Pertinent to what is now happening in our United States, I have selected these passages for your consideration.
From pages in Eldridge Cleaver's 1978 book, Soul on Fire:
25
“Ever since the Watts uprising of 1965, in which scores of black people had been killed, a rising tide had been growing against what had every appearance of the indiscriminate killing of citizens by the police. Everyone talked about it but no one was doing anything about it. The Black Panther Party was called into being by this, strongly dedicated to organizing resistance to the repression from the occupying army of police that patrolled the black community like foreign troops.”
18
“We Panthers had expected a military coup to take management of “American democracy,” that being the only apporpriate response of the people in charge to the revolutionary war exploding all over North America.
21
“Across America, black people were at the end of their patience with the empty promises and fulfilled threats of a government which now seemed prepared to wage war in the ghetto with the same mindlessness that it continued to kill Vietnamese.”
22
“In response to the outpouring of rage and destruction by the black community, LBJ called out the troops to get Washington back under control. The Panthers were right—we were in a state of seige.”
23
“As I limped forward, one cop called me a name and told me to run to the paddy wagon. . . I was sure this man wanted to kill me, that he had already sentenced me to death in his heart. He wanted me to run to give him a pretext for shooting, the oldest and dirtiest cop trick of all, the use of which turns some guardians of the law into wanton murderers . . .”
80
“There was a poison wind blowing throughout the wilderness of Babylon, pouring out of the manholes of Wall Street, Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, the White House, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the churches, the universities, colleges, and even the campuses of high schools, and out of every home—a noxious poison oozing out of every porous institution of American life.”
89
“The merger of the SNCC organization into the Black Panthers was a natural but not easy hookup. Racial conflagrations in the American cities had shut down the future of the nonviolent speech makers. . .
“So when the gunfire started and the plastic bombs were going off smartly, and people like Martin King getting shot down in Southern motels . . .”
“The severity of the times made the merger necessary, and the presence of the Black Panthers made it possible. For we were not the Bible belt but the gun belt. . .”
142
“On the very last afternoon in San Francisco prior to being hauled away to San Quentin . . .
. . . I went out the rear door and over the back fence into a waiting car that took me to where I prepared for stage two of my goodbye to America . . .”
. . . the Mime Troopers made me up to look like a sick old man . . .Past security, past any questions or detention, this little old wheezing nigger was led by a young woman in white who urged the flight crew to give me special attention. . .
. . . After my connecting plane to Montreal and then a Cuban freighter ride—in a closet—to Castroland, I was to live six months in a wretched and restless existence—sort of a San Quention with palm trees . . .
108
“In 1969 I had sent a cassette recording back to friends in the United States warning how insidious and dangerous was the white racism of the Castro dictatorship in Cuba.”
121
. . . the four years that I headed the International Section of the Black Panther Party in Algiers, conference and speaking assignments took me into China, North Korea, North Vietnam, and much of the Third World.”
98
Pig power in America was infuriating—but pig power in the Communist framework was awesome and unaccountable. No protection by outbursts in the press and electronic media—the Reds owned it. No shelter under the benevolent protection of a historic constitution—the Marxists held the book and they tore out the pages that sheltered you. No counterweight from religious and church organizations—they were invisible and silent.”
“The longer I stayed in these foreign enclaves, the more I realized that America could not be instructed, by them, in anything that had to do with individual rights or personal liberty. The inner recesses of my being, the secret soul of my most honest self was developing a searing resentment against the ridiculous claims of communism. If they couldn’t convince me, I thought, how are they going to ever sell the rest of the world . . .”
97
“ I had lived defiantly so long and in such seething hatred of all governments, people in power, people in charge, that when I came under the shelter of Communist powers, I sadly discovered that their corruption was as violent and inhuman as the people they ‘victoriously’ replaced. ‘Up against the wall’ was a trendy slogan of the underground movements around the world—but I later learned that without inner control, a moral perspective, and a spiritual balance that flowed out of Christian love, justice, and caring, the Communist promises were to become the largest fraud of all.
211
“It was a beautiful Mediterranean night. . . I was brooding, downcast, at the end of my rope. I looked up at the moon and saw certain shadows . . . and the shadows became a man in the moon, and I saw a profile of myself . . .
. . . As I stared at this image, it changed, and I saw my former heroes paraded before my eyes. Here was Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, passing in review—each one appearing for a moment, and then dropping out of sight, like fallen heroes. Finally, at the end of the procession, in dazzling shimmering light, the image of Jesus Christ . . .”
No comments:
Post a Comment