 Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, the Black Panther Party is very proud of you, the Lumpen! So, music fans will recognize this quickly. This is a standard James Brown party start. This is, there was a time. And the Lumpen members told us, well, did you guys start with this? Yeah, we would run on stage and start doing steps. The way other rhythm and blues acts would do to get you excited as soon as the record started. And then they would start singing. They were singing freedom. And then you hear them, then you hear the leader interspersing all this James Brown type of scatting. Good God! So the singing, we want freedom to determine the destiny of our community. If you go back and read the 10 point program of the Black Panther Party, that's one of the first lines. We want freedom to determine the destiny of our community. And so they took a fundamental Panther line, Panther chant and put it in verse. Put it in the groove. Put it in the phone. On the one. They put it on the one so that the youngsters hearing this, oh, I can feel this. Oh, that's the JB song. Let me get with the, what are they saying? We want freedom to determine the destiny. Hey, and you can soak it in. This is how the hip hop generation lives. They soak in their consciousness, their ideology, their world view through the rhythms. The lumpen did the same thing going back in the graduate school in 2002. What are you going to write about? What are you going to study? I'm working on it. But I'm thinking it has to do with politics and culture and how Black Power politics and culture and the lived life of the people and how the music of that period all interconnected. There was something about those three things that I thought belonged together. And then in 2002, I got a phone call from Boots Riley. Any hip hop fans around here? Hip hop fans? A couple? Boots Riley is the leader of a rap group known as The Coup, one of the most successful politically conscious rap groups in the business. And they're based out here. And Boots Riley himself is an activist. His father Walter Riley was an activist going back another generation. Boots made a name for himself, organizing youth in Oakland. I remember he organized an all day activity he called F the Police Day. And so he was one of the few people that I would let come in my house with this little portable computer hard drive, plug in and download all my beats. And get all the funk beats that I would use. And he would use them in his rap and stuff and I'd get a credit in the booklet. So anyway, we got along. And then he would always throw little nuggets, little historical nuggets my way. So Rick, did you know that so and so happened that the Black Panther sponsored a music concert? Did you know about this? And then one day he called in 2002 and said, Rick, did you know the Black Panthers had a funk band? I was like, a funk band? That's funny. You're a funny guy, Boots. And we laughed at that one. I was like, how can the Black Panthers have a funk band? The Black Panthers are the most serious, together, organized brothers and sisters my generation had ever known. Because they took on the system in a sophisticated, dignified way. And they didn't act a fool about it. They were death, deadly serious about defending their community. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, an organization that was formed, it was founded in October of 1966, just a few months after that Black Power March, a medium from Fear March that James Meredith did in June of 1966, that everyone mobilized for, just a few months after that. In Oakland at Merritt College, a junior college, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were going there, taking classes, trying to organize and establish black history courses there. Now they organized the black students there to create a self-defense organization of their own, and they were doing their homework, studying what other organizations were doing, what SNCC had been doing. They came from the community, they understood a lot of the dynamics of the street, and yet they also read, they also did their homework. They studied revolutionary practice and revolutionary theory. And so they put together really the culmination or a next evolution of community organization, a group that had a 10-point program for liberation. They had a 10-point program before they even had a name. And so they participated on a hands-on level in addressing this issue of rampant police brutality. And that inspired the community, particularly youth, to join and figure out how can I contribute. Well, you can do some work, you can do some homework. You have to take classes, political education classes, and you have to do work 24 hours a day. Keep the offices open so that people having grievances in the community can always come and they can be served. Now into this mix it turns out there were some young people who joined the Black Panther Party who before the revolution hit them thought they were going to be entertainers, thought they were going to be singers, thought they were going to maybe have a life and a career in the rhythm and blues industry. But the times had impacted them to a point where they didn't want to do that anymore. That wasn't important. Changing the world, giving their lives to an organization that they felt was capable of changing the world, that's what they wanted to do. And these three young brothers met at San Jose State with a plan to put together a San Jose chapter of the Black Panther Party. In the spring of 69 they were called up to San Francisco to organize, to actually defend the Panther Party offices from some police activities that were taking place. And eventually they were asked to stay in the San Francisco offices. These three young men, the three on the right, the one on the left is James Mott, the other three, William Calhoun, Michael Torrance and Clark Bailey, those are the three from San Jose who as a group moved to San Francisco in 1969 and became rank and file Panther Party members in the central offices in San Francisco. What happened was as many of the Panther Party members were required to do regular duties, one of the regular duties was the shipping detail where the Panther Party paper had to get produced at a warehouse not too far from here. The Howard Quinn printing company had to get all the hundreds of Panthers would come and sort the paper, figure out what gets mailed where, stack it, wrap it, bind it and ship it out. This happened weekly, happened every Wednesday night for years as part of the Panther Party duties. It's incredible how much unsolicited volunteer activity took place within this organization. If it wasn't for that level of commitment from rank and file, the Panthers would have lasted a couple months, maybe that was it. But at this weekly event, people would just do their work. We got to stack, we got to sort, we got to move on and people would start making up songs as they went. And they would sing, what's off the radio? It's your thing, do what you want to do. Why do you can't tell you what to do? They would make up these kind of politicized spins on popular music as they did their routine work. And what happened was the minister of culture, Emery Douglas, was there and he heard these three brothers singing and harmonizing and making up music as they went. He said, you guys are pretty good. You guys might be able to produce some songs for the revolution, for the Black Panthers. They were just youngsters, they were soul brothers, people knew they had a little bit of skill. And Emery Douglas put, play some music. Why don't you write a couple songs for this rally we're going to have in the Fillmore district? And they got up, wrote a couple songs, sang them. Bobby must be set free. They did a song about Bobby Seale. They did another song about what people are going through. It was a ballad about life in the city and there won't be no more. We're not going to stand for this. And the crowd loved it. The little impromptu made up rhythm and blues tracks just were ahead. And at that point Emery Douglas said, you guys, I'm going to take this to the Central Committee, the organizing body of the Black Panther Party. We're going to put something together and get you the resources to put a rhythm and blues band together. This was in the summer of 1970. They were told, go get some equipment. Go get some uniforms. Get an act together and go put on a rhythm and blues performance that promotes the message of the Black Panthers and recruits. And they said, we'll add a fourth member, James Mott, the Afro on the left. He's from Sacramento and had made his way. He was one of the founders of the Sacramento chapter of the Black Panther Party. All these people are self-taught, just sort of brought their skills to the forefront and came together to join this organization. And they applied the skills that they had. These four young men, the skills that they brought with them were musical skills. You can call this a publicity shot of the lumpen. They since told me that they had been on security duty all night and they were just tired. They looked like they're glaring at you like, yeah, we're Panthers, don't mess with us. They really like why we got to take a picture. We've been up all night. But that's the lumpen. James Mott, William Calhoun, Michael Torrance and Clark Bailey. This lumpen are performing at Merritt College in Oakland on November 10th of 1970. Merritt College was originally located on 58th and Grove Street, which is 58th and Martin Luther King. In the late 70s, the school was closed and relocated to the Oakland Hills. And if you go to Merritt College up there in the hills, they actually are very serious about their legacy as being part of the location where the Black Panther Party was developed. Because Huey and Bobby were going to Merritt College, the North Oakland Merritt College, when they developed, devised and created the party. And there was a nice auditorium there, fancy old architecture. And the lumpen performed there more than once and got folks riled up and I'll play some of their music in a moment. This is them at San Francisco High School, 1970. This is the lumpen on a road trip. They went on a tour, if you want to call it that. I mean, they insisted they're not entertainers. They were revolutionaries. But they did go on a road trip in November of 1970. Actually, the day after that concert with the flag behind them, they packed in their cars and they headed to the northeast. And they played at Amherst College. They played at Wisconsin. They went up through the upper Midwest and wound up in New England. And they played at New Haven, Boston. They played the Rose Land Ballroom in New York City. They went to Philadelphia. They played at Temple in Washington, D.C. And the FBI followed them the whole time. They were treated like panthers. When they went to these colleges, very often they would be put up by the Black Student Union at those schools who wanted to have a panther event, some sort of show of solidarity with the panthers. And in some cases, there'd be a leader like Kathleen Cleaver or somebody who would be speaking. And then they would be the entertainer. In some cases, they were the star of the evening. So the tour made an impact. Now ironically, if you look at this picture, you see the lumpen leaders in front. You see the guitar player on the right? None of them remember this guy's name, but the band often had two white guys in the group. Now in the Bay Area, rhythm and blues, integrated bands, it's not really news. If you think about Johnny Otis, Sly and the Family Stone, Tower of Power, Santana Band, integrated bands. If you feel it in the Bay, you feel that vibe that you're in the band. But when the lumpen and their band would travel the country, they would run into fiery black nationalist college kids and say, we love you guys, we'll put you up in our dorm, but the white guys, they can't come. You've got to keep them out. Let them stay in the station wagon. This sort of reverse Jim Crow type of thing. And the lumpen said, no, we're a unit. We don't need that kind of hospitality. And we'll all stay in the station wagon together and ride this out. And that's what they did. They really took a stand for the messages that they wanted to deliver. This is the lumpen back in Oakland at the DeFirmary Park, better known as Bobby Hutton Park. Another thing they did was they had choreography. They did skits. They enacted a lot of this resistance to oppression, to police brutality. They acted that out on stage. The lumpen performed a dance routine and evolved stomping a racist cop that had tried to brutalize a member of the community. And if you can see some of that, yeah. The lumpen used dance and choreography as well as music to deliver the Panther Party message. This is in backstage at that event. It turns out that event, that concert at Merritt College, was a big production. They had photographs, they had a truck, and they had a professional recording made of their live concert. And the plan was to make an album, to produce an album of rhythm and blues, a Black Panther Party production of rhythm and blues music with their revolutionary message. And that would have changed the mythos of the Black Panther Organization in a fundamental way, if you think about it. I remember as a kid, my mom, Tony here, she was a member of the party. And even after she was no longer a member of the party, we always got the Black Panther Party paper. Well, fast forward 40 years, I'm doing research in the Bancroft Library to find out information about this Black Panther's group. And I come across that picture of Muhammad Ali. I'm like, hey, I remember that, it brings me back. I flip a few more pages and there's a full page ad for the lumpen and one of their performances in the same paper, in the same edition, in the same issue. And that didn't stick. I didn't think the Black Panther were revolutionaries that could dance. And now I got to own that because they flipped the script. So here's the lumpen backstage at Merritt College. Another one, Michael Torrance. They did some studio overdubbing of their music, and that's Calhoun Band Leader William Calhoun at the controls. Doing some rehearsals. There's the lumpen, one of their big advertisements in the Black Panther paper. The lumpen, a revolutionary performance since returning from their East Coast tour. See how they have the puffy shirts, like the temptations, like rhythm and blues bands have. So part of the style, somebody made their shirts for them. Ironically, this is an ad for the lumpen that was in the school paper at UC Berkeley because this is an ad for an event at Polly Ballroom on the UC Berkeley campus, sponsored by the Arab Students Association. And ironically, some of those Arab students wound up in positions of leadership in Iran a decade later causing problems for President Carter's administration. The Freedom Messengers were the folks that were recruited out of the community to be the backup band. And that amounted to a couple of phone calls to their high school friends who were playing in grade school. They knew they could play youngsters fresh out of high school or willing to play for anybody just to be playing, just to be seen and heard. And then the Panthers were so cool. It was like, ooh, I'll play for the Panthers. Yeah, no problem. We don't get paid. Not a problem. After a few gigs, after the police would harass them, after some of the issues they had, people would leave. And so the backup group changed membership a lot. And that's why it was actually hard for me to ask all the members of the group, well, who was playing guitar? Who was playing bass? I don't remember if it was one time it was so-and-so or one time it was so-and-so. So there was turnover a lot in the band. The band turned over. And like a lot of rhythm and blues shows, for the start, the band would come and do a performance, 20 minutes, sometimes a half an hour long performance of their own music or of standards, of hits, other people's hits. And then the star would come out and do that. So the format of a lumpen performance was like any rhythm and blues performance. And then they would introduce the band and the guys would run on stage and do their thing. This is their single. The lumpen 45 single, a seize to time production. This has been reissued, and you can actually find the CD of the side A of this. This is one of many full-page ads for the lumpen. So you're thumbing through the Black Panther Party paper and they're showing you quotes from Chairman Mao in China, and they're showing you an analysis of maybe the trial of the New York 21 or something like that, and you flip a page and boom, there is a full-page ad for the lumpen. So there's Emery Douglas who designed those things. Other comments? The Panthers had regular duties. So in the center is Michael Torrance to his direct to the left. That is James Mott, and the two of them were in formation. This was a picket line outside of a North Oakland liquor store that Huey had issues with. I'll just leave it at that. So they had party members support this picket line, and three of the lumpen decided to pull out congas and make it a more festive picket line. And these are the lumpen today, and that's the auditorium that they played outside of. The lumpen, the present day. This was their first gathering, the first time they were together in 42 years. I got them together in April. Since the release of the book, they've come together, one or two or three of them at various points. A lot of those pictures that I showed you, I got from the guy on the left here, Billy Jennings. On the right, Billy Jennings. And you should recognize the guy on the left. That's Huey Newton in the 70s. Kind of Mackin. That's how he is. But there's just such a surplus of style here. I just couldn't resist when this picture came my way. It's in the book, but I just wanted you to see this overlap of this revolutionary culture and the politics was really, really rich. Real quickly, there's a relationship to soul music. The movement and the music influence one another. As soul artists reflected the ideals of black power, which allowed the movement goals to spread and inspire the activists to push on further. This is Godfather Soul, James Brown. Wearing his afro. That was during his I'm black and I'm proud years. Bay Area favorites, Sly and the Family Stone. If you just look at how they're using all the hip street style, they really kind of changed the way people think. And it's interesting because they were an integrated group and they were a pop superstar group, but they really were a part of the black community's sense of, you know, what is hip, if you will. What is the style? How are we going to look? And they were part of that. Here's Aretha Franklin in her garbage. She was in a bag where she did a record called To Be Young Gifted in Black, which is one of her most popular albums. It has this song Rock Steady on it. And she was getting into fashion and sort of African aesthetics for a moment. I just couldn't resist this picture. This is Chaka Khan in 1968, I believe, in high school. And in parts of 69, she was working with the Black Panther Party in Chicago. She knew Fred Hampton. This is Curtis Mayfield, very respected superstars of soul music. Isaac Hayes, Harold of the Black Moses in 1970. This is an odd picture. If you recognize Marvin Gaye in the middle. After his time in the lump-in, Michael Torrance, one of the lump-in members, went back to singing. He left the Panthers in 1972, 1973, I believe it was after the election of 1973. He went back to get in a singing group. They were called Ladies' Choice. And when Marvin Gaye came to Oakland to record a live concert, they recruited Ladies' Choice to be the backup singers. And so Michael Torrance, former Panther, was on stage when Marvin Gaye recorded that famous song, Distant Lover. Soul fans know what I'm talking about. Distant Lover. All the girls go crazy, right? After leaving the Lover. This was three of them at a reunion event just a couple weeks ago. I brought a band. They didn't know I was bringing a band. I was like, we're going to have a talk. And then I slipped their concert to some of their tapes to some folks at KPFA that play. So they started singing Clark Bailey, William Cahill, and James Mott. So I'll just finish with this rendition they do of a soul standard called People Get Ready. Which is one of those soul classics. If you don't know how to sing, don't touch that song. Curtis Mayfield, one of the most respected soul music practitioners. You can just feel the sincerity that he had in the music. And he helped people get through that decade a lot with his music. And so they use this song, the lumpen use this song as their sort of dedication song. So we'll just listen to a minute of them sort of dedicate themselves. So we dedicate this song. We make a special dedication tonight. As you know, we're cutting live here at Merritt College. We'd like to dedicate our entire album to the Minister of Defense, Supreme Commander of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newt. William Christman, James McClain, Hampton, the brother that was the beginning, Little Bobby Hudson. We the lumpen, respectfully dedicated song. That's the lumpen. We'll put the pigs where they belong. They went for it and they moved on. And it was an amazing thing to try to pull them back out. None of them wanted to talk about their music. I said, I want to ask you about this and that. They said, what? What do you want to talk about? Your music. I was a revolutionary. I was a Panther. I don't want to hear about it. It took a while, but eventually they wanted to talk about their music as well. And so now I think kind of got the story told.