"Max B. Sawicky" wrote:
>
> 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.
Yes. And the failure of so many white leftists to support the Panthers in _any_ way contributed greatly to the dissolution of the '60s movement. Two weeks before Fred Hampton was murdered Jan & I practically begged both the local Moratorium and one liberal community group to express even _verbal_ opposition to the growing repression of the Panthers. After the murder, one or two of them had the grace to come around and apologize for being wrong, but _only_ one or two of them.
There was no contradiction between seeing the grave weaknesses of the Panthers on the one hand and maintaining solidarity with them against police repression on the other hand.
> The pressure
> they were under helped to foster a looniness and a loony faction
Mark Clark was murdered along with Fred Hampton. Why was Mark Clark
(from Peoria) in Chicago? Precisely because the Illinois BPP was
attempting to purge its ranks of the loonies in their ranks, and part of
the process was interviewing all the members. And it was not just the
police pressure that generated the "looniness." The press helped a lot.
>From the beginning the newspapers treated the Panthers as thugs; and of
course amongst the readers of those lying reports were would-be thugs
who thought, "That's for me!" The purge in the Illinois Panthers was
primarily to weed out those who had in effect been recruited by the
Chicago Tribune!
There really were a lot of good people in the Panthers. After thirty-five years they are still being slandered.
> The 'White Panthers' were indeed
> a little strange.
I for get the exact details, but some of their leaders (Sinclair?) were wqnted by the police, and were picked up in the Upper Peninsula by state cops who saw them drinking beer while tooling down the highway in a van. They were indeed strange (though I don't remember meeting any of them myself). There was a pretty good group of older people who organized as the Gray Panthers. I think the organization still exists, but I don't know what they are doing now, if anything.
Carrol