![]() Then I realized that their understanding had to be developed.The cover of this issue of The Black Panther newspaper featured the image of a line of schoolchildren dressed in button-downs and the signature Black Panther beret, accompanied by an unattributed Mao Zedong quote describing the role of the youth in creating a better future. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. ![]() After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly feel into this error. You cannot win them over by drawing a line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other that shows a lack of consciousness. I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. Maurice just wanted to preach to the converted, who already agreed with him. I was turned off by a person who did not want to talk to me because I was not important enough. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible. ![]() Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand. Maurice taught me a lesson that I try to apply to the Black Panther Party today. “You know what an Afro-Cucan is?” “Yes” “You know what an Afro-Brazilian is?” “Yes” “Then why don’t you know what an Afro-American is?” It may have been apparent to him, but not to me. I could not understand what he was saying about “Afro-Americans.” The term was new to me. I had come searching for something, and he scorned me because I did not already know what I was seeking. The first member I met, though, was Maurice Dawson, one of Warden’s tight partners. I went to Berkley to find Warden and hear what he was saying. He was the head of an organization called the Afro-American Association. The other told me that I sounded like a guy named Donald Warden who was preaching Blackness at the Berkley campus of the University of California. “In the discussion at Phi Beta Sigma, a social fraternity I joined for a while, I expressed my anger about society and white racism. We will have to be driven out with a stick.” When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish it means just the opposite. But before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. Indeed, we are all-Black and white alike-ill in the same way, mortally ill. This possibility is important, because much in human existence is based upon hope without any real understanding of the odds. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions. Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide. “I do not think that life will change for the better without an assault on the Establishment, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth.
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