Sections Above and Below This Page:

chants and rip off whatever else they could from the hip community.They promised to make everything clear to their black brothers and sisters in the next publication of their well-read newspaper, and also issue a warning to those young blacks who were causing all the trouble. The Panther party did this because they wanted to avoid a racist confrontation between their people and the longhairs, not because they were protecting the "hippies" who were perfectly capable of defending themselves by now.

The Black Panther party's statement was printed the following week and picked up and republished on the front pages of the city's newspapers. It was the only reason that open warfare between the two peoples didn't occur. The phony Panthers who were strutting around the Haight stopped after they read this: "Warning to socalled Paper Panthers--stop vamping on the hippies. They are not your enemy, black brothers. Leave them alone or the Black Panther Party will deal with you!"

It was around the same time that the inevitable happened to the man who'd originated and maintained the Black Panthers and who became a dynamic heroic figure to the young people of his community as soon as he began standing up to the intimidation of the Oakland police department. To those black youngsters, Huey P. wasn't just another "bad" brother off the block--he was a "bad" brother who not only was unafraid of the cops, but openly defiant of them. Every time the kids saw him, they asked him one question over and over, again and again: "When you gonna off a pig, Huey P.?l" "Yea, Huey P., when you goin' blow one o' them oinks away?! When you goin' to snuff one o' them motherfuckers, huh, Huey P.? When? When? When, Huey P.? When?"

The kids were a chorus, chanting the same refrain whenever he appeared anywhere. A refrain from a song that was burning with rage inside of him, ever since he realized that men who brutalized other men weren't men, they were animals. They were pigs! And one night, two members of that species appeared behind the car he was riding in and began to harass him, using the power of their uniforms as a badge, a license to insult the humanity of a human being, just because they felt like it and just because he was the uppityist black nigger they or the country had seen since Malcolm X.

When they pulled the car over and told him to get out, he did. They had guns in their hands. Huey P. had a book in his, a bound copy of the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights. One of them shot Huey P. in the stomach, and then Huey P. some [end page 447]