![]() The events of October 1967 brought Gene into the inner circle of the Black Panther Party. Gene was my big-brother, right-hand partner. Gene’s father held gambling parties at his house, and Gene’s mother would cook up a mountain of fried chicken and ribs and bake cakes. Another brother, Bull McKinney, was built like a football player. A couple of those brothers were basketball players. We grew up together in West Oakland, along with his four brothers and two sisters. Gene McKinney had been my junior high school friend since the eighth grade. I figured we could break the stuff down and sell matchboxes full of it for five bucks apiece to raise money for Bobby’s bail. ![]() I’ll bet we can triple our money.” I knew people who sold large quantities of weed. “Let’s buy a couple, break them down, and sell them. “I know these guys who’ve got bricks,” I suggested to Huey. I knew that weed was one of the easiest commodities to buy and sell quickly. “What do you think we should do?” Huey asked me.īefore I had started my job at the longshoreman union hall, my best way of making money came from the street. At the very least, we’d have ourselves a small reserve. Now we could maybe parlay it into something bigger to help get Bobby out. After the speech, we looked at one another. Huey and I jumped into my car and rode over to the campus, on the foggy side of San Francisco, to the student union, where Huey was scheduled to speak that day. Hayakawa, a conservative and feisty semantics professor–turned–campus president and later a Republican U.S. A year later the college would be the site of student riots, tear gas, strikes, and demonstrations under the tumultuous administration of S. Like many colleges and universities, San Francisco State was already a hotbed of debate and radical politics. How were we going to raise the bail to get Bobby out of Santa Rita? How were we going to top Sacramento in terms of another “colossal event”?Ī windfall came our way in the form of a paid speaking engagement across the Bay at San Francisco State College. Huey was always thinking, and I knew what was on his mind. He’d still be lying in his bed, reading a magazine or a book. I would go over to Huey’s house, and it might be two o’clock in the afternoon. The young Black Panther Party was experiencing one of its very first lows. I had a job and a car, a family, and very little money. ![]() We had picked up the gun, now we could not put it down the media froze us in this agonizing posture.īobby, the cofounder of the Black Panther Party, was incarcerated, and Huey wanted him out of the Santa Rita Jail. The press painted us as wild, gun-toting animals. The situation was desperate, and some of our rhetoric became as inflamed as that used against us by politicians and media. The actions the BPP engaged in were purely strategic for political purposes designed to mobilize the community. Many seemed steeped in rhetoric, withdrawn from reality, with no practical programs for the people. When Bobby Seale and Huey came together to form the Black Panther Party, they observed many political groups. ![]() Sacramento was the “colossal event” that sent shock waves throughout the country black men and women in forty cities were prepared to defend their own people with their lives. We went from being a small neighborhood Oakland organization to a nationwide phenomenon. Black Panther Party memberships came rolling in from all across the country. Immediately afterward, we were deluged with publicity and press from all over the world. Sacramento put the Black Panther Party on the map, just as Huey had planned. Bobby was still locked up on gun charges after a compromise enabled the remaining members arrested in Sacramento to go free. Five months earlier, the Sacramento state legislature had been visited by a group of gun-toting members of the Black Panther Party. On October 18, 1967, Bobby Seale sat in jail.
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