Sections Above and Below This Page:

to kill all and anyone, no matter who, and finally offing one of his own brothers in Algeria who, he boasted, ". . . was only the first to be buried in the Panther graveyard, leavin' plenty room for more!" Just another low-riding mug who, like all mugs, started knifing his brothers in the back when he got himself in a jam by leaving the country he couldn't handle--in the same way he couldn't handle women.

Cleaver finally parodied himself by holding an absurd press conference in Algiers to announce his imminent return to America where, he said, he was going to organize "urban guerrilla units" patterned after those in Latin America, Quebec and Northern Ireland. Their deeds would include political kidnappings "of such a nature that they will receive nationwide and worldwide coverage, as well as other exploits that we will openly and proudly admit throughout the Pigs' news media!"

Later that same day, H. Rap Brown was shot, apparently, in a gun duel with some New York cops after he and three St. Louis black men allegedly stuck up the Red Carpet Lounge, robbing all the nonwhite patrons and some kids who were having a penny-ante dice game outside the bar. Some people would say that sticking up saloons was a revolutionary act. It wasn't, and probably no one knew that better than H. Rap Brown. Apparently, Cleaver doesn't know it, even though the conviction of his Black Panthers, Richard Moore and Eddie Josephs, who pleaded guilty to the robbery of the after hours club, gave proof to the lie of his announced "threat" of organized urban guerrilla warfare in America.

Emmett listened to the black, brown and white people on the streets of New York that day, as they reacted to Cleaver's statements with angry contempt for his false-bottomed threat against the "Pigs!" In the end, they all seemed to know that whenever the deal finally went down for Eldridge Cleaver, he would prey on his "own people" and, just like the other two brothers of his Panther faction, would call it a "political act" instead of simply another street crime committed against the poor. The low-money people didn't like it very much, and neither, Emmett suspected, did such legitimate, stand-up, serious organizations as the FLQ, the IRA and the Tumpamaros.

Huey P., Bobby Seale and David Hilliard, however, stood in front of the men and women who chose their side, and that major faction of the Panther party finally began to get down to what it was all about by serving the people through fulfilling their needs, rather [end page 494]

 

Creative Commons License
The Digger Archives is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Cite As: The Digger Archives (www.diggers.org) / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0