As those in Oakland remember, the Panthers, I’d like to quote a few passages from Kwame Ture, Eldridge Cleaver, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Huey P. Newton…
Each quote will be from a book or speech belonging to the respective gentlemen listed above.
“The racial and cultural personality of the black community must be preserved and that community must win its freedom while preserving its cultural integrity. integrity includes a pride- in the sense of self-acceptance, not chauvinism- in being black, in the historical attainments and contributions of black people. No person can be healthy, complete and mature if he must deny a part of himself; this is what ‘integration” has required thus far. This is the essential difference betweeen integration as it is currently practiced and the concept of Black Power.”
-Kwame Ture, "Black Power"
“For Me Political life begaqn with the Black Panther Party.
When an older sister name Audrea handed me a copy of the The Black Panther newspaper around spring of 1968 my mind was promptly blown. It was as if my dreams hade awakened and strolled into my reality.
I read and reread the issue, tenderly fingering each page as if it were the onion-skinned, tissue-like leaf of a holy book. My eyes drank in the images of young Black men and women, their slim and splendid bodies clothed in black leather, their breasts bedecked with buttons proclaiming rebellion, resistance, and revolution.
I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I scanned photos of armed Black folks proclaiming their determination to fight or die for the Black Revolution.
It would be some months before I would formally join something called the Black Panther Party, but, in truth, I joined it months before, when I saw my first Black Panther newspaper.
I joined it in my heart.
I was all of fourteen years old.”- Mumia Abu-Jamal, “We Want Freedom:A Life in the Black Panther Party”
“Malcolm X had a special meaning for black convicts. A former prisoner himself, he had risen from the lowest depths to great heights. For this reason he was a symbol of hope, a model for thousands of black convicts who found themselves trapped in the vicious PPP cycle: prison-parole-prison. One thing that the judges, policemen, and administrators of prisons seem never to have understood, and for which they certainly do not make any allowances, is that Negro convicts, basically, rather than see themselves as criminals and perpetrators of misdeeds, look upon themselves as prisoners of war, the victims of a vicious, dog-eat-dog social system that is so heinous as to cancel out their own malefactions: in the jungle there is no right or wrong.
Rather than owing and paying a debt to society, Negro prisoners feel that they are being abused, that their imprisonment is simply another form of the oppression which they have known all their lives. Negro inmates feel that they are being robbed, that it is “society” that owes them, that should be paying them, a debt.”
- Eldridge Cleaver, “Soul on Ice”
For the rest, WWW.OWLASYLUM.NET
Each quote will be from a book or speech belonging to the respective gentlemen listed above.
“The racial and cultural personality of the black community must be preserved and that community must win its freedom while preserving its cultural integrity. integrity includes a pride- in the sense of self-acceptance, not chauvinism- in being black, in the historical attainments and contributions of black people. No person can be healthy, complete and mature if he must deny a part of himself; this is what ‘integration” has required thus far. This is the essential difference betweeen integration as it is currently practiced and the concept of Black Power.”
-Kwame Ture, "Black Power"
“For Me Political life begaqn with the Black Panther Party.
When an older sister name Audrea handed me a copy of the The Black Panther newspaper around spring of 1968 my mind was promptly blown. It was as if my dreams hade awakened and strolled into my reality.
I read and reread the issue, tenderly fingering each page as if it were the onion-skinned, tissue-like leaf of a holy book. My eyes drank in the images of young Black men and women, their slim and splendid bodies clothed in black leather, their breasts bedecked with buttons proclaiming rebellion, resistance, and revolution.
I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I scanned photos of armed Black folks proclaiming their determination to fight or die for the Black Revolution.
It would be some months before I would formally join something called the Black Panther Party, but, in truth, I joined it months before, when I saw my first Black Panther newspaper.
I joined it in my heart.
I was all of fourteen years old.”- Mumia Abu-Jamal, “We Want Freedom:A Life in the Black Panther Party”
“Malcolm X had a special meaning for black convicts. A former prisoner himself, he had risen from the lowest depths to great heights. For this reason he was a symbol of hope, a model for thousands of black convicts who found themselves trapped in the vicious PPP cycle: prison-parole-prison. One thing that the judges, policemen, and administrators of prisons seem never to have understood, and for which they certainly do not make any allowances, is that Negro convicts, basically, rather than see themselves as criminals and perpetrators of misdeeds, look upon themselves as prisoners of war, the victims of a vicious, dog-eat-dog social system that is so heinous as to cancel out their own malefactions: in the jungle there is no right or wrong.
Rather than owing and paying a debt to society, Negro prisoners feel that they are being abused, that their imprisonment is simply another form of the oppression which they have known all their lives. Negro inmates feel that they are being robbed, that it is “society” that owes them, that should be paying them, a debt.”
- Eldridge Cleaver, “Soul on Ice”
For the rest, WWW.OWLASYLUM.NET
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