From this point forward I tried to acquire the information I needed in order to decide whether I wanted to become a member of the Communist Party. At this stage in my life and my political evolution — even more than during the San Diego days — I needed to become a part of a serious revolutionary party. I wanted an anchor, a base, a mooring. I needed comrades with whom I could share a common ideology. I was tired of ephemeral ad-hoc groups that fell apart when faced with the slightest difficulty; tired of men who measured their sexual height by women's intellectual genuflection. It wasn't that I was fearless, but I knew that to win, we had to fight and the fight that would win was the one collectively waged by the masses of our people and working people in general. I knew that this fight had to be led by a group, a party with more permanence in its membership and structure and more substance in its ideology. Confrontations were opportunities to be met; problems were entanglements to be sorted out with the right approach, the correct ideas. And I needed to know and respect what I was doing. Until now all our actions seemed to end, finally, in an ellipsis — three dots of irresolution, inconsistency and ineffectiveness.

If I still retained any of the elitism which almost inevitably insinuates itself into the minds of college students, I lost it all in the course of the Panther political education sessions. When we read Lenin's State and Revolution, there were sisters and brothers in the class whose public school education had not even allowed them to learn how to read. Some of them told me how they had stayed with the book for many painful hours, often using the dictionary to discover the meaning of scores of words on one page, until finally they could grasp the significance of what Lenin was saying. When they explained, for the benefit of the other members of the class, what they had gotten out of their reading, it was clear that they knew it all — they had understood Lenin on a far more elemental level than any professor of social science.

One day I remarked to a Cuban how I admired his skill in cutting cane — it was almost like an art, the way he did it. He thanked me for the compliment, but quickly added that his skill was a skill that needed to become obsolete. Cane-cutting was inhuman toil, he said. Before the revolution thousands had had to depend for their survival on working like animals during the cane season. Many of them would end up having to cut off a finger with the machete for a little insurance money to make ends meet a little while longer.

The job of cutting cane had become qualitatively different since the revolution. No one was a cane-cutter by trade any longer; during the cane season everyone pitched in. Also profits for others were not being squeezed from their sweat and toil. They knew that the returns from sugar sales abroad would be used to raise the living standards of the Cuban people as a whole — new schools would be built, more hospitals constructed; child care centers would multiply, better housing would be available to those who had the greatest need.

Having read about my fight for my job at UCLA, he felt that I could assist him in constructing his defense. He wanted to call me to the stand as an expert on the socioeconomic function of racism. I would testify about such things as the incidence of unemployment in our communities; that most of the time at least 30 percent of the young people in black ghettos across the country are unable to find work. He wanted me to talk about the things that white people generally try to ignore — about the starvation and severe malnutrition which Black people still suffer.

"What is a Black man to do," he asked, "when he has applied for jobs day in and day out, when his unemployment insurance is running out, when he can't pay his exorbitant rent for his rundown apartment, when his wife is desperate, when his children are hungry? What is he to do?" He spoke in a voice haunted by personal tragedies.

George was a symbol of the will of all of us behind bars, and of that strength which oppressed people always seem to be able to pull together. Even when we think the enemy has stripped us of everything, left us bereft even of our souls. The strength that comes out of an almost biological need to feel that we have something to say about the direction of our lives. That need had gnawed at George, behind bars all of his adult life — and, what was most important, he had known how to give the clearest, most universal expression to that need, and his writings had aroused people all over the world.

George was dead, and the deeply personal pain I felt would have strangled me had I not turned it into a proper and properly placed rage. I could not dwell on my own loss. Any individual gnashing of teeth would bring me to my knees. Personal sadness in that still gray cell under the hateful eyes of my jailers might break the cords of will that held me together. George's death would be like a lodestone, a disc of steel deep inside me, magnetically drawing toward it the elements I needed to stay strong and fight all the harder. It would refine my hatred of jailers, position my contempt for the penal system, and cement my bonds with other prisoners. It would give me the courage and energy I needed for a sustained war against the malevolent racism that had killed him. He was gone, but I was here. His dreams were mine now.

This realization brought to mind the many heated arguments we had had around the bail movement — arguments which usually found me alone on one side and Fania, Kendra, Franklin and the other Committee leaders on the other. It had been about a year since the bail campaign was launched. I had profound reservations about devoting so much of the energy of the campaign to the single question of bail. In the first place, I had been certain that there would not be the flimsiest chance of victory. In the second place I thought the political content of the bail issue too weak. It did not permit people to express their resistance to the system of repression, which was not only behind my own imprisonment but was why so many others were languishing in prison.

Only after many months had passed did I begin to understand my own misjudgment. True, the demand for bail was not a revolutionary demand. True, it did not of itself expose the rotten core of the capitalist system. But precisely because a bail demand was something which could appeal to anyone who wanted to side with justice, it allowed the campaign to reach out to many thousands of people who at that time could not have been stimulated to call for my complete freedom. They would not go on record demanding my freedom, but they would go on record demanding that I be released pending the determination of my innocence — or guilt — by a court of law.