We Want Freedom was written because I had tried to read everything that was written by ex-party [Black Panther Party] members and even people who were not party members, and I found so much lacking. I found the experience that I lived tended to be lacking. And there were some good histories, and some were quite extraordinarily written, but they didn’t give people a taste of what it meant to be at the bottom, not at the top. So, in a way, you know, I’ve been studying and reading a lot of what’s called “history from below,” and this is a history from the bottom of the party, certainly not the top.
It isn’t written from leadership or the central committee or the ministries, it’s written from a perspective of someone who spent hours every day selling papers or feeding kids in the morning or doing security at night or doing whatever needs to be done, which is what most Panthers did every day. And these are average people who had a very deep level of commitment. I mean, you had to, because, you know, there are a lot of people who joined, who never walked away from that commitment, you know, like Fred Hampton, like Mark Clark, like little Bobby Hutton and many, many others.
When you see that your people are suffering or oppressed, you feel compelled to do something to stop that, that kind of evil. So, there are many times where I slip from the voice of an historian and go straight to first-person. I did this, I saw this, I remember this, I smelled this. And I think it will give people some insight on what it felt like to be a member of an extraordinary organization like the Black Panther Party.
These commentaries are produced by Noelle Hanrahan for Prison Radio.
