong and articulate as it has ever been. The theme of an oncoming social revolution is described vividly by a number of artists who have dedicated themselves to a life of consciousness, culture, activism, and social change. Michael Franti has earned a reputation as one of the leaders of a new wave of courageous artist-activists who are seeking a new way for people to visualize themselves in a just world. He made the following observations on the title track of his 2005 album, Yell Fire:
A revolution never come with a warning
A revolution never sends you an omen
A revolution just arrive like the morning
Ring the alarm, we come to wake up the snoring.
While Oakland native Michael Franti has been belting verses similar to this ever since his metal thrashing days in the Beatnigs back in the 1980s, one does not need to rock out to share his sentiments. The Bay Area-based R&B singer Goapele became well known for her haunting, sublime love songs on her first national hit record Even Closer in 2002. Once she obtained a recording contract from Sony, Goapele took a bold step and wrote the title song of her Columbia album, Change It All. Arranged with the subtle complexity and beguiling sensuousness of most of her music, her impassioned lyrics and lush tone recall music from Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On album:
Basically there are people left out
From living comfortably can’t we figure it out
I’ve been waiting restlessly for the words to a song
That could change it all, change it all, change it all.
Goapele’s sentiments are not uncommon. To hear these sentiments on a larger scale was and remains the hope of some of the greatest artists who ever lived. When Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit” in 1939, she undoubtedly hoped that she could curb the scourge of lynching that was so prominent in the South; when John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang from their bedroom “Give Peace a Chance,” they were pleading in the most personal way for a change from the heart from within. When Stevie Wonder produced the song “Happy Birthday” and toured in support of his Hotter Than July album in 1980, it was to promote his vision of making Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday (a campaign for which he was successful). When KRS-One and his massive crew of New York rappers produced their “Self-Destruction” video in 1989, they were clearly seeking—through the song and all it symbolized—to stop the violence in hip-hop. Similarly, the West Coast Rap All-Stars sought to check their own violent lifestyles in their 1990 collaboration “We’re All in the Same Gang.”
What if a song could in fact change it all? If only there truly was a method that could rally a generation to take action in their own interests. The sentiments for a youth-based movement of major proportions already exist in the United States and in many places around the globe. Can a cultural movement become the spark for a sustained surge of social justice?
One might conclude that economic and political inequality and privilege are so entrenched that people can only turn to the cultural front to imagine a large-scale swing of the political pendulum. But waiting on the world to change is not going to do it. Perhaps Boots Riley was on to something when he came up with his 2007 album title: Pick a Bigger Weapon. Or as Talib Kweli put it in a 2007 rap, “Bushonomics,” “Revolution requires participation.”19
The year 2008 represented a generational shift in national politics as well as the nature of participatory electoral politics, as the most diverse generation in the nation’s history participated in the election of the first African American president of a majority white country, Barack Hussein Obama. To a large degree, many of the issues that had ripped apart the social fabric of the United States in 1968 were still in play and were symbolically confronted and woven together in the watershed events of 2008. The bitter racial divide of the 1960s that compelled so many African Americans to actively engage in armed self-defense of their communities also spawned a generation of activity in the realm of community activism and local electoral politics. While Obama tactically avoided the representation of the black radical era and the black radical movement, he was clearly a product of it.
While Obama’s message of racial transcendence was and is drawn from Martin Luther King’s laudable vision of equality for all, Obama’s direct speaking style does not imitate the southern Christian church dialect. Obama does not speak like a southern Baptist preacher. In fact, Obama’s oratorical technique borrows directly from the cadence and syntax of the veteran Harlem street orator Malcolm X. Obama captured the imagination of a nation that was desperate for change. He rallied those who desired a respite from the famously incompetent George Bush administration, as well as those who sought a complete, total change in America’s political landscape. Obama presented himself as a new-era Abraham Lincoln, bringing right and left together while seeking to demolish the racial caste system. Obama may have succeeded in making a leap around the race mountain, but inequality exists, and the fallout from his failed “change” mantra could result in a backlash that goes on for further generations.
It is interesting to note that during the Obama campaign, a number of rappers and black entertainers produced tributes and performed in support of his candidacy. Once he was elected, however, the music retreated (much like Obama’s policy promises toward the working class) back to the shallow status quo. Further, the television and movie industry dropped the ball on the opportunity to reflect the racial diversity seen in the White House every day, and there remains a palpable dearth of characters, television hosts, and leading men and women of color on the airwaves. Despite the monumental social transformation of electing an African American to become the president of the United States, a cultural movement that acknowledges the diversity and humanity of the people in the United States has not materialized. It will take more than politicians to generate lasting social change in America.
A worldwide protest movement that involved nonviolent expressions of a collective desire for human equality took place in 2011. That spring an “awakening” swept through a number of Middle Eastern countries—Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and others—that involved what appeared to be spontaneous mass mobilizations of thousands. They were typically peaceful human expressions of a collectively expressed hope for basic freedoms and demands for the removal of totalitarian rulers. The repressive reactions of the governments, and intrigues by foreign empires, have thwarted the initial thrust of these movements. Nevertheless they are worthy of discussion.
The movements were spawned by youth who utilized modern technology—social networking—to form alternative communication networks that forged an imagined community based on shared humanity and a shared quest for basic respect and personal freedoms. Massive nonviolent protests served to oust the decadent, outdated authoritarian leaders in Tunisia and Egypt, which inspired millions more across the region to act, with varying results.
A case can be made that this process began when Barack Obama spoke in Cairo in 2009, reaching out to the Muslim world and affirming the basic humanity of a quarter of the world’s population, providing a pathway for millions to envision a global community devoid of the outdated barriers constructed by warmongers, profiteers, racists, and colonialists. A case can also be made that this movement was taking place regardless of the actions of any civic or national leaders, and that the people—connected horizontally as equals on a global scale like never before—were doing this entirely on their own.
In the fall of 2011 a group of protestors gathered at the steps of the New York Stock Exchange and began a sustained sit-in to express their outrage at the vast inequality that exists between corporate owners and workers in the United States. The dual economic crises of millions of home foreclosures and financial-industry meltdowns—banks that were bailed out by the US government but crippled the finances of millions of workers—have caused what many see as a permanent rift between the moneyed and the labor classes. A broad cross-section of America’s workers, not as racially stratified as before and increasingly economically unstable, have found a voice in what was termed the Occupy Movement. The Occupy Wall Street protests spawned similar actions across the country and worldwide in solidarity with Occupy and Arab Spring civil protests.
In addition to organizing events that emphasized the human face of the economic oppression taking place, many of the groups sought to de-emphasize the idea of centralized leadership. Some peculiar aspects of the movement included the fact that most of the events took place without leaders and often came together through consensus meetings held in public, on public grounds occupied by the protestors. Often, recently laid-off middle-class workers and people who had been homeless for years were choosing to share the same space and admit that they shared many of the same issues, as “the 99 percent” shared similar hopes for basic respect and economic opportunity. Many of the Occupy sites developed their own forms of personal services, food services, health services, and sanitation services that allowed the people, all the people, to be treated with dignity in the absence of corporate, profit-driven constrictions. In many ways, the methods of the Occupy protestors were revolutionary, not simply as strategic sites of protest but in the cultural transformation of daily interactions, as they were providing a deeper critique of the power apparatus than any chant or sign or police tear-gas canister thrown. Occupy was creating “free space” for a generation of people to envision and imagine an entirely new type of liberation, one free of hierarchical, corporate control.
The corporate media initially tried to ignore the phenomena, then when some cases of police excess made national news, the media tried to ridicule and marginalize the protestors. When the movement grew to more than nine hundred cities worldwide, action was taken to seize control through brute-force police activity to quell the nonviolent, civil, public protests. In one case in Oakland, California, OPD threw tear gas canisters on peaceful occupiers of the downtown plaza in front of city hall, late in the evening of October 25, 2011, spawning a graphic melee that went viral on social media within minutes.
In response, city officials retreated in embarrassment, and the Occupiers announced a general strike, in which the entire population was invited to spend the day in downtown Oakland on November 1, to take children out of classes, to skip work, and occupy the central city with an all-day festival, followed by a march to the nearby Port of Oakland to protest the economic exploitation taking place at the commercial freight transportation hub. The day was a spectacle, as free food, free music, and free people thrived in the streets of the city for hours, without police presence or a profit motive to contain the revelers. For a moment, a free space had been created. The loudspeakers at the central plaza blasted James Brown’s “The Payback” (an anthem of the Occupy Movement if there ever was one) in rotation with other celebratory dance songs. Angela Davis was at the event, along with thousands of others:
The general strike—I think that when we experience such moments, we have to preserve them for the revolutionary promise that they offer. Obviously revolution is not going to happen in a single day or a single year but there are moments that inspire us. And I can remember on that day and looking around at the people at that gathering, the march…. It was multiracial, it was multiethnic, it was multigender, it was multigenerational, and there was something very palpable about the community of resistance that we were forging.20
Davis referred to a community of resistance that was growing in size, intensity, and clarity. She was acknowledging that a new generation is beginning to believe that it is capable of a generating new type of human revolution. If one were to study closely the rhetoric of the rebels of the 1960s, many of their demands were similar to those of the Occupiers, who sought human dignity and the ability to live lives free of discrimination and free of corporate economic and social controls.
During the early years of the Black Panther Party, Minister of Defense Huey Newton made unequivocal statements about the necessity of political violence in the challenge to the power structure. “Kill the slave master, destroy him utterly, move against him with implacable fortitude. Break his oppressive power by any means necessary.” This was the rhetorical forge that sharpened the spearhead of Panther politics and garnered the attention of the young masses—and the wrath of the state. A revolution required revolutionaries, ready and willing to take on the awesome power of the Western ruling classes. Young people by the thousands followed the call. The Lumpen members all answered this call as well, long before the order to perform songs about the revolution was given to them. The Party’s long-term results, as we have seen, were mixed.
In the 1990 documentary Eyes on the Prize, former Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale explained the purpose of the organization in terms of revolution: “Now a lot of people call revolution, a confrontation. Really, what Huey and I meant by revolution was the need to revolve more political power, more economic power, back into the hands of the people, that’s really what revolution is.”21 While this larger view may not jibe with some of the militant rhetoric used by the Panthers during their heyday, the idea remains that Bobby Seale and the Panthers were addressing social inequalities through the means that were at their disposal at the time. The times required a fearless challenge to the power structure, one that told the world that their humanity would not be denied and that they were prepared to fight for their freedom “by any means necessary.”
Over the years, both Seale and the tenor of the times have changed, and the nature of the forces against the masses of underprivileged people have changed. In the way that Huey Newton grew to understand that Black Nationalism was but a starting point for his organizational philosophy, he constantly redefined the Party’s vision as events steered the Party. Newton’s ideas of social change evolved to the point where he could foretell many global shifts generations hence:
In 1966 we called ourselves a Black Nationalist Party because we thought that nationhood was the answer…. Shortly after that we decided that what we really needed was revolutionary nationalism, that is, nationalism plus socialism. After analyzing conditions a little more we found … we had to unite with the peoples of the world so we called ourselves Internationalists…. But then … we found that everything is in a state of transformation…. These transformations … require us to call ourselves “intercommunalists” because nations have been transformed into communities of the world.22
Huey Newton, at a speech at Boston College in 1970, was beginning to move the Party toward a recognition of a global community some forty years ahead of the people’s uprising worldwide sparked by the Arab Spring. Newton’s concept involved the sharing of resources on a community level, in a post-national society that values all members equally, decentralizes power, and emphasizes the interconnectedness of all people. In a sense, the collective people’s movements of 2011 and their imagined remaking of social movements can be thought of as a variation of Newton’s idea of intercommunalism.
While short-lived movements at the time, the opening of the Occupy movement and Arab Spring events had set in motion some larger, greater opportunities to rethink the meaning of radical social change, a redefinition of community that transcends the traditional modes of protest and demands. As Grace Lee Boggs has stated:
We are at the point of a cultural revolution in ourselves and in our institutions that is as far reaching as the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture eleven thousand years ago, and from agriculture and industry a few hundred years ago.
The time has come for us to reimagine everything. We have to reimagine work, and go away from labor, we have to reimagine revolution and get beyond protest, we have to reimagine revolution and think not only about the change in our institutions but the changes we have to make in ourselves.23
In a far-reaching panel discussion between Boggs and Angela Davis in March 2012, the two embarked on a discussion of how to go about reimagining a world in which humans are not fractured by the obligations of work only to be forced to find fulfillment by demanding higher wages rather than demanding a better way to live and work. They spoke of the need to rethink not just environmental destruction, but food politics and how what we eat and how the way we obtain our food reflects upon who we are as human beings; to not just rethink health-care reform, but to remake how we care for people and how we link generations with our elders in a mutually helpful form. These human questions have the possibility of transforming how we deal with trivialities of political contests and economic mandates. How does one begin this reimagining process? Davis said:
Of course we find ourselves in a period with rising unemployment. The tendency is simply to demand more jobs. Also with education, the tendency is to demand greater access to education, but we don’t necessarily ask ourselves what needs to be transformed about education, and what needs to be transformed in the way we conceive of work.
Through our labor we externalize our own creative impulses. And that actually, work should be fulfilling. Workers should possibly be able to have the same relationship to that which they produce as artists have to their art.24
Could workers truly have a relationship to their work as viable as artists have with their art? Could the muse of the artist help to frame the nature of work, of society, of civilization? This has been part of the premise of rock and roll since the 1960s.
Carlos Santana explored this in a conversation with Brian Copeland in 2011:
But one thing that I knew [in the 60s] was that things were not going to be the same between young people and the United States government, because we realized that we have a different kind of power than the Pentagon. We have the power to put the pressure on the United States government and we got them out of Vietnam. We the hippies. When I say hippies I mean conscious people. Some people try to stereotype the hippies as people who just get loaded, and wear rainbow shirts and they don’t know nothing. Hippie people are conscious people. In Hitler’s time it was the beatniks and bohemians in the French Resistance. The hippies are the ones, along with the Black Panthers, who made a change in the United States forevermore.
I like to see the young people be a little more passionate about putting pressure on brother Barack Obama, and promise what he said he was going to do, which is to stop the war, and spend more money on education than incarceration. Because as brother Marvin Gaye said, “War is not the answer, only love can conquer hate.”
I would invite brother Barack Obama to listen to What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye from beginning to end, and don’t be so concerned about what the Republicans be thinking. Follow the voice of your heart who got you there in the first place, and before they kick you out, or you stay there, fulfill the promise that you made.25
It is perhaps a reach to imagine that a song or some music could transform a collective consciousness of a people, or of a leader. Of the far-reaching visions put forth by the people in this book, many harbored ideals that were just as far-fetched, and because masses of people saw their viability, the ideas took hold. The ideas went beyond Marxist or capitalist, they were seeking a greater connection, a connection to humanity, to the Earth, to their lives and families that was and is free of oppression. During the black power years, those ideas were revolutionary, and the revolutionaries were from all walks of life.
A new vision of human relationships is evolving that is post-capitalist and post-Marxist and is growing daily on the basis of a shared humanity. Che Guevara, writing “On Socialism and Man in Cuba” in 1965, wrote: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”26 Guevara may have been seeking that connection that inspires and unites all of humanity in a shared struggle for coexistence based on mutual respect. One day, perhaps, the inspiration of the artist, the musician, the source of their muse will be studied as a methodology for structuring a society never before seen, or heard.
Every song tells a story. Some songs not only reveal stories and provide storytelling narratives, but they generate stories—legends—of their own making. Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin, James Brown: they were a part of the movement, of an awakening, of a revolution. Their songs tell a story of a people in motion. Soul music tells us a story of social change in America.
The Black Panthers were a part of a cultural revolution in America, in which a dispossessed and disheartened population redefined itself and staked a claim to self-determination. The Lumpen group is a crystallization of the revolutionary culture that the Party helped to create. Through music, the potential for cultural memory always exists, so that the power of soul music may one day take form again in the manifestation of a people’s movement.
To write a book about the Black Panther Party is no simple task. The organization was far too vast an enterprise to be properly captured in one study. There are, however, a number of worthy volumes that have successfully captured the nature of various elements of the Party, and my hope is that there will be many more. This work was only partially about the Black Panther Party; it has sought to merge the important research being done on the Party as a political organization with an examination of the popular culture that was profoundly affected by the Panthers in the late 1960s.
There should be further serious study of the Black Panther Party because the efforts of the leadership, the rank-and-file membership, and their nonblack supporters resonate with many of the present-day struggles people are undertaking to restructure society on terms that the masses deserve. The strategies, tactics, commitments, and counter-measures engaged in by the Party, while perhaps anachronistic in today’s political climate, are certainly worthy of analysis and reflection.
Furthermore, one should realize that the Black Panthers have been studied in depth by their opposition. Those generating the forces of social control have gone the extra mile to study everything the Party leadership ever thought about doing, let alone what the Panthers were able to put into action or introduce into the public discourse. Some of the Panther Party operations may look frivolous today, such as their constitutional convention, their erratic forms of internal discipline, and their near-extortion of local businesses for donations. However, other projects were very foresighted, such as their police patrols, sickle cell anemia testing, their free busing to prisons, and their breakfast for children programs. Their fearless public presence was a watershed of cultural capital that was a necessary and perhaps inevitable outgrowth of the evolution of the black power ethos within the black community. The sharp social critique put forward by the leadership has stood the test of time as a rigorous analysis of the failings of the American enterprise. In addition, these young people from the streets had the bombast to produce an action plan for doing something to change the situation.
Perhaps most prominent, and most essential to this study, was the humanity of the Party membership, in all of its various quarters, various camps and factions, class divisions, fractious gender dynamics, infiltrations, and betrayals. It is indeed that humanity that remains a testimonial to the endurance of the human spirit and desire for justice. The sacrifices some have made for this cause are too great to mention in one volume.
To that extent, this book is dedicated to all of those Black Panther Party veterans—especially the political prisoners—and so many other like-minded spirits who are still being harassed, dehumanized, and subjected to the law enforcement apparatus for the crimes of associating with the Black Panther Party and for sharing their dreams of a just society with people with the audacity to try to bring those dreams into reality.