GUEST: Flores Forbes, author of “Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party” and Chief Strategic Officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation<\/em><\/p>\nThis weekend is the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party was a progressive political organization founded by Huey P. Newton as a powerful movement for social change. The party was the only black organization in the entire history of black American resistance in the United States that was armed and promoted a revolutionary agenda. <\/p>\n
Party leaders required members to volunteer long hours and memorize 36 books on black history and socialism. They served food to hungry children in a 5 a.m. breakfast program in local churches, sold the party’s official newspaper, and registered voters. They offered groceries and medical care to the poor, drove people to the hospital in a Panther ambulance and took families by bus to visited incarcerated loved ones. <\/p>\n
At its heigt, about two months after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, the Black Panther Party had 5,000 members in 49 chapters and branches across the country. But FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.” The FBI infiltrated the Panthers and several other activist groups in its infamous counterintelligence program called Cointelpro, begun in 1967. Eventually many members were incarcerated, purged or left the party. <\/p>\n
In addition to the social work of the Black Panther Party, there was also a secretive military branch code named the “Buddha Samurai.” Today, on this 40th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, we’ll spend the hour with Flores Forbes, who at a very young age, became the Assistant Chief of Staff of the BPP Central Committee and was involved in the Buddha Samurai. Forbes has just published his memoir, “Will You Die With Me? My Life and the Black Panther Party.” Herb Boyd, author of Black Panthers for Beginners said of the book, “Of all the books on the black panther party, few are as honest, self-critical, and chock-full of gripping detail as Flores A. Forbes’s Will You Die With Me? It is at once a cautionary tale and a compelling story of a survivor.”<\/p>\n
I began by asking Flores Forbes to read from his book, “Will You Die With Me?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
GUEST: Flores Forbes, author of “Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party” and Chief Strategic Officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation This weekend is the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party was a progressive political organization founded by Huey P. Newton as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-program"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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