Later on, law enforcement courses helped me to know how to deal with the police. Before I took Criminal Evidence in school, I had no idea what my rights really were. I did not know, for instance, that police can be arrested. My studying helped, because every time I got arrested I was released with no charge. Until I went to prison for something I was innocent of, I had no convictions against me; yet I had done a little of everything. The court would convict you if it could, but if you knew the law and were articulate, then the judges figured you were not too bad because your very manner of speaking indicated that you had been “indoctrinated” into their way of thinking.

Bourgeois values define the family situation in America, give it certain goals. Oppressed and poor people who try to reach these goals fail because of the very conditions that the bourgeoisie has established. There is the dilemma. We need a family, because every man and woman deserves the kind of spiritual support and unity a family provides. Black people try to reach the goals set by the dominant culture and fail without knowing why.

How do you solve the situation? By staying outside the system, living alone? I found that to be an outsider is to be alienated and unhappy. In the Party we have formed a family, a fighting family that is a vital unit in itself. We have no romantic and fictional notions about getting married and living happily ever after behind a white picket fence. We choose to live together for a common purpose, and together we fight for our existence and our goals. Today we have the closeness, the harmony and freedom that we sought so long.

Over a span of time—I do not know how long it took—I mastered my thoughts. I could start them and stop them; I could slow them down and speed them up. It was a very conscious exercise. For a while, I feared I would lose control. I could not think; I could not stop thinking. Only later did I learn through practice to go at the speed I wanted. I call them film clips, but they are really thought patterns, the most vivid pictures of my family, girls, good times. Soon I could lie with my back arched for hours on end, and I placed no importance on the passage of time. Control. I learned to control my food, my body, and my mind through a deliberate act of will.

After fifteen days the guards pulled me out and sent me back to a regular cell for twenty-four hours, where I took a shower and saw a medical doctor and a psychiatrist. They were worried that prisoners would become mentally disorganized in such deprivation. Then, because I had not repented, they sent me back to the hole. By then it held no fears for me. I had won my freedom.

Soul breakers exist because the authorities know that such conditions would drive them to the breaking point, but when I resolved that they would not conquer my will, I became stronger than they were. I understood them better than they understood me. No longer dependent on the things of the world, I felt really free for the first time in my life. In the past I had been like my jailers; I had pursued the goals of capitalistic America. Now I had a higher freedom.

Bobby and I entered into a period of intense exploration, trying to solve some of the ideological problems of the Black movement; partly, we needed to explain to our own satisfaction why no Black political organization had succeeded. The only one we thought had promised long-term success was the Organization of Afro-American Unity started by Malcolm X, but Malcolm had died too soon to pull his program together. Malcolm’s slogan had been “Freedom by any means necessary,” but nothing we saw was taking us there. We still had only a vague conception of what freedom ought to mean to Black people, except in abstract terms borrowed from politicians, and that did not help the people on the block at all. Those lofty words were meant for intellectuals and the bourgeoisie, who were already fairly comfortable.

Much of our conversation revolved around groups in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley areas. Knowing the people who belonged to them, we could evaluate both positive and negative aspects of their characters and the nature of their organizations. While we respected many of the moves these brothers had made, we felt that the negative aspects of their movements overshadowed the positive ones.

We started throwing around ideas. None of the groups were able to recruit and involve the very people they professed to represent—the poor people in the community who never went to college, probably were not even able to finish high school. Yet these were our people; they were the vast majority of the Black population in the area. Any group talking about Blacks was in fact talking about those low on the ladder in terms of well-being, self-respect, and the amount of concern the government had for them. All of us were talking, and nobody was reaching them.

We worked it out in conversations and discussions. Most of the talk was casual. Bobby lived near the campus, and his living room became a kind of headquarters. Although we were still involved with Soul Students, we attended few meetings, and when we did go, our presence was mostly disruptive; we raised questions that upset people. Our conversations with each other became the important thing. Brothers who had a free hour between classes and others who just hung around the campus drifted in and out of Bobby’s house. We drank beer and wine and chewed over the political situation, our social problems, and the merits and shortcomings of the other groups. We also discussed the Black achievements of the past, particularly as they helped us to understand current events.

In a sense, these sessions at Bobby’s house were our political education classes, and the Party sort of grew out of them. Even after we formally organized we continued the discussions in our office. By then we had moved on to include not only problems but possible solutions.

We also read. The literature of oppressed people and their struggles for liberation in other countries is very large, and we pored over these books to see how their experiences might help us to understand our plight. We read the work of Frantz Fanon, particularly The Wretched of the Earth, the four volumes of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and Che Guevara’s Guerilla Warfare. Che and Mao were veterans of people’s wars, and they had worked out successful strategies for liberating their people. We read these men’s works because we saw them as kinsmen; the oppressor who had controlled them was controlling us, both directly and indirectly. We believed it was necessary to know how they gained their freedom in order to go about getting ours. However, we did not want merely to import ideas and strategies; we had to transform what we learned into principles and methods acceptable to the brothers on the block.

The Black Panther Party had done as much as it could in dealing with the authorities. But another avenue was open to us. We could go beyond Martinez and take our investigation of Denzil’s case to the people. Bobby suggested that we put out a leaflet describing the rally and what the Black Panther Party was trying to do for the Dowell family. The boldly headlined leaflet dealt with all aspects of the murder. This was our first newspaper, and when we held it in our hands, it seemed we had taken down another barrier between the Black Panthers and the community.

We had never even thought of putting out a newspaper before. Words on paper had always seemed futile. But the Dowell case prompted us to find a way to inform the community about the facts and mobilize them to action. Lacking access to radio, television, or any of the other mass media, we needed an alternative means of communication. No one would do it for us. The Party had only five or six full-time regulars, but we relied on the community to help us out. Many people knew Denzil Dowell personally and willingly pitched in.

Most of the labor for the first paper was contributed by a hippie underground mimeographing outfit in San Francisco. This was the time when underground newspapers were just beginning: if you took material to them, they would print it for you on an electric stenciling machine. We bought supplies—paper, ink, and staples—and put the leaflet together. Then we took it into the community.

We tried to pay paperboys to insert our paper into the Richmond Independent, the Oakland Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle before they delivered them, but when they saw what our sheet was about, they did it for nothing. After delivering their own papers, they went around and passed out ours. We circulated about 3,000 the first time, asking for a donation of ten cents. This went into a fund for the funeral expenses of the Dowell family and also for the costs of printing the paper. If anyone did not have ten cents, we gave him a paper anyway and asked him to read it. But most people gave.

The Black Panthers have never viewed such paramilitary groups as the Ku Klux Klan or the Minutemen as particularly dangerous. The real danger comes from highly organized Establishment forces—the local police, the National Guard, and the United States military. They were the ones who devastated Watts and killed innocent people. In comparison to them the paramilitary groups are insignificant. In fact, these groups are hardly organized at all. It is the uniformed men who are dangerous and who come into our communities every day to commit violence against us, knowing that the laws will protect them.

The movement was cresting around the country. Brothers on the block in many northern cities were moving angrily in response to the problems that overwhelmed them. New York and other eastern cities had exploded in 1964, Watts went up in 1965, Cleveland in 1966, and in 1967 another long hot summer was approaching. But the brothers needed direction for their energies. The Party wanted no more spontaneous riots, because the outcome was always the same: the people might liberate their territories for a few short days or hours, but eventually the military force of the oppressor would wipe out their gains. Having neither the strength nor the organization, the people were powerless. In the final analysis, riots caused only more repression and the loss of brave men. Blacks bled and died in the riots and went to jail on petty or false charges. If the brothers could be organized into disciplined cadres, working in broadly based community programs, then the energy expended in riots could be directed toward permanent and positive changes.

[...] (This was in 1967, just after one of the longest, hottest summers in American history. Student consciousness had never been higher.) I talked about the necessity for Black people to gain control of the institutions in their own communities, eventually transforming them into co-operatives, and of one day working with other ethnic groups to change the system. When I had finished speaking, an informal dialogue began; almost all the students’ questions and criticisms were directed at the Black Panthers’ willingness to work in coalition with white groups. We maintained this was possible as long as we controlled the programs, but the students were opposed to working with white groups, or, for that matter, almost anyone but Blacks. While this viewpoint was understandable to me, it failed to take into consideration the limitations of our power. We needed allies, and we believed that alliances with young whites—students and workers—were worth the risk.

I pointed out that many young whites had suddenly discovered hypocrisy; their fathers and forefathers had written and talked brotherhood and democracy while practicing greed, imperialism, and racism. While speaking of the rights of mankind and equality for all, of “free enterprise,” the “profit system,” “individualism,” and “healthy competition,” they had plundered the wealth of the world and enslaved Blacks in the United States. White youths now saw through this hypocrisy and were trying to bring about changes through traditional electoral politics. But reality is impervious to idealism. These youngsters were discovering what Blacks knew in their bones—that the military-industrial complex was practically invincible and had in fact created a police state, which rendered idealism powerless to change anything. This led to disillusionment with their parents and the American power structure. At that point of disillusionment they began to identify with the oppressed people of the world.

By political strategy I mean this: I wanted to use the trial as a political forum to prove that having to fight for my life was the logical and inevitable outcome of our efforts to lift the oppressor’s burden. The Black Panthers’ activities and programs, the patrolling of the police, and the resistance to their brutality had disturbed the power structure; now it was gathering its forces to crush our revolution forever. Public attention was assured. Why not use the courtroom and the media to educate our people? To us, the key point in the trial was police brutality, but we hoped to do more than articulate that. We also wanted to show that the other kinds of violence poor people suffer—unemployment, poor housing, inferior education, lack of public facilities, the inequity of the draft—were part of the same fabric. If we could organize people against police brutality, as we had begun to do, we might move them toward eliminating related forms of oppression. The system, in fact, destroys us through neglect much more often than by the police revolver. The gun is only the coup de grâce, the enforcer. To wipe out the conditions leading up to the coup de grâce—that was our goal. The gun and the murder it represented would then fade away. Thus, for the Black Panther Party, the goal of the trial was not primarily to save my life, but to organize the people and advance their struggle.