 The question that I get most from my colleagues at Berkeley is, how did you get selected? And I just, but basically what I want to do is to try to talk about a question that most audiences that I've talked to over the course of the several years that I've talked about the book since this publication you know to me it's at the core of the book and that is what is historically important about the Black Panther Party? Why should we care? What continues to resonate with should and does continue to resonate with us? And there are several things that I'd like to emphasize and I just want to say that we are going to keep our remarks brief so that we can engage in conversation but I just wanted to lay out several kinds of points. First off for us as we were trying to pull this together and thinking about the enduring historical significance of the party the first thing I'd like to highlight is politics. The centrality of a serious radical revolutionary politics why it's important what it's about and if you cannot take politics seriously and you don't see politics as a serious undertaking then I think you're really going to have some problems with the party because I think the party took politics in a kind of committed dedicated revolutionary way that made it very very important then and makes it important today. And so thinking about that politics I just want to say several things. One is the ways in which you have to contest power especially power at the top it's not going to give you anything it's Frederick Douglass said if you want something you have to fight for it it's not going to dribble down the crumbs are not going to feed you what you want you have to fight you have to embody and you have to be vigilant in your struggle. The other kind of thing about political power that I would emphasize in terms of thinking about the party is not just it's sort of enduring sort of significance as part of a history of resistance a history of political activism rooted in the African American struggle but ultimately speaking to the broader American project a broader humanist project a broader global project seeking democracy freedom equality all those things but there's a specific historical moment in the transition in the broader black freedom struggle that the party really encapsulates and for us we were trying to get inside of and that's how and why and what consequences the party comes to represent in a lot of ways the quintessential black power expression and how and why as black power takes root in the late 60s and you know develops in late 60s and into the 70s the black panther party comes to embody that in a way that seizes the global imagination it's not just sort of a local phenomenon it's not just a national phenomenon but it's a global phenomenon and the politics that drove that is very important for us to think about and understand and that's one of the things that Josh and I wanted to to get into another kind of issue in terms of thinking about power in terms of thinking about politics is to understand that there are varieties of black activism there are varieties of black politics and that the party built upon some of those innovated in some of those traditions drew from other traditions and so what you really get is an extraordinary creation by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale the founders but others obviously contribute so it's an open it's an eclectic it's a very improvisational political project but it's always rooted in some core principles and Josh will talk a lot more about some of those but I'd just like to say something about at the core one of the issues for us in terms of thinking about the politics was to think about how those politics were anti-imperial this is one of the reasons not only it resonated in the late 60s early 70s across not only black America but left progressive fronts other struggles among communities of color other struggles among other sort of oppressed groups and so thinking about how you resist American empire at home and abroad not only in terms of a third world kind of sensibility but also understanding peoples of color as internal colonies how do they sort of define themselves how do they determine their own existence so some of the most compelling sort of ways in which we thought this politics expressed itself were both global connecting up with anti-imperial anti-colonial struggles around the globe but also sort of how that consciousness expressed itself another expression of that was sort of the anti-war sort of sensibility and commitment which was at the core of the party's work and also sort of the anti-draft work and obviously this made coalition work very possible and very fruitful I want to say two more things one is a problem as a historian that I confront daily in my teaching and that is trying to get students to understand the specificity the particularity of a particular moment in time and how and why you understand why people do what they do at that time under those circumstances and how you can't just read back who I am what I think and then that's adequate to understand what people did 40 or 50 years ago to understand what people did 40 or 50 years ago you literally have to put yourself in their position you have to empathize you have to sympathize and I think sort of getting students to think historically what the big point for Josh and I was that the late 60s and early 70s radical change revolutionary change for a lot of people seemed possible and for some people it seemed imminent for some it appeared to be right around the corner so if that is the world you inhabit then that particular understanding shapes and drives your politics and I think the Black Panther Party personified that it seemed possible it seemed doable the fact that it didn't quite turn out the way that most people in the party wanted it to has a lot to do with sort of the the historical circumstances all the things that happened but that kind of commitment that kind of understanding how you seize a moment how you seize not only the local national and global imagination is something that I think the party you know really was quite extraordinary and that's something that I think I'd like to talk about I always get lots of questions that go something like this what was the role of women in the party even though it started initially as primarily a male formation at its height there would have been no party with our women obviously the Black Panther Party especially if you saw that exhibit over in Oakland I mean it was like one of the strengths of the exhibit was I thought it sort of gave you a strong and insightful understanding of who the members were what they did who the local people were that made the party and to me and for Josh as well the grassroots activists the young Black folk who joined the party and gave their lives to the party is what the party was about and so at its core these were people who were committed to a kind of radical politics and so when I get the question about gender and sexuality this was a concern that roiled the nation you know there was a women's movement going on there was a whole feminist critique emerging there was a womanist critique emerging there was third world women's feminism and a lot of the the women and men in the party were obviously part of that yeasty experience and so on the ground people struggled with this and this is what really comes through we tried to integrate sort of the struggle around those kinds of issues throughout our book but the organization was often under siege that siege mentality drew members together and it tended to override differences but day to day ordinary people were struggling just like other people with issues of changing gender and sexual roles but you know I the the upshot of it is that women every social movement that I know about every social organization that I know about women if you if you really want to know who's doing the work you go out there and you see who's on the line and women dominate a lot of those those they may not be the out front leadership but they clearly there is no movement without women clearly the final thing that I want to say something about is one of the things that I most admire about the party and I think it has some particular relevance and especially for the kind of points that josh wants to make is this notion of action versus rhetoric one of the things that I find most compelling and most impressive about the party was that they not only talked the talk but they walked the walk and what I find so often is that even back then there's a lot of people with a lot of good rhetoric you know you know they can throw it out you know you oh but when push comes to shove they open the corner you know they ain't gonna do nothing um and the party was totally committed to action uh totally committed to understanding that if we're going to get a people to move in a radical a revolutionary direction we have to work with them we have to facilitate that change and we have to be the agents of that change that can work with our people to bring that about and to me that's an extraordinary kind of commitment that's often ill understood you work where you are serving the people in ways that make sense and help them and then you can sort of help them to think about how you expand your political horizon how you expand your political action and that kind of work I think is still relevant today and I know my colleague and an extraordinary friend Joshua Bloom being a sociologist and being someone who's very much committed to sort of radical social transformation has a lot to say about where we go from here and sort of what the Panther Party tells us about today so I want to turn the podium over to Josh. Good afternoon so thank you Waldo for those inspiring comments I want to thank also Naomi and the entire library staff for having this event Davey Dee for facilitating the conversation are there any Black Panthers here in the audience thank you for coming I want to thank all the Black Panthers who you know risked their lives and those who gave their lives for our freedom and I want to also thank all of you who came here today to have a conversation about this history so history does not provide easy answers I wish it did racism has been around a long time and it keeps changing forms so you know many people perhaps are coming here today to think about this current historic moment we're in how do you resist racism today how do you resist the rise of a xenophobic authoritarianism and unfortunately all forms of resistance don't necessarily work well in new circumstances and new conditions I think that and many of you know this better than I do but that the the solutions are in the creativity love and intelligence that's within all of us um so what what what can the history of the Black Panther Party bring to this conversation and I think that the history of the Black Panther Party helps to think about how to ask better questions so I want to talk about a few of the pieces of that history that I think can help us sharpen some of the questions for today um so to start with um there's a moment in the mid 60s where there's really a puzzle and a transition which which motivated a lot of the research that Waldo and I did um on this book and trying to understand this history and there's the puzzle is that there's there's this moment in the mid 60s at the end of the civil rights movement the insurgent civil rights movement where the civil rights movement has been so effective at dismantling formal segregation and caste subordination it's been so effective at ending the era of Jim Crow and yet there's a sea change in the character of black politics and young people in cities across the country young black people turn to a revolutionary politics they turn away from claims for participation in citizenship rights and they take up the gun so why does that happen and and what is it about this moment um that leads to these kinds of changes in the in the movement and how does the movement respond to those changes um so 1966 is really a moment of ferment and we like to think of black power not as an answer but really as a question and the question is um very similar to a question that many of you may come here today asking and the question is how do how do we struggle effectively for liberation how do we how do we fight for liberation um in the early 60s the civil rights movement was very effective at dismantling Jim Crow with civil disobedience against formal caste subordination um violation of racial segregation claims for participation citizenship rights but the civil rights movement was not able to effectively challenge the poverty the police brutality the exclusion from political participation and representation that was prevalent in the cities throughout the country in the north and the west included and so those kinds of practices those civil rights practices they weren't working they weren't working at challenging police brutality and lots of people were trying people tried throughout the 60s and you read accounts of the northern civil rights movement in the same period and many times the struggle is like beating beating your head against a brick wall so in 1966 this really burst out into a question a black power question how do we build political power right you have to think that the cities throughout the country had where you had large black populations none of the police were black it was all white police departments municipalities were not hiring black people black people were excluded from the political machines they didn't have roles in the democratic party machines they didn't have roles in the republican party machines for that matter either so black power is a ferment of people around the country asking a question dozens and dozens of organizations in every major city with large black populations here in the bay area there were ram organizations there was publications like soul book there were people doing trying different kinds of boycotts on order row there were all kinds of efforts to try to figure out how do we build political and economic power and it's in this moment where it's clear that you can't sit in against poverty you can't sit in against police brutality that the that the panthers emerge and they're very much asking that question how do we find right we can't apply the old forms to the new problems how do we find the forms that will work for us here in today so I want to just talk you know there's there's obviously more in the book than I can talk about in a few minutes here but I want to make a couple points about how the panthers developed answers to that question and the first is this idea of elaboration and I want to talk about the story of Denzel Dow to who knows about the story of Denzel Dow okay so some people know about Denzel Dow so he looked at the urban rebellions sometimes called riots he looked at the the response largely sparked in cities across the country by incidents of police brutality and said that resistance is a source of political power those rebellions represent the possibility for political power in a way that we can we need to do is we need to channel that so there was a there was an active effort to try to figure out how do we organize that rage into a into a political power and and the first practice and the first tactic that the that the panthers really developed which put them on a national stage was a tactic of policing the police so what the panthers said was we can actually they studied the law and they said we can actually tap into that rage by standing up to the police and challenging police brutality and they studied the gun laws and it was actually legal to carry loaded weapons in the city limits there were all kinds of specific regulations that they studied in detail about the distance that you had to stand from arrest and so they went following the police around looking for instances of police brutality and confronting the police aren't so you can imagine the kind of the kind of attention and and also interest that this built in communities where people had been exposed to poverty and a containment policing policy and all of a sudden here are the panthers saying hey you know you can't you can't treat people like that and and confronting the police with excuse me with guns so the panthers built a small following in Oakland this went on for only really a few months in in mostly in early 1967 right at the end of 1966 as well they built a small following in Oakland and what really changed was when a young man a construction labor named Denzel Dow was shot and killed in north Richmond just a few miles north of of Oakland and Berkeley and the police were intransigent they said you know basically were you know the officer was justified now there was all kinds of evidence it looked like Denzel Dow had been killed with his hands up it appeared that he had been shot in the back there had been a whole history of this particular police officer harassing Denzel down so there was a lot of evidence that suggested that something was was going on here but the police and it was really the sheriff's department refused to refuse to even investigate and so the family of Denzel Dow Ruby Dow and others they went to the civil rights organizations in the area and they asked for help to address this but the civil rights organizations didn't have any way to really address the situation so a young man an activist named Mark Comfort introduced the Dow family to the Black Panthers and the Black Panther Party came to Richmond and started to organize street rallies and they started they went to there was some confrontations at the school and some confrontations at the sheriff's department and then they organized a series of street rallies and what happened is is that you can imagine the Panthers and North Richmond was virtually exclusively black small community several thousand people unincorporated and so really fairly little political representation no police representation a history of brutality and so people start turning out to these rallies on the street corners and the Panthers are there on the street corners armed and people start bringing their own guns so think about that today think about hundreds of black people turning out in this black community protesting police brutality and brutality and injustice of the killing of a black person by police bringing their own guns and saying the police you know you you don't have any right to to interfere with what we're doing here right so the state can people imagine that can you imagine that happening today so um so what um what happened is the state changed the law right so they passed and you have to you have to realize this is with the support of the NRA signed into law by Ronald Reagan the state restricted gun rights so that the Panthers could no longer conduct these forms of mobilization um another key innovation that was really a little later was the free breakfast for children programs and the community survival programs so the Panthers very much drew on Malcolm X and the idea and the tradition of really thinking of themselves as as stewards of the black community of taking care of the black community the black community um has needs right and so the the party from from the start was not just about self defense and and what really became in 1969 a couple years after the founding what really became the bread and butter daily activities of the party was really about providing for the basic social needs of the party and um there were free clinics there were shoe programs food distribution and the the program that really was the most prevalent um and the core of the party's politics across the country was the free breakfast for children program and you can imagine that this really was a way that that people's needs were directly being addressed that the community built support for the party and that the party also reached out and built alliances powerful alliances with with interested allies now the problem is and so this is um the next point I want to make is that um when you succeed at challenging power from below what do you think happens you get repressed right power fights back and so um let me read to you uh quote um from Jay at Crahoever who coordinated some of the um national campaign of repression against the Black Panther Party um this is in response so he asked for hard-hitting counterintelligence programs the party by by 1969 had spread um to pretty much every significant city in the country um more than 70 um with uh dozens in some cases hundreds and a few cases thousands of members dedicating their lives to revolutionary struggle through the Black Panther Party um and so Jay at Crahoever asks for hard-hitting counterintelligence measures that can undermine the the political science of the party and he gets a response from San Francisco agent actually saying um well you you you don't really understand a lot of what they're doing is actually feeding kids so this is what Hoover writes back one of our primary aims in counterintelligence as it concerns the Black Panther Party this is Hoover writing to the San Francisco um director special agent in charge of the counterintelligence program one of our primary aims in counterintelligence as it concerns the Black Panther Party is to keep this group isolated from the moderate Black and white community which may support it this is most emphatically pointed out in their breakfast for children program where they are actively soliciting and receiving support from uninformed whites and moderate blacks you state that the bureau under the counterintelligence program should not attack programs of community interest such as the Black Panther breakfast for children you state that this is because many prominent humanitarians both white and black are interested in the program as well as churches which are actively supporting it you have obviously missed the point so from the beginning but especially in the latter part of 1968 and building powerfully through 1969 and into 1970 the party is faced with a constant barrage of repressive action by the state Hoover declares the party the greatest threat and certain security of the country there are constant armed raids on the offices Panther offices stormed raids with guns firing in many cases and there are a whole range of counterintelligence programs aimed at building division between the party and its allies as well as within the party for example the party sends all kinds of inflammatory letters and cartoons to members of the Black Panther Party and to members of the us organization which is a Black nationalist organization in in LA insinuating assassination plots etc and trying to foment violence and when in fact several Black Panther party leaders in Los Angeles are killed by members of the US perhaps directed although we don't have smoking guns on that but certainly encouraged by the by the counterintelligence program the count the FBI celebrates these these victories similar projects in Chicago similar projects in New Haven really throughout throughout the country and the one one piece that you may have heard of that I want to just talk about briefly is assassination of Fred Hampton Fred Hampton is he's 21 when he's killed he's 20 and 21 when he is leading the Black Panther Party in Chicago a noi chapter and he's built these tremendous support among a whole range of allies including a group of whites from Appalachia who use the confederate flag as their symbol called the young patriots a Puerto Rican organization the big gang the Blackstone Rangers and Jeff Fort there are kinds of co-intel pros to try to split them and he's built community programs on a really vast scale the Black Panther Party as a whole has actually Yvonne King is the person who leads the breakfast for children programs there and so what the state does is it works directly with the police and just takes a much more direct approach and drugs Fred Hampton and raids his house while he's in bed and and not conscious and she's him twice in the head we would not know about this and this is the last point that I want to make we would not know about the killing of Fred Hampton if it were not for the vast outpouring of support we might know that he died but the official story of the the Chicago police was that this was a warranted raid that the police knocked on the door and that the Panther started shooting and there was a vast firefight and Fred Hampton was killed in the crossfire and the police had all kinds of photo evidence of this and you know it ended up being for you know fake but what what happened was there was a vast outpouring of support for the party and resistance to the state repression and so last the last point this last idea that I want to talk about is is articulation and resilience right if we know that when you effectively resist the state the state is going to take action to repress you then the question becomes how do you sustain resistance in the face of repression and what the party did and again these politics are not no more than we can sit in against poverty and police brutality no more can we directly take the models and the actions of the party to the challenges today in a direct way but we can learn from the way that they ask the questions and the dynamics of their politics and so what they did is they engaged in a set of practices where when the state repressed them it was broadly threatening to many other constituencies beyond the immediate people who were who were who were part of the party and the constituency of the party and part of this is the anti-imperialist politics and framework and ideas that the party talked about so they made they made common cause with a wide range they said yes we are Black Panthers we are addressing the needs of the Black community but this is part of a global struggle it's a global struggle against imperialism our struggle is part and parcel of the struggle that other people of color are fighting for against racism in the U.S. but it's also part and parcel of the revolutionary struggles abroad it's part and parcel of the challenge to poverty and what we seek alliance is with everyone fighting for their freedom the Black Panther Party was the first major Black political organization to endorse gay rights while there was a lot of complexity in terms of the dynamics on the ground that Waldo talked about the party in its formal positions was very strongly profeminist and really talked about the importance of gender liberation so there was a politics both in word and in relationship that was able to support the party when it when it was repressed and so when you you have Fred just to use the killing of Fred Hampton as an example so many people turned out from so many different sectors who did not necessarily endorse and support the politics of the party they were certainly not participating in the politics of the party but they felt threatened by that repression so who who were these folks and it's specific to the time right in part one of the most important supporting groups in in Chicago was actually moderate black political organizations people like Whitney Young from the Urban League who they wouldn't you know clearly not supporting the revolutionary claims of the party they were not supporting the tactics but you have to remember police departments are were all white there was no municipal hiring very little municipal hiring of blacks black people were excluded from the major political platforms right and and so there was a need for basic redress that had not been addressed in the dismantling of Jim Crow and so the Black Panther Party was speaking to a much broader audience and when folks like Whitney Young saw members of the Black Panther Party killed in their bed he saw that as a threat to the the basic trajectory of progress because if it can happen to the Panthers then it can happen to us and similarly a lot of the revolutionary movements and governments abroad saw the struggle of the party here against imperialism as part of their struggle just a few examples the premier of China hosted the Black Panther delegations and met with Huey Newton and there were tens of thousands of Chinese rallying in the street in celebration of Huey Newton's visit Algeria while it which was a hub of revolutionary movements throughout Africa and to some extent internationally did not have a embassy of the U.S. but created an embassy for the Black Panther Party so the Black Panther Party had an embassy in Algiers Cuba initiated a project to develop a military training ground for Panthers so the anti-imperialist politics of the party was situated and framed and the relationships built in such a way that many different constituencies saw the party as part and parcel of their struggle the anti-war movement in the U.S. you know we think about Chicago in 1968 the Democratic Convention and the fights in the streets but you have to remember that there was also a fight going on inside those halls right 80 percent of Democrats voted to end the war and the Democratic Party pushed through a pro-war platform and a pro-war candidate so people felt that they couldn't vote and get what they wanted they were being told you have to go and die in this war you're going to be drafted and you don't have a choice and you can't vote so there were a lot of people who may have looked very different than the party and may have had very different politics than the party but also felt that if the party leaders could be killed in their bed then they could too so I'm gonna stop there and save some time for a conversation thank you how y'all doing Waldo didn't have his jacket I bought mine just in case but since he didn't have his I'm not gonna put mine on and no I'm I'm a rate of fan but I'm not I'm boycott the NFL so there you go but I'm not throwing away my jacket though um there's a lot to cover and this book is uh fascinating uh I teach history a lot of times and one of the things that I think is important is having a detail and contextualizing that detail for the moment in time we're 50 years past the formation of the Black Panthers we're talking about 51 years at this point and I think there's a lot of things that are said casually to the point that they become either cliche or they just become symbols and what I appreciate but appreciate about this book is that you all went into great detail and kind of put us in a moment and so I'll start off with my first question what stood out to me is the amount of violence that was facing the Panthers I don't think we have a full appreciation of that I think we think well you know if they just marched and if they just did it peacefully everything would be okay but you set the tone and you described this incredible amount of violence where there's really no place to turn can you talk a little bit about that you know the dead ending of the civil rights movement like civil rights movement hits a wall and you have folks that are trying to make a way out of no way with very little choice but to really and literally pick up a gun yeah I mean there's this moment it's not clear what's going to happen with the civil rights movement at first right and there's this moment in Atlantic City when you know Freedom Summer has you know just completed and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Organization is trying to get seated there's a Dixie Cratt all-white exclusionary party and Johnson plays dirty right and tricks people to be across the street when things are going to come to a vote and seats the all-white Dixie Cratt Democratic Party right so so the civil rights movement it grinds to a halt right there's there's the capacity to challenge formal cast of the nation but how do you take that that beyond and I think what you see with the party it's interesting if you look at some contrast like actually the us organization that Caranga had was doing some serious organizing in the early days in San Diego and actually faced in those early days some significant repression as well and then they sort of turned away from that and said okay we're we're not going to do the serious organizing anymore we're not going to stand up and have the sort of confrontational politics we're not going to challenge power we're going to turn towards a cultural thing and then you know and I don't know what deals also might have been cut because some people say that there were but they they were no longer facing that kind of repression the party the more the more effective it became at mobilizing people the more it tapped into those so that anger the more the more they were repressed but even beyond just the party itself there's an appreciation for the violence understanding the violence that the black community itself was facing reading the story about Denzel McDowell and you know it's not just him but it's the constant um harassing and killing of people seeing what was going on in Oakland the description of some of the police including the one that Huey was accused of killing you know for the first time you actually hear about his background this was a beast you know when you hear about it's like oh he killed a cop and you know people have this wave of sympathy until you're like wait a second he did this that this you know it's like this was an evil cat and so that that sort of appreciation I think puts it into context maybe you can hit on that a little bit more what I'd just like to say is um for me what I think is hard sometimes to grapple with is what I would call state violence and state violence uh operates at so many different levels psychological emotional material institutional and oppressed people suffer the bulk of the violence meted out by the state and throughout african-american history whether you're talking about lynching whether you're talking about the rape of black women in the south there are all these ways in which violence against black bodies has been part of the white supremacist project in this country and black people have fought back against it and it strikes me that one of the things that the party was able to do was to really focus on this idea of it's time to get up and stand up you know somebody has to draw a line in the sand and say I commit myself that this will go no further and this is what we are about and it seems to me that the kind of violence that you know was perpetrated against the party is often misrepresented and misunderstood virtually all of the violence that you know the popular historical narratives and misreadings of the party most of that violence was perpetrated against the party the party did these weren't perfect people there were some people in there who did some bad things but most of the bad is being done by the state against the party and so I think most people don't have a clue and I think that persists you and I think josh made the point anytime you really stand up speak out and really seek have you disrupt you offer a very different kind of alternative and you put the state on its heels the state responds very aggressively and this is what you saw with the party and you know but thinking in a long term historical frame the violence this is very about me what what this country has done and continues to do to indigenous people very violent I mean the theft of the country the you know the murder of the the genocide of the people so there's a whole practice of violence and and the role of violence in the creation of this country that I think we really have to come to grips with and I think the party you know suffered sort of that you know practice all right but you know I and you know this and and I think somebody said this one of those guys back then you know violence is an American as cherry pie I mean it's all over the place right around yeah yeah I love me you know and I you know it's like and the thing that always gets me is that people are always into physical violence but there's so much emotional and psychological violence perpetrated against working people against poor people uh you know against oppressed people in general that we we don't even think and then people might do this well why are they angry would you be angry uh to me anger is a very legitimate response you know I I think you know if you aren't angry you're gonna go you know you might have some other kinds of issues if you can't sort of like understand that that kind of response so um you know as we were working through this stuff uh the the thing that really surprised me was that most of the really bad stuff which I hadn't read all this stuff I sort of thought oh well they but so much of it was fundamentally the state just sort of boom boom boom we're gonna destroy you right that's fundamentally what the state said and and when you're out to destroy we see them as enemy number one you know well this is the other thing that also comes to mind that I don't think is fully appreciated is we see the pictures of Huey we see the pictures of Bobby we see the Panthers marching in the documentaries and we forget how young they were we're talking about the state we're talking about police who are older and have these connections to white supremacist organizations because they're recruited but we're talking about 17 year olds and six and 18 year olds and 19 year olds who not only are willing to confront and this is one of the things I also appreciated about the book is that you just don't jump into Sacramento which is what everybody gets to know the Panthers but you talk about these confrontations that have happened on the streets of Oakland and Richmond where these young folks are armed with the knowledge of the law who are incredibly disciplined and who are really going face to face like clocking the gun and pulling back the rounds in the chamber and it's like you step forward you'll get shot you know can we talk a little bit about that this that discipline this willingness to be at such a young age to confront this state power that had terrorized the community that I think is a game changer that we never really look at and fully appreciate as to what would draw people to the Panthers versus so many other organizations that were around at that time yeah and Waldo talks about a little bit about this idea of the the party as doers and not just as thinkers and some of the ideas you know you look at so you trace the different strands of where the party's ideas came from you know the 10-point program is drawn very heavily from Malcolm X you have the symbol of the party is brought by Stokely Carmichael it comes out of Lowndes County Alabama you have much of the sort of anti-imperialist ideas come from the revolutionary action movement and you know the part you know Huey and Bobby and a bunch of others had worked with Ram in the Bay Area before and many of the ideas were the same and I think what happens is that there's a there's a break right that Huey and Bobby feel like we really need to be mobilizing people this is this idea of elaboration right if we're going to do something like the civil rights movement here if we're going to really mobilize people we have to tap into sort of where they're really at and so they they saw the anger they saw the anger at being constantly brutalized you know there were all these instances you know Matthew Shepard I think it was his last name and who was killed in in Hunter's Point there was a young girl who was killed at a traffic stop there were there were a whole series of sort of many rebellions where police beat some people up right so the and the daily experience the daily experience of that kind of brutality that you were talking I mean this is this is what you know it's not just about poor people I mean I think there's something particular to race into blackness right I mean Dubois says whiteness is ownership and there's a this this process of of of dispossession and taking the land and setting the law and and creating blackness as the other and control as whiteness it's like what Franz Fanon talks about the rule by rifle butt and bayonet right it's not a rule by civil participation so what the party does with Bobby Huey doing that moment is they figure out that by standing up to the police that they can actually tap into those those feelings and that anger and they can channel into a political force now now the the policing the patrolling the police is also borrowed that comes from the community alert patrol in Los Angeles but what was happening with the community alert patrol is that people would patrol the police and they'd have a tape recorder and a notebook and they'd follow the police and there was a confrontation the police were brutalizing someone they say you can't do that and the police would say hell we can't they'd smash the tape recorder and maybe lock up the person who is confronting them right so what Huey and Bobby did is by studying the law they said well we're going to do just what community alert patrol was going to do but we're going to know the law so well and we know that we can carry these aren't these guns and they would take arrests right they they in that period they said we we will take an arrest if you arrest us but we know the law better than you they knew the law better than the police and if you arrest us we're going to take you to court but if you try to take my gun or you try to shoot or do something that's against the law i'm going to shoot you back and what's striking is that they did this they they made these confrontations so precisely and so there was not a single shot fired in the first six months of the party when they were using this practice all of the actual shooting confrontations came after the mulford act and after this this practice um had been outlawed the other thing that i find uh insightful in the book is the leadership um let me contextualize is we often hear about black leadership what does that mean um and we think of a charismatic person who everybody rallies around but we're talking about the political landscape at that time where people are fighting the war um they're talking about anti imperialism but the panthers are the ones that start to lead and when we talk about this coalition what you draw out in the book is these white organizations that come into coalition with the panthers first of all are looking for their leadership and then have to line up with that so that's one thing if we could talk about that because i don't think that's fully appreciated and you talk about one point in the book where it's made very clear that we're going to break ranks unless you really recognize our leadership versus having this paternalistic uh type of approach the other thing is going back to this action scenario you talk about the anti-war movement is more like a lot of talk until the panthers and others are coming along and saying we're going to be active draft resistors and willing to pay the consequence for that and then everybody falls in line and then leading up to just a leadership and in the need of the panthers to have a peace and freedom party which i have some questions about but let's just talk about this leadership in this coalition building um because it seems like uh the way it gets described 50 years after the fact is everybody was at the table at the same time and it was a kumbaya festival when really no way you described it in a book it was definitely folks who are willing to put their bodies on the line and everybody lining up right afterwards and taking leadership and guidance and and inspiration from this organization that i don't think fully gets credit for that let me let me just say because i'm i'm gonna try to be brief here i want to say a little bit more about the youth angle because one of the things that i try to talk to my students about is sort of youth making change there's a whole tradition in african-american radical politics of radical youth organizing for change that my students tend not to have a sense of not only do you have the student nonviolent coordinating committee which is the cutting edge of radical sort of black youth sort of trying to do something in in the 60s but you have organizations which predate them the southern negro youth congress in the 30s and 40s and there's a whole history of radical black youth trying to figure out what can we as young people do and i think that's an element of what the panthers are a part of and i think we need to um highlight that we need to highlight youthful audacity bravery courage stepping up standing out uh you know standing up standing out too uh but i i do think that sort of that youth piece and why how and with what consequences black youth activism is an important element of the story and how it needs to be highlighted um you know it wasn't a bunch of old people sitting around trying to tell the young people what to do no one like that at all the youth decided what they wanted to do but it wasn't just the youth just deciding you're talking about people who in one part of the country who get in a car like an erica huggins and drive all the way to the other part to join you're talking about folks who are really making um not just moves but a full commitment to be totally a part of that that i don't think is fully realized this wasn't a part-time type of endeavor no no go ahead yeah no i want to speak to that because i think it's a really important point and question and um why does the party emerge at that moment as the point where people really consolidate i mean so to just to just give scale right at its height you know the media has its biases whatever but let's use that as one measure the new york times during 1970 published an average of three stories a day on the black panther party that's a higher rate than any civil rights organization during the height of the civil rights movement um we talked a little bit about the international alliances right what what david is saying is absolutely true right the party did not go around the country knocking on doors and saying will you please join us and do this with us right people saw the party and they said that's what we need to do there were people all over the country dozens of organizations in many of the larger cities where there are large black populations asking this black power question how do we build political power how do we build economic power and when the party really emerged and developed people flocked from all over the country both to the bay area but also to start their own chapters and the party was inundated they had to say no you cannot join and they had a whole you know united front of against fascism was basically a way to let other people also in that they weren't ready to let be be party chapters so what was it about the party you know what where does that leadership come from and i and this is you know again i don't think the specifics of the answer will answer our questions today but i think it helps sharpen the question i think we need to look at practice i think we need to look at practice that what the party leaders did if you look at the the people who were party leaders it was an eclectic collection and none of them was strong at everything and all had their own problems right and their own limitations right um they did come together well right um the the strengths of of different party leaders and we can talk more about that if if people are interested but i think what is crucial here is that the party developed a set of practices it was like a cultural technology it was a it was a cultural technology that had the capacity to really challenge authority from below to disrupts right to challenge containment policing to make it impossible for police to continue treating people the way that they were treating people and at the same time to do so in such a way that when that heavy repression came that repression was threatening much more broadly and people would really support them so i think those two elements are key that we we need to think about the practices we take them for granted right we think okay we know what movements look like we can go and we can march and we can go and we can sit in well you can't sit in against poverty you can't sit in against police brutality you couldn't in 1966 and you can't today it didn't work in the early 60s it doesn't work now how do you fight you know trump's the rise of authoritarianism how do you make business as usual impossible for the trump administration in a way that is really hard to repress i don't think the answer to that question is obvious and i think that that's really becomes the crux of it you know there's some part of chance right there were real strengths to the individuals and leaders involved but i don't know does anybody know anyone who was really famous and influential when they were younger and now are in a very different sort of stage of history and part of their life and maybe aren't like quite as influential in everything that they touch after that moment right there's something that happens where where the the the activities the practices themselves become powerful right and that that cultural technology is developed and we need to we need to use that as a way of sharpening our question if we want to resist trump if we want to resist the rise of fascist authoritarianism of racism today you know we need to be able to look at what kind of practices work to do that well what kind of practices make business as usual impossible in a way that's difficult to repress okay we're going to open it up in a in a couple of minutes i have another question i have a lot of questions but we'll just do this one um eldritch cleaver in his role of having these connections to these predominantly white left-leaning groups let's talk a little bit about that and juxtapose it with the ideological differences in similarities and the navigation the panthers had with snick which you know has some very key roles there's a black panther party with snick before the panthers there's a northern black uh uh panther party up here uh they're moving into a militant organization the merging this there's a fascinating story on to itself which i think ultimately plays out you know coalition building or having a very black nationalistic stance on your politic which i think plays out in debates today in many ways but let's talk about that and then the role that eldritch plays because he he brings in the possibility of having these broad coalitions of what you know eventually gets as you call in your book the new left let me just sort of try to be brief about eldritch complicated brother um very brilliant but complicated and i do think that the way you represent it um is sort of one of the important ways that he functions within the party he has certain networks he has certain uh sort of resources at his disposal especially after soul on ice and he himself uh is very much enamored of what he sees in the party but it's also clear that he's a person with his a lot his own ideas about things he has has has a very strong ego and so it's not surprising that over time there were there there were probably um and there were clashes um but the other thing and and and and i'd like to mean josh can really give you the nuts and bolts on this why the party of hui and bobby comes to dominate is a fascinating story in and of itself because there was no there were all these organizations in the bay area some of them competing some people moving across these and there was no way if you were looking on the ground to know that this was the organization that would one day be the dominant organization it wasn't clear at all and i think what what what really sets them apart in a lot of ways is the power of the leadership hui and bobby coming together to do what they did and then sort of other people mixing in um is is a for me sort of a fascinating uh check check the the the way that historians like to talk about this is to think about um sort of the specific conditions that that created this and why and how that particular organization emerges and and and we try to do some something like that the other thing about the student nonviolent coordinating committee is that by by the black power phase it was a very different kind of organization it had really um shifted from a really interracial politics in a lot of ways to a black power politics and there were people who were contesting for a different kind of leadership i.e john lewis when john sees it this this stokely and h rap are the future that party you know john lewis goes off into democratic party politics which is you know where he still is today but there was another group and then that group is also you know talking to and interacting with hui and bobby so it's that kind of environment but it was there was no guarantee there was no i don't think anybody sort of looked at hui and bobby said oh this is the shape of the future uh there was no way to i mean the shape of the future looked like someone like stokely because stokely was as someone said star child uh he really had you know all the charisma he had a lot of stuff going for him but i don't think he had the uh and we can talk about that why why why is what happens you know because i think a lot of people what you said in the book he didn't have the plan and the way that the panthers that they were very i mean you appreciate hui's uh uh being able to have this theory and you can appreciate bobby being able to organize and execute it and it becomes this powerful thing as you described in the book and you know i mean i guess it's a debate as to whether not snick had full plans but i from what i gather we're talking about new terrain the north and we're talking about the west coast which in many ways is similar to the northern environment versus the south where they were really dominant miss nick was really dominant yeah yeah absolutely and i mean i think so you can look at the leader you know you can look at if you want to take those three you know bobby and and hui and eldridge right they each brought different things right there were important pieces they each brought um so you know bobby was as you say an incredible organizer and he he was a stand-up comic right so he was a great speaker a great public speaker um eldridge um you know was also a very flamboyant but very powerful public speaker um and an amazing writer and he brought all these networks with you know these publishing circles and the white new left and he really did bring those networks in to the party um hui he couldn't really publicly speak have people seen videos of him talking i mean he could he but he was very philosophical and he talked in this kind of high-pitched voice and he went on and he just people were like you know what are you talking about and um so he was not a public speaker but he had these two he had these two other elements right i mean one is is that he was really involved in developing these theories and position and he was also um very much um the one he was a street guy so he he was the one who who would make these confrontations right and could read the dynamics and make that you know and play them out and back the cop down back the cops down with the the law on a gun and not get shot or arrested right um so so there were these important sort of characteristics of the personality i i tend to look at that as fairly contingent right and we're just talking about sort of the big you know main three originators here i mean there's so many women there's so many men that we could talk about that all brought really important pieces um to the party and i i really do believe right that that it's that it is the practice not just the plan right you look at snick and stokely car michael and hrap brown and shim foreman and all these folks who were so effective right snick led the vast majority of the of the civil disobedience and the civil rights movement these are the folks that dismantled jim crow but when it came to the late 60s when it came to fighting police brutality when it came to you know challenging poverty and political exclusion they didn't know what to do you know it wasn't their character right i mean it's the same same people right it's the same folks but they couldn't they didn't have the they didn't have the practices and i think that there's some contingency to it i think that there were a lot of people trying different things that what the panthers did in oakland was not unique we just talked about some of the different strands they drew on they put it together in a particular way that worked right and i think that that really that's really what drove the sentence of the black panther party we know that snick is the reason why dr king took his position on vietnam you know because snick had that that element um as we take questions i guess what i would toss out there you know what's overarching in all this um effectiveness or lack of effect of effectiveness we can't discount the role of the state and coantel pro and i would i would imagine that snick was already a target well before the panthers and things were going to get undermined and splits were going to be fostered and and um and and and things were going to move in a certain direction and then you have this other organization that pops up out of oakland and then they got to take some time to you know craft splits and do whatever and you know we're following that um and then you just have the outright brutality where people are just killed you know at the end of the day like we're going to take fred hampton out and take this person out we're going to take this person out and everybody else is going to jail um and we're at that moment now and i don't think they are full appreciations i know you all talked about it but i don't think we really internalized like the what the state has the role it's played and you see that primarily when you see certain types of engagement with the state while people will also extol the virtues of the panthers and you'd be like well the panthers wouldn't have really you know embraced the state that maybe some organizations are today and that may be a debate in itself so with that being said why don't we um get some questions and comments and what have you and uh sis over there will Naomi will be Oprah hi your your book seems to me to um stress the relation of the of draft resistance and the whole anti-war movement and the initial sort of coalition with the panthers but the panthers began to unravel before the draft ended and while the it seems to me the anti-war movement was still rising into 1970 with the great student strike is it is it possible that your timing is timing is off for the whole anti-war panther connection okay let's just hold that question let's keep that in mind and let's get another one as well so they can do both it you know we'll do two at once so we got the draft question and the panthers uh maybe unraveling as the draft movement is going up and what's your comment oh Ricky hi Vincent yeah the author of party music that's in the building which talks about the black panthers and they're banned the lump in them thanks uh now you guys both you referred to Eldridge and you referred to Stokely and you sort of unpacked something that I hadn't really thought about and that is how yes they're charismatic they're their leaders but Stokely was really going in a black nationalist direction and that may have hindered some of the the daily practices that josh you were talking about they couldn't really organize that way because they didn't want whites involved but Eldridge for all his craziness he and Kathleen we need to make sure people know Kathleen and Eldridge did a lot of that networking with the other organizations uh Eldridge and Kathleen they had a way of crossing over into the white left navigating them and playing them because the white left wanted credibility and the panthers needed bodies to support and so there's really something between Stokely's nationalist direction of leadership and Eldridge's sort of uh I don't know what you call inclusive radicalism when they were trying to really explode the party use the free Huey thing to make it go and um I didn't really thought much about it but can you really dig into how Eldridge played the anti-war movement and all the other characters that were involved I think the panthers are known for their coalition building but there was something unique and crazy about the way Eldridge made it happen so let's get those two he started they're kind of related in some ways they're talking about the draft resistance and I'll go first because I think there's a piece of this that I also want to pick up on I think you're totally right about Stokely Stokely was going in a more pan-Africanist black separatist sort of direction which really was going in another direction but um the the other piece um that I think it is very very important especially in terms of thinking about um sort of um what what what you're talking about with Eldridge and Kathleen is a larger political dynamic and to me uh I'd frame it something like this can you listen to hear and follow black leadership why do I put it this way because the history of interracial politics is very fraught and one of the reasons I think it's fraught is because white people want to bring supremacy and dominance into the relationship and so one of the things you have all these organisms abolitionism women's rights everybody struggles with this um when you have people like black people can you listen to them can you hear them and can you follow them and it strikes me that our history around that is deeply troubled and it strikes me that one of the geniuses that that Eldridge and Kathleen had was they understood how you you need to manipulate certain kinds of networks to get what you want now I also know that from the other side there are lots of you know white radicals and everybody who sort of had their own needs and concerns and people opposed to this so it's you know it's it's complicated but for me as an African-American African-American that's thinking about it historically one of the things that stands out to me is who who listens to who hears and who can actually work with black people without trying to run it without trying to tell them what to do who to be how to dress you know I think this is you know can we can I be me uh and and can we work with me being me as opposed to you telling me how to be me um I think that whole problem and I think Eldridge and Kathleen totally finessed that well that's that I think is a good point about the book because you get that nuts and bolts understanding of what was going on because again when we talk about it today it's talked about in this kumbaya sense you know where everybody thought and we forget there was struggle there was there was intelligence there was as Ricky might have described an understanding of how you might have to flip and pimp and play somebody to get from point A to point B because there was an unwillingness to sit back and listen and there's a certain type of genius in that uh because again we're talking about we're not talking about 30 and 40 year olds we're talking about 19 and 20 and 21 year olds what which I come back these are students that have to figure this all out you know in the middle of this deep horrific oppression that is not letting up and giving you no avenues to to escape you know you have no friends you know in these high places and so I think that's what I really appreciate so he had a question about the draft yeah or yeah I mean I don't I don't know if people understand this um has anybody seen did anybody see that movie that came out a bunch of years back ollie with wil smith the people see that when I saw that my initial reaction and I hadn't looked into this at the time I was like you're kidding me right so you have ollie there and he's like front and center out by himself basically resisting the draft and there's no big anti-war movement there's no big draft resistance he's just like this hero out there by himself I'm like come on hollywood right and then I went and looked into it and it's dead on right there had been a few small Catholic organizations doing draft resistance and they were like treated as traders and beaten in the street um and snick really started following after ollie you know they started to really champion the draft resistance and sds was the biggest student organization they were doing some anti-war organizing on campus they hadn't completely blown up yet but they were they were pretty big and national and um in 66 they invited stokely out um to talk about black power and this is right when black power sort of becomes this is a berkeley right this is this is right in berkeley in berkeley um to the university it's the it's the berkeley um it's the national convention of students for democratic society but it's being held at berkeley in 1966 october and this is just before the founding of the party and stokely has been talking about black panther and all this from louis county and they call him out and he gets on stage and he says you all are talking to yourself he says if i'm gonna kill i'm gonna decide who i'm gonna kill if you want to make this movement real you have to start resisting the draft and you we we went through and i've you know we found all these flyers and we looked and there had been no draft resistance in sds no draft resistance in the berkeley area right and right after that all the flyers are like we asked stokely to come and talk to us and he said so let's talk about draft resistance and then the draft resistance starts and the resistance organization right so snick very directly very directly pushes um and and the black panther party steps into that role right because it's the and so there's this there's this emory spoke here last week in this auditorium and he did this drawing and it's this three-part analogy um and um the panthers had it in their paper and then it was taken up widely by by the new left and the anti-war movement and it was three pigs each stomping on somebody's head and one was the police stomping on black people the next one was the national guard stomping on war resistors and the last one was the marine stomping on the vietnamese so this idea that this is an anti-imperialist struggle and our struggle as black people from the black panther party is part and parcel this global struggle against imperialism that was taken up widely you know and the and the party was a reference because it made the imperialist struggle real it made it local it brought it home right so the party you know was involved heavily in the early stop the draft week in 1967 here in the bay and in 69 sds declared the black panther party vanguard of our common struggle against imperialism right so the party was very involved um as a you know reference and in the gestation of of the anti-war draft resistance and the black freedom struggle more generally um was really foundational to that term let's get a couple more go ahead yeah um thanks for your great book um last year at the in oakland at the 50th year the 50th anniversary of the panther party um i asked kathleen cleaver what she how would she compare the black panthers with the the black lives matter movement her answer basically was that we were the black panther party for self-defense we were not nonviolent also my question is richard ioki he was a close associate of bobby ceo and hui and uh when the fbi came out and charged him i mean out of the mouth as a spy for the for them bobby ceo said it was a bogus charge what does you take okay we'll hold that okay and we'll get another one well thanks for coming i'm really enjoying the conversation um josh has emphasized the importance of practice and and waldo has emphasized the the role of women and again elements of practice in the community and when i think of a revolutionary movement i also think of inspiration and vision of possibility and you know one of my email addresses has got a uh uh the the 10th point of the black panther party 10 point program which i just want to read which is oh shoot um sorry i had it up here and it closed on me um you're not going to read all 10 right no no just just just the 10th right he said the 10th point is we want land bread housing education clothing justice peace and people's community control of modern technology now that sounds like a revolutionary vision to me that may be inspired people to not only resist i like to say as a as an activist myself resistance is not enough what we need is a good strategy and these guys were articulating a strategy that was based in the practice of feeding people and organizing people to do for themselves that's a huge threat to the power structure of my view i wonder if you had any comments on how that where that came from and how that in practice worked out so we had his question in the back you mentioned black lives matter and richard ioki being outed as a spy bobby ceo saying that's bogus and we have this uh 10 point platform thing so um i'll say just a brief couple words about each and maybe waldo will have some other things to say um so um violence and and black lives matter i mean i think this is the point about practice right is that um you can't apply the same practice to a different political situation and expect it to work effectively i think that for an organization to do what the black panther party did today in a very different historical and political situation you know they would be you know labeled as terrorists and you know kill with impunity i think um that is not a politics that's gonna work today right so it's a different moment and different and different practices are required um i think in terms of richard ioki it's not something that i claim to be an expert on there's been a lot of people who have said different things people have said yeah the fbi wanted to sort of discredit there were a lot of asian americans who were paying attention to the party and there's been a bunch of books coming out and so this was you know something that the fbi was doing to basically you know snitch jack at ioki i don't have any evidence that that's true i think that what some of the interpretations that make the most sense to me um are um some of the asian american historians that have talked about the way that you know when ioki in these documents initially worked for the fbi when he was very young and it was in the context of the korean war i believe um it was a very different kind of situation and so what um some people think is that his sort of interests evolved and he basically was stuck in the middle and didn't really have a way out um it's really hard to know what happened with ioki but um uh there were a lot of people who were infiltrating at very high levels um and were um yeah i think the fbi wouldn't be limited to richard ioki in terms of just having a spy when you just look at the papers themselves they were going all out let me give an example of that right william o'neill was he was the he was the security officer for fred hampton right and he would publish articles in the black panther paper on the payroll of the fbi that said if you get it somebody who you think is an informant torture them right i mean this is what the fbi was paying people to write in the black panther party and then he's the one who gave the map of the house and showed where fred hampton was going to be sleeping and drug them and these kinds of things um so there were a lot of high-level informants and you know we don't know exactly what happened i think richard ioki was around for long enough and did enough you know positive things that i think it may be a complex story um i want to say about vision yeah absolutely the the black panther party had a very strong vision i think what the point about practice is not that it's like tactics instead of instead of vision when i say practice vision is part of that how do you how do you explain and think about what it is that you that you're doing but the point is to distinguish practice also from just philosophy right so we look at the revolutionary action movement and ram and and a lot of the philosophical statements were the same much of the 10-point program was taken from malcom x but the ideas in the vision themselves did not a movement make people had to do stuff and they had to do stuff that was effective and powerful on the and the party developed those practices just one thing um you know in the book you show that there was the 10-point platform but there was what we want and then there was 10 things of what we need which i think is important for people to see there's 20 things all together the other thing um you keep mentioning malcom for the 10-point platform with the nation of islam but what i didn't see um what was the dance what was the navigate what was what was the interaction with the nation of islam which you know was one of those first militant groups that was that was an inspiration definitely for a lot of people in the cities especially when you go on the eastern coast um you know was it just limited to malcom was their conversations as everything was going on um with the nation or elijah or various chapters how did that play out with the panthers from the research you all did will it go ahead now i think that the um my my reading of this and uh has a lot to do with the extraordinary impact of malcom um i think um malcom's evolution toward the end of his life and the politics that he himself was crafting for the kind of organization that he wanted to lead i think was more of an inspiration um and i don't this is not to discount the nation of islam but i do think that malcom um you you i i just think that malcom's impact is outsized i i think he is in a lot of ways what a lot of people think about when they think about the nation which is so not true obviously so i mean i i see a lot of it is i i see uh in a lot of ways the party as the children of malcom right and i see it to me it's more you know coming out of malcom because as you know the the nation is a very complicated socially conservative organization doing all kinds of things and i don't think a lot of that is you know sort of where the panthers were coming from let me just say one thing about richard aoki um i knew him personally i met him socially uh in a context where he was the only asian-american person there everybody else was black and so my immediate response was who was he um but i liked him um i didn't know who he was uh and when i started understanding who he was it was very clear to me that he was very complicated and that's my favorite word um guy and i know a lot of people who knew him uh i've read a lot of stuff about this and i don't know who will ever know the total truth but one of the things that i think is that he was never a policy insider i mean i don't think he was running things my sense of him judging from what i know he ran guns uh you know he knew how to get guns he knew he knew he had logistical training you know how to use guns he knew how to get guns um and he had grown up you know with with with a lot of the early panthers so there was this personal connection the other thing is that there was a whole radical revolutionary asian-american left that he's a part of and so trying to think about the relationship between that and the kind of politics that you know sort of connects through some kind of third world nexus what he's doing over there with what you know he's doing you know because he's sort of new new new bobby and everybody else is is another kind of question um third world strike at berkeley creating ethnic studies there's richard aoki third world activism creating you know in early san francisco there's richard aoki he's you know he's he's involved in a lot of different things including some of this but my basic take on him and and there's a whole issue of the amerasia journal committed you know everybody weighs in on this i don't really i mean i'm sure what i get is that he he was not and you know he was not an inside guy you know they they he ran guns he did this or that but he was not he was not up there discussing policy or theory with hui or he was not sort of crafting sort of you know these other kinds of plans with bobby that's sort of my sense of it but i agree with josh we really don't know uh because there's a lot of stuff uh people are trying to figure this out the other thing is that he is an iconic presence i think this is the other thing i i go to certain communities and speak to certain bodies of uh of students richard aoki is like huge and i think we really need to grapple with that too you know it's it's it's sort of has this sort of rep and people are trying to figure out what the meaning of this right and the thing is you know i don't yeah okay hello i'm lisba my question is there's two different changes from that time one is the iphone or the phone with the video that's in all of our hands and the second is that we have social media to get a lot more light shine on you know inequities and such so what ideas do you have around how we could be advancing and taking action with our video and showing more truth around what's occurring around us and micro inequities and brutality thoughts technology question and organizing let's get another one hi um come to you next i i kind of piggyback on this question um i i just wanted to tell you you both i i'm just so appreciative of how you have just deconstructed the movement in just two just very profound ways one um that made the book just a read that you didn't want to put down but at the same time just my heart was just like you know tearing apart one by you know mr bloom you talk about your cultural technology which is like so important the practices and then mr martin just breaking down the amount of state violence and oppression and tying that to the movement itself and how powerful it was at the time which you know kind of begs that question of gosh you know then how do you maintain the movement and today our movements the young folks movement has to be so different because of the media and because we have this history of such aggressive oppression by the state that it has to be underground to a certain extent which is both a burden and a blessing and i wonder if either of you have any comments on that i think oh no that's not isn't that the second question no no go ahead you can hit those questions let's make sure i do rather i just want to sort of respond to the older i get and i'm 67 the clearer it is to me each generation must make its own history and what i think is very very important is for those of us who may know a little something to try to help them along but what i really resist is old people trying to tell people who are going to do it what to do if you want me i tell you i'll share with you whatever i may think but i think each generation must make its own history and and one of the things i feel very sad about today is that i don't think my generation in some ways did as good a job as i thought we would do um when i was in my teens and twenties i just knew you know 50 40 years from now you know oh we'll be there not quite uh and i really am sometimes depressed about that because i feel you're well maybe i shouldn't have done that i should maybe i should have you know and you know what what about but i think ultimately um you know giving young people whatever they need whatever tools whatever resources whatever material they need to to to do what they need to do the other thing and i think josh and and someone said this to to you have to dream change you have to you have to imagine it you have to create it because if you don't create it and imagine it and dream it where is it going to come from it's certainly not in some book like you say we don't have any gap so you have to dream a revolution you have to dream change you have to imagine it and then that's the other thing we need to empower young people to imagine a different world to imagine to to dream a different world and right now one of the things i find with my students is that most of them are not into they like change but they don't want to upset the apple cart which you can't have and they aren't very interested in they think capitalism is one they think that we've reached the end of history sort of you know because this is going to be capitalist and this is going to be it um and so my argument with them is that how do you know this you know um you know are you god um you know the people who invented the current economic system and and and as it developed didn't necessarily and so my thing is that if you if you think you want equality of some kind if you want democracy of what kind what is equality what is democracy how is it you know and so what what i find is people don't even want to talk about economic equality because it's going to rock their boat but you know somebody's boat's going to get rocked and i think we you know my my sense is that i really you know old folks we need to help young folks do what they got to do and then we have to give them the space to dream and imagine possible worlds i i agree my brother i agree but i what what i don't sometimes i feel some of my colleagues in my cohort want to close it down you know uh they don't want to let young people be young people make mistakes do what they gotta do say what they gotta say do you know what one of the things that i also gather from the book and then we'll come brother what's your name again panther in the front denise okay yeah we're gonna come to you in a second yeah so that's why i want to make sure i saw you wave yours in the book what i gather is that what we celebrate now wasn't widely known then and so you could have been in another part of the country and not know that there was people patrolling the police wouldn't have known that they were the free breakfast program etc and i bring this up because we just did a talk at merit a couple of weeks ago and we made this point i had somebody that was there and they were talking about somebody's like what are these young people doing and you know it's like well there's 45 books and breakfast programs right around coming out of the furgusson rebellion right people didn't know that many of those people been to the un not once not twice but four different times and got responses so the challenge before the people in that room is like where were you getting your information from because many people i didn't see it on cnn well why the hell are you watching cnn to get your information when your politic in the 60s was not to trust the media that would distort you right and so i want to caution us to also know that you know i teach at sf state a lot of students are doing things that you would not believe that are you know they're struggling uh they they are learning from elders they're talking to a lot of these panthers that are erica huggins or an alain a lot of them are sitting up there soaking up game we're not going to always see their moves it doesn't mean that it's not underground it's just that ktv you it's not here today talking about what you all are talking about cron in here but let there be a fight outside and every and that'd be the first story and even if it is covered it doesn't have the complexity and the nuances that really require you to get a full breath of what we're talking about and so i just want to say from my standpoint i see a lot of folks doing a lot of things but they also got a lot of challenges in front of them but it's going to be up to us to really dig deep the way that you all dug deep to bring these stories out so now we can celebrate them but i don't think people have just stopped and called it a day and clicked in there's a lot of people but even back in those days from what i understand there's a lot of people that weren't down with work marching with martin there wasn't a lot of people down at the panthers 50 years later everybody marched with martin and everybody was part of the panthers right and i'm old enough to know you know and i know ricky ricky in the back we're old enough to know that there was a lot of people that weren't down with the anti-apartheid movement at berkeley now you sit up here today not only does uc berkeley celebrate it the very institution that opposed it there's a whole lot of people that were part of that movement that you're just like wow you know then you got to go how old are you so you're 30 that meant you were a part of it when you were two you see what i mean you got to go through those type of things so i just wanted to kind of put that in mind and i think your book brought out a lot of that so can we get denise's question since he is a panther and then we're yeah and we've got the okay okay okay go ahead okay um uh what i want to say is um from what i'm getting from what you guys are saying um we had a lot of powerful leaders with uh you know the hewing newton um bobby seal and uh eldritch cleaver and whatnot and cathleen cleaver and um the question i'm you know that's kind of getting to me in a way is uh us kind of going in and uh you know we're not going always going to agree on things but just how we seem to be getting sprayed off in different directions and like you mentioned william o'neill how the infiltration affected us us and what i'm what i'm getting at is how did that play a factor in ultimately breaking down the movement and as we move forward how important it is for us to maybe not be exactly on the same page but how when you go off in different direction you got all these strong personalities how ineffective that is in the long run and how you know how they'll end up working against us because that seems to be a problem even going back to slavery with the field the field negro and the house negro and how that just tears us down in the long run so we got a question on division and how that works systemically thank you for letting me be here today um i was with the 504 movement in 1977 where you have ramps and brails things and uh better education for young kids and blind kids and disabled kids all over the world now i became a member in that building the federal building in which we took over in 1977 and i think it was april 14th the newspaper said so you can look at it and it's been almost 70 or 47 years or something like that my question is twofold number one there is a way that we can conquer a lot of this stuff and a lot of the things that the government is going to try to stop us to do first thing is to learn how to use our mind the imagination is a very important tool that we must learn how to use and can learn how to use and specific avenues to learn how to use to move past all of this second thing there are two books you must read one book is how to clear yourself from legal tyranny the other book is infinite banking those are other books that you can read they're not in the revolutionary sense but i think they can open many many doors to help us move in that direction i want to thank the two gentlemen uh that wrote the book i really enjoyed it especially all of the the word visual words that made me believe that i was there and yes i grew up in san francisco and it was a part of that every day of my life so i totally understand what the media and everybody else was doing and yes it was just nothing but barrage of what the state was doing but if you learn how to conquer your imagination in your mind the state will not be able to touch you all right thank you thanks for that denis want to get to your last two okay i want to feel this question from the youth okay my name is gary i'm happy with the black patches did it because i would be here thank you for that and i bet you when when he goes home he'll talk a mile a minute like my kids and then you put a mic in front of them they're just like right on though i appreciate it um are we i want to say um i want to say a couple things about the divisions in the party and um the unraveling of the party um i mean there were differences from the start um there were big egos involved um there were some ideological differences part of what the party did is it created a politics that contained a tremendous amount of tension right so you have all the the sort of violence that that we've been talking about that black people experience just as part of daily life and then you have this party that's standing up to that and it's facing a tremendous amount of repression of action and so you know it's really living in a war i mean the people who dedicated their lives to this revolution were really living in a war and and the way that the way that the i tried to make sense of the history when you look at sort of let's break down the way that the unraveling and the split actually happens for people who haven't read the book fully the the party really is is at the front and center of black liberation struggle for about three years or so and in early 1971 there's a major split in the party and it very quickly most of the national chapters are shut down and it returns to being a local oakland organization again um and the split is in part a personality thing right and there's tensions between um in specific sort of cleaver on the one hand and hui um and um david hilliard on the other or sort of main characters in this maybe geronimo and the um new york 21 or with with cleaver in the international section as as big players in this um but there's also an ideological component um so um what happens is that the national headquarters um really turns and starts talking basically about social democracy and says we're going to put down the gun we're going to put down self-defense politics we're going to really focus on the community programs and um what they call survival pending revolution and the international group and the new york 21 and you know say basically we're going to fight it out and have guerrilla warfare and what happens is that neither of those politics are very tenable um the the the both the cleaver faction the bla i mean most of the people who try to wage guerrilla warfare end up very quickly um either dead or in exile or in prison and that branch of the party is is um really crushed um very very rapidly and and forcefully what happens to the oakland party and the national headquarters and the folks that say survival pending revolution is that it becomes another community organization it becomes you know one of a thousand different organizations trying to you know have some community support so there was a there was an intense tension and ambiguity contained in the practice of the party right in being able to say we're going to have this armed self-defense and we're really going to do it in a way that we can at least as a national organization be above ground and legal and sustain this and do the community support but we're going to stand up to the to the police and we're going to deny this right so what in reading it there are some tensions and one of the questions alluded to this earlier part of what happens is the repression but i i think if we argue this very pointedly in the book repression is not enough to explain what happens to the party repression is not enough and so there's two there's let me give you three reasons why i three pieces of evidence about why repression is not enough to explain what happens the first is let's look at the timing the most intense repression of the party is in 1969 over the course of 1969 and into 1970 and those are the two years that the party grows the most the more forceful and direct the repression the raids the killings that the arrests all of it that's when the party grows that's the period of the party's greatest growth the second piece of evidence is that if you look and we only deal with this cursorly in the book but there's a pretty big secondary literature if you look at other organizations that had a similar politics and there were a number of them think of drum think of republic of new africa has some similarities there's a range of other revolutionary nationalist organizations that have some influence not as much as the party but in that same period all of them all of them decline at the same time all of them decline at the same time so what what we argue is that the context shifts in important ways and what really makes the repression stick and what makes these divisions in the party uncontainable and what drives this wedge and and forces the party to separate and to to desert these two kinds of the combination of these kinds of revolutionary claims and armed politics with community programs is actually concessions it's actually concessions it's now now it's very different than the civil rights movement and the civil rights movement the concessions are made directly to the movement right you think about the sit-ins and the way that the the civil rights when we think about the sit-ins you know February 1st 1960 Greensboro North Carolina four college students sit down and they violate Jim Crow lunch counter right and they're not they're not brutalized they're not arrested people all over the south look at them they say wait a minute they had to shut down that Woolworth to deal with those students now we have a practice we can use and it's like wildfire within three months virtually well every state in the south except for Mississippi and virtually all the large city have have these kinds of mobilizations right so what happens is that in the civil rights movement the public spaces are integrated right in the civil rights movement voting voting rights are are institutionalized right in the civil rights movement there's formal desegregation right in the in the case of the Black Panther Party it's not like the federal government gets up and says okay you can have community sovereignty we're not going to govern you anymore right but what what happens is that the level of disruption and and it's not just the party right you have to think about the anti-war movement and the draft resistance you have to think about the women's movement you have to think about the environmental movement you have to think about this vast mobilization that's destabilizing the kinds of oppressive organization that's structured into American society and what happens is that ironically it's Nixon who at the same time is coming so hard at the left makes concessions to the middle this is under Nixon that you get affirmative action it's under Nixon that you get municipal hiring of black people it's under Nixon that you get an increase in a growth of black electoral representation it's under Nixon that you roll back and repeal and eventually end the war and the draft right and so what happens is that those concessions they intensify the effects and the pressure from the repression right because remember the party's able to survive and sustain in in the face of this intense repression because allies are turning out folks like Whitney Young right or mobilizing to say okay you can't treat the panthers like that but the more that there are institutional avenues the more that that 80 percent of democratic voters who voted to end the war in the draft and were slapped in the face by the democratic party the more the democratic party embraces the the position of the anti-war movement and says yes we need to end the war in the draft now there's an institutional channel right and now it's harder to sustain the kind of position that the panthers have really built their power on which says we need sovereignty we need community self-control we are going to govern ourselves right it's harder to sustain those kinds of politics so that the context changed now does that mean that necessarily the black panther party would not have undergone those visions in the face of the repression and there wouldn't have been splits between cleaver and Huey and everything else i have no crystal ball i can't answer that question but what i can tell you is is that i believe that if those concessions had not been made if we had a draft today like we had in 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 by 1970 it was starting to roll back and then it rolled back very quickly if we had the lat if the police department in san francisco and oakland and chicago and new york and new work and everywhere else was still 100 white or nearly if there was almost no electoral representation of black people in this country right we would still have organizations like the black panther party today if you had revolutionary movements and governments throughout africa and asia right and there hadn't been the diplomatic resolution we would we would still have politics like the black panther party today so what's happened is that the political context changed under the party right through those concessions to allies right and the politics that the party had developed no longer were able to wield the same kind of influence okay the i need to say something that's germane to my question which is that i lead a walking tour about real estate and politics and i'm a bit embarrassed to say that it was featured as a centerfold of this month's november's a san francisco magazine the author was quite brave in putting it into a real estate magazine lindsay smith my question is alternative walking title for my walking tour riffing off of the title of the book might be people against real estate and i'm interested intrigued i've read the book is there any position that the panthers had respecting the monopoly essentially of real estate by chiefly by white interests and exclusion there for the pain of rent over to the empire i i think what you get are a series of specific mobilizations around specific moments but i don't remember any sort of like policy directive but being able to control your own community and seeking economic equity within the community they had rhetoric which spoke to this but and i know there were specific landlords and stuff that you know came under the purview or some some actions but right at the top of my head i can't remember anything i think josh yeah yeah so this is point four of the program and and platform point four what we want we want decent housing fit for shelter of human beings um what we believe we believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community with government aid can build and make decent housing for its people so that was the program and the platform and the party um engaged in a lot of mobilization around evictions and those kinds of things and various it's important to read the part about the needs because we just know the 10 points but we don't read the needs which kind of gives it a richer context so there you have it do we are we wrapping up or was one last question i understand it um one point in time that there were more females in the party than there were males i wanted to know where this imbalance came from and do you think it came from the fact that or do you think that uh was it the fact that police were more prone to shoot males than females so more females gotten to the party understand what i'm saying and where's angela davis she was women are always doing the work i mean i think i think in some ways it's not unique to the party right a lot of times it's the women who do the work and and that was true in a lot of the civil rights movement as well um so even though the party started as a predominantly sort of male centered organization there were women right from the start and some of the women were carrying the guns they weren't and there weren't as many confrontations but there were there were instances where that did happen um then you have people seeing that famous poster of um hewie newton in the wicker throne in that same photo session there was a there was a woman panther and there are photos of her in the holding the same sort of garb she wasn't in the wicker throne but she had the gun and she would have the spear and she was um you know in that and and some of the early picture like when the panthers went to sacramento there were women in that delegation ruby dal among them i mean look at black lives matter you know it was started by women and as you know um led by police tower network with cat brooks i mean i think the thing is is that historically as you mentioned women are the key in a lot of it even when we talk about the march i mean the boycott in montgomery if you don't talk about um joanne robinson you don't talk about the women's political caucus then you miss a big part of the the boat but having taught that i'll show the documentary and i'll ask my class what do you remember about it and what they remember is king led the boycott in montgomery even though right through and i've won the prize they interview the sister right there right and so part of what our challenge is is that we're conditioned to invisible eyes a whole lot of folks which is why we were even broaching this conversation about black leadership in general because there's an invisibility an invisibilizing of us as black folks when our genius and our technological proficiencies are all in front and center and instrumental people just ignore it and just go to another part and when you trickle that down women that happens with women all the time so uh there's always been women leadership i mean in the book you talk a lot about cathleen cleaver and elaine and the key roles that they play but ultimately a lot of people will gravitate towards this like yeah that's them and then we'll move it we're gonna talk about that if i was just my own personal opinion in 2017 with so much leadership being held by women in key positions in key moments you have this backlash now so every time you see somebody who is a woman especially a black woman that's leading we have this narrative now that they're not they're somehow married to white feminism and that somehow the leadership is now being diluted i hear that more times than you know to to believe that it's it's a it's a organic thing that seems very much planted in my opinion like this is a narrative that we want to push because you without the women you're not going to have the movement and it's just a way in which i think women network with each other in the way that they just so get down that just allows things to actually take place at the end of the day they do the work you know bottom line and um and and that becomes a threat that becomes a threat and so i think two things are being played out one is narrative of discounting and discrediting women which would go right along with what jaya gohova was talking about but the other thing is to um try to find a woman and put her in leadership position where she uh has a patriarchal type of viewpoint in a whole other manner in which she runs things so we're going to find this one woman that will be like i'm a woman but i'm doing the same stuff that these males have done and we ain't even trying to have any sort of gender balance or equality etc etc but you can point and say we had a woman just like we can point and say we had a black president but that black president was all about imperialism like any other president but that's very hard for a lot of people to swallow it's very hard for people to take that as it would be very hard for a woman who's in leadership position who they will one day put up there to say that yeah she was a woman but she didn't do much different than the other past folks in that position and that's that's the challenge can we give it up for our two authors ladies and gentlemen joshua bloom and wallby weldo e martin davie he stole my thunder but i just wanted to make a couple of comments one is that in the wonderful resource guide that i mentioned uh there was reference to the 10-point platform both the black panther path platform and the black life matter is there so you might be interested in reading for you also the book is available in the back for any of you that are interested and once again thank you joshua waldo and davie for digging deep and leading us on a wonderful conversation thank you all