A Memory of Panthers 
by Mumia Abu Jamal 
  
The young man came up to the older man, and in an attitude rich with the rhythms of the street, the younger inquired: 

Y.M. : Yo, old head! Dig this here, right--Was you ina Black Panthers? 

O.M. : Yeah- 

Y.M. : Well uh; What's up with y'all? Was y'all a gang or somethin'? What's up? 

O.M. : What? Are you serious? Who are you? 

Y.M. : Oh! My woman's Mama say she knew you, and you was with them. What's up with that? 

O.M. : Yeah, young buck. But it wasn't no gang. It was a revolutionary organization, dedicated to the freedom of Black people, and to their defense. The conversation was surreal, and an unexpected reflection of the erosions on communal memory worked by the young of a new generation.

"Yeah. But, I didn't listen to what she had to say. I thought she was just rappin'. So I, like, tuned her out." 

The younger man, with no real connections with the movements of the recent past, had rejected information from one who lived in the midst of it, and thus, truly knew next to nothing about a grass-roots organization that covered the country and had international, radical impact. 

His mother-in-law, who worked closely with the BPP, and who knew the people who lived as Panthers, tried to talk to the brash youngster, but, like that of most adults, her words were taken as so much static, noise from a passed generation, and virtually ignored. The schools, the captive of a generation that lauded the Civil Rights generation, while denigrating or ignoring the Black Liberation movement, were no more helpful. So, a young Black man, rich in innate and learned intelligence, would not learn anything meaningful about the Black Panther Party, until he came to Death Row. 

Still now, locked into a steel and concrete box, he gained some sense of a hidden history, learning of some of his hidden birthright. He read of the birth of the party, it's heady heyday, and it's tragic decline. He learned of a history that was his own, of the family of Africans resisting repression in America. 

Scholars Jones and Jeffries, writing in the remarkable The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered] (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998) describing the impact of the Party: 

Arguably the leading Black leftist organization in the African American liberation struggle, the BPP captured the imagination of oppressed people throughout the world. Its organizational life span lasted sixteen years from 1966 to 1982. Although not widely recognized, the Party produced a rich and multifaceted legacy that significantly impacted the Black Liberation struggle. The legacy of the BPP consists of four components: (1) the sa1iency of armed resistance, (2) a tradition of community service, (3) a commitment to the self-determination of all people, and (4) a model of political action for oppressed people. (p.27) 

How does this reality transform into one where a young man can reach his twentieth year and ask, honestly, "Was y'all a gang or somethin'?" 

If the system has it's way, that is the only question that young minds will ask about the BPP, for the radical and revolutionary history of the Party, which is the common history of all Black folk (and all radicals) can only be let out in dribs or drabs, in bits and bunches, mediated through the madness of a media that paints Black people's history as little more than a joke. In an age when a major American TV network makes a comedy about the horrific Slave era, what can the revolutionary movements of the 1960s mean? History is a powerful tool for an oppressed people, for it can provide a people with hope. Scholar Farideh Farhi writes: 

Concrete historical forms of ideological mobilization have given us clues about several sources the revolutionaries can draw on to mobilize. The most important source seems to be the "dangerous memory" of conflict and exclusion. This memory has two dimensions: suffering as well as resistance and hope. The former draws from concrete memories of specific histories of oppression and suffering....Past suffering hence becomes an indictment of existing economic and political systems. Memory of resistance and hope, on the other hand, chronicles actual or imagined instances of resistance and liberation. These accounts are a declaration of the possibility of change, and they are examined continuously in an attempt to understand what enables resistance in specific historical situations. [Farhi, F.,States and Urban-Based Revolutions: Iran and Nicaragua (Urbana: Univ. of Ill. Press, 1990), p.85] 

"No, young buck. The Black Panther wasn't a gang. That's what they want you to think, man. It was an active group of Black brothers and sisters who fought and battled for our people's lives and human dignity during the '60s."  

"Learn your history, young man. Learn it so that you can teach young dudes like yourself, so that you won't hear that question."