The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

­It's been 40 years since 1968­ and already people are wondering how to remember it. Well, this is how I remember it and some of the years beyond.....

­

 I heard the loud thumping of­ footsteps coming up the ­basement stairs of my parents' home in Silver Spring, Md. Something was very wrong. My girlfriend Marie appeared at the kitchen entrance, distraught and out of breath. Martin Luther King has just been shot dead in Memphis. It's all over the news. Come downstairs. Now.

A terrible primal rage boiled up from somewhere deep in my
consciousness. Not Martin Luther King. Not King. For God's sake, not
him.

I stood for a moment overcome by a terrible anger then said,"
They're going to burn America to the ground tonight. And I'm glad."

I wasn't kidding.

The TV news was already reporting riots in cities across the nation.
There had been several seasons of deadly riots since about 1964. Now
April, what T.S. Eliot once called the cruelest month, was exploding
into flames and gunshots. And Dr. Martin Luther King was dead.

Earlier in 1968, I had volunteered to work on Martin Luther King's Poor
Peoples' Campaign. King envisioned a massive multiracial occupation of
Washington DC to press for social justice and an end to the Viet Nam
War. He planned to call it Resurrection City.

King had moved in a radical direction by 1968, still committed to
non-violence, but upsetting many in the traditional liberal community
with his appeals to class solidarity and his opposition to the Viet Nam
war.

I was a student member  of the University of Maryland(UM) Poor Peoples'
Campaign Support Committee with my friend Mike Green, another guy who
would later become a campus cop and  20 other people. It was nothing
glamorous. Our job was logistics: helping to move the food and
materials necessary for the poor peoples' tent city that King hoped
would awaken America's conscience.

At our last meeting, we were planning for a DC walk with Dr. King in
mid-April. I had never marched with King before. This was going to be
special.

King had gone to Memphis to support a sanitation workers strike. The ­
workers were represented by the American Federation of State, County
and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the same militant civil rights
oriented union that had established itself among campus workers at UM.
King hoped that the  Memphis workers would become part of his Poor
Peoples' campaign.

UM student activists were already committed to supporting the campus
workers' union. Somehow it all looked like it would come together.

Instead, King had been cut down by gunfire as he stood on the balcony of his motel.

I sat with Marie in my parents' house in Silver Spring Md, and heard
the news that Washington's  14th Street corridor was in flames. This
was street where I had experienced some of my earliest childhood
memories...where I had seen my first movie (ironically, it was Snow
White).... the neighborhood where I had cried hysterically at the age
of 4 when we moved. Familiar landmarks were disappearing.

An era was over. Who knew what was coming next.

The news stations played the speech that King had made the night
before, about having been to the mountain top. ... about seeing the
promised land.....and the possibility he might not get there with us.
It was the greatest speech of his life; better than the more famous "I
have a dream" speech. King knew the odds. For a man in his line of
work, they weren't favorable.

Both Marie and I felt the need to do something. The next day, we went
over to the UM campus for a rally. Several hundred confused, distraught
students were there: Students for a Democratic Society members, Black Student Union members, student government representatives and
others. Many people had fled the campus in fear of violence.

Everyone wanted to do something. Typical of that Jim Crow era, the flag
in front of the admin building was not at half-mast. Even MacDonald's
Hamburgers had lowered the flag out of respect. A short angry
confrontation with an administration bureaucrat got the flag lowered.
It wasn't much. But what else was there to do?

Marie and I huddled with  other SDS members. Someone said a rally was
being organized in front of the White House. Neal and Dinky offered to
drive down there with Marie and I. Jackie volunteered  her car and
another group of SDSers piled into her VW wagon.

Neal took the wheel of his small compact and we sped off down Route One
and headed for the White House. As we drove into the District,  it was
obvious that white people were fleeing the city. DC traffic jams were
notorious( especially after they ripped out the street cars), but this
one was too early in the day for rush hour.

As we approached the intersection of 7th Street, we could see smoke
rising to the right. Stopping for a red light we could see fire trucks
and cop cars a couple of blocks away with buildings in flames. People
were running in the streets, some with stuff in their arms.

We were in the middle of the riot.

The light changed and we drove on. No one on the street seemed to take
any notice of us, but there was now bumper to bumper traffic going out
of the city. Periodically,  DC cop cars with riot shotguns pointed out
the windows would wail past.

As we approached what was then the downtown shopping area near Woodward
and Lothrop dept store, we saw small bands of teenagers
running through the stalled traffic. They were looting stores a couple
of blocks from the White House. We saw armed soldiers and riot cops as
we neared Pennsylvania Ave. We were supposed to meet in Lafayette Park,
but that was closed off. Angry short-tempered cops waved us away. If
there had been a rally, we were too late.

Driving back through the riot via Rhode Island Ave and the stalled
traffic jam of terrified commuters did not seem like a good idea, so we
headed over toward Dupont Circle and got back to the Maryland suburbs
from that direction.

As night fell we knew that across our nation people were being killed, wounded and arrested as whole blocks went up in flames.

There were machine guns on the White House lawn. But for us, there was nothing to do but go home feeling helpless and defeated.

We got in touch with Jackie and she told us that they had made it to
Lafayette Park ahead us, but had been driven out by cops and soldiers.
The rally had fizzled.

Something went out of me that day. I never went back to volunteer for
the Poor Peoples' Campaign. Yes, King's aides did organize a
Resurrection City, but I lacked the spirit to even go to help out or
attend the rallies. Somehow it seemed pointless.

1968 was a bad year. A very bad year.

In January the Tet offensive in Viet Nam was drowned in blood.
Thousands of people were killed. Lyndon Johnson did announce that his
presidency was over and that Viet Nam peace talks were scheduled, but
they soon bogged down. Then Martin Luther King was shot. Soon
afterward, Bobby Kennedy, the great liberal presidential hope was
assassinated. The Mexican authorities massacred peaceful demonstrators
at Mexico City's Plaza of the Three Cultures. The Gaullists put down
the French student-worker revolt with riot cops and repression. The
Soviet Union sent in tanks against the Czechoslovak experiment in
socialist democracy. Mayor Daley's Chicago cops beat up anti-war
protesters on international television while Gene McCarthy's peace
candidacy went down in defeat at the Democratic convention. Richard
Nixon was elected president in the fall.

A bad year. A very bad year. One could easily argue that our current
age of GOP barbarism dates from those awful 365 days in 1968.

In the winter of 1968, I had volunteered to work for Dr. Martin Luther
King. In the winter of 1969, I found myself volunteering to work with
the Black Panther Party. The times were a changin' alright........

In the Year of the Panther

The Illinois Prairie Path begins on First Avenue in Maywood, Illinois,
a little north of Madison Street. It is a 61 mile bike and hiking path 
that branches off in several directions when it reaches the Fox River.
Despite its bucolic sounding name, the scenery surrounding the first
few miles of the Path is blue collar suburban rather than the swaying
grasses one associates with the word prairie.

But if there is no prairie to be found near the Path when it begins in
Maywood IL, there is history. On Oak Street near the Path is the Fred
Hampton Family Aquatic Center. On hot summer days, it is filled with
noisy frolicking kids escaping the blazing sun of the American Midwest.

I've ridden past it on my bike a number of times and I always think of
Fred, although I never met him or even saw him when he was alive. He
would have approved of naming a swimming pool after him. When he was
youth organizer for the West Suburban NAACP in the 1960's, he mobilized
hundreds of young people to fight for better recreational facilities
for the largely Black town of Maywood.

On December 4, 1969, Fred Hampton was assassinated by the Chicago
police as he lay in a bed on the city's West Side. He had left the NAACP
by then and had become the head of the Illinois Black Panther Party.
Drugged by an undercover informant without his knowledge, Fred never
had a chance when the police raided his Chicago apartment that night.
Also killed in the raid was Panther Mark Clark. Several other Panthers
survived the raid, including  Fred's partner Deborah Johnson who was 8
months pregnant .

I was living in Langley Park, Maryland then and struggling through my
first year of teaching in the DC Public Schools as a member of the
Urban Teacher Corps while trying to adjust to my new married life.

The previous year, I had been emotionally overwhelmed by the death of
Martin Luther King to the point where I actually quit my volunteer work
for the Poor Peoples' Campaign. King had hoped to build a powerful
multi-racial coalition to challenge economic exploitation and war with
the use of creative non-violence. That dream died with him.

Although committed to the philosophy of armed self-defense rather than
Gandhian non-violence, the Black Panther Party shared King's vision of
a multi-racial coalition to fight injustice. One of the most promising
of these multi-racial campaigns was the one led by Fred Hampton in
Chicago. In May 1969, he had announced the foundation of a Rainbow
Coalition that would unite young Chicagoans across racial lines in what
was then the most segregated city in the North.

Sometime on December 5th, I learned of Fred Hampton's death. My wife
Marie and I were devastated. Fred's prowess as an organizer was well
known nationally. I had retreated from the struggle after the death of
King. This time would be different. Marie and I talked it over and we
decided we had to do something.

We had heard that Dick Ochs was involved in trying to organize a
Rainbow Coalition with the DC Black Panther Party. Dick had been a
leader of the University of Maryland SDS and an inspiration to both of
us. We called Dick and he told us we could meet with him at the DC
Panther headquarters on 18th Street. It was located in the heart of the
Adams-Morgan area, then an integrated working class section of DC, not
at all like the Yuppie enclave it has become.

That began what became for us, "The Year of the Panther".

The  Rainbow Coalition in DC consisted of the Black Panther Party and
the Patriot Party. The Patriot Party was an outgrowth of the Young
Patriots, a group of young whites from Chicago's Uptown and Lincoln
Park neighborhoods who were in coalition with the like minded Black
Panther Party and the Young Lords Organization (a Puerto Rican
revolutionary group).

The Patriot Party, led by Arthur Turco and William "Preacherman"
Fesperman, was trying to organize chapters across the country in
working class white neighborhoods.

DC no longer had any white working class neighborhoods to speak of.
Most working class whites had moved to nearby Prince Georges (PG)
County or to the less affluent areas of Montgomery County like
Glenmont, Viers Mill Village or Twinbrook.

I was born into inner city DC when whites still lived there in the late
1940's and early 1950's. We moved to working class Glenmont when I was
5 and eventually to the leafy middle class area of Hillandale in Silver
Spring. The class differences between Glenmont and Hillandale were
stark.

Glenmont was a land of black leather jackets, Brylcreem, beehive hair
and '57 Chevys racing up and down the streets. The junior high in
Glenmont was a violent place with frequent fights,  where gangs of kids
would form a circle and cheer on the combatants as subsidiary fights
broke out among the spectators. There were assaults in the lavatories
and cherry bombs exploding in the hallways. I never heard of anyone
carrying a gun in Glenmont, but switchblade knives were a popular item.

When I transferred to Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, it was
a whole different social scene with snooty rich kids and tight cliques.
There was scarcely a black leather jacket in the place. I only saw one
switchblade the whole 4 years I was there and fights were rare. In a
way it was a relief. I had been in a lot of fights while growing up,
but was rarely successful because I had a bad temper without the
physical skills to go with it.

I wasn't  one of the "poor whites" that the Patriots wanted to
organize, but my experience in segregated white Glenmont led me to
believe that only a  multi-racial working class movement could really
turn this country around. I saw racism as the primary roadblock to
serious social change in America.

I had been through desegregation when I was in the  YMCA and knew that
despite the social isolation that prevails in white working class neighborhoods, at least some of the people were not the hopeless
redneck bigots that they were portrayed in the media.

The DC Patriot Party had attempted to set up a base in PG County's
District Heights area, but had met with little success. When I arrived
on the scene, they were in a period of reorganization. Dick Ochs had a
printing operation in the basement of the Black Panther office. He was
genuinely overwhelmed with the volume of printing and needed help. So
that became my first job as a supporter of the Patriot Party. Dick gave
me some technical training and I was soon printing jobs on an ancient
1250 multilith.

I spent many nights in the basement of the Black Panther office on 18th
street printing material for both the Panthers and the Patriots. Marie
was a skilled  clerical worker and so was often busy in the 18th Street
office helping create newsletters and leaflets using her formidable
typing abilities.

We also joined a political study group that analyzed American history and Marxist theory.

Marie and I had purchased a Ford van with our modest salaries and since
neither the Panthers nor the Patriots had anything like that,  I became
the unofficial transportation department.

One afternoon I got an excited call from Dick. There is a huge copy
camera available if we could pick it up. It would make producing large
format literature a lot easier. Apparently it had been built in WWI and
designed for making battlefield maps.

We climbed into the Ford van and drove off to look at it. It must have
weighed a ton and I don't remember how we got into the van. The van
sagged dangerously with all of that weight in it, but we somehow got it
from Northern Virginia to the alley behind the Panther office and into
the basement. Dick was like a little kid on Christmas morning with this
huge  piece of printing equipment. The van was less than happy and I
had to have the suspension repaired from the sheer bulk of the thing.
It cost me a couple of hundred dollars, but it was worth it. The
monster copy camera made producing posters and newsletters a lot easier.

The van got a lot of use and was a familiar sight parked near the
Panther office. We moved furniture, office supplies and building
materials. I drove community members to Panther events.

On some nights we would take the back seat out of the van and a bunch of
us would pile in for a poster party. Those were always fun. We'd pick
up a few Panthers who were living illegally in an abandoned building on
14th St and then drop off small teams armed with condensed milk,
brushes and posters. We'd plaster the walls of DC after midnight and
pile back into the van laughing as we passed around jugs of cheap Bali
Hai wine. Technically this was against Party rules, but not even the
senior Panthers ever objected.

I have fond memories of DC Panthers like Jim, Malik, and Maurice. They
were some of the hardest working most motivated people I have ever
known. I had met Maurice  before  he was a Panther. He had sat in my
class when I was a student teacher at Coolidge High School. We had
studied Orwell's 1984 that spring.

Sam Napier was the national coordinator of the Black Panther newspaper
and he was very good. The guy had an incredible organizational mind and
sales of the paper soared because of his well oiled distribution
system. He was in DC for a while and  I would sometimes help him get
bulk copies of the Black Panther paper to various distribution points.

One night we had a close call. It was around 2 am and we were coming
down New Hampshire Ave in Prince Georges County after a trip to Baltimore. A
traffic light had just turned red and I decided to run it. Bad idea. A
PG cop turned on his lights and motioned for me to pull over.

There we were: a national leader of the Black Panther Party; a nervous
miserable teen-aged member of the Party (he had become ill during the
trip); a van load of Black Panther papers; and me. We weren't doing
anything illegal (other than the stupid traffic violation), but PG cops
had a well deserved reputation for being trigger-happy racist thugs. If
the cop figured out what and who was in the van, there was no telling
how complicated things could get.

I apologized profusely, pleaded the lateness of the hour and promised
to never, ever run a traffic light again. The cop looked curiously at
the two Black men with me, but fortunately did not shine his flashlight
on to the bundles of Black Panther newspapers in the back. He let me
off with a warning. Sam had good reason to give me holy hell, but he
was very cool about it and we delivered our cargo to the 18th Street
office without further incident.

It seemed that I was doing more support work for the Black Panther
Party than helping the Patriots organize white working class
neighborhoods. The actual Patriot Party members were friendly to me,
but reserved about their plans for a new project after the District
Heights project had fallen through.

I remember a few of them pretty well. Danny was an ex-marine who had
come from a troubled childhood. He had made it all the way through Viet
Nam without a scratch but had been badly injured after being arrested
at a furniture workers' strike. The cop wagon he was in had crashed on
a rain slick bridge coming from SE Washington and he got pretty banged
up. He still walked with a limp. Elise was originally from Kentucky and
had high hopes that white southerners could be brought on-board a
revolutionary movement. Jenny was more of an  organizational type and
with Dick, seemed to be closest to the Panthers. There were other
people I don't remember very well.

Maryland was a strange mix of Yankee and Confederate attitudes and
seemed like a natural for the Patriot Party. Preacherman Bill Fesperman
had already been through town and had attracted a large crowd to a
public meeting. A documentary film that featured the Patriots working
in Chicago was playing to enthusiastic leftwing audiences. Patriot
Party chapters were springing up across the country and the group had
already published its first newspaper, adorned with a Confederate flag.

I was frankly uncomfortable with the "Stars and Bars". It reminded me
of the "White Only" signs I had seen as a kid while  visiting my mom's
family in North Carolina. When segregationist George Wallace campaigned
in Maryland for president, he always attracted crowds of Confederate
flag waving supporters, some of whom had  a taste for nasty racial
violence.

I understood that the Patriots wanted the rebel flag to take on a new
meaning, but I was skeptical. It didn't seem like that important an
issue, so I kept my misgivings  to myself.

There were more pressing problems. Across the country the Black Panther
Party was under attack. Police raids on Panther offices and  police
attacks on Party members and supporters were all over the news  People
had been killed, wounded and imprisoned. Panther leaders faced multiple
charges and some were already in jail.

The DC Panthers wanted to focus on their Free Breakfast for Children
program, their liberation school and other community initiatives, but
the question of self-defense was never far away. Ironically, the whole
time I worked with the Panthers, I never saw a Panther with a gun. They
were too focused on their community activities.

Once I loaded  a couple of  heavy crates into my van that were probably
weapons, but I had adopted a "don't ask, don't tell"  policy. Well
deserved concern about police informers was rising and asking too many
questions didn't seem wise.

My dad had been a combat infantryman throughout World War II and hated
guns, so unlike some kids, I hadn't grown up with them. Before I started
working with the Panthers and the Patriots, I had never even picked up
a weapon. That was soon to change.

Accompanied by a couple of Patriots, I went out to remote sites in the
Maryland countryside and practiced with shotguns, rifles and pistols. I
wasn't a bad shot, but I truly hoped that I would never have to aim a
gun at another human being.

Being a teacher, it was presumed that I was "respectable", so I became
an occasional conduit for guns and ammunition for various people of my
acquaintance. Another teacher I knew also worked with the Panthers and
started a Black Student Union that became a kind of clandestine youth
wing for Panther recruiting. I didn't inquire into exactly what he was
doing with the BSU kids and he didn't ask me too many questions either.
It seemed better that way.

I later found out that the school principal had testified in front of some Congressional committee about how the Black Panthers had tried to infiltrate his school. I was fired from the D.C. Public Schools the following year because of my work with the Panthers. It took several years before I found my way back into teaching again.

More and more of our time became consumed with legal defense work.
National leader Bobby Seale was being held in New Haven along with
other Panthers after a suspected police informer was killed. 21 Black
Panthers faced charges in NYC for supposedly planning to bomb
department stores and other public places. The national office of the Patriot Party was raided in NYC.

Patriot Party leader Arthur Turco along with several Baltimore Panthers
was under indictment for the murder of Eugene Leroy Anderson, a
suspected police informant. Baltimore Black Panther member Eddie Conway
is still in prison for another Panther related shooting even though he
has long protested his innocence.

Bobby Seale was facing the death penalty in New Haven and we soon had
posters all over DC showing Bobby in an electric chair awaiting
possible execution. The Panthers planned a national demonstration in
New Haven for May 1 to protest the trial. Since New Haven was also the
home of Yale University, students and faculty there were involved in
the defense. We feverishly printed leaflets and organized
transportation. Marie and I made plans to drive to New Haven and take
people with us.

Then on April 30, 1970 Richard Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia
and all hell broke loose on American campuses. Suddenly the New Haven
rally was also an anti-war rally as well as a Free Bobby Seale rally.
We arrived in New Haven and the entire campus had become a student
strike center. At the main rally on May 1, reports came in from all
over the country of demonstrations against the war and in support of
the Panthers. Then someone told us that University of Maryland students
had trashed the ROTC offices and seized Route One. At first I didn't
believe it. I had been at UM for 4 years and had concluded that it was
one big mass of student apathy. But Nixon had succeeded where UM SDS
had failed. UM was on the move at last.

That night there was supposed to be a big fund-raising dance at Ingalls
Rink near the Yale Campus. Marie and I thought it would be nice to go,
but we were both pretty tired. We parked the van around the corner and
decided to take a nap before hitting the dance floor. The next thing I
knew we awoke to an enormous explosion. Having no idea what was going
on, we hastily sped back to the Yale campus. We found out that someone
had planted a bomb in Ingalls Rink, but that it had gone off after the
dance was over. No one was hurt.

After returning from New Haven, I was busy with anti-war protests at
the University of Maryland campus. When my teaching duties ended in
June and the UM protests  wound down, I had time to devote to the
Patriots and the Panthers again.

As part of my required community work that accompanied my teaching job,
I volunteered to spend the summer of 1970 working for the Washington
Free Clinic. The Free Clinic was located in the basement of a church in
the upscale Georgetown neighborhood and catered mostly to Dupont Circle
hippies and suburban teenagers. But I had another agenda. We discussed
the idea of setting up a health clinic that would be sponsored by the
Panthers and the Patriots. The coordinator of the Washington Free
Clinic really wanted to branch out to DC's working class communities
and thought working with the Panthers and the Patriots was a great
idea. So part of my job that summer was learning how free clinics
actually worked.

I was the Clinic draft counselor and specialized in draft counseling
working class white guys. I hauled VD tests over to the lab every week
and was jokingly referred to as the Clinic "VD carrier". I picked up
free samples of drugs in my van from sympathetic doctors. I called our
list of abortion providers and made sure they were still on board for
women who wanted  to terminate pregnancies. We began to reach out
beyond the hippies who normally filled the Clinic waiting room. Maybe
we could interest people in starting  similar clinics in working class
communities that really needed them.

On the night of July 4, 1970, the DC police  raided the DC Black
Panthers. The Panthers now had a second building on 17th Street and
that  was the target of the raid. A number of people were beaten after
the cops broke up a community singing party in front of the Panther
office. The cops wrecked office equipment and stole money that had been
earmarked for the Free Breakfast Program and the Health Clinic Program.

That night I was at the Washington Monument with several thousand other
people protesting a pro-Nixon rally. We had fought running battles with
the police all afternoon and by nightfall the Monument grounds turned
into a chaotic riot scene as the pro-Nixon people tried to ignore the
teargas and repeated police charges against their tormentors.

The next day I found out about the raid and went downtown to see if I
could help. Cops were everywhere and one of the Panthers told me to get
back into the van and warn the 18th Street office. It looked like the
cops were organizing another attack and he was afraid they would cut
the phone lines to prevent communication.

My Paul Revere fantasies ended about 3 blocks down 17th St when I was
pulled over and arrested. I spent a few hours in jail before being
released without charges. I should have walked. It would have been
less conspicuous than the well known blue  Ford van. The day ended with
no actual police attacks.

By mid-summer it was clear that the Patriot Party was falling apart.
Police repression and internal problems had taken their toll.

One day Jenny announced that the Patriot Party was dissolved and we
were now to organize ourselves into the Committee to Defend the
Panthers. This came as no surprise to me as this was pretty much what
we'd been doing anyway.

Besides raising consciousness and money for Panther defense, our other
big project was preparing for the Revolutionary Peoples' Constitutional
Convention. The Panther leadership had decided that the USA needed a
new Constitution to uphold our nation's revolutionary traditions and
serve the needs of poor and oppressed peoples. Groups from all over the
country made plans to go to Philadelphia in September.

Despite all of the repression, raids and assassinations, the Panthers were still very much alive.

Marie and I drove the van up to Philadelphia the first weekend of
September to attend the convention. Thousands of people flooded into
Philly that weekend. The Convention attracted a diverse cross-section
of the movement and I was impressed. We stayed at a church with the Gay
Liberation Front. We were probably the only straight people there, but
no one seemed to care or even notice.

During the day we attended workshops. Michael "Cetewayo" Tabor gave an
especially memorable presentation based on his pamphlet "Capitalism +
Dope= Genocide" about how Black communities were being flooded with
drugs to destroy the Black Liberation Movement.

We tried to get into the plenary session where Panther leader Huey
Newton was scheduled to speak, but were turned away because it was
already full to capacity. As we wondered what to do next, a limo pulled
up nearby and a large powerfully built man surrounded by security
guards stepped out. It was Muhammad Ali. He strode briskly down the
sidewalk for a few blocks and gathered admirers into an impromptu
parade before jumping back into the limo.

Later Marie and I  joined some other DC area people in a street corner
meeting with Chicago's Rising Up Angry(RUA). Michael James was there
along other RUA members. Rising Up Angry was organizing among the white
working class youth of Chicago. RUA had links to the Black Panther
Party, the Young Lords and other like-minded groups. With the demise of
the Patriot Party, we were eager to share ideas with them.

We agreed to order bundles of the Rising Up Angry newspapers to
distribute to people in the DC area. We also met an RUA member named
Mike who was moving to the DC area and we made plans to stay in touch.
We were still determined to work toward a revolutionary rainbow
coalition despite the setbacks we had encountered.

By this time the Committee to Defend the Panthers had closed up shop and I was looking for a new organization .

After coming back to DC, Dick Ochs, Danny and Elise joined with some
former UM SDS people to form a new collective based in Prince George's
County. Marie and I soon joined up with them. We named ourselves the
Mother Bloor Collective after an early 20th century radical leader.
There was a sister group in Baltimore called the Mother Jones
Collective which was already doing some great community work in that
hardscrabble industrial city.

We drew up plans to do organizing among PG high school students and
help them put out a newspaper. We distributed Rising Up Angry
newspapers to high school kids in the Washington-Annapolis area. One of
them reported to me that he had shown it to his Annapolis high school
social studies teacher. The teacher then closed the door to the
classroom and locked it. He swore his class to silence and then read
articles from the paper telling the students that he could lose his job
if the principal ever found out. No one ratted on him.

Some of us were moving into union organizing. Several Collective
members were employees at the University of Maryland and worked to
overcome the racial divisions among the employees there. We still kept
up contact with the Black Panther Party and were publicizing the next
meeting of the Revolutionary Peoples' Constitutional Convention to be
held in Washington DC.

The prospects for a multi-racial revolutionary movement looked brighter than ever. Our optimism did not last long.

The DC meeting of the Revolutionary Peoples' Constitutional Convention
was a disaster. The Panthers were unable to negotiate space at Howard
University for the Convention and thousands of people came to DC with
virtually no place to go.

It was a demoralizing defeat.

Unbeknownst to us, a  split was taking place in the Black Panther
leadership that would eventually  lead to violent showdowns between
followers of Eldridge Cleaver and  followers of Huey Newton. There is
no doubt that government infiltrators played a major role in making the
divisions even worse.

I don't recall any violent factional disputes in DC, but the DC
Panthers did split. I didn't want to become involved in what was
shaping up to be a possible civil war, so I cut my ties with the
Panthers. Later I learned that the DC Panthers had reorganized in SE
Washington and had finally set up their long-planned health clinic.

In 1971 I was shocked to learn of the death of Sam Napier in the fratricidal strife that tore the Black Panther Party apart. Sam was one of their best. It was a terrible loss.

The Mother Bloor Collective went through its own internal problems and
the high school organizing project died when several Collective members
left the group. Eventually Mother Bloor morphed into a Youth Against
War and Fascism chapter. But by that time my marriage was over and I
had moved on.

Chicago

In 1975 I went to Chicago to become partners with Estelle Carol whom I
had met in Cuba while on the Venceramos Brigade. Ironically, she lived
in the Uptown neighborhood which had given birth to the original Young
Patriots organization.

Estelle was an active member of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union
which was committed to building coalitions with women of color. The
CWLU also had a close working relationship with Rising Up Angry and I
was soon swept up into the politics of radical Chicago.

Cha Cha Jimenez, a former member of the Young Lords, was running for
alderman of the Uptown ward. He was supported by the Intercommunal
Survival Committee, an Uptown group led by Slim Coleman and Helen
Shiller and heavily influenced by the Panther ideology. I rang
doorbells and turned out voters for Cha Cha. He lost the election, but
eventually Helen Shiller was elected to the City Council where she now
sits. Efforts by the Daley Machine to knock her out of her position
have repeatedly failed.

In 1975 I took a job a the St Mary's Community Education Center, a
innovative alternative high school on the West Side near where Fred
Hampton was assassinated. We were part of the Alternative Schools
Network, which was committed to educating people from poor and
oppressed communities. The Network was on a social mission and made no
attempt to hide that fact. I can still name some of its members: The
Southern School, Chrysalis, Latino Youth, St. Mary's, St. Pius,
Universidad Popular, and the Ruis Belvis Center.

In 1977, an Illinois State Senator named Harold Washington announced
that he was running for Mayor of Chicago. Harold had the backing of the
Intercommunal Survival Committee, as well as other progressive
organizations. Students from St. Mary's braved violent threats from the
Chicago Machine to work the neighborhoods for him. The rainbow
coalition was back in business.

He lost that year, but was successful in 1983, becoming Chicago's first
Black mayor. Chicago radicals who had battled City Hall for years
suddenly found themselves running city departments.

A bloc of white politicians, led by Alderman Ed Vrodolyak, declared war
on the Harold Washington forces, unleashing years of racial strife in
the city. Harold's supporters, who invariably referred to themselves as
"The Movement", fought back. Washington was re-elected in 1987, beating
back a nakedly racist challenge from the Vrodolyak forces.

I was active in all three of Harold Washington's campaigns. Estelle and
I had moved into the racially mixed Logan Square neighborhood, a
perfect place to campaign for  "The Movement". We never got a majority
of  our ward, but we increased vote totals each time and racial tension
in the neighborhood eased.

Harold Washington died of a heart attack in the fall of 1987, brought
on in my opinion, by the stress of constant racist attacks on him. As
far as I was concerned, he had suffered the same fate as Martin Luther
King and Fred Hampton. Ed Vrodolak might as well have put bullet in
Harold's heart, the end result was the same. We lost one of America's
best.

America has a way of killing those leaders most committed to building multi-racial social movements.

But as Fred used to say," You can kill a revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."

I look around today at union workers, student activists, community
militants, progressive religious coalitions and others who are building
solidarity across racial lines that would have been considered
impossible only a couple of generations ago.

And of course there was the Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns and the possibility that Barack Obama will become this nation's first black president.

The dream lives on...­­