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GUEST: Elaine Brown, former leader of the Black Panther Party

Last Sunday, candidates seeking the Green Party nomination for President of the United States debated one other before a crowd of hundreds in San Francisco. Former Chair of the Black Panther Party, Elaine Brown, was not among them. Though Brown declared her candidacy with the party last year, she recently withdrew her name. Disaffected with the predominately white leadership of the Green Party that advocates, in her opinion, a softer form of capitalism, Brown also withdrew all affiliation with the organization. She also claims that assaults were made on her character and reputation.

Elaine Brown is the first and only woman to lead the Black Panther Party. She is in Los Angeles this week to commemorate the lives of Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins. Thirty-nine years ago yesterday, these two young members of the Black Panther Party, were killed on the UCLA campus while attending the university. Carter and Huggins were shot during a meeting about the formation of a Black Studies department. The current Afrikan Student Union at UCLA held events to commemorate Carter and Huggins yesterday with speeches, teach-ins, and a march. Elaine Brown was an invited speaker.

When she was Deputy Minister of Information for the party in 1969, Brown released a musical album called “Seize the Time” which featured the song “Assassination” about the murders of Carter and Huggins. The album has been recently re-issued on CD. Elaine Brown will have a special one time performance of many of her songs from “Seize the Time,” tonight at Café Largo.

Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party from 1974-1977. In addition to her work as a community organizer and singer/songwriter, she is also the author of numerous books including “A Taste for Power: A Black Woman’s Story.”

For more information, visit www.elainebrown.org

Elaine Brown will be performing tonight, for a one-night-only performance at Cafe Largo, 432 N Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. Doors open at 8:30 pm. For reservations, call 323-852-1073.

Rough Transcript

S.K: It’s an honor to have you in studio, very excited. And we introduced you to our listeners right before you arrived. And, there are so many things to talk about. I want to talk about some of the new stuff first which is your involvement in politics. You recently were affiliated with the Green Party and then decided to pull your affiliation – you were not part of last Sunday’s debates. Tell us what that was all about. Why did you withdraw from the Green Party and what would you hope for the Party?

E.B.: Well, first let’s talk about why I actually participated in the first place, because I’m looking at the situation right now across the country. We’re in the levels of oppression and reactionary universe – we’re so immersed in it, but there’s no national movement. There is no movement. There’s no more cohesive peace. There are people doing wonderful work in communities. There are people doing wonderful work with prisoners, with AIDS, with homeless people, with all of the issues, but we’re not cohesive and joined by an ideology as we might have been perhaps during the 60s, so there’s no common movement. And, as a result, we have, for example, we have over 2 million people in prison which is what I use as a kind of marker for where we are in life at this moment, not to count all the people being murdered, murdered in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, I look at all of this and I think, what can I do, what can I do? How can I use what I’ve got, use my own understanding? What can we do to organize something? So, I’m always looking to organize something. I ran for office in Brunswick, Georgia, where I live, just because I wanted to use the ballot as a bullet. As Malcolm X talked about the ballot or the bullet, it’s clear to me that nobody’s getting ready to do very much of anything. We can’t even get big anti-war marches going on. We can’t even stop – here in California where people pretend that, oh, we have a progressive universe here, but yet, a law was passed not only 3 strikes crime law but also one that allows young people, 14 years old, to go to prison as adults. These things are absolutely abominations against humanity. And yet we can’t seem to move the agenda. So, I thought if I could run for the presidential nomination, get that nomination from the Green Party, I could put a platform out there. I could talk about these people who are in prison, I could talk about the people who are homeless, the poverty in this country, and not just talk about, you know, whether or not we’re going to have an insurance package for health care, which I consider to be ridiculous. We should just have free health care and let’s go forward to the next issue.

S.K.: So, you wanted to be an advocate for what you call the non-voting marginalized millions.

E.B.: Right, the marginalized millions, meaning – I was telling some of my friends this morning, you know, I have a lot of friends, young people who some people call them thugs, so I just say, you know, it’s thug-life, you know. All my little young people who are in the streets, you know, who are really pretty hopeless. If you’re a young Black male in America and you’re living in the deep ‘hood or a young Latino male in America and you’re living in the ‘hood, where’s the dream for you? There isn’t one. You’re not going anywhere but to the joint. Trust me. Unless you then lock down into another process where you will become a cog in the wheel, where you get a little job working for the system and everybody will say what a wonderful success story this is, you came out of nowhere, you got into the house and now you’re serving “massa” and everything’s okay. So, my thing was to try to raise these issues and the Green Party presented itself because it has a mechanism in place and it has some values that it puts forward. Internally, however, from my perspective, it’s being run by a number of white males who are pretty much racist. They don’t even see the racism, that’s how racist America has become – it doesn’t even recognize racism. Of course, we who have been Black all of our lives and other people of color, we recognize it when it rolls up, when it hides itself, when it disguises itself. And, their agenda was to basically be another arm of the Democratic Party. Progressive Democrats, if you will, whatever that’s supposed to mean. It’s like Kerry said – John Forbes Kerry – I like to mention his middle name because he’s from a family of the Skull & Bones. John Forbes Kerry said when he ran – this war is being mismanaged. This is the kind of thinking people have. For example, in the Green Party, they’re saying, well, we’re really not against Capitalism. We just want a better Capitalism, a kinder, gentler Capitalism. And so I realize, as people began to attack me personally, for a variety of reasons, that at the end of the day, what would I be doing? I’m trying to bring Black and Latino and other people into the Green Party. What is the point? The Green Party is not trying to serve their interests. And, I’m sorry to say, I’m sure somebody will be very upset about this in the Green Party but this has been going on for a while. So, I said, I’m not going to spend the few dollars I have to try to run around the country to try to use this tool to get a message out when nobody wants that message out.

S.K.: Is it possible to use electoral politics to bring about real progressive social change? I mean, in your years as an activist, in your very distinguished background as a radical activist, after all these years, do you feel that it’s still possible?

E.B.: I just think it’s an option. I think it’s the only option we have. Because, I look at it like this – you know, in the Black Panther Party, when the party started, the thing that made the party famous, we could say, is that we didn’t talk about: well, there’s police brutality; no justice, no peace; let’s march in Jena; let’s cry about it; let’s raise our little banners and take photographs and do the video, YouTube piece. We said, listen, we’re strapped just like you. Okay? We have shotguns on the street just like you. If you want to blow away this brother, you’re going to have to deal with us. Now, that’s a whole different conversation. Let’s face facts: nobody’s picking up any guns in America right now to talk about challenging the status quo. Nobody is talking about challenging it at that level. Okay? Whether it’s with the gun or without the gun. So, the question becomes: what can we do that’s effective? You have the Three Strikes Crime Bill – Clinton put this bill in. Black people voted for Clinton. Matter of fact, they loved massa Clinton so much they ready to put Miss …Clinton into office. Okay? So, what I say is this, we’ve got to do something as opposed to nothing. So, given the level of commitment that people basically have at this moment and the fear that most people have of taking on the challenge of changing the status quo, let us start with the most fundamental thing, which is: I can say yes and I can say no. So, can we get a candidate in office that is going to vote against the Three Strikes Crime Bill? Let me tell you something: the majority of Blacks who are in the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the Three Strikes Crime Bill, voted for it, knowing that anytime you talk about crime in America, you’re going to be talking about putting some Black folks in jail, okay, in prison. And what’s the result? 1994 to 2004, the prison population doubled in this country. Clinton gave us the Welfare Reform Bill. These things don’t happen by rain coming down from heaven. This happens because people vote for them. If we had one Black in Congress – we did, Barbara Lee – one, one, who stood up against the entire Congress – Black, White, Republican and Democrat – who said George Bush is leading us into a war in 2001. She did that. (But, she was threatened, but that’s another conversation.) The point I’m making is: if we had had 10 Barbara Lees, we might have at least gotten some consciousness raised. We might still be at war but, at least, we might have had something. So, we need some people in place. If we’re not going to have some people in place, what are we going to do? We’re going to have to either take some people out or put some other people in. So, I say, let’s get, you know, Dante and them. I want to see some folks from the ‘hood. I want to see, you know, I want to see all the young people who are complaining and doing their little rap music and their little hip-hop music – put them in the United States Congress. Put some do-rags up in there. Put some grills up in there. Put some folks there who are going to hold the line and ain’t scared and have no ties to the system. And that’s the only thing I can see. I don’t say it’s the only option, but I’m saying it’s not like, let’s just not do this – we aren’t doing anything!

S.K.: Now, do you think that there’s any even symbolic value to having, for example, this year, two front-runners – one a woman, one a Black man – something that we really haven’t had in a while. Is there any, at least, symbolic value in your opinion?

E.B.: No. I don’t consider Hillary Clinton to be a woman any more than I would Margaret Thatcher. You know what I mean? So, the fact that she happens to be a woman is almost not a point. As a matter of fact, I consider her, as I indicated, to be Bill Clinton’s woman, that’s all. We’re electing his wife. She is no different than that. She is Bill Clinton, she likes Bill Clinton, she talks about his presidency as a great moment in life. This was a man who gave us Three Strikes; this was a man who gave us Welfare Reform. As far as I’m concerned, he did more damage to Black people than the Bushes have done, okay? in terms of the Black community. I’m not talking about in terms of war. I mean, it’s comparative, it’s relative. But the bottom line is that Hillary Clinton is just Bill Clinton in drag. And, as far as Barack Obama, I’m getting ready to write a piece about this, but I will tell you what my key point about Barack Obama is: I say he’s not just Black, he’s invisibly Black. Barack Obama is doing everything he can to make sure that nobody thinks he’s just out here for Black issues. He’s not going to be talking about the history of slavery. He says, let’s get over that – it’s in the past. So, we won’t have to talk about reparations, we won’t have to talk about affirmative action, we won’t have to talk about anything because we’re all going to be holding hands and not worrying about these little issues. We won’t have to worry about the questions that are confronting poor people because we really don’t have an agenda. So, he is what I call “invisibly” Black. Being Black is not relevant to him. Not only that, he’s not familiar with it. And what I mean by that is not his color. He himself says, I’m not just Black, you know. I’m here for all the people, meaning, I’m not going to address, I’m going to erase the issues. I’m going to make the issues that Black people are confronted with irrelevant. So, we’re not going to have conversations any more about our issues. We’re just going to talk about all holding hands together and going up into the world of Capitalism in some kind of kinder, gentler Capitalism. He’s now not even talking about ending the war. He’s saying, well, we have to end the war, kind of, maybe, and so forth. You get an endorsement from John Kerry. You get Bill Bennett saying you’re a great… Wait. Bill Bennett? Wait. Could there be anybody more reactionary, more racist than Bill Bennett, who only last year opened his mouth and said, if you kill all the Black babies, you’ll end crime in America? You don’t mind having this guy say you’re a pretty good candidate? You don’t mind having John Forbes Kerry, who is just the other side of George Bush, Prescott Bush and his grandfather, James Forbes, being best friends in the Skull & Bones Society, which is not just a society but, in fact, runs the planet? It’s the cartel that is running the planet? This is who you don’t mind having an endorsement from? No. This is not a Black man and a woman. These are two Capitalists, two people dressed up to keep the status quo. And they’re also dressed up because at the end of the day, who in their right mind thinks that somebody with the name of Barack Hussein Obama is going to win the election? So, if I were a Republican, I would make Barack Obama my candidate and I would hurry up and give him some money because I know what’s going to happen come November.

S.K.: I’m speaking with Elaine Brown. She joins me in studio this morning and we’ve got a lot to talk about, but we’re going to take a short break now for our weekly commentary, The Black Agenda Report by Glenn Ford. When we come back we will talk about Elaine’s legacy with the Black Panther Party, the event that she was at UCLA yesterday to commemorate, and also we will talk later in the hour about her musical career. Stay tuned, lots more to come.

[BREAK: Black Agenda Report]

Sonali Kolhatkar: Welcome back to Uprising, and we continue now our conversation with Elaine Brown, the former chair of the Black Panther Party, the first and only woman to have chaired the Party. She’s also the founder of Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice and her 1969 album, Seize The Time, was recently re-issued. She joins us in studio for the hour. So, Elaine, let’s change tack a little bit because there’s so much more to talk about. I want to talk a little bit about why you were at UCLA yesterday. You were there to commemorate the lives of two young members of the Party who were killed 39 years ago. Who were these men? How did they come to meet their death so early in their lives?

Elaine Brown: I’m glad you asked me that. I appreciate it very much because, of course, well, not of course, but for me the date January 17th is a part of my life. It’s as significant as my own birthday or as any other date. This was the assassinations of Al Prentiss “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins. On January 17th of 1969, I was there, I was with them, I had just left them when they were shot down and killed by a member of Ron Karenga’s US Organization. People would like to say that this was an argument or that this was some sort of a dispute between two Black organizations at the time. I absolutely am convinced that this was as much of an operation of CoIntelPro as anything else. So, let me just say something about who they are. Bunchy Carter was the founder of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party, which I joined, parenthetically. But, the Southern California Chapter was the first chapter of the Black Panther Party. In other words, the Party just existed in Oakland and when it branched out the first chapter that was formed was in Southern California. He had been a leader of what was then the Slausons Street Gang or street organization – I know people say “gang” – which was, at that time, over 5,000 members of the second largest street organization in America at the time, the largest being in Chicago, the Keystone (sp?) Nation Blackstone Rangers and headed by Jeff Fort. And so, this would be, if one could imagine it today, if you were to imagine all of the Bloods and the Crips coming together out of L.A. and having a leader that would suddenly say, wait a minute, let’s not shoot each other, let’s go and turn our guns and our energies on the true enemy which is the state, meaning the United States Government and all of its variations and branches throughout the country, including the government of California and so forth. We want to change this, we want to have a revolutionary change – let us do something together. You can imagine what a dangerous moment that was. And so we have to know why Bunchy Carter was killed. He wasn’t killed over some small dispute at UCLA. He was killed at UCLA in this moment. No one could have killed him in the ‘hood because they know they wouldn’t have come into the ‘hood to shoot him unarmed and to shoot John Huggins in the back. They were killed and I say that they were killed for bigger reasons. If one understands, and most people do at least now have an inkling when you see the Patriot Act today which is really another extension of the various machinations of the United States government to keep dissidents and dissent down and any form of dissent down and all kinds of activities are used – dividing people against each other and so forth. But murder was certainly the ultimate. Fred Hampton was murdered at the end of the year. We know for a fact that it was by the FBI. We don’t have to question it – this was proven in court. It had to be, it took 10 years to prove it but it was proven. And so we have the same scenario in January with John Huggins and Bunchy Carter. So, yesterday for the first time, in all of these years, there was an acknowledgement and this was powerful. And there was a young sister named Kendra Arseno and others in the African Student Union who decided – we want to commemorate these brothers. We want to say that somebody shed blood here and that blood was shed so that we could have just the few opportunities that we have. At this moment at UCLA, the black population is down so much that in the 10,000 students coming in, not last year but the year before, 10,000 came in and of the 10,000 incoming freshmen, less than 100 were Black. And so, the numbers have dropped as opposed to coming up and everything has been done to get rid of, you know, the poor. In other words, college education is only for the elite at this point, at least at certain universities. So, that became a part of the scene – how can we get back to the agenda that John and Bunchy had as part of their agenda which was, we used to say in the Black Panther Party, we used to sloganize and say, “educate to liberate”? And so, we talked about what happened to them and we talked about what we can do with that legacy. And one of the things that we’re hoping to do – the students there and joined with a number of us outside of there and old people like me – is to have, at least, that place where they were murdered renamed after them, so that Campbell Hall will become Carter-Huggins Hall or Carter-Huggins Building or whatever and put up a plaque and so forth, have a scholarship, but at least to keep alive that piece of history. So, I was very honored to be a part of it. It was a heavy day for me on an emotional level. I was there with Erica Huggins, of course, whose husband John was murdered there that day and her daughter, their daughter, came with her son named after John. So, it was all kind of an emotional day as well as a politically powerful day to see all these young people. And there weren’t just Blacks – it was Black students and Latino students and White students and Asian students and Native. If you name every single part of the rainbow, truly they were there and saying, yes, we have to remember, not because they were Black men killed on this campus but because they stood for something. And I think one of the other things we talked about was how the Black Panther Party was in the vanguard, not only in revolutionary change, but we did create these coalitions with AIM, with the Brown Berets and so forth and that we need to get back to that agenda of recognizing who the enemy is and not allowing the enemy to divide us against each other and therefore weaken our ability to make change. And so that came out yesterday. We had an all day conference and it was well attended and I think it was a very powerful moment. I was very inspired to see so many young people come together around this.

S.K.: Elaine Brown, let’s go back a little bit. I mean we talk about the legacy of the Black Panther Party. I think it’s important for us to go back and dig up a little bit more history, but not just institutional history, also the history of ordinary people and how they become extraordinary. Like yourself. Tell us the story, if you can, briefly, of what brought you into the Party, your background a little bit, and how you evolved to where you were as Chair of the Party and even today.

E.B.: What a wonderful question, because some people from my generation try to tell young people that they were sort of born, that they came out of the womb with their fist raised in the air crying Black power. No, no, no. We were all born in America and as DuBois said, for Black people, we had to deal with the duality of being Black in a White man’s world, as we said. And we had to walk a fine line between are we in this part of the world or not, in terms of that, whereas Ralph Ellison calls it the Invisible Man and so forth. We had to deal with our identity but what did that mean in terms of our reality and so forth and I certainly grew up in a very divided world. I went to mostly White schools but I lived in the ‘hood, so I was always Black and White every single day, trust me. And I actually thought I was a schizophrenic at one point. Once I learned the word, “schizophrenia”, I thought, okay, I have a dual personality – I’m White during the day and Black at night. I mean, truly, I felt that way for years. And by the time I came to L.A., trying to run from my own problems, or whatever, as young people do, I was essentially White or maybe not exactly Black or maybe not just Black, you know. I was a cocktail waitress. I had no life or anything else. Eventually, however, there was a movement going on, somewhere in the world. Watts was rising up in 1965. I didn’t even have anything to do with it. The March on Washington was irrelevant to me as far as I could see, obviously not irrelevant, but irrelevant to me, in my world. And so ultimately, I bumped into a Black woman living in Westwood here.

S.K.: In Westwood.

E.B.: Yeah, I was living in Westwood because, I told you, I was White. And there was one other Black woman in the building. Actually, for me, she was the only Black woman in the building. But, in any case, I had a lot of money coming in. I had a rich lover, White lover, and he was paying for a lot of my expenses, we can say. And he was older and married and didn’t live in L.A. but, in any case, he was also talking to me about Communism and Capitalism but we’re doing this over champagne, please, so it was irrelevant, but it was interesting. But this Black woman, who had an afro, which I thought was interesting, you know, from my perspective as a non-Black, exactly Black person. Although I was always conscious of my own history, I was just erasing it as I went along. And she came up to me and she said, how you doin’, sister? And I was thinking, who is she talking to? There’s only two of us in this elevator, how can it be that she is talking to me? I’m not as her sister. And so, you know, it went like that. She wanted me to teach piano to some kids in Watts because she had heard me playing piano and I thought, well, this would be a nice, charitable thing for me to do, to help the little children learn piano lessons. And so, I had my fall (those of you who don’t know what a “fall” is – it’s a hairpiece that you wear on the back of your hair, it “falls” down) and I had on my little $200 sundress and my $100 sandals. And this was in 1966, something like this, and went into Watts, into the Jordan-Downs Housing Project and it looked like where I lived and it reminded me of where I had come from and I wanted to leave it immediately but, ultimately, those little girls that I was supposed to teach piano to, it was a moment of transformation that was as powerful as any Christian becoming born again, as powerful as the Chinese said as, … (unintelligible), when one recognizes that you have been transformed. You can never be anybody else now. You have now learned something that you cannot unlearn. And I now knew that these girls were me and that they lived in this housing project, that they had no money, they had nothing and there was no hope or dream for them and that my teaching them these little piano lessons was not going to be enough, but I didn’t have a plan for what to do for them. And that was the moment of my consciousness – I was them, they were me and I wanted to do something and to change something and it became confusing for me. But, ultimately, I decided that I would be Black first. So, I got involved in every Black thing there was. I read every Black book there was and I became Black. I just immersed myself and I became a part of the Black Student Alliance, even though I wasn’t really a student, you know, and I joined the Black Congress – I was the representative for the Black Student Alliance in the Black Congress. At that time it was a big organization in South Central, L.A. I was doing everything I could do to make up time for all that I had not done. And, in the course of things, we ran into a man named Bunchy Carter, who was a poet. And, suddenly, he announced one day that the Black Panther Party (for Self-Defense as we would call it then) was forming a chapter in Southern California and everybody was trembling and everybody was scared because now it wasn’t enough to be Black – you had to do something. And everybody knew that something was dangerous because Huey Newton had just been shot and he was getting ready to go on trial. And so we were all scared and we all, nobody knew what to do because now there was a challenge and we had to do something more. In April of 1968, Bobby Hutton was killed and when Bobby Hutton was killed, almost the next day I walked down to the Black Panther office and I gave my life because that’s how you felt when you joined the Party. It’s like this is it. And Erica Huggins signed me up. I filled out a little card and she became my “captain”, because we had a paramilitary structure and Erica was my captain and I met all these other wonderful people and these were the pieces of transformation. And I tell young people that a lot because I want people to know that it doesn’t necessarily happen, sometimes it has to be that internal moment when you say I’m prepared now to give my life for something bigger than me because what I get back is that I become, you know, I have eternal life, as Huey Newton used to say – by giving my life to the Revolution, I gain eternal life.

S.K.: We’re speaking with Elaine Brown, the first and only woman to have chaired the Black Panther Party. She joins me in studio for the hour. And, we’ve been talking a lot about Alprentiss “Bunchy” Carter, John Huggins – you wrote a song about them and I want to focus the last part of our interview a little bit on your music and before we do that, we’d like to actually listen to the song. Right after this Radical Day in History, we’ll take a listen to the song, “Assassination” by Elaine Brown off her “Seize the Time” album, which was recently re-issued.

(Song – “Assassination”)

S.K.: …and we’re listening to Elaine Brown off of her album, “Seize the Time”, which was originally released in 1969 and was just re-released. This is the song, “Assassination”. Elaine Brown joins us in studio, the first and only woman chair of the Black Panther Party. Elaine, tell us about this song.

E.B.: Well, this song was obviously – you know, I always say as a songwriter, and I do think of myself, in some parts of myself, as a songwriter. I like to be a songwriter. I wrote this song when I was in jail. We were arrested, all of us in the Southern California Chapter, almost all of us, were arrested on the 17th of January. The funny thing is that the people who killed John and Bunchy were not arrested but we were arrested, rounded up by the police and taken in. Erica Huggins was with us. She had just had her baby three weeks before and she was taken in the police car with the baby and she named the baby in the police car, Amai, after a Vietnamese woman that John wanted to name his baby. At some point they discussed it – they hadn’t named the baby yet. We used to laugh about that. And we all went to jail that day and sitting there at Sybil Brand Institute, as they called it, in that cell, I kept feeling that John and Bunchy weren’t dead, as people do when you want to go into denial about your friends dying and it was so shocking – we were all so young. And I sort of just wrote this song like the writing hand. You know, it was what I wrote for them. And as a result of that, as a matter of fact, after I got out of jail and after, at Bunchy’s funeral – I sang for his funeral – I sang Precious Lord, at his mother’s request. David Hillyard, who was the active leader of the Black Panther Party at the time as the Chief of Staff, came down for the funeral and had heard about these songs and asked me if I had some more and, of course, I did. And he said, go forth and make an album. And a wonderful man – I want to say this – named Horace Tapscot, who was a great jazz pianist and really had a wonderful jazz orchestra and who died, but whose work is still very much alive here in the L.A. area, particularly in Leimert Park, where there’s a lot of activity going on. And Horace had been someone I had met at something called the Watt’s Happening Coffee House on 103rd. So, I knew him and I knew he could write music. When I say write, I mean he could script it out. I can do it too but it would take me three years to do one song but Horace could do it, you know, he was brilliant. So, he orchestrated all of the pieces for this album. He got me in touch with somebody and we did it for something called Vault Records and every single day we did this. It was, they called it, direct to disc, meaning you don’t have tapes, you can’t replay, once you do it, that’s it. It’s like a live thing. So, we had all his orchestra people there – Arthur Black on saxophone, all these wonderful jazz musicians. You just can’t imagine how honored I was. And Horace lifting up my piano most of the time – I played most of it but he lifted it up because he’s a great pianist and we did that album. The police were outside all the time. We were stopped all the time. And, I was pregnant. It was a wild, scary moment in 1969. Every single month of that year, we had someone in the Southern California Chapter of the Party killed. And then, of course, at the end of the year we had the deaths of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago and the raid on our office so it was in this incredible moment that this song was made or this music was made. So, I say that to say, I never really write these songs, the people who live these lives write them and I’m just taking a photograph in words and music of what powerful things they’ve done.

S.K.: Elaine, you’re going to be performing at Café Largo tonight. It’s a one-time performance. You’re going to be playing songs from this album. Let me just mention to our listeners, Café Largo, that’s tonight. Doors open at 8:30 p.m. The opening act is Lisa Flores whom we actually featured on Uprising recently. The address of Café Largo is 432 North Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. For reservations, you can call 323-852-1073. So, let’s talk a little bit more about how this album then figured, if you will, within the Party. You were the Deputy Minister of Information for the Party when this album came out. How did music and how did your music in particular for you feature as part of your struggle within the movement and as part of your struggle in the Black Panther Party?

E.B.: Well, of course, we always said that, you know, the culture and the art is secondary, in other words, it’s a reflection. So, we have the videos now today and the people talking about, arguing about the “bootylicious” video, what have you. But, at the same time, not recognizing that you have these big corporations that are behind this kind of activity, so it’s a reflection of what they want to promote because they’re in control, so we tried to produce a culture that was revolutionary. But I was not an artist first, I was an artist as a part of being a revolutionary. If I could contribute that, that was what I contributed. If I had been better with weapons, maybe I would have been the security forces. But I wasn’t. We had other people who were. I could write a song and could we use that song to inspire people. We did everything. Our clothing. Everything that we did was a part of the revolutionary struggle as we saw it. It was a part of the educational thing. When Emory Douglas did his artwork, all of that was to engage people’s minds in some way or another so my songs were just another part of the Black Panther Party’s program to get our word out, get the message out and say what we had to say. I was fortunate because one of the songs that I did write for that album came to be the Black Panther Party national anthem, as we called it. And if you were to see anybody who had been in the Party today, and I started singing that song, they would stand up and raise their fists because that was our song and I’m very proud to say that. But it wasn’t intended to be that way. It was just the way it was. We wrote music, we wrote poems. Bunchy was a poet, a great poet. Erica Huggins is a great poet. Huey wrote poems. We all did things but we didn’t see this as our primary goal, we saw this as how can we, what tool can we contribute to the struggle? And, one of the things I was able to contribute was these songs and people liked them and so that got people past the first thing – and they said, wait a minute, what are they talking about? What is the message here? So, every song on this album is about the Black Panther Party or something. And if you were to see the cover of this album – it’s a big AK-47 on the cover. Of course, that’s the gun of the poor and the oppressed. That’s the weapon that the poor use in revolutionary struggle around the world, sort of the symbolic thing. So, we put that on the album cover and it’s still on there. And so that’s what it was, it was a tool for their struggle.

S.K.: Finally, in the last minute of this interview that we have left, Elaine Brown, the Black Panther Party was what it was in that moment all those decades ago. Today, moving forward, you talked about how young people really need to get in there, you know, get into politics and get into activism. Do you think that there is room for another resurrection, for a type of Black Panther Party? What are some of the ways in which young Americans today can keep the struggle going and to not just struggle but to actually win change?

E.B.: Well, as I mentioned, I don’t think the ballot is the only way but I think it’s a good start, in other words, if we can take out a few reactionaries and put in somebody with a real revolutionary agenda. I do think there needs to be some study but I think that people can come together. As I said, last night I saw the hope that I haven’t seen in a long while. Young people who are college students talking to some young people who are there, who are from the streets, thug-life and the college students, and we need to pull these people together, people of all different so-called races which is, of course, really not even an intelligent term, coming together. I think that that movement is possible. It will be what it is. It will not be that movement of our time. It will be what it is. You’ve got connections through communications. You know, thanks to the CIA, we have the Internet. But the bottom line is that it’s now become something we can use as a tool. We’ve got to do that and I think we can. I think young people have a lot of hope. There’s a generation coming, truly, I believe that. And I see a lot of hope. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t even be here today.

Special Thanks to Julie Svenden for transcribing this interview