You’re listening to a segment from A Black Panthers Life, Chapter 8, of We Want Freedom, by Mumia Abu-Jamal. Over the course of a decade, literally 10s of 1000s of people came into direct contact with Black Panthers on a daily basis. From elementary school students attending the morning breakfast programs, to the adult poor who came to the free clothing and free shoes programs, to the ghetto ill who came to the party’s People’s Medical Centers across the nation, for sickle cell anemia testing, and treatment for high blood pressure, sexually transmitted diseases, and other fairly simple ailments. To this must be added those many interested people who bought the party’s newspaper, The Black Panther, on ghetto street corners, in bars, in beauty parlors and outside high schools. Who were these people called, the Black Panthers?
Much has been written about party leadership and so-called stars, the photogenic Newton, the charismatic Eldridge, the brilliant Kathleen Cleaver, the ambitious and talented Elaine Brown, the long-suffering Geronimo, and the like. Many of these people, as leadership, formed the party’s public profile, and came to typify the very meaning of a Black Panther in much of the public mind. Most people, indeed, most Panthers, never came to intimate contact with such people, for they traveled, for the most part, in a rarefied higher strata than did the average Panther. The average young man or woman in the Black Panther Party was between 17 and 22 years old, lived in a collective home with other Panthers, worked long and hard days, and sometimes nights, doing necessary party work, without pay, and owned nothing.
Except to their neighbors and, of course, the ubiquitous police, or their snitches, most Panthers lived in relative obscurity and rarely, if ever, got their picture in the paper, in either the bourgeois press, or the party newspaper. Friends, comrades, and lovers were primarily other party members. With very few exceptions, other than the folks who participated in the various programs, most Panthers spent every waking hour with other Panthers. The people you looked up to and admired were the leadership, of course, but close, loving relationships of true care and concern were with your fellow Panthers. They were your confidants, your counselors, your comrades, those you could be easy and relaxed around. As Elaine Brown would later note, “Panther women were hard, in a way, soldiers, comrades, not pretty little things.”
The average Panther rose at dawn, and retired at dusk, and did whatever job needed to be done to keep the programs going for the people. From brothers and sisters cooking breakfast for the school kids, to going door to door to gather signatures for petitions, to gathering clothes for the Free Clothing Program, to accepting donated supplies from neighboring merchants, the average Panther’s life was long, hard, and filled with work. Being a Black Panther for many members was never a single thing. Indeed, it meant many things at different times in different places. Panthers were taught to eschew, what was called, careerism, and to shun compartmentalized thinking. This meant that one should not perceive any given rank as one’s own, nor to look at things from a narrow or linear perspective, but from a broad one, as in what is in the best interest of the party. Individualism, like careerism, was seen as a negative, bourgeois, trait that was criticized. The highest achievement for a Panther, was to think in collectivist terms, as in we, not I. This way of thinking fostered humility, self-sacrifice, and discipline in party ranks, promoting the best interest of the collective, rather than arrogance and egotism, which threatened to destroy and break our working relationships.
In this environment, the Party became the central focus in the lives of 1000s of Panthers across the nation, and an extraordinary morale and sense of unity of purpose were engendered. Thus, there were few things more exciting than meeting a fellow Panther from another part of the nation. Although there is considerable linguistic diversity in Black America, these regional forms of speech did not divide Panthers, but, acted as bonds of affection between brothers and sisters. The deep Southern drawls of our North Carolinian or Virginian comrades, drew smiles from Pennsylvanians or New Yorkers in the party. Similarly, when we met Panthers from, say, New Haven or Boston, who wanted to “drive a cah to the bah,” we found ourselves rolling on the ground, giddy with laughter, and really with a kind of amazement that Black people, Black Panthers, really talk like that. In many of these informal settings, Panthers learn from other Panthers how life was lived in other parts of this vast country.
That joy, however, was tempered by gritty moments of terror, either by one’s experience, or by psychological projection from what happened to other Panthers at the hands of the state. The slaughters of the sleeping Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, in a Panther pad in Chicago on December 4th 1969, sent a disturbing message to Panthers all across the nation. “We will kill you in your sleep with impunity,” the government seemed to be saying. You’re listening to a segment from A Black Panther’s Life, Chapter 8 of We Want Freedom. This is its author, Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are produced by Noelle Hanrahan for Prison Radio.
