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.