"The gun is the only thing that will free us..."

"The gun is the only thing that will free us — gain us our liberation.”

So said The Black Panthers, a group who had a more consistent and passionate defense of Second Amendment gun rights than the GOP or NRA ever have:

Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X, Newton and Seale decided to fight back. Before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X had preached against Martin Luther King Jr.’s brand of nonviolent resistance. Because the government was “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm X illustrated the idea for Ebony magazine by posing for photographs in suit and tie, peering out a window with an M-1 carbine semiautomatic in hand. Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.”

Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us — gain us our liberation.” They bought some of their first guns with earnings from selling copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book to students at the University of California at Berkeley. In time, the Panther arsenal included machine guns; an assortment of rifles, handguns, explosives, and grenade launchers; and “boxes and boxes of ammunition,” recalled Elaine Brown, one of the party’s first female members, in her 1992 memoir. Some of this matériel came from the federal government: one member claimed he had connections at Camp Pendleton, in Southern California, who would sell the Panthers anything for the right price. One Panther bragged that, if they wanted, they could have bought an M48 tank and driven it right up the freeway.

Along with providing classes on black nationalism and socialism, Newton made sure recruits learned how to clean, handle, and shoot guns. Their instructors were sympathetic black veterans, recently home from Vietnam. For their “righteous revolutionary struggle,” the Panthers were trained, as well as armed, however indirectly, by the U.S. government.

Civil-rights activists, even those committed to nonviolent resistance, had long appreciated the value of guns for self-protection. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.” William Worthy, a black reporter who covered the civil-rights movement, almost sat on a loaded gun in a living-room armchair during a visit to King’s parsonage.

The Panthers, however, took it to an extreme, carrying their guns in public, displaying them for everyone—especially the police—to see. Newton had discovered, during classes at San Francisco Law School, that California law allowed people to carry guns in public so long as they were visible, and not pointed at anyone in a threatening way.

In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.

Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.

“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.

“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.

By this time, the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere. Newton played it up for the crowd. In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Because they hadn’t committed any crime, the Panthers were allowed to go on their way.

The people who’d witnessed the scene were dumbstruck. Not even Bobby Seale could believe it. Right then, he said, he knew that Newton was the “baddest motherfucker in the world.” Newton’s message was clear: “The gun is where it’s at and about and in.” After the February incident, the Panthers began a regular practice of policing the police. Thanks to an army of new recruits inspired to join up when they heard about Newton’s bravado, groups of armed Panthers would drive around following police cars. When the police stopped a black person, the Panthers would stand off to the side and shout out legal advice.

To read the full article:

The Secret History of Guns
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608

Black Panther Revolutionary Art

Thanks to DangerousMinds.net for the following link...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/arts/design/25galleries.html

Art in Review
A mural recreating newspaper art by Emory Douglas, the official revolutionary artist of the Black Panthers in the 1960s and ’70s.
HOLLAND COTTER
Published: September 24, 2009

‘Black Panther’
The New Museum
235 Bowery, at Prince Street
Lower East Side
Through Oct. 18

James Baldwin wrote that “artists are here to disturb the peace.” He might have added that the artist’s job is also to create peace in the midst of disturbance. Both sides of the picture apply to the work of Emory Douglas, who from the late 1960s to the late ’70s was minister of culture in the Black Panther Party and its official revolutionary artist.

In these roles, he not only designed and illustrated the party’s weekly newspaper but also created a wide range of political posters, broadsides and promotional cards in a vigorously resourceful, eye-zapping graphic style. In 2007 a younger California artist-activist, Sam Durant, organized a survey of Mr. Douglas’s work for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and now that show, reconceived by Laura Hoptman and Amy Mackie, is at the New Museum.

Mr. Douglas joined the Black Panthers in 1967 after studying commercial art at City College of San Francisco. He began designing the newspaper with its second issue, and his illustrations for it were a direct response to the party’s early experiences of harassment and civic conflict. He invented the visual symbol of the porcine police officer that became a Black Panther signature. His 1960s drawings were done fast and loose, and they still carry the heat of the perilous events, the political ardors and the pressure-cooker deadlines that produced them.

Later, as he turned to promoting the party’s social programs — providing free food and free clothing in black neighborhoods — his work become more deliberate and polished, with single, powerful figures drawn in thick black outline against a patterned ground, with terse captions placed above or below. Drawing on American art of the 1930s, contemporary cartooning and Socialist Realism from Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere, his work was geared toward delivering unequivocal messages in forms that either jumped off the newspaper page or could be easily read from afar, taped in a window or pasted on a wall.

It’s hard to convey that kind of immediacy in a museum setting, where art almost automatically turns into artifact. And the New Museum compounds the difficulty by presenting Mr. Douglas’s work in reverential, precious-object terms, with newspapers and posters neatly arranged in a few vitrines sparsely distributed over a big space. The approach is classic white-box pure and a good example of how operating by the modernist letter can tamp down the art spirit.

But spirit comes through anyway. Mr. Douglas’s works were meant to be in your face and in your gut, and they are, irrepressibly. His early images are shockers and utterly appropriate, on-the-spot responses to a shocking time, when a group of disenfranchised citizens under assault was trying to carve out a pacific and protected place for itself.

If Mr. Douglas’s work from the mid-1970s tends to be milder in tone and more internationalist in focus, the issues it tackles — poverty, war, health care, corporate rapacity — are as immediate now as then. So it’s a very good thing he is still hard at work. Under the auspices of the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Groundswell Community Mural Project, he recently collaborated with a team of New York City teenagers to produce an outdoor mural at 122nd Street and Third Avenue in Harlem. The painting is lively; it’s soaked in Black Power history; it’s permanent; and it’s called “What We Want, What We Believe .”

Keys Talks About Her Conspiracy Theories

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080411/D8VVUAHG0.html

Keys Talks About Her Conspiracy Theories
Apr 11, 2008

NEW YORK (AP) - There's another side to Alicia Keys: conspiracy theorist. The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter tells Blender magazine: "'Gangsta rap' was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other. 'Gangsta rap' didn't exist."

Keys, 27, said she's read several Black Panther autobiographies and wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck "to symbolize strength, power and killing 'em dead," according to an interview in the magazine's May issue, on newsstands Tuesday.

Another of her theories: That the bicoastal feud between slain rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. was fueled "by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing."

Keys' AK-47 jewelry came as a surprise to her mother, who is quoted as telling Blender: "She wears what? That doesn't sound like Alicia." Keys' publicist, Theola Borden, said Keys was on vacation and unavailable for comment.

Though she's known for her romantic tunes, she told Blender that she wants to write more political songs. If black leaders such as the late Black Panther Huey Newton "had the outlets our musicians have today, it'd be global. I have to figure out a way to do it myself," she said.

The multiplatinum songstress behind the hits "Fallin'" and "No One" most recently had success with her latest CD, "As I Am," which sold millions.
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On the Net:

Blender:
http://www.blender.com/

Alicia Keys:
http://www.aliciakeys.com/