It has been my experience that because of institutional and individual racism

Chapter 10
Meeting the Black Panther Party
In April 1970, the 
New York Times
reported on a questionnaire taken by 907
prisoners awaiting trial in the Tombs. “More than four out of ten prisoners
said they had seen a guard assault an inmate,” the newspaper reported.
“Fewer than one out of ten said they had a mattress and blanket their first few
days in the Tombs. About half said they obtained a mattress and blanket a
week or more after entering, often from another prisoner who was leaving the
jail. Nine out of ten prisoners who had blankets said they were filthy. About
half the inmates said a total of three men were assigned to their cells designed
for one; a large proportion of the respondents complained about the presence
of rats, roaches and body lice and a severe shortage of soap.”
That spring, three new prisoners were placed on the eighth-floor tier of
the Tombs. They introduced themselves as members of the Black Panther
Party for Self-Defense. Unfortunately, I only remember the name of one of
the men—Alfred Kane. But I’ve never forgotten the men themselves. They
taught me my first steps. I noticed they had the same pride and confidence
that I had seen in the Panthers on the streets of Harlem. The same
fearlessness, but there was also kindness. When they talked to someone, they
asked him his name. “What do you need?” they asked. Within a few days
they ran the tier, not by force but by sharing their food. They treated all of us
as if we were equal to them, as if we were intelligent. They asked us
questions. “Does everyone know how to read?” they asked. “We will teach
you.” They set up meetings and invited all of us to come. I was skeptical but
curious, so I went. The concepts they talked about went over my head:
economics, revolution, racism, and the oppression of the poor around the
world. I didn’t understand any of it. But I kept attending the meetings.
Over time I learned they were part of the Panther 21, arrested the year
before with 18 other members of the Black Panther Party in New York City.

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Thirteen of them were on trial, indicted on a total of more than 100 charges,
including conspiracies to kill police and bomb department stores, police
stations, and the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. Bail for each of
them was set at $100,000, astronomical in those days. They told us they were
innocent. The charges and high bail were manufactured to get them off the
street so they couldn’t do the work of the party in their neighborhoods. That
work included breakfast programs for children before they went to school,
forming alliances with local business to support the breakfast program and
other community projects, distributing the Black Panther Party newspaper,
and having meetings in black neighborhoods to recruit more members. When
I heard about the false arrest, trumped-up charges, and excessive bail I was
surprised they weren’t angry. They acted like they weren’t even in prison.
They told us about great black people from history and great achievements
made by African Americans. They spoke of providing health care to black
people in their communities. They said this country had been treating blacks
horribly and that change was coming. I didn’t understand anything about how
change could happen. I didn’t think one person could make a difference.
Then a prisoner on the tier gave me a book called 
A Different Drummer
, by
William Melvin Kelley. It opened my mind.
I read the entire book in two days. Then I reread it. The story takes place
in a fictional Southern state and features a main character, Tucker Caliban,
who is descended from a great and powerful African. That African, brought
over in the hull of a slave trader’s ship, was so strong it took the ship’s entire
crew to contain him. After being dragged from the ship in chains he broke
free; gathering his chains in his hands he ran away from the slave traders,
eventually leading a band of escaped slaves who freed other slaves, until he
was shot and killed. His baby son was taken into captivity. The generations
between the son of the African and Tucker’s grandparents had been born into
slavery. As the story opens the time of chattel slavery has passed but Tucker
isn’t free. He works for the descendants of the family who had owned his
ancestors. He lives in a small, Southern, racist town.
He tries to find peace buying former plantation land, but it gnaws on him
that he is only allowed to buy what a member of the family allows him to
buy. He builds a house and plants crops he owns, but it feels wrong to work
the land where his ancestors were enslaved. It feels wrong that his life is still
connected to the family who owned his people. He wants a life that is not
dictated by white people. He wants to control his own destiny but he also

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knows he can’t be someone different and live his old life at the same time.
Tucker covers his land in salt so nothing will grow there again. He kills his
livestock. He sets his house on fire and it burns to the ground. He and his
wife and child move north. “Tucker was feeling his African blood,” a white
character says. His actions are a revelation to other black people in the town
who had felt just as trapped. Word spreads and a mass migration of blacks
eventually leave the state.
I knew how Tucker felt. Like him, I wanted to burn my past to the
ground. At one time my greatest dream was to go to Angola prison. Maybe
that’s all I’d been allowed to dream. To survive Angola, I had become a man
who acted against his true nature. Now I wanted to go as far as my humanity
would allow me to go. After reading 
A Different Drummer
I started to
believe, for the first time in my life, that one man could make a difference.
The words the Panthers spoke started to make more sense to me. The
Panthers explained to us that institutionalized racism was the foundation for
all-white police departments, all-white juries, all-white banks, all-white
universities, and other all-white institutions in America. It was purposeful
and deliberate, they told us, and it wasn’t just blacks who were marginalized.
It was poor people all over the world. On the tier, in the dining hall, on the
yard I started to see the black men around me as if for the first time. I thought
of my neighborhood where three out of every four kids were petty thieves.
We were all so poor. I was so used to it being that way. It was illegal for us to
go to places where white people went. Racism was the law. The Voting
Rights Act wasn’t passed until I was 17. Although blacks were allowed to
vote before that, we were usually intimidated and told by powerful white men
who and what to vote for. We had no knowledge of the history of African
people and their contributions to civilization. We didn’t know anything about
African American scientists, statesmen, historians, writers. Without knowing
black history, we knew nothing about ourselves.
I thought of my mom, living under the dehumanizing Jim Crow laws in a
world of white supremacy that didn’t care about her. All the textbooks in a
black child’s classroom in the South were already used—passed down by
white schools under Jim Crow laws. Out of date and worn out, many of them
had cruel and racist remarks about black people handwritten in the margins.
My mom used to tell us she missed a lot of school because she only went
when she had shoes. I had judged her harshly for not being able to read.
I thought of the most violent and depraved prisoners I’d encountered at

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Angola and in New York. I couldn’t bring myself to hate them. Uneducated,
they were surrounded by racism and corruption in prison, threatened by, and
often the victims of, violence and beatings because of their race, forced to
live in filth, worked to death, and barely fed. Treated like animals they
became subhuman. They became animals. All the principles I was being
taught by the Black Panther Party I now started to understand. We want
freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our black and oppressed
communities . . . decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings . . . land,
bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace. I not only got it with my
mind, I felt it with my heart, my soul, my body. It was as if a light went on in
a room inside me that I hadn’t known existed.

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