ENOUGH IS ENOUGH   IN THE BLM SECTION      BLM1 Refutation     BLM2 Responsiveness     BLM3 Groups of Concern  BLM4 (here) Old Black Panthers  Commentary- on origins of Black Panthers in 1960s, backdrop of Civil Rights movement Links/Articles    Books     DVDs, Youtube Videos        Utne magazine: Kevin Powell on “Will Racism Ever End” - Example of the Black Lives Matter voice? - Or is this another product of Race Grievance Industry (RGI)? (recommend reading to hear the arguments and sense the tone)? Black Power Leaders:  Louis Farrakhan     Malcolm X BLM5 Nationwide Riots     BLM6 Oregon Riots 2020    BLM7 Resources      BLM8 Black-Centric Media     BLM9 Starkes                                                                                                                                                                            BLM10 ACT Letters     BLM11  Radical Islam  BLM12 govt     BLM13 Support     BLM14 BLM Funding/Terrorist links BLM15 Russia-History     BLM16 Maps of BLM Riots 2020     BLM17 Police Chiefs-Black-Problems and Issues     BLM18 Attorney Generals-Black     BLM19 Mayors-Black     BLM20 Governors-Minority Notes Backlog 3   Black Lives Matter input from bulk of #1 News/#2 Personal Notes Jews/Israelis -possible biases  (Also see Notes #1-News and #2/Personal)  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Commentary Backdrop of the Civil Rights movement The Black Panthers was created to combat real discrimination and abuse in the 1960s.  It attempted to stop intensely serious police abuses by white cops and others against black people.  It did a lot of good in a number of ways.  Empowerment, self-pride, self-determination.  Children’s breakfast programs for poor black kids that made a difference on a broad scale.  Showing that black is beautiful.  Creating articulate, intelligent voices with real things to say about What’s Wrong With America.  Blacks in the 1960s were still finding themselves in a country which operated more like an Imperialist State.  Many did not feel it was really their country.  Desegregation might have been made into law in the 1950s, but whites were still giving blacks attitudes, creating barriers against upward and lateral mobility. There were low paying jobs for black people and then there were better jobs for white people, with many blacks still not able to find work.  A lot of American jobs were sent overseas that would have applied to those persons of color with less education (see the What-When-How website below).  Apartment and other housing costs went up as the lower cost older housing was torn down in places like Oakland, California.  No jobs, no place to live, no hope.  The Black Panthers was an understandable response to unfair treatment and unequal opportunity. They made it clear they were not biased against all whites, indicating the distinction between discriminatory and non-discriminatory whites.  In this regard, they welcomed whites who showed support or interest - up to a point, I would say, because the main focus was on helping blacks.  However, the effort to be more open to certain whites was welcome in a sea of pure anti-white attitudes during the Civil Rights era. New Voices They helped shake up persons of all colors in the United States by giving the country a new voice and a new way of looking at things.  Unfortunately, as time moved on, things shifted.  It became overtly militant, with media-mirrored images of guns, looking cool with guns and T-shirts showing black people with guns fueling the image.  Then later after all that died down, I don’t feel the group really went away; I think it withdrew behind different guises.  These people could be in the military, on college campuses, in arts and entertainment, network technology and wireless communications.   I feel the Muslim connection is unfortunate.  I don’t trust it and do not support it.  One reason is that there seems to be an occult aspect in certain pro-minority strains.   Some American blacks, in trying to reach out to blacks on the African continent and Islamic groups in various parts of the world, got themselves into a mess, a venomous mess.  This mess is linked to the strands associated with The Holocaust, the Israel-Muslim conflict, the African continent and South Africa.  There is also a link to old Soviet-Muslim ties, old Nazi-Ottoman Empire (Muslim and Jewish Turks) and old southern, British and other European trading companies (which included slave-holding).  They felt they needed real help in the form of outside intervention because most of the people in charge were whites who were abusive or at the very least indifferent.   The lost zone and communist exploitation What do any people do when backed up against a wall, with no place to go, nowhere to turn?  Instead of receiving mature and compassionate help, they became tangled up with dangerous elements from all over the world.  Many of these people were lost themselves, trying to find answers in different contexts, not ones that directly applied to the American black. These people had different roots, cultures, languages and religious approaches than blacks raised from childhood in the United States.  Some had been raised in communist countries from the time they were children and had developed some terrible habits and ways of thinking because of that.  They steered and influenced American blacks in ways that were not wise because they themselves did not know better and did not have better solutions in their grab-bags.  These influences set American blacks and other minorities on a communist tangent which was counter-productive.  Remember, communism as it is applied in the real world does not operate like it sounds on paper.  In the real world, it is like a subversive Catholic monastery with party leaders (like Catholic clergy) exploiting the people under the illusion of  the motto for the people, by the people like the Catholic version of it’s for Jesus and the good of your soul.   Taking charge of modes of production, the people become tyrants over the rest of the people.  These dangerous elements could send all of those involved into spiritual decay, a cold heart space, a point of no return, an endless war zone until everything and everyone is dead.  Like stepping into a quagmire.  Unable to pull out of the downward sucking mud.  And behind all of this, the communist pulse could be manipulated by an old royalty and trading company elite made of whites and their black (or other minority) mixed blood offspring secretly moving buttons for their own gain.  Communism can be a way for rich people to retain their power quietly while directing and diffusing the human slave tendency for rebellion when up against a wall. The Two Panthers Groups It is possible that some members of the original Black Panthers group as well as those associated with The New Black Panthers participated in 9/11, along with an international group.  I suspect factions related to Obama and The Black Panthers were involved.  However, I am hearing at least one of the old Black Panthers members on the Internet saying Obama is a jerk who hates America, and  is not particularly supportive of American blacks.  We should not discount the fact Obama came in on the wake of 9/11.  The New Black Panthers say that they helped put in Obama, but regardless of their veracity, I think we should consider a Black Panthers involvement because of the long-term proclamation of community-based dissension against the United States.  We should ask ourselves if there is an agreement between racially divided groups to re-organize the United States along certain non-publicized dividing lines, not too unlike gang turfs. Whites in certain kinds of positions might have made agreements with minority factions outside our scope of knowledge.  Deals behind closed doors.  The perpetrators knocked out three buildings in New York, not the whole city or country; people ask about internal conspiracies because of this, although it has been suggested they had intended to do more damage.  What we can ask is if there was a black/white conspiracy - a mix of insiders and outsiders divided along not only race, but economics (like oil and gas) and religion (like right wing whites and right wing blacks). Another Direction Needed Black people, as well as minorities working with them in an anti-white, anti-United States movement, need to find another way for a better day.  Hatred will suck you dry, leaving your original fresh and joyful self withered and stale, like dried up leaves on a dead branch blowing in a hot summer breeze.  There won’t be anything real to enjoy life with after you are splattered with blood, after your soul is dried up.  There is an energy around people who spend too much time thinking about killing whites and using dark occult magic.  Again, they seem to dry up.  They become caricatures of their old selves, mere shadows on a wall.  They become hanging empty dolls, they are clanging around on chains.  They have not come out of the dungeons of hate; they solidified them.   In using the See What You Create emblem vindictively, the blacks become a manifested copy of white discrimination.   Hate begets hate.  There is a point where you push back the whites and then start making progress financially and educationally.  You’ve got cars, nice houses, stuff, plenty of stuff.  Highly educated and experienced positions as doctors, lawyers, college professors and more.  But you perceive that the whites are still treating black people like shit.  So what then?  Kill off all the whites?  It is possible a minority controlled faction has put certain whites on color-coded programs for long-term pay- back style vendettas, like gangstalking and mental torture with the built-in message of “See what you did to us, see how we felt!” even if those particular whites had absolutely nothing personally to do with it. The answer is in liberal integration.  This website is about that.  Gotta find a truce in the race wars.    There is no denying that some whites still to this day are acting ugly toward blacks.  We keep hearing them calling blacks niggers.  Who in their right mind would do that?   We find extant groups like the KKK and Aryans.   Some of those whites are fighting a dead war of racism, and they know it. Some of it is coming out of union groups and the military.  Faced with the horrors of an increasingly complex world, simple responses like racial sneers and downright violence won’t take them far.  Much of the problem is those particular whites have not developed themselves sufficiently to be more educated and capable people, while many persons of color have moved on.  These whites are either at the bottom of the rung or in occupations that don’t have much direction.  Their corruption in politics is caught time and again.  Read the history of journalism in the southern Untied States during the 1920s and 1950s when certain key journalists countered the KKK with searing accounts that exposed members and complicit politicians.  Sensing their own mundane inadequacy, the racism will not go far in the long run because the will founder to extinction.  But in the process, these particular discriminatory white minorities are giving blacks reasons to continue the race wars.  These whites are making it too easy for blacks and others to turn to the equally or more dangerous Muslim fundamentalists and other American haters around the world.  Going from one fire to another, minority groups proclaiming equality and power might land in another jungle of pain.  Muslim fundamentalists are not the answer, nor is a Nazi-based European One World Order thinly disguised as a liberal upper crust white collar campus, just like white racists or religious extremists are not the answer.  Going from the laps of one mean dog to another, blacks are making bad choices in a panic.  Part of it is still low education among many of their numbers.  Another part is they were raised in an abusive environment, both at home and from the whites.  Abused people often make bad choices from the wirings of their background.  Certain blacks are still coming out of the generations-old lines of abuse from the days of slavery or hard times in ghettos or poor black neighborhoods ridden with crime.  Due to no fault of their own, and is true for any deprived people no matter their race, they are wired for dysfunction because they have not been exposed to healthy life-ways.  Certain blacks coming about of decades of abusive and impoverished situations have not had good role models or personally experienced warmth and sincere kindness from either their people or white people.   It is important to break the cycle of abuse and self-sabotage by alerting each other that Islamic fundamentalism and communism are not the answer.  Communist and Muslim connections The original Black Panthers had a communist and Muslim connection.  The older survivors seem to have taken on a more midway approach; maturing and seasoning does that to many of us.  There is a New Black Panthers organization that is militant.  People say the two groups should not be considered the same. New answers needed to old problems; The Black Panthers mirrored universal human themes; pendulum swings We need new dynamic answers.  We should not lean on old communist plots, misguided socialism, dominating religions, male- dominated economies.  We should not regurgitate Marx or decide the answer to everything is to kill off most of the world.  The Black Panthers stimulated creative thinking about how to shake loose tyranny.  It was an approach that, like the American Declaration of Independence, has a universal aspect applicable to people of all colors.  The pendulum swings.  Old victims become new tyrants, new tyrants are taken down and then become victims again.  In this century, we are the leaders; in another century, we were the slaves.  So the struggle for freedom is a universal issue.  In this regard, we have to ask some questions so that the efforts of people like the original Black Panthers or the writers of the Declaration of independence are not wasted.  This includes the efforts of so many others who tried to do the right thing for themselves and others - whistleblowers of all kinds who decided not to play it safe, to not stay well paid and hidden in the corners.  Asking the deeper what next questions honors people who dared to be different to make serious changes in countries, regions or organizations that had gone too far to the negative. The old argument about using money spent on bombs for food and people is still true Can you envision a safer, more gentle world?  For all the energy put into guns and bombs, can you take genius and passion to newer levels of technical innovation?  For every years-old plot and millions of dollars spent to take down World Trade Center buildings, an equal amount of years and money could have been applied to feeding the homeless and poor.  Know that whites wander this country seeking love and a place to call home, too.   Start counting the number of whites whose only material possessions are in backpacks on their backs, or hanging out on street corners with “Anything will help, God Bless” signs.   The costly neighborhoods squeeze out everyone of all color without money.  Once people are down and out, it’s hard to pull back up.  Long stretches of housing developments can look like the other man’s country when you don’t have a dollar in your pocket to buy a cup of coffee, much less a place to sleep tonight.  The arrogant Protestant or Puritan work ethic does not work for the majority of poor people.  We need another way to spark people.  Another way to engage flow.  Real flow is about the innate engagement with the creative use of life force in cooperation with taking care of one’s self.   Genius is in revitalizing natural human processes to stimulate the tapping into that soulful flow, not beating up on people for dropping out.  For others, they did not drop out so much as something in their bodies or minds gave out.  Walking in beauty means we need to create art in our souls first, then project it into our cities.  Making things pretty, gentle and sweet to the soul goes hand in hand with making sure everyone has a place to go home to each night, has food in the belly and enough money to buy a cup of coffee - and then some.  We have beggars of all colors on the streets of America.  We can find a new direction.  Genius is in the solutions, not the guns.  Can you spur all the physics majors in the country to dedicate brain power to solving America’s homeless problem within 365 days, starting tomorrow, rather than putting up another satellite designed to spy on Russia or China or another cool gadget that will take us to Mars? Don’t kill it, fix it We should not try to kill a country to define ourselves, but remake it according to a vision of kindness and non-violence.    Each time we succumb to things that tick us off using violence or into splintering divisions, we have to ask ourselves if we can grow enough to overcome it next time.  Communities built on anger create walls.  That attitude alone is a type of wall, both as a group and individually.  It’s hard to reach someone who has been told whites are the enemy.  It’s equally hard to reach someone who calls blacks niggers and thinks they are disgusting.  In one case, we could be dealing with people whose parents and grandparents, aunts and uncle told them to “stay clear of white folk, they can’t be trusted” and on the other, those same types of family members might have told their kids to “stay clear of that filthy scum.”   What is worse, both sides might make it difficult for mixed marriages to occur in a zone of emotional safety and support. Although we see more and more mixed marriages, it is a sad commentary that they still tend to be exception and in certain parts of the country they stand out more than others.  Racial tensions can work on people in ways that goes beyond skin color, because it can also relate to cultural orientation.   It might take two hundred more years for the kinks between whites and blacks and other minorities to even out.    An underground Black Panthers fomenting dissent and plotting to overthrow the American government is not the answer.  We need to build on the things that work and continue to weed out the things that do not. Two Faces, Changing Guises of the Actors Hypocrisy or second-guessing hypocrisy can make us go crazy, either way.  Is that white person being nice to be nice, or is something else going on?  We hear blacks saying whites are two-faced.  Maybe they are, but given different circumstances, if they were white in their next lifetime, would they be different?  Once they obtain money and power, are blacks any different from anyone else with too much of a good thing?  If you were king for a year, what would you accomplish?  World peace or a state of tyranny?  What seems to make people bad leaders is the fear of encroachment and coups.  They crank up controls to counter people trying to undermine them or take their spot in the sun.  Like actors on a stage, we humans seem to take turns being white, black, leader, slave, gay, heterosexual, poor and rich.  At some point we have to say Enough is enough, let’s all get along because in the end we are all the same. The Crystal Rainbow Panthers The original Black Panthers had something, it struck a chord in people of all colors everywhere.     We need a new Panthers, but one that is Black-White-Brown-Red.  A Panthers for a new age, a new world, setting the stage for equal opportunity for all people who don’t want to sit in air-conditioned living rooms and offices behind police protected white collar neighborhoods looking down at everyone else.   A Panthers that takes us to the land of plenty and tribal kindness with support outside brainless bureaucracy.  A Panthers that knows love has to be mentored early on or it is lost.  One that protects nature from further loss and secures privacy and wilderness for future generations.  Perhaps we can call it The Speckled Panthers.  Or better yet, maybe The Crystal Rainbow Panthers, as a mix of all the colors and sexual orientations gleaming like a diamond in the sunlight. LINKS, BOOKS, DVDs, and VIDEO CLIPS LINKS In These Times on Black Panthers (2013) Excerpt: For the following two years, we focused on unearthing further details about the FBI's involvement in the conspiracy and sought the Chicago office's COINTELPRO file in order to establish a direct link between the FBI's program and the raid. When the government would not produce the file—and District Court Judge Joseph Sam Perry refused to compel them to do so—we turned to the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations for help…. http://inthesetimes.com/article/15949/how_the_fbi_conspired_to_destroy_the_black_panther_party On Black Panthers Excerpt: A militant black activist organization established in the 1960s, the Black Panther Party put forward an analysis of institutional racism in the United States that had conspiratorial overtones, while at the same time it was the subject of conspiracy theories told by white conservatives who feared that the party constituted an armed conspiracy against United States institutions. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party (BPP) in 1966 in North Oakland, California. In the aftermath of the recent uprisings in Watts, Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit, Newton and Seale had come to question the effectiveness of the civil rights movement. Examining the situation in their own backyard—an exodus of manufacturing jobs to the Oakland suburbs and even overseas (replaced by jobs in the commerce and finance sectors that required high levels of education and skill) and a shortage of affordable housing (from 1955 to the early 1960s, over 7,000 low-income housing units were destroyed, and few of them were replaced)—they began to believe that the movement was not properly addressing these issues of economic change and inequality and thus questioned how best to proceed. For many black nationalists, the answer to this query was a call for racial separatism, while traditional liberals continued to press for greater integration and the passage of new legal civil rights guarantees. It was within this volatile ideological milieu that the BPP called for “revolutionary intercommunalism” (Newton, 9), a distinctively “socialist and Marxist” (Newton, 27) ideology that rejected both the concept of separatism as well as the gradualism that accompanied liberal calls for change, and placed the civil rights struggle in a more global context. Stating that since the United States was no longer a nation but an empire, they argued that the sovereignty of all countries had been called into question. “Their self- determination, economic determination, and cultural determination,” Newton explained, “has been transformed by the imperialists and the ruling cycle.” These transformations and phenomena required the Panthers to call themselves “intercommunalists” (rather than “internationalists”) because “nations have been transformed into communities of the world” (Newton, 29). Such a focus led to attention on the inequities of capitalism on the local level, as the Panthers saw African American neighborhoods as such communities within the U.S. empire. Party members established armed police patrols (which the Panthers are perhaps best known for), free breakfast programs for children, health clinics, escort and transportation services for senior citizen housing project residents, and clothing and shoe programs for community members across the country. These programs were seen as explicitly protecting the community from the dangers of imperialism, providing a local wall of self-defense against the larger forces that maintained the U.S. empire. As one might expect, such a sweeping ideology lent itself to conspiracy theory, particularly as the BPP continued to face hostility from the very forces it wished to overthrow. By 1970, the BPP was referring to the United States as “a barbaric organization controlled and operated by avaricious, sadistic, bloodthirsty thieves” (qtd. in Foner, 268). There was, as the New York Black Panthers explained, a “Government Conspiracy” (qtd. in Foner, 208) that sought to eliminate all of those who dared to question the inhuman capitalistic system. Not surprisingly, it was those institutions that the Panthers interacted with on the local level that were most often implicated in these conspiratorial theories. Police officers and court officials were tangible symbols of “the most ruthless system in the world,” a system that attempted to cover up instances of cruelty, inequality, and outright brutality through the propagation of the “big lie” of U.S. freedom and equality. Such actions showed that “[t]he ‘Amerikkan system of justice’ is a hideous sham and a revolting farce” (qtd. in Foner, 203). In the face of such a wide-ranging conspiracy, the Panthers felt that they had little choice but to topple these institutions wholesale. http://what-when-how.com/conspiracy-theories-in-american-history/black-panthers/ CNN South Carolina KKK black panther rally, Ed Payne (2015) http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/19/us/south-carolina-kkk-black-panther-rally/index.html Excerpt: Supporters of the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers clashed outside the South Carolina Capitol in Columbia on Saturday.  The South Carolina Department of Public Safety reported five arrests. Seven people were transported by ambulances for medical treatment. Both the Loyal White Knights of the KKK and the New Black Panther Party held rallies on the statehouse grounds. http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/19/us/south-carolina-kkk-black-panther-rally/index.html Utne: Kevin Powell Will Racism Ever End https://www.utne.com/community/kevin-powell-will-racism-ever-end-zl0z16szsau see bottom of page for excerpt from this article Related material Fahim Knight on Black Greek Letter Fraternities and Sororities Tradition Mis-Education Daily Grail: Black Greek Letter Fraternities and Sororities http://www.dailygrail.com/blogs/fahim-knight/2008/11/Black-Greek-Letter-Fraternities-and-Sororities-Tradition- Mis-Education  Excerpt: Thus, during the early 1900s African Americans who were considered bourgeoisie and had bought into this equation of class and status—viewed in terms of caste significance and of upward socio-economic mobility ranking, as it was being espoused and set by standards of the dominant culture; and more specifically by the Caucasian Elite and aristocratic societies who were part of a privileged world of academia. George G.M. James in his monumental book titled, “Stolen Legacy” explored the historical and cultural exchanges between ancient Egypt (Kemet) and ancient Greece, in which James dismantled the myths and misconceptions that Africa gave nothing to world civilization and intellectually challenged the Eurocentric worldview that had falsely proclaimed that Europe had culturally enlightened the entire world to the detriment of other civilizations. (Reference: George G.M. James; “Stolen Legacy”). http://www.dailygrail.com/blogs/fahim-knight/2008/11/Black-Greek-Letter-Fraternities-and-Sororities-Tradition- Mis-Education BOOKS Power to the People: The Rise and Fall of the Black Panther Party Hardcover – Jan 1 1997 by Jim Haskins (Author) DVDs The Black Panthers:Vanguard of the Revolution Stu Richel (Actor), Stanley Nelson (Director)  Format: DVD Video Clips History of the Black Panther Party: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (1994) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rf21JLnN-A World History Channel - Geronimo Pratt.  The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpoPPDl-wto Storyville - The BlackPanthers - full documentary 2016 National Geographic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixCjPlwROYk PBS - Independent Lens - Women in the Black Panther Party http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/videos/women-in-the-black-panther-party/ KEVIN POWELL Example of the Black Lives Matter voice:  Race Grievance Industry?  Utne: Kevin Powell Will Racism Ever End https   //www.utne   com/community/kevin-powell-will-racism-ever-end-zl0z16szsau Excerpt:  I AM NOT A NIGGER, or a nigga, or a nigguh. I am not your nigger or anyone else’s nigger, either.  Nor do I belong to some specialized society that contains within its boundaries niggers, or niggas, or niggaz4life. No— I am a man, a Black man, a human being, and I am your equal. After this piece goes live I am never again going to utter that word “nigger” to describe myself, to describe Black people, to paint a picture of a certain type of mentality born of racial oppression, self-hatred, confusion, of ignorance; not publicly, not privately. No— Yet when I look at race and racism in America in the 21st century how could I not help but feel like I am nothing but that loaded and disgusting word? I often wonder if it actually matters I came up from the ghetto; me, the product of a single mother who escaped, barely, the color-line insanity of the Jim Crow South only to confront a different kind of race and class insanity in Northern slums; me, the son of an absent father who completely and permanently abandoned my mom and I when I was eight because he was a broken Black man and did not know it; me, a Black boy who has known rivers, poverty, violence, abuse, fear, hopelessness, depression; me, who made it to college on a financial aid package, never got my degree, but still made a name for myself, against all odds; me, who has published 12 books and who has visited all 50 American states—as a writer, as a political activist, as a speaker; me, the kid who did not get on an airplane until I was age 24, but who has since been to five of the seven continents, and who is interviewed virtually each week on television and radio and elsewhere for media outlets from every corner of the world. What does it matter that I, as my mother has said with her grits-and-butter South Carolina dialect, “speaks well”; that I have the ability to converse with equal comfort on college campuses and on concrete street corners, that I can easily flow from exchanges on presidential campaigns and gender politics to basketball and pop culture? What does it matter, indeed, if I have produced a body of work, my writings, my speeches, my humanitarian and philanthropic efforts, in service to people, all people, and that I really do see you, me, us, as sisters and brothers, no matter who you are or what you look like, as part of the human race, the human family, if you, in the smoked out buildings that are your mind’s eyes, refuse to see me, or refuse to see me as a whole human being, or, worse, simply see me as that word? Or what if you see me as an animal, a monster, some thing to be dissed, avoided, detested, labeled as angry or a thug or difficult or arrogant or a problem or a burden?I can hear my White sisters and brothers say now, as many often declare to me when this uncomfortable dialogue occurs, “But I did not own slaves, I had nothing to do with that” or “My relatives did not do that.” It does not matter if you or your long-gone relatives were directly involved or not, or if you believe that “that is in the past.” The past, tragically, is the present, because we’ve been too terrified to confront our whole history and our whole selves as Americans.Look what happened to my great-grandfather, Benjamin Powell, who was murdered amidst this racist hysteria in the early 1900s. He had the audacity to own 400 acres of land in the Low Country of South Carolina, right near Savannah, Georgia. He had the nerve to be an entrepreneur, a cook, and a man who did things his way on his own terms. The good White men of that community did not take too kindly to a Black man with that brand of swagger, who thought and knew he was their equal. They pressured my great-grandfather to sell the land. When he did not, one day his wife got a knock on the door and was told my great-grandfather had choked on his own food and was found dead in nearby water. No, they had killed him; my great-grandmother was forced to sell 397 acres of that land to the White men for one penny each, and scores of my relatives on the Powell side fled for their lives to other states, never to be heard from again. Years later, when she was an 8-year-old girl, my mother would pick cotton on that very same Powell property, her life reduced to being the help for the good White people, the same good White people whose relatives had a hand in killing my great-grandfather—To be ignorant to what I am saying is a sickness. To think I am lying or exaggerating is a sickness. To think you are somehow immune from all of this is a sickness. And to twist things around, to believe that you are somehow the victim, in sheer opposition to history and modern-day facts, is a sickness, a sort of mental and spiritual escapism devoid of truth and devoid of a desire for real healing and real reconciliation in America. THE ABOVE SAID, this is so much bigger than #OscarsSoWhite or #BlackLivesMatter, although both are symptoms of the bigger problem. The Academy Awards are so White because America still believes it is so White, that White stories matter and that the stories of people of color do not, except on rare occasions, and with the same basic types of characters and plots. Rarely are we permitted to be complex, multi-layered, thoughtful humans on film or television, except for the masterful producing work of, say, a Shonda Rhimes, that rare Black person shining in Hollywood. This is why I say Black lives do not really matter because if they did we…For White Americans this means you’ve got to re-invent yourselves if you are serious about ridding our society of racism. You’ve got to ask yourself who and what was I before I became White? What does it mean to me to be human, to be a human being, and what, again, am I willing to do, willing to sacrifice, and willing to give up to be a part of this necessary healing process? You must learn to listen to the voices of Black people and other people of color, you must not feel the need, through arrogance or insecurity, to tell us who we are, what we should be thinking or feeling or doing, and you must, with love and respect, understand when we may be hyper-sensitive to race, to racism, given the history and present-day realities of our America. Shutting us down or ignoring us or un-friending us says you do not truly want a conversation, as equals, especially if that conversation makes you uncomfortable. As for me, I just want to be at peace, I just want to see love in the world; I just want to love and honor myself, who I am, without it being considered an affront or danger to someone else, because of racism, because of hate and ignorance and fear….that is because to be Black in America is to live a sort of death every single day of your life. It makes for a stressful, paranoid, and schizophrenic existence: Am I an American, or am I not? You do not know how you will be assaulted, so you brace yourself for the worst and hope for the best. For me that means I am forever thinking about things my White sisters and brothers do not have to think about. Like if I carry my black iPhone in my hand will it be mistaken for a gun, and will I consequently get shot by a cop? Like if I, a marathon runner, jog my miles through certain neighborhoods at certain times of the day or night, will someone call the police on me or, worse yet, will they morph into George Zimmerman to my Trayvon Martin and be judge and jury and executioner of my life? Like if I dare to show an emotion like outward confidence will I be deemed a menace to society, a threat to the status quo, an uppity nigger or “boy” who needs to know my place, the way some in America have been offended by Super Bowl quarterback Cam Newton, his smile, his smirk, his proclamations that he is superman, his doing the dab dance whenever he makes a big play? Like if I dare to challenge or question a White woman, a White man, as I have many times—the White female journalist on the New York public radio podcast, the White male editor of that national men’s magazine, the White women and men both who like to come on my social media pages to criticize and challenge, randomly and disrespectfully, my posts—will I be penalized, ostracized, deemed a problem child simply because I use the mind my God gave me? Like if I dare to express, aloud, pride in my heritage, my culture, my people, and to acknowledge, through my art, as Beyoncé does with her song “Formation,” will I be told that I am offensive and unacceptable to middle America, because I also reference the revolutionary elements of my history like the Black Panther Party? http   //www   utne   com/community/kevin-powell-will-racism-ever-end-zl0z16szsau Louis Farrakhan https://www.cnn.com/2013/05/24/us/louis-farrakhan-fast-facts/index.html https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Farrakhan https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/womens-march/555122/ Malcolm X  “hard” versus “soft” Malcolm X was the most influential thinker of what became known as the Black Power movement, and inspired others like Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party. (Academy) Malcolm X: Early Life Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska. His father was a Baptist preacher and follower of Marcus Garvey. The family moved to Lansing, Michigan after the Ku Klux Klan made threats against them, though the family continued to face threats in their new home. In 1931, Malcolm’s father was allegedly murdered by a white supremacist group called the Black Legionaries, though the authorities claimed his death was an accident. Mrs. Little and her children were denied her husband’s death benefits. Did you know? In 1964, Malcolm X made a pilgrimage to Mecca and changed his name to el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. Malcolm X and The Nation of Islam It was in jail that Malcolm X first encountered the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, head of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, or Black Muslims, a black nationalist group that identified white people as the devil. Soon after, Malcolm adopted the last name “X” to represent his rejection of his “slave” name. https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/malcolm- x#:~:text=Malcolm%20X%20was%20an%20African,of%20Martin%20Luther%20King%2C%20Jr. https://www.history.com/news/malcolm-x-autobiography-lost-chapter That progression alone would be a powerful story to tell. But what’s even more compelling is his personal transformation: his conversion, in prison, to the Nation of Islam, or NOI…his rise to becoming its national spokesman…and finding himself in dialogue with other civil-rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s FBI https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/may/19/malcolm-x-wiretap/ CIA dot gov on Malcolm X  Sanitized copy Washington Star https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP73-00475R000302210001-9.pdf This article shows Malcolm, a radical black activist, considered whites enemy number one, a group to fight with “every ounce.” Huey Newton New York Times 2016/08/22 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/huey-newton Updates:  2020/10/01 editing and additions; blackpanthers_racialissues_humanissues_thegoldenrivernet_updates_02/17/2018 Utne-Kevin Powell; 02/07/2017

BLM4  Old Black Panthers & Some Black Power Leaders