 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the San Francisco Public Library and so glad to see you here in person today and hi to everybody online as we are streaming on SFPL's YouTube page. We'll be joined shortly by Kimberly Cox Marshall, daughter of Field Marshall Don Cox and Steve Wasserman, Hay Day's publisher and executive director to discuss the legacy of Don Cox, the Panther Party and the new book Making Revolution. I'm Shauna Sherman, program manager for the African-American Center, co-hosting the event in partnership with Hay Day Books. Before we get started, it must be said that the San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytusha Lonely Peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As an uninvited guest, we affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramaytusha community. What territory are you joining us from today? Find more information on native lands from the links in the chat or at your local library. November is also Native American Heritage Month. Please check out the events we have planned for the celebration on SFPL.org. In addition, we have many, many other upcoming events. I'd like to highlight for you now. Information to register for these online is in the chat online and also on SFPL.org events page. So first off, this Tuesday at 7 p.m., author Gene Slater will talk about the new book Freedom to Discriminate, How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America. Freedom to discriminate uncovers Realtors definitive role in segregating America and shaping modern conservative ideology. Drawing on confidential documents from leaders in the real estate industry, Gene Slater reveals how Realtors systematically created justified residential segregation. Register for this online event at SFPL.org. Next we have on Wednesday at 7 p.m. also online, Kevin Simmons reads from his new book, The Monster I Am Today, Leontine Price and A Life Inverse. Joining the reading and celebration are poets Jane Cagney, the former SF Poet Laureate, DeVora Major, and Soprano Valletta Brinson who will offer a special musical performance. You can also register for this program on SFPL.org. And on Tuesday, November 16th, Tony Platt, author, academic and activist, and Milton Reynolds, educator, author, and activist will discuss Platt's book, Grave Matters. Grave Matters is the history of the treatment of Native Americans, Native remains in California, and the story of the complicated relationship between researcher and researched. Platt travels the globe in search of the answer to the question, how do we reconcile a place of extraordinary beauty with its horrific past? So this is online as well as live at the main library. So register online and get more information on SFPL.org. On the same page selection this month is Why We Swim by Bonnie Sui. And now to our main event. We're in for a great discussion today with Kimberly Cox Marshall, daughter of Field Marshal Don Cox, and Steve Wasserman, Hay Day's publisher and executive director discussing the posthumous Making Revolution, My Life in the Black Panther Party. In Making Revolution, Don Cox recounts the story of his work as the party's Field Marshal in charge of gun running to planning arm attacks, tales which were told for the first time in this book written by Cox in the 1980s while exiled in France and brought to life by his daughter who is with us today. Born in Missouri in 1936, Don Cox joined the Black Panther Party one year after its founding in 1966. Appointed as the party's Field Marshal known as DC, he was inducted into the party's High Command as a member of its Central Committee and founded the party's San Francisco office. In 1970, he helped open the party's international section in Algiers. Two years later, he resigned from the party except for a brief trip between when he entered and exited the United States incognito using a false passport. He lived in France in the village of Camp Surrey, I'm sorry I can't pronounce that, I'm sorry I didn't mean to put it in there, where he died at age 74 in February 2011. Details in the book about organizing missions, arming the party and insight into the party's organizational leadership is a fascinating and instructional read and now I'll introduce our two speakers today. Kimberly Ruth Von Cox Marshall was born and raised in San Francisco to Donald and Iris Cox. After attending schools in the San Francisco Bay area, she worked in a brokerage and investment banking firms as a wire operator and cashier before starting an IT career. Now retired, she lives in the East Bay with her husband and enjoys spending time with her sons and grandsons. Steve Wasserman is Hayday's publisher and executive director. He is a former editor at large for Yale University Press, an editorial director of Times Books, Random House and publisher of Hill and Wang and the Noon Day Press at Farrar, Strauss and Grio. A founder of the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities at the USC, Wasserman was a principal architect of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books during years he was editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. So without further ado, please welcome Kimberly Cox and Steve Wasserman. Well good afternoon and thank you for the lovely introduction. I should say by way of introduction, yes, my name is Steve Wasserman and I'm publisher of Hayday and have the privilege of acting as midwife to the birth of this remarkable memoir by the late DC, Don Cox, the father of his daughter, Kimberly Cox Marshall, who joins me today in what I hope will be an interesting conversation. In the introduction that was given to me, it managed to skip anything actually relevant to why it is that I am here as Kimberly's interlocutor and I should declare a personal interest in all of this. I came of age in Berkeley, my parents having moved there in 1963. I went to high school at Berkeley High School during the tumultuous 1960s and in 1966 when the Black Panther Party was founded, many of its early members were students at Berkeley High School and my very good friend, the late Ronald Stevenson and I led a student strike in 1968 in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And Ronnie Stevenson was the founding chair of the Black Student Union at Berkeley High School, one of the first in the nation. He was an early recruit to the Black Panther Party and together he organized the black students, I organized the white kids and together we led a strike of about 2,000 students out of a 3,400 population with a single demand to establish a black history and African American studies department. And to our shock and surprise, we won. The school board exceeded to the demand and that fall of 1968, the first such program in any public high school in the United States was created and I am happy to report that 50 years later in 2018, when I came back to Berkeley to take the helm of this little independent non-profit publisher Heyday, they held a 50th celebration for that department which still continues at Berkeley High School and to my shock, I also learned that of the many such departments that were created in its wake, there is only one left at Berkeley High School and despite the woke moment, despite the upwelling of black lives matter, the contest over the curricula in the nation's public schools with the controversy over so-called critical race theory which is just a fancy word by saying we should actually know our real history, the good, the bad and the ugly, they discovered the organizers, the various teachers at Berkeley High School that alas, there was only one person left alive who had helped found the department and that was this white Jewish kid me who had helped in alliance with many others to create this department so I was honored to give the keynote address at the Malcolm X dinner in 2019, a year after the 50th anniversary and this is a long way of saying that I came of age at a time when the Black Panther Party was just beginning to build, I knew several of its founding leaders though I never had the privilege of meeting DC, your father but Bobby Seale and others, I attended several days of the Huey Newton trial and in fact when we were publishing our underground high school radical newspaper, it was Bobby Seale who said we could use the typesetting equipment at the then headquarters on Shattuck Avenue and so we used to go there so that is a kind of introduction to just let you know that I have some personal stake in this story and have been following the various histories and memoirs of the party that have been written in the last five decades, many of them self-serving, some of them enlightening but taken together they give you a portrait of a party whose impact and legacy has skipped a generation and with the release of even feature films like the recent one on the life and murder of Fred Hampton, the party's leader in Chicago, it is clear that interest in the Black Panther Party trying to understand how it came into existence, what it stood for, trying to strip away the myths that have encrusted it over the years has been of considerable interest to a growing number of people which is why when five years ago I came to Berkeley to take as I say the helm of this small independent press, I was delighted through a mutual friend to make the acquaintance of Kimberly and how this memoir came to be published is about as interesting a story at least to me as the memoir itself so perhaps we might begin by asking you how it was that you came to know that your father who you had not seen in many many years because he was living in exile in the south of France and you were here in the United States and during that whole period as I understand it you didn't have much contact with him how did you learn that he had begun to write and indeed had even completed this book and what did he say to you with respect to urging you to find a home for it? Well, what happened I went to visit him in October of 2010 and I went to visit him and he came out the room with this gigantic binder and I said well what do you want me to do with this and he goes read it and I'm like okay and so I open it up and it's his memoirs of his time of the Panthers and I speed read but this book I mean it was like God how about that tall and I sat there and by 3 o'clock in the morning I was done and I said oh my God this is my daddy you know you grow up your parents tell you right and wrong and what I was reading blew my mind but I knew we needed it and so I went talking to him because he stayed up waiting for me and I go well here here you go and he goes no and I go what do you mean no and he goes here you take this and I'm like oh my God one of the reasons was I didn't speak French so I only took a carry on and this binder was like weighing about 5 pounds and I'm like oh my God but I was determined so I said okay I'll bring it home and I shopped around I shopped around and at the time people just weren't interested but I found someone and he's a famous person he's written screenplays and many books and I met up with him and he's like oh yeah I'm so excited because he had written a book regarding the Panthers and the weathermen and so I met him in Austin and well the next thing I know I text him about two days later and say well what did you think of the book and he goes oh it's fantastic and I'm like oh great because he's with a very famous agency and so I waited and I emailed again and I emailed again and I emailed again and I did not hear from him and I'm like oh no this is not good and so about two months passed and I couldn't sleep anymore and I have a girlfriend that works for a very famous law firm and I said would you take my book because they do pro bono work they get people off a death row and I said would you throw it in and what happened was the head of the firm John Kecker came down and they said it was like Moses when the seas parted and he goes I'll take that and well he took my book he wrote a letter to the gentleman and within seven days I got my book back and the first thing in the letter that John received was oh your reputation precedes you so I was not worried I got my book back and what happened he had written a book John and his attorney Liz has knew Steve and she in turn gave it to Steve and well here we are. I should say that when I got a call from someone I knew and admired Liz Hasse the attorney who agreed to represent the book on Kimberly's behalf frankly my heart sank because Don Cox was not known as a writer he was known as a terrific speaker at the rallies he was known as an extraordinary organizer he was known for saying telling the truth and let the chips fall he said what he meant he meant what he said he was as honorable as the day is long and he was a man of great courage but he was not known as a writer and while it's true that everybody may have a story not everyone is gifted enough to tell it and usually when someone leaves at their death a manuscript frankly in my experience it's really not very good it's earnest it's heartfelt but there are problems with it it would need to be edited so when Liz told me about this manuscript I was of course interested I had written publicly about the Panthers before I was familiar with the literature and as I say I knew any number of former Panthers and had kept up relationships over the years so I took the home I took the manuscript home and kind of like Kimberly I stayed up all night reading it and with each passing page my excitement mounted because I felt myself in the hands of a man who was as it were from the grave honestly grappling with a whole series of issues and challenges that had presented themselves to him at the time and then after his period in the Panthers had ended he was still haunted by that experience and what it meant and the various personalities some of them quite charismatic and compelling that he had encountered along the way and the other thing that struck me is that he was interested in a warts and all portrait he wasn't going to simplify matters just because they might be served the ongoing dominant narrative if something disablaging had happened he was going to say yeah this happened too and we need to take responsibility for that so unlike many of the memoirs that have been published and unlike some of the histories that have been published he was interested in a three dimensional honest portrait nearest he could manage it himself and as nearest his talents could permit to create this well rounded deep dive into the panther history as well as to tease out some lessons that still might be relevant and though he passed away many years before dying in if I'm not mistaken 2011 so that's ten ten years ago now so it just occurs to me we're publishing the book on the tenth anniversary of his death so that that that makes me feel humble in that regard there was something about the work he had done with the party and the work he had done trying to reckon with its legacy that has grown in importance it's not a footnote to history but it's part of any history worthy of the name and I wonder if you could recall to me or at least share with the audience those of you who are here in the auditorium and those of you who are listening as we stream this what the portrait of the man you encountered in the memoir of his life and the man you knew whom you call affectionately daddy was there a gap between that man and the other? Tell us about that. I mean in the forward I wrote in the book I talk about how he would pick me up from San Francisco ballet school and a little side note to that I didn't know him but Steve would come and pick up his sister with his father so I have known Steve well I should say ran into him ever since I was about four or five years old but that man who would pick me up we'd drive through Golden Gate Park I'd sit in the back of the Austin Healy with the top down and wave like I was Miss America whatever I wanted to do my daddy never told me no where I hear some kids their parents oh well you can't do that if I said something that wasn't stupid okay go out and do it but then I read this book and here's a man that did some things that I was very shocked the actions that he did to go and shoot someone unarmed that didn't know because we always he always had guns in the house he was a hunter when he was in Missouri and whenever he cleaned the guns he'd go no you know don't pick up that gun because if you ever pick up a gun and you point it at someone you shoot to kill and as you can see to this day I'm 64 years old and I remember that and so to reconcile you know that man that would put me on his shoulders and we'd go to movies go to Tattage Grill if any of you know that about that in San Francisco to this man that did armed exercises it was it was hard it still is because one side is my daddy and another side is a revolutionary and so it's it's it's hard but I've had time to kind of balance it out one of the things you learn in this book is that Don Cox was one of the older Panthers you know Panthers generally I mean Lil Bobby Hutton who was the first to die killed by the Oakland police and the immediate aftermath of the of King's assassination in April 1968 was the youngest recruit to the party and was just 17 when he was murdered Don Cox on the other hand like Eldridge Cleaver was older in their thirties when they when they joined the party more or less Bobby Seales age and and they came to the party with more experience of the world than many other people had your father was a professional photographer had a successful business here in San Francisco had had migrated from Missouri to Mendon Low Park if I'm not mistaken originally and for him his political coming of age was very much prompted much like Bobby Seales as well as a whole generation of other people with the mounting militancy of a civil rights movement whose demands were not being heard in their depth or or their swiftness as the times seem to warrant and particularly when Malcolm X was killed in 1965 that was a kind of turning point for people the Watts rebellion of that later that year in August also was motivating as well as many of the students and others who came back from the freedom summer of 1964 and flooded in back to schools in the Bay Area Mario Savio among them and there was the auto rose sit-ins and the and the protests against the Woolworth and others who had been discriminating and your father in fact there's a picture in the book he's he's you know dressed very Natalie protesting peacefully of the discriminatory policies of one of the department stores if I'm not mistaken so from that to training folks for for armed struggle and carrying out as he reveals in the book even before he had joined the party an armed attack on police officers in the city of San Francisco which brought him to the attention of Huey Newton and others and so when he was made Field Marshal he was given responsibility for as he details in the book for the for the for the stockpiling of arms as well as training people in their use. That was something excuse me when he would go get the guns he would go to Nevada and he had a GTO and at that time that was a pretty fast car and the backlash though we'd go home my grandmother would drop off my mother and I because they lived not far my grandparents and there's the FBI just surrounding our car you know and and looking and what are they looking at no one's in the car they know where my daddy is they have to but it was that was very hard you know for my mom but she'd get out the car and just go shoot shoot like they were flies or something like they were going to leave but they did but it was it was very hard it's very hard. You have a passage in the forward that you were kind enough to write to this book that I wonder if we might take just one minute if you're it's just a paragraph long and give you some of the flavor of of a small girl's vision of her father's growing stature in a revolutionary movement and you recount how you were going at the time to a Lutheran school and I wonder if you would share with the audience and the listenership this paragraph that begins another time. Another time when I was going to a Lutheran school I wore my hair in a curly afro one day how proud I was until I got to school. The principal told me my hair looked a mess. I promptly called daddy and I don't remember what I told him but the next thing I knew here comes daddy and about four or five panthers looking fine and sharp and all black turtlenecks pants leather coats and berets. I never heard my daddy raise his voice. I think I would have crapped in my pants if I did and when he spoke he always spoke eloquently and softly and looked you directly in the eyes. For people who didn't know him that alone would make them crack in their pants. I didn't hear what he said to the principal that day but at the end of the year I left that school for good. Now DC was the object as were the panthers more generally of a excoriating satire written by the famed author Tom Wolf in a bestselling book that would be called Radical Chic, Malmowing the Flak Catchers which recounted a evening spent at the Park Avenue penthouse of famous conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife at which a party was held to raise monies for the panther to raise money for the panthers in 1921 which was a notorious case. Ultimately all the charges would be dropped trumped up case trying to break the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party and DC had flown out to make an appearance to appeal at the well-heeled crowd what would later be called limousine liberals, white folks of deep pockets and kind hearts and with a pronounced affection for white wine and canapes who would gather in the plush penthouse of Leonard Bernstein and his wife and we would hear the appeal by Don Cox and others about why it was they should dig deep in their pockets and help aid the cause to bail these good people and get them free and Tom Wolf was an uninvited guest writer at this party and he later wrote many thousands of words in New York magazine and as I say it would later be published as a book which would become a bestseller and he coined the phrase Radical Chic and he mocked the proceedings, mocked them viciously and DC was one of the objects of his satire and this was a terrible moment in which the reputation of honest and good-hearted people were demonized and Don Cox recounts that story in this book and he gets back at Tom Wolf in really terrific ways and I commend it to your attention because there was a great hit song I think the Marvelettes, it was called Don't Mess With Bill, you didn't want to mess with DC. When you were reading that book in that evening you were reading it in manuscript and you say you encountered things that amazed you, that even shocked you, what were some of those things that you thought were so compelling? Everything. Well, everything is a big word in that sort but what especially sticks out. Those, the armed attacks against the police station, you know, that just floored me and just some of the other things, you know, when, like I say, your parents tell you, you do things, if you see something that's not right, you say something but when he went up in the house in Baltimore and the man was getting tortured, that was why he had to leave because since he wasn't there, he just ran up some stairs, they were trying to get him any type of way and that's how they were going to get DC was on the charge of torturing the gentleman but it turned out he was an agent and that's why he was being tortured. To me, my parent would have stopped that but now I understand why he couldn't. That was very shocking and just some of the things he even had to go through. In the book it talks about a shootout at Fillmore but what he doesn't tell, one officer he took his gun and he shot through his afro and it was a good thing he had a big afro because he would have shot him in his head and the next day, you know, he had to go to court and the judge says, well, you know, what are you doing in my court looking like this because he had a split down the middle of his hair and like I said, my father spoke very well and he proceeded to tell him and he goes, oh, I'm sorry that happened so, you know, it's just things that, again, as a parent, but I tell my kids I, you know, and what daddy told me, he turns out and he does the opposite but I try to say to myself he was doing it for us, he was doing it for blacks at the time because nobody else was and now what do we have, we have black lives matter and what I think, you know, one of the things daddy wrote, mistakes of the past, you know, nobody listens and this is what I really like about daddy's book is that people need to see what they went through so it doesn't happen again because nothing will come out of it because we needed the panthers at that time. If we didn't have them, I don't know what would have happened, you know, how we are right now but we need them again and more, to me, black lives matter is great but they're not revolutionaries. We need to make some noise and I don't think we are now. One of the things about this memoir that your father wrote which I think took some courage and in that, and that was the kind of courage that a true revolutionary exhibits and he had it, it was part of his temperament and so toward the end of the memoir, spoiler alert here, he, while recognizing the tremendous blow to the party that occurred when the FBI and other assorted state agencies began to do their best to pit one member against the other and in their so-called Cointel program in which they tried by every possible means with lies, subterfuge, dirty tricks and worse to divide and pit people one against the other and to create factions where there didn't need to be factions, while acknowledging that DC in this memoir also takes on some self-criticism as well and with your indulgence, I know we're here because we're alive but these words live too and I feel especially on the 10th anniversary that we can't have a gathering to talk about his book, we need to give DC a chance to speak too so if you'll bear with me, I just want to read a couple of passages that he wrote and these words really, it's not a huge exaggeration to say these words were written with his own blood, they were written with sacrifice and with courage. He writes, there can be no leader without a group of followers and so we must take some blame. I submit my personal history as a case study yet the problem is much deeper than anything I have exposed. The very nature of the campaign to free Huey and that was a campaign when Huey Newton was accused of the killing of a police officer in Oakland in October of 1967 for which he was imprisoned, went to jail and there was a notorious trial and the slogan free Huey was created. He says the very nature of the campaign to free Huey as conceived by Eldridge Cleaver who was the party's minister of information was in fact the creation of a cult of personality. Newton became our God. He became the sole possessor of truth as every word became the law and line of the party. I do not agree writes DC and here this book is quite exceptional. Not everyone agrees with this sentiment. I do not agree he writes with the widespread idea that it was the repression by law enforcement agencies that destroyed the Black Panther Party. Of course they did much harm but each blatant act of repression was accompanied by growing support among the people. The public repression the party received was clear evidence for all to see that the things we were saying were true and after the murder of Fred Hampton in his bed as he slept even our staunchest detractors began giving consideration to what we had been saying. And then he writes concluding we refuse our own history by blaming every negative thing that occurred on Cointel Pro that is a very convenient way of avoiding analysis that also gives the pigs much more credit than they merit. When Huey fell we so desperately wanted to save him from their clutches and possibly the gas chamber that we glorified him far and wide north and south east and west. The actual Huey could not survive the Huey we had created. How many could have resisted? We killed Huey with our love. Now those words even in a week a bust a beautiful bust of Huey Newton has now been erected on the street corner in Oakland where he was sadly gunned down in August of 1989 at the age of 47 in a drug deal gone bad. That bust is a beautiful bust and is burnished to a high high gloss and this book is a contribution to a historical understanding that refuses to regard any one of us even the most talented as a saint. And in that without renouncing any of the revolutionary acts that he had committed is one of the chief merits of this remarkable memoir and this remarkable man who was your father. That is not really a question. It's just a kind of testament of a witness to a very powerful and important work. Well I agree because one of the things like you're asking me what he did. One thing daddy was going to do was bust Huey out of jail. The only reason it didn't happen little Bobby and Martin Luther King were killed the week before and he told my brother he goes I knew the day I was going to die and not many people do but I only thank God. I don't thank God that what happened to the two people did but at least my father wasn't sacrificed because there was no way he was going in to San Rita and get Huey out of jail. Like he said try exercising going up 11 flights of stairs. It was at the Alameda County Courthouse that DC as he recounts in the book was charged was tasked by the Central Committee of the Black Panther Party at the time with creating a plan that would a realistic plan. That would try to break Huey out of the jail. And this plan was meticulously worked on and called off at the last possible moment but unbeknownst to DC Eldridge Cleaver had concocted a plan. A sort of spur of the moment plan to attack the Oakland police which led to the shootout and the ultimate killing and arrest. An injury visited upon Cleaver and a small group of Panthers who had opened fire on the Oakland police several days after King had been killed. Tell us something about the reception. We're publishing the book in paperback finally. We published it in hardcover a couple of years ago about two years or so ago three years ago now. And we think there's an audience for the book a readership for the book that would enjoy a somewhat cheaper price on the book because we think it's an important story. And you know people should be able to access it on any platform they want whether it's on a audible book or or a e-book or a paperback. But tell us about some of the reception of the book in hardcover as you made your rounds. What was that like the original name. Well we talk about the original name. The original name of my father's book was just another nigga my life in the Black Panther Party. And you don't know I don't know I will read something that it'll let you know why one of the reasons why he named it. Well he wrote it in the 80s and when nigga wasn't a bad word to us it was a term of endearment. And like my grandfather said I'll never be a nigga. That's what other people call this. We were niggas. But he said he was getting leaps and bounds in his in his consciousness. And he said I don't recall any specific catalyst. It was probably the sum total of all my experience. But the day finally dawned on me when I realized that no matter how I dressed no matter how I carried myself when I left a small circle of people who knew me and walked down the street. I was just another nigga. I was 31 years old like they say better late than never. So the first book was hardcover and it was called just another nigga and we kept it like that. But it didn't get everywhere. I was happy because it was in the museum in Washington and right next to it was a man I called uncle Kwame Turing also known as Stokely Carmichael. But we wanted everyone to hear what he had to say because what he has to say is important. So we said let's change the name. And here we are we're making revolution my life in the Black Panther. I want to add when the manuscript the original manuscript was read by me. Everything about it was DC's including the title which he had insisted on to Kimberly virtually on his deathbed that this is the title I want. And there was an epigraph by W. B. Du Bois which perhaps suggests a rationale for that. W. B. Du Bois was once asked in an interview and he responded to the question. He said in my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a nigga. So this title was a kind of homage a bitter mocking but proud embrace of a term of derision but turned inside out and used as a cudgel. Now when I got the manuscript the question is how do you edit a dead man. I mean if DC were alive I might try to sit down with DC DC DC not come on. You cannot in today you this this is not going to work. Let's talk about this and he might have given way he might have he might not have you know he might have said no no no this is what I want. But we would have had that conversation as one does with any author you know and you might have said about the third chapter you know DC maybe the third chapter should open the book. That should be the first chapter and maybe this passage is a little bit too long and maybe could you give us some more about that. But the man was dead. So I and my staff had a choice. And by the way the title was very controversial among the staff. There were people who said we can't know we cannot do this. And I made the argument the book is too important. The man is too important. And we have to we have a choice. You could either publish it as he wrote it or not publish it. You know I mean that's the choice. But you can't change the words. You can't do that. Now so we publish it as he wrote it. And it is a very fine book. Not entirely unexpectedly. You know we got some pushback in the publicity. There were people in radio stations on it. We can't even pronounce the name. Nothing but an N word. Doesn't quite have the same ring. Nothing nothing but a and then they wouldn't say anything. So the viewer can like imagine whatever. Right. Certain review publications had trouble just printing. So they wouldn't. And there were African-American bookstores all over the country including Marcus books. I had a long conversation with its wonderful proprietor. And she looked at me and she said I love the book. I love the book. The title is a problem for us. The problem it is a problem. I cannot really put this book. People it's going to be a problem. So. We decided we would put it out in paperback. And I came to Kimberly with this challenge. Can we in with a good conscience without betraying DC. Can we change the name of the title for the paperback. And can you live with that. Can I live with that. Can we live with this. And she we thought about it. And and and and and what we came out is we published it. She honored the promise to DC. We published the book in hardcover. It exists. There it is. We did it. It can't be that can't be taken away. So and the answer is. Yeah. My daddy would have wanted his words to be read. Let's come up with a title that works making revolution. That was what he was about. That is what he tried to do. My life in the Black Panther Party. It felt like we were honoring the book. So that's how we got to that place. But it was. But it took us a while to get there. Maybe we should have some questions from the audience or some comments. We have some time I think to do that. Maybe there are some people who've bestowed themselves while listening to us. Natter on in this way about a man I wish I had met. But whose words made me a respect. Admire even love him. Yes sir. And there was some discussion about his international work. You know what led him to travel and relocate to Northern Africa. Algeria and his work there. The question I'll repeat it for those of you who might not have heard it as. Could there be some discussion of his international work. What caused him to go to Algiers and later to Europe. And the legacy and experience of that work. Thank you. Well what happened when he when I was talking about Baltimore. What it happened they were torturing this this man that turned to be out to be an agent. Like it was over 100 degrees during that time and they had this man in the closet. And so when daddy ran up the stairs they stopped him. But once he was in that house I mean he could have they could have sent him to jail. So he got himself together because that's when the the split was kind of starting to happen too. So he just got himself together and he waited until he could get to Algiers. And from there. Until the split happened. Turns out he did stay there for about four years. He did photography work. I learned that from Elaine Mahal. And once he knew he couldn't stay there. He ended up going to Paris. And learned how to speak the language watching TV. And ended up marrying a wonderful woman from there. They aren't together anymore but ended up living there. And most of the people they go down to the south of France. That sounds real romantic but daddy lived in the mountains. So they have a little summer homes because in August that's when they have their vacations. So daddy would always go down to this place called Camps, Sir Leology. And it's just was 20 people and in August during the vacation they'd have about 80. But that's where he lived out the rest of his time in exile. I'd like to, just if I may add, just a couple of contextualizing things there. So Don Cox was instrumental along with Eldridge Cleaver and others in founding the international section of the Black Panther Party in, if I'm not mistaken, 1970. 1971, 1970, 1970. And when Kimberly refers to a split, yes. After Huey Newton was released from prison in August of 1970 and sought to exert more personal control over the party. There were both issues of personality as well as competing visions over the party's strategic direction. As well as the unacknowledged, I hate to even call it mischief making by the FBI, mischief making is too benign a term. The outright evil that was being done at the highest levels of the US administration to divide and destroy and pit people against each other, often in murderous ways. And that was being done constantly through the use of phony letters, phony telephone calls and basically jacking people up. And to deepen both real and imagined suspicions that range the whole gamut from personal relations to ideological splits. So that is some of the background of this. I'm going to come back. We have a person in the audience, Jonah Raskin, who knew many of these people and visited them, including DC in Algiers. And I'm going to come to you, Jonah, in a minute. There's a person in the back who has a hand up, has been waiting for some time. So we'll go to that person first and then we'll come to Jonah. Yes. Yeah, I'm from Oakland. Do you have a question related to the subject at hand? Any meditation to get my dreaming going? Do you want a picture at the end of the book or on the cover? Do you use your picture? Because my sherman lets you blast at me. You had this man ecstatic and hopeful and great pain on the cover. What on the back was sherman lets? So the question has to do with how to convey the essence of a book by the use of a visual image either on the cover or the back cover. With respect to this particular book, on the hard cover we only used all type display. And on the paperback we use excellent photograph taken by Stephen Shames, who was one of the great photographers. There were several, even many, who captured in real time many of the images of the Panthers. And this photograph of Don Cox is he's waiting to speak at a November 1969 rally here at Kesar Stadium here in San Francisco to speak against the war in Vietnam. And we thought there was something in the look of his face that suggested a man who was both in his time and also had his eye on the future, had his eye on the prize. And there was nobility in his entire, the way he inhabited his body bespoke a kind of innate nobility which I think you can feel in the sentences that he wrote and in the life he lived. Jonah? I'd like to move on to another person. Yes. Jonah? I was with the mother of us all to the edge of the city and the Mediterranean was the parapet, I think you call it a parapet. And he said that during the warfare independence by the Algerians there were so many Algerians who were slaughtered by the French that when they dumped the bodies into the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean turned red from their blood. So he was very aware of what the bloody warf to be free of the French. And at the same time there was another side of him I remember once we were outdoors and there was a full moon and we were looking up at the moon and DC said in the US because of racism and segregation and genocide I couldn't really appreciate the beauty of the moon but here in Algeria I can. So the recollection that Jonah has shared with us when he was visiting a number of the Panthers in 1970 just a mere 51 years ago. He remembers vividly being taken to the Parapet that fronts on the Mediterranean from Algiers and being told of the ways in which the French during the Algerian war for independence had committed many massacres and dumped the bodies into the sea. And that so many that the sea itself had turned red and he recalls Don Cox confiding to him that when DC was living in the United States because of the ways in which the accumulated histories of our broken country, its racism, its segregation, its genocidal manias had weighed as it were so heavily on the brain of the living that it was nearly if not almost completely impossible just to enjoy the beauty of a full moon. And in Algiers he felt freed of that burden or at least he didn't experience its suffocations as heavily and so for the first time in his life he felt a free man. It reminds me a little bit of George Orwell. George Orwell who wrote brilliantly about the ways in which the jack boot of the state could be pressing in on a person's neck. And he wrote about the totalitarianism and its suffocation so memorably in 1984, his imperishable dystopian novel. But too little remarked upon is the ways in which Orwell wrote brilliantly about tending to the beauty of the roses he tried to raise in his garden. And one of San Francisco's best authors, Rebecca Solnit, has just published a book called Orwell's Roses and it is a revolutionary pursuit. You know the phrase bread and roses, you need the bread without which you die. But if you don't have the roses, if you don't have the joy and the beauty, you need that too to live a completely fulfilled and free life. And Don had that with his, I think you can see it in his photography, in his love of trying to capture the light and the objects. That never really left him, I don't think. He still would take pictures in France of flowers, the bees, sunflowers, because he had a honeybee farm until he found out he was allergic to bees. Then he went to potpourri making. There is a marvelous photograph, I don't know, holding it up probably doesn't work. There is a marvelous photograph of D.C. with a very beautific smile, his glasses slightly slipped down on his nose in a bit of an older age, cradling a, I think it's a Nikon or a Canon camera, and there is something so beautiful in that photograph that it just makes your heart want to burst. I think we've pretty much come to the conclusion of about an hour's worth of gabbling about this important book. I hope we've left you with some sense of the delights and lessons that can be experienced in its pages. For such a hard life, it goes down easy. And thank you for your attention. Thank you to the San Francisco Public Library and this very good program. We're honored to be part of it. Thank you very much.