Sidney, Hilton, Cornel, (and David)

[Max B. Sawicky]

My mates and I supported the Panthers in my fashion.  Not
everyone was what we used to call a "Third World suck."  There
were a lot of good people in the Panthers.  The pressure
they were under helped to foster a looniness and a loony faction
led by Cleaver that eventually split off.  Cleaver certified his
looniness by his subsequent antics -- joining the Moonies,
designing goofy clothes.  Newton corrupted himself.  Bobby
Seale turned out pretty well.  So did Bobby Rush.

You didn't have to accept the BPP as a vanguard to have
a congenial view of them.  The 'White Panthers' were indeed
a little strange.  I met one on the way to a demo who thought
they had potential to recruit from the KKK.  He might have
been right.

mbs

That was Horowitz's line then, which he expounded with great vigor: general
and uncritical left-wing support for the Black Panther Party as some sort of
revolutionary vanguard, with the white working masses to follow in their
train, any day now.  Strange as it is to recall now, in the bay area of the
day one occasionally ran into lefties who espoused similar views.  Loony,
no?

 And especially so by 1978.

(For several years, I lived next door to the World HQ of the White Panther
Party, which, as was said at the time, specialized in organizing straight
white male hippies and their old ladies.  More strange fruit of a strange
era...)

Jacob Conrad