THE BLACKS WHO REMAINED IN THE SOUTH WERE SUBJECTED to racism and police brutality every day. It was part of their lives. In 1964 a young man from Lowndes County in Alabama decided he had had enough, and he organized the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. The emblem that that man, Stokely Carmichael, chose to represent his organization was the black panther, described as a vicious animal that never bothers anyone, but when cornered, takes no prisoners.
Bobby Seale and Huey Newton took Carmichael’s symbol and formed the Black Panther Party. Begun in Oakland, California, initially the group was set up to give its members some solidarity in the fight against police brutality and racism. Its goal was freedom, full employment, decent housing, quality education for their children, the end to police brutality, putting black people in juries, and getting reparations for their days as slaves.
The group arranged medical clinics and provided free food to poor black schoolchildren. Before long the Black Panthers were feeding ten thousand children before they went off to school.
The Black Panther Party began taking its cues from Malcolm X, a spokesman and symbolic leader of the Nation of Islam in New York. The white press portrayed Malcolm as a hate-monger who was evil in his hatred. But to black youths, Malcolm was a more important figure than even Martin Luther King Jr., because Malcolm, who generated pride and self-reliance, focused on the problems of the ghetto and on black self-denial. To whites, Malcolm was the antithesis of Dr. King. To blacks, Malcolm X belonged beside Dr. King as a hero.
The Black Panthers preached black solidarity. Whites were not allowed to join the organization. The Black Panthers argued that blacks had to arm themselves if they wanted to be safe from the police. That black men would stand up and fight for their rights scared the bejesus out of local police in cities where the Panthers organized. They put a scare into J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.
When Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, he had run on a platform that included two themes: a hatred for Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and a charge that Democrats were “soft on Communism.” Upon his election, he began a campaign to harass political radicals, a campaign that was ongoing until the very day he was finally forced to resign in disgrace in 1974. During this period Nixon ordered the IRS to hound his enemies, and as a result the IRS collected dossiers on ten thousand individuals and organizations including the Black Panthers, SNCC, and Students for a Democratic Society. Nixon also compiled a list of personal enemies including Senators Ted Kennedy and Ed Muskie, New York mayor John Lindsay, singer Barbra Streisand, actor Paul Newman, Pete Hamill of the New York Post, and the always-dangerous Gregory Peck, Tony Randall, Joe Namath, and Carol Channing!
Under Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover was given a free rein to do his dirty work. With the death of Martin Luther King Jr., Hoover called the Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” In November of 1968 he ordered the FBI to use counterintelligence methods to wreck the Panthers, including the use of infiltrators to stir up trouble and spy on the group.
In the middle of the night of May 25, 1971, the FBI invaded the Chicago home of the Black Panther Party. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed. Those left alive were arrested and charged with attempted murder of the police. But evidence showed that the police had fired one hundred bullets at the Panthers, while the Panthers had fired just once. Later it was also revealed that Hampton’s bodyguard, William O’Neal, had been an FBI agent-provocateur, who had delivered the floor plan to the FBI days before the raid.
Over six years, twenty-four Panthers were killed in shoot-outs with the police.
In 1971 a dispute arose between Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton over the direction the group should take. Newton wanted to renounce violence. Cleaver, who fled into exile, didn’t.
To show how popular the Panthers were in the black communities, in 1973 Bobby Seale ran for mayor of Oakland and finished second with 40 percent of the vote.
Charles Barron, now a New York City councilman representing the East New York section of Brooklyn, had been an angry black teenager who felt he didn’t fit into white society. He lived in the projects, and what he learned was how hard it was to escape from poverty and institutional racism. At school he resented that most of the teachers were white, and though he was a bright kid, he lost interest and dropped out of high school to become involved in “the movement.” A member of the Black Panthers, Barron suffered with the deaths of his fellow Panthers killed by the FBI and police in shoot-outs. He watched as J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI infiltrated his organization, bringing chaos and paranoia. When the East Coast Panthers, led by Eldridge Cleaver, got into a dispute with the West Coast Panthers, led by Huey Newton, over what direction the organization would take—violence versus education—Barron left the Panthers to get his GED and to go to college. And what an education he got! As a youngster he felt the slings and arrows coming from white society, but it wasn’t until he became educated that he fully understood that for African-Americans, learning history, language, and religion from a Eurocentric perspective could be destructive and self-defeating.
CHARLES BARRON “I grew up on the Lower East Side in the Lillian Wald Projects on Avenue D and 6th Street. You had to really compete with each other whether it was sports or how you dress. When people are growing up oppressed, you often have to put a front on your poverty by buying expensive clothing. I used to buy tailor-made pants, waistcoats, and leather fronts when I had my little jobs in the summer.
“One issue you had to deal with living in the projects was dealing with the police, particularly the housing police. It was always a tense relationship, though not nearly as bad as it is today. Then an officer at least would take you up to your parents and let them know what you’re doing. You don’t get anything like that now, especially with the black police officers. Though we also had some who were mean and abusive.
“But you also had to worry about the drugs and the gangs, and you had to worry about people coming in to exploit you for your labor. There were all kinds of schemes, multilevel marketing schemes, and you didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. Knowing we were trying to get out of poverty, they were wanting you to invest, making you promises.
“There were a lot of people who just gave up hope, got on drugs, went to drinking alcohol, and had difficulty. People don’t understand the conditions of oppression and how much hopelessness it brings.
“A lot of the elected officials were white. You didn’t see any hope. Unless you were a boxer or an athlete, you didn’t see any way out. A few might go to school and get through that way, but the masses of our people were—and are—suffering.
“I was lucky to have a job. I was very personable, likeable. Even when people didn’t like my politics, they still liked me. I worked as a sorter for the post office, and that was big money back then. The people who worked for the Youth Poverty programs were making $38.63 a week. My post office job was very boring, but I was making a couple hundred dollars a week.
“There was discrimination in the U.S. Post Office just as there is in every institution in America. Most of the blacks had the lower jobs, the mail-sorting jobs. It was like the Rocky Mountains: the higher up you went in the post office, the whiter it got. Matter of fact, most of the time I worked there, I was an eighty-nine-day employee. If you worked ninety days, they had to pay you benefits. So they signed you up for eighty-nine days, fired you, and then you would have to re-up.
“I said, ‘I want to be like the rest of them so I can get some health benefits.’
“They said, ‘We don’t have openings for that.’
“But in our neighborhood, unemployment was very high, so whatever job you got was good, and a post office job was very good.
“When I was fifteen, sixteen years old, I started to read books on my own seriously. I read The Last Days of the Congo, by Patrice Lumumba. That really turned me around. I was taken by his courage and sincerity and his tenacity to stand up to such powerful opposition—the Belgians. I was reading this book, staring at the pictures of his face, seeing this serious look of determination. I was, Wow. And I connected it to the discrimination I saw happening in New York, and the courage of Malcolm X to stand up, and I was seeing what my father was going through.
“My father had been in the merchant marine, and he was working for a place called Canadian Furs in mid-Manhattan. He did some stock work, some interior decorating, but he never made much money, $80 a week, chump change. I remember when I was seventeen, with tears in his eyes he told me, ‘Son, don’t you ever kiss the white man’s ass.’ To me it meant he had to sweep floors, had to buckle down for them. It meant he couldn’t be the man he really wanted to be. And it led to my father drinking more than he should have—to his not always bringing all the money home, and this led to my father and mother separating.
“You might say they separated because of his drinking, but I would say it was because of oppression. Society would say drinking. I would say because of racism and oppression.
“Do we focus on the symptoms of oppression and say those are the root causes of a broken family or do we focus on the root causes of a broken family? Both are issues. There is truth to both. I don’t think you should let society off the hook. I could say, ‘I don’t care how poor you are or how much racism there is, get over it, get around it, and work hard. You gotta work harder and stop using racism as an excuse.’ Nope. I don’t agree. The masses of our people are not making it even though 90 percent of our people want jobs and work hard. Why? Because structural racism, institutional racism, sexist, gender discrimination, and exploitation monopolism—capitalism—has created a class problem in the American society that creates poverty.
“From reading Patrice Lumumba and Malcolm X and being influenced by the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers—and getting back to my dad—I saw how the system was tearing him down. And this was a strong man. There were times I didn’t even know he and my mother were having arguments. There was a time I didn’t know we were impoverished and oppressed. We as a family had a wholesome life. For the most part, my mother took care of my four brothers and sisters and myself.
“I went to Brandeis High School and transferred to Seward Park High School, but I never finished. I got caught up in the street life in the neighborhood, playing hooky, getting high, smoking reefer, hanging out with girls, not interested in school. As I gained consciousness, I saw there were too many white teachers, too much white curriculum, all our heroes were white, all the pictures on the walls of the school were white. Not enough was said about me and who I was and my struggles in life. So I lacked interest. I didn’t see myself in school. I said, ‘This is not for me. This is designed for someone else.’
“Each year I tried to get it together. The teachers all said, ‘You’re very bright, very intelligent.’ But it just couldn’t draw my interest. That’s why I can understand what our black youth is going through, because I’ve been there. I can talk to them now and try to make them understand something I didn’t understand until a little later, and that is, no matter what’s going on there, this is a credential-oriented society, and you can get the truth somewhere else, but give them what they need for you to pass. You can speak the truth and still be disciplined to do your homework, pass the classes.
“What I did was say to myself, ‘I’m not dealing with this. I’m going to seek the truth and join the movement, the struggle, the Panthers.’ This was 1968. The Panthers had come into existence in 1964 in Oakland, started by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.
“I lived on the Lower East Side, and two Panthers, Mark Holder and Tony Martin, who actually lived in the projects with me, came along selling the Black Panther paper. I used to argue with them, fuck with them. I said, ‘You talk about your revolution. It’s not making sense. If you were revolutionaries, why would you have an office in Harlem with a big picture of a black panther? That’s why there’s all the shoot-outs.’
“They said, ‘Why don’t you just come up to Harlem and see.’
“I went, and I remember seeing a lot of free clothing in front of the Panther office. And then they showed me where they fed children breakfast for free. I met some of the people in the office, and I went to a few of the educational classes they had, and what impressed me most was their ability to do so much with so little.
“I was an angry, young black man, and you have to channel that anger in a positive way, so I started organizing block parties, just to get people doing something positive together, shut the street down and let the children have some activities in the street. They’d ride their bikes up and down the street and not have to worry about cars. People who had things to sell could sell them in the street. People would cook food and make donations, and at night they’d play music and have dance contests. It was something positive, better than sitting there doing nothing.
“And I made a little community newsletter. ‘So-and-so got into college.’ ‘This one got straight A’s on his report card.’ There was so much negativity around. I was trying to build their self-esteem.
“I was becoming culturally conscious, and I started wearing a dashiki, had a big Afro. I was really caught up in it. American is our citizenship, our legal identity, but we are African people who were brought to the Caribbean and to the Americas, and that doesn’t take away from our Africanness.
“When it came to the police, there was some hostility. It was a scary thing to be on the subway selling my Panther paper. I’d stand on the train with another guy. I had a big Afro, black leather jacket, ‘Free Huey’ buttons all over me, and fifty Black Panther papers in my hand, combat boots with black dungarees or corduroys, a blue shirt, walking up and down the subway and walking past cops. I’d say, ‘Get your Black Panther paper. Don’t forget your Black Panther paper. Power to the people. Buy your Black Panther paper.’
“The cops would stop us from time to time, and they’d say, ‘No solicitation. You have to take that out of here.’ But I never had any real confrontation with the police.
“But it was a scary thing when you saw in the newspaper, ‘Black Panther shot and killed,’ or ‘beaten and brutalized.’ Here I was, letting everyone know I’m a Black Panther, walking the street, and there was a time when the police and the Panthers were having shoot-outs across the nation, and Panthers were dying or being jailed, and the rhetoric was scaring the system more than our actions.
“The government engaged in war. You had the New York 21 who were arrested—Afeni Shakur (Tupac’s mother) and many of the others were charged with conspiracy to blow up the New York Botanical Gardens and Macy’s. It was a bunch of crap, trumped-up charges. Eventually they beat the charges, but it took a year or two of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend them. Some of them jumped bail.
“There was also the New Haven 8, and the San Francisco 6. All over the country the movement was raising money for legal defense. ‘Free Angela Davis. Free Huey Newton.’ Huey Newton was arrested for a shoot-out in Oakland.
Eldridge Cleaver. Library of Congress
“While all of this was going on, I was just a teenager in the party, not in the leadership, which was a good thing, because had I emerged as a leader then, we would not be talking. I would either be dead or in jail.
“J. Edgar Hoover said, ‘The Black Panther Party is the most dangerous party to the internal security of America and should be neutralized,’ meaning eliminated. Once that was put out there, thirty-three Panthers were killed, including Fred Hampton and Mark Clark—in their sleep, in Chicago. Then the Panthers were infiltrated by the FBI. Informants would join the Panthers and tell the FBI all about our plans, and they’d lead you to do something so you’d get arrested and busted. In California they changed the laws regarding the right to bear arms. Under the second amendment, we had that right as long as the gun was unloaded and exposed. That’s why when you see pictures of the Panthers, the bullets are on their chests, showing the gun is empty. And then they changed the law so they could now confiscate all weapons, and that led to shoot-outs, and when the dust cleared, across the country twelve police were killed, but more than thirty Panthers were killed and many others ended up in prison.
“J. Edgar Hoover had done this with Marcus Garvey in the 1920s. With Hoover, it didn’t matter whether you were Martin Luther King or Huey Newton, whether you said, ‘Turn the other cheek, love your neighbor, be nonviolent’ or whether we said, ‘By any means necessary, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Any black organizational leader who stood up to the system was going to die or get character-assassinated or lose his freedom. There was no right way to fight this system under J. Edgar Hoover, and even to this day it doesn’t matter what you say. If you stand up to the white power, you are a threat. Under McCarthy it was Communism. Now the new word is ‘terrorism.’ It’s all part of the same deal. Before there was J. Edgar Hoover, and now we have the PATRIOT Act. Under Reagan we had a COINTELPRO type of program with the FBI, a similar kind of repressive legislation or policy or institution to suppress any kind of movement that might occur in this country. Under the PATRIOT Act you have to watch the library books you’re reading.
“When I was twenty, in the early 1970s, the internal conflict of the Panthers got me out of there. Here we had the system coming down on us, arresting people, killing people, and we were being infiltrated, and on top of that, Huey Newton on the West Coast and Eldridge Cleaver on the East Coast got into an internal conflict over which direction the party should go in. Eldridge was more into militarism and going to war. Huey was into survival programs, political education, being involved in electoral politics. Bobby Seale ran for mayor. Erica Brown ran for assembly. Huey ran for Congress. Eldridge himself ran for president on the Fear and Freedom Party ticket. But the individual internal conflicts led to violence. Because of the infiltration by the FBI, everyone was accusing everyone else of being an agent, and the party started to purge people, and in the end Panthers were killing Panthers, and I said to myself, ‘This is not making sense.’ Because it was a scary thing to be walking down the street in my Panther uniform, especially after the Black Liberation Movement started, and cops started dying, and they were looking for Panthers. And here I am. And cops were killed on the Lower East Side. They were looking for Twyman Myers, who they eventually found and killed. Twyman Myers put fear in the police. They accused him of killing policemen, but here’s the thing: did he? Not every Panther they accused of killing people was killing people.
“Around this time, one of the most troubling times in my life came when they turned the draft into a lottery in 1970. I was totally politically conscious. I was in the movement, twenty years old, and I was not going to war.
“I always found it interesting when I was learning my political history that everybody America hated were my heroes. I thought Ho Chi Minh, who was for his people, was a hero. The United States was for the dictator of the South. I thought Kim Il Sung in Korea was fighting to keep from splitting his country. The administration liked the guy in the South. They liked Marcos in the Philippines and Pinochet in Chile. I liked Salvador Allende, the duly elected Socialist president. The government backed Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier [in Haiti], and Batista in Cuba, all right-wing dictators. I liked Castro and Che Guevara. I said to myself, ‘Man, my country is on the wrong side of history and is creating a lot of divisiveness around the world.’ I said to myself, ‘I am not going into this racist army and fighting for America. That’s just not happening. What am I going to do? Am I going to run away? Go to jail? Go to Canada? How am I going to beat this?’
“I thought of doing what Rap Brown did, act crazy when you go to see the psychiatrist. ‘I need to go to this war because I’m a revolutionary and I want to learn how to shoot guns.’
“Fortunately for me, my lottery number was 263, and the cutoff was 125. I’ll never forget those numbers, because it was one of the most traumatic times of my life.
“And right after that, in 1971, the Attica prison riot hit. The prisoners were asking for better living conditions, a right to education, and an end to the brutality by the jailers. They weren’t saying, ‘Free us.’ They were saying, ‘We want more humane treatment and some more respect.’
“What disturbed me so much was Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s decision to go in there and just murder all of those people. I talked to William Kunstler, the Panther lawyer, about it. He was negotiating, and the state was about to give in—the prisoners were going to get some of their demands met, when Rockefeller sent his men in to just murder everybody. They tried to say the prisoners slit the necks of the hostages, but not one hostage’s neck was slit. Not one. All of them died from the firing of the state.
“That they could just go in like that and destroy everybody just rocked my world. Kunstler had tried to negotiate, and Rockefeller went in there and murdered everybody—hostages and prisoners alike. To me, how could the government actually do that when there were negotiations going on? What were the prisoners demanding? Better food and more books in the library. And to be murdered because of that? I was very depressed, and Kunstler said that was the most depressing moment in his life too.
“When that happened I was in the college adapter program, going to New York City Community College on Jay Street and Borough Hall in Brooklyn and getting my associate’s degree. I wanted to work with youth and get into social work programs. I majored in sociology and minored in elementary education.
“In 1972 I went to work at the Willa Hargrove Mental Health Clinic in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. I became the youth director of their summer camp and their after-school program.
“Working in a mental health clinic was deep. I started reading about black psychology, and I studied linguistics and learned a lot about Ebonics.
“I would see black children walk in, and if the diagnosis was schizophrenia or hyperactivity, the answer was always to give them chemotherapy, Ritalin, or Melperone. We had black clinicians who were using Eurocentric treatment and Eurocentric analysis and diagnosis and prognosis.
“I used to argue with them. I’d say, ‘No, they don’t need chemotherapy. You need to visit their families, get to know them, get to know more about their history.’ But the black clinicians were not culturally black. That’s why it’s not enough to say, ‘He’s the first black this or that.’ Look at Clarence Thomas, a [Supreme Court] judge, or Condoleezza Rice, she’s the secretary of state. But can you say they’re black? Hello! And it’s the same thing in every field.
“Every black clinician should be required to know about the black experience in America. How can you treat black children if you’re not aware of the social and interpersonal impact of racism on a child? I don’t see how you can do that.
“I’d say to them, ‘You need to take a course in black history so you understand.’
“Not every black child is angry. A lot of people say to me, ‘Why are you so angry?’ First of all, I have no problem being angry. Even the Bible says, ‘Anger, but sin not.’ But what is considered as hyperactivity or other diagnoses is really our black culture. It isn’t a sickness or an illness; it is misunderstood. As an example, the school environment and the curriculum isn’t geared for the black child. All the studies to prepare classrooms are for the white, middle-class child.
“There is no understanding of this. Everything is geared to the white, middleclass child. In society, what is dressing for success? A shirt and tie?
“What is the language, standard English? No. Proper English, because Americans are messing up the King’s English.
“It’s how you walk, how you talk, how you think. You basically have to turn white to make it. Quote, unquote.
“Whoever has the power imposes their value system. If you’re out of power, whatever your culture is, it’s not going to be the standard. That’s why you wear a shirt and tie, because unless you do, you’re not going to get hired.
“When I was six years old, my mother made me wear a shirt and tie for my class picture. After that, I have never worn a shirt and tie in my life. I wear Nehru suits and collarless suits. I have them made, and once in a while, when they come back in style, I gather them up.
“I can’t go in to a job interview and say, ‘What your name be?’ Which is a fine way to speak. But it’s not acceptable. If I have power, and you speak the way you speak, I would be able to say to you, ‘You’re not going to get this job unless you learn some Ebonics’—the opposite of what happens to us.
“Look at rap music and the way whites react to it. This is what we’re up against. And the esteem questions—I know people in college, brilliant black men and women who think they speak badly. They won’t raise their hands and ask questions, because they haven’t ‘learned how to speak.’
“And it’s the same with religion. After I got my associate’s degree, I went to Hunter College in 1976. It took me twelve years to get a four-year degree because I was in and out, working at the mental health clinic, spending a lot of time in the movement, and it was during this time that I met the Reverend Herbert Daughtry, my closest friend and pastor. His church is the House of the Lord Pentacostal Church at 415 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, between Bond and Nevin.
“In 1981 I moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant on Lewis between Putnam and Madison, and I’ve lived there ever since. I found a beautiful brownstone for reasonable rent right around the corner from the Willa Hargrove Mental Health Clinic. It wasn’t far from Reverend Daughtry’s church, and it was there that he unwrapped for me the European contamination of Christianity and presented its African and its revolutionary essence.
“The Panther movement had given me my politics and some of my culture. I would sometimes go listen to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam up on 116th Street in Harlem, and some of his people were trying to recruit me as well, but I just couldn’t get with their lack of involvement in the political struggle. They were more institution-builders, but I did like their morality. Don’t get high. Clean up yourself. Learn how to eat right. Respect your women. Stand up. That was good. They employed people and cleaned up brothers coming out of prison, but I just couldn’t get with Islam and the lack of political involvement in the struggle.
“When I joined Reverend Daughtry, he was extremely political, very African-centered with the religion. Because all my life I had thought Christianity was a white man’s religion, but Reverend Daughtry showed me that the origin of all major religions came out of Africa, whether it was Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or African traditional religions, and that Jesus Christ himself was black, that in the Bible it says he had ‘hair of lamb’s wool, feet of burnt brass.’ When they described Jesus in visions, he was always black. And the areas he dwelt in—the Garden of Eden was down near the Euphrates River in Ethiopia, and I began to say, ‘This is not a white man’s religion.’
“The white man brought the Bible to Africa, gave the Bible to the African, and took his land. Missionaries came and pronounced us heathens.
“The white Baptist ministers for a century used the Bible to justify slavery, but you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. What you have to do is reinterpret Scriptures, and the particular passage relating to this is the curse of Ham.
“According to the Bible, Noah’s three sons, Ham, Japheth, and Shem, repopulated the earth. The lineage of Shem was the lineage of Jesus Christ. Shem had Tora, and Tora had Abraham, and he had Isaac, and Jacob had the twelve tribes, and out of the House of Judah came Jesus.
“But Ham meant black and warm, and the Hamites migrated to Africa, and that’s why the whites who knew that Ham was black said that after the flood, when Noah was naked and drunk in the vineyard, his two brothers Japheth and Shem walked backward and put a cloth over him. Ham looked on his father in his nakedness, and the Bible said that Ham was cursed because of that. And that is where the whites got ‘the curse of Ham.’ Therefore black Hamites who went to Africa were cursed to be slaves.
“The Bible said, ‘Curse ye, Ham.’ The Bible also said, ‘Noah cursed Ham to be a slave to his brethren Japheth.’ And if you look at Japheth’s lineage, it goes to Europe, through the Celtics, the Germanics, and the Caucasian Mountains—that’s where you get Caucasian—and Ham’s lineage goes to Africa, so they concluded that Ham should be a slave to Japheth.
“But read the Scriptures further, and you’ll see that first of all, God didn’t curse Ham. Noah did. So you have to question the validity of a curse from someone who’s drunk in the vineyard, even if it is Noah.
“It’s a great irony that the whites used the Bible to enslave blacks, but that’s what they did. What we had to do in the black theology movement was change the tone. Reverend Daughtry, and A. Rod Gilmore, Cornell West, the Reverend Albert Cleeves, they began to unwrap the European contamination of Christianity and reinterpret the Bible.
“When they started to use religion, at first it was liberating. That’s why during slavery it was against the law for blacks to read, let alone read the Bible. If it was brainwashing and making us docile, why did they forbid us reading it?
“You could die for reading the Bible, because they knew liberation was in that Bible. They knew that when Harriet Tubman read the Bible she had to be free. When minister Nat Turner read the Bible, he had to be free. Because the Bible was liberating. It was a liberating gospel.
“When the whites saw how liberating it was, they reinterpreted it. ‘Love your enemy.’ ‘The curse of Ham. You’re supposed to be our slaves.’ They reinterpreted everything. Jesus became white. They made white pictures of Jesus all over the place. White supremacy took over the Bible.
“The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses, and they were religious people, and they justified it by saying, ‘These people are cursed.’ How could you come out of church and get your family and enjoy a lynching? What a contradiction! And they could do that because they were convinced that we were cursed people that had to be destroyed—or enslaved. People can only do that if they are convinced this is the right thing to do.
“So when you get to the 1960s, it was exciting when you get Martin Luther King, and Minister Malcolm X, and Reverend Herbert Daughtry, and Reverend Albert Cleeves all saying, ‘No, no, that is not what Christianity is all about. It’s not a white man’s religion. You’re not cursed. Jesus was not white. He’s black.’
“So first you get a revival of Christianity, and it’s the same Christian Bible that the slaves were not allowed to read, and then the whites reinterpret it so they can use it as a tool of enslavement, and then you get the ’60s, where we revived it so we could get back to its original intent.”