Volume 3 - Issue 2

Volume tbr~, number two I October 12, 1969

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• Bartolomeo Vanzc«i

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Bobby Seale

N acola Sacco

21 The New Journal! October 12, 1969

Boys will be boys . . . .

idea. The name of the game is still politics -and a moderate war protest may well amass the greatest base of support.

But there are problems. With the effort to get prominent community and national leaders to speak against the war, it is too easy to forget that Richard Nixon could get up on that platform and state that he is opposed to the war and thinks it should be ended as soon as possible.

He's already said that in living color on prime time. It's too easy to start believing that the war is some ugly mistake, that Thieu and Ky are tinhorn dictators, that all we have to do is "bring the boys home" and everything will be hunky dory.

The exercise of power changes not only those who are bombed, but al&o those who drop them. The war is not an honest mistake; it is the result of many complex forces, many of which we probably do not yet understand, but which nevertheless create the reality with which we must cope. We should march; we must march, but let's not buy a sophisticated myth of innocence: we are not going to be the same as we were, when the war ends, if it ever ends. · It's about time that prominent community and national leaders took their stand against the war. But we should be aware that because they are committed to the forces that entangled us in the moral atrocity, they are going to try to make the ·war look like an ugly wart to be scraped off and forgotten. It's no wart, it's a malignant tumor. And it's been on the body long enough to spread, and spread deep.

... Another End Another Beginning ...

Well, it's time to end the war again. As the first touches of brown begin to burrow into green leaves, we are all reminded that time is indeed passing. Sometime, though no one is sure quite when, after a quiet spring and lethargic summer, the secret seeped out. We ended the war when we marched in April, years ago. We ended the war when we marched on the Pentagon. We dumped Johnson and ended the war. The politics of boredom took their toll, but as the air cools and darkness comes earlier with each day, as we realize we are on the edge of winter hibernation, it is time for yet another last scream to end the war.

But the October 15 war Moratorium will be different from earlier attempts to end the war. In the past, war protest was run by steatping-mad people who called themselves radicals. This Moratorium is distinguished by its moderate tone: it is being run by students who still dream about being president. or maybe senator, or, if Yale has taken its toll, about being an advisor to presidents.

The call is "ecumenical": that the members of the New Haven community should all unite in opposition to the war, forgetting for the moment lesser political differences. That seems to be a damn good

Well, the cultural revolution has finally hit the east coast. Starting last Sunday and for every Sunday henceforth, the Electric Circus announce,d that it will admit any girl without a brassiere free. My, times are changing, and change may be one of the few things good for its own sake; and so in keeping with wha~ we hope will be a growing spirit, The New Journal is going to effect a small change of its own.

This is the last issue of the New Journal that I will edit. Like the Chinese general who becomes a private, it's time to go back into the ranks. Power, on no matter how small a scale, is a tough thing to deal with, and if one stays in a position too long, he runs the risk of taking himself seriously.

Jonathan Lear

Volume three, number two October 12, 1969 Editor: Jonathan Lear Executive Editor: Herman Hong Managing Editor: Lawrence Lasker Business Manager: Steve Thomas Art Director: Nicki Kalish Associate Editors: Paul Goldberger William Rhodes Advertising Manager: Robert Kirkman Copy Editors: Nancy Vickers Craig Slutzker Richard Caples Stuart Klawans Circulation Managers: John Callaway Tom Davidson Contributing Editors: Susan Braudy Mopsy Strange Kennedy Michael Lerner LeoRibuffo Walter Wagoner

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Staff: Richard Conniff, Charles Draper, James Hinson, Edward Landler, Joanne Lawless, Manuel Perez, James Rosenzweig, Barbara Rich, Scott Simpson.

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Credits: The Black Panther: pages 5, 6 David Schorr: page 10 Ellen Smith: page 9 Twentieth Century-Fox: pages 12, 13 Contents 3

8 10 12

Jailing a Revolution

by Charles Draper Poetry by Bill Berkson Black Panthers in Algiers

by David Matthews Schaffer An opening on College street

by Mopsy Strange Kennedy

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•

You can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail a revolution.

by Charles Draper

Last May 19 on Malcolm X 's birthday, Bobby Seale, the chairman of the Black Panther Party, arrived in New Haven to give a speech at Battell Chapel. After the speech he went to the local Panther headquarters to discuss problems and issues with the three-month-old New Haven chapter. The discussion lasted until early in the morning when Seale left to catch a plane back to the west coast.

Three months later in Oakland several cars tilled with armed federal agents forced Seale off the road on his way back from a wedding. They arrested him for " unlawfultlight to avoid prosecution,'' a federal offense. This was surprising because Seale was in no way "fleeing" at the time: he was openly carrying on his functions at the national Panther headquarters. Moreover, he was unaware of any prosecution against him. He put up bail but was arrested again before he got out of the courthouse, when Connecticut charges were brought against him on six counts of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. These charges will involve him in what may be one of the most political trials ever held in America. It begins early next year in New Haven.

On May 21, a fisherman found the mutilated body of Alex Rackley, a Panther from New York, in a shallow river near Middlefield, Connecticut. In the early morning hours of the 22nd, police swooped down on Panther headquarters on Orchard Street and the next morning the New Haven Register convicted the eight arrested Panthers with a full banner of mugshots and all the gory details. Over the summer seven more Panthers were picked up as fugitives in various cities across the country, the latest being Bobby Seale, who is said to have given the death order for Rackley when he visited the I~ cal headquarters. As evidence the police say they have a tape which they seized during the initial arrest that apparently recorded a tonure session in which several Panthers are said to have identified themselves. The police also have a confession, which is said to be the basis for the charge against Seale, from a Panther named George Sams who was caught burglarizing a house in Toronto in mid-August.

In order to understand the background of these events, it is necessary to review the history of the Panthers on the east coast last spring. They were in a deep state of disorder, due largely to the infiltration of many of the chapters by police agents and informers. Many chapters were new and unorganized because of the rapid national expansion of the Panther Pany and were susceptible to the more subtle methods of police surveillance.

The Panthers were tightening up their ranks nationally, expelling both possible agents and possible criminals. Being both black and radicals, they were becoming extremely aware of their vulnerability to repression and were taking pains to remove any justification for the increasing attacks and harassment by law-enforcement agencies. They wanted it to be clear that these were acts of political repression and not the policing of criminals.

In April, twenty-one Panthers were arrested in New York City for allegedly conspiring to blow up a police station, some downtown department stores and the politically dubious goal of the Bronx Botanical Gardens. For this crime which never happened. in spite of the "depend-

Charles Draper is a sophomore in Saybrook College.

able" information that they had intended to commit it, the Party in New York has been effectively destroyed with a collective bail of about two miJJion dollars. Conspiracy had long been used against political movements and radical labor unions. It places the burden of proof on the defendant, despite all guarantees of his assumed innocence, and ascribes guilt by association, which can, in a case such as Reverend Coffin's, include people the defendant has never met. At any rate, the indictments tie up leaders in individual legal defense and effectively hinder their organizations and their political activities.

As Ronald Steele said in his anicle on the Panthers in a recent issue of the New Y ork Review of Books: Is it likely that members of a white political organization, even the Ku Klux Klan, would be rounded up in the middle of the night, thrown into jails dispersed around the city, kept under maximum security and even solitary confinement, detained in prison for months on exhorbitant bail for a crime that was never committed, and charged with plotting irrational actions without the liberal press voicing its indignation? Yet this is precisely what happened to the New York twenty-one. If you Jet it happen to us, the Panthers are saying to white liberals, it will happen to anyone who dissents. After the lessons of Chicago and Berkeley, white radicals, at least are beginning to believe the Panther contention that weâ&#x20AC;˘re all niggers now.

Rory Hithe and Landon Williams came east from the Bay Chapter to help the floundering organization in New York.

With them came a Panther of questionable reputation and of extreme importance to the forthcoming trial in New Haven: his name is George Sarns. Sams, known as a street fighter from Detroit, had been expelled from the Party for several offenses which could not be tolerated, including raping several Panther sisters and stabbing a brother during an argument. He was reinstated in the Party on the personal request of Stokely Carmichael, who decided later that Sams was a police agent but was unable, he said, to inform the Party because his letters were never received at national headquarters. Sams, Hithe and WiJJiams drove up to check the New Haven chapter in the middle of May. The fourth person in the car was Alex Rackley. According to the police they turned on Rackley, accused him of being an agent in the New York bust, held him hostage for several days at the New Haven headquarters, tortured him in a prolonged and painful session and, on the order of Seale, executed him.

It seems unlikely that a chapter anxious about infiltration and already subject to increased police harassment would record the supposed torture and then kill and so clumsily dispose of such an obviously identifiable body. It is also hard to believe that a chapter which at that time was spearheading the search for a missing eleven year-old black girl, and which was respected for its tight Panther discipline and its constructive community action, would spend its energies glorying in the savage mutilation of a man and providing such incriminating evidence for the police.

These alleged a.c tions seem considerably more likely in the context of the image which the national media has presented of the Panthers. They are vilified as shotgun-waving hooligans fiUed with black despair and white hatred as well as a penchant for destruction and crime. This image has dulled the public consciousness

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to the fact that Panthers are continually denied their rights, held without bail, harassed without cause, denied justice and shot in the streets as part of a growing widespread effort to destroy the Party.

As a direct consequence of the charges in New Haven, Panther offices have been smashed in Denver, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Des Moines, Indianapolis and Washington, D.C. in the search for "fugitives from justice." Seven more Panthers have been arrested in connection with the Connecticut case, but in several instances the destruction- gassing, smashing of printing presses, confiscation of documents and money-was done with no fugitives to be found. In Chicago eight Panthers were arrested for concealing a fugitive who wasn't there. In late July the police hit the Chicago office again destroying office equipment, medical supplies and food for the Breakfast for Children Program. It becomes increasingly difficult to see these acts as necessary to the protection of the local citizenry.

J. Edgar Hoover has called the Panthers "the greatest threat to the inter_nal security of the country," and Spiro Agnew has labeled them "a completely irresponsible, anarchistic group of criminals." The Berkeley Tribe has exposed a carefully worked out plan to destroy the national headquarters, drawn up by the Oakland Police Department, complete with the caliber of the machine guns necessary, the types of gas to use, and a thirty-four step plan of attack. Over three hundred Panthers are in jail, and more than thirty have been shot to death by the police. Of the four national leaders, only Dave Hilliard, the chief of staff, is not in exile or in prison, and he has been ordered to face charges involved with a shoot-out with the police last year in Oakland.

The Black Panthers have become the focus for black and third world liberation struggles in America on the one hand and for political repression on the other.

Crushed between these opposing forces is a black¡race, an oppressed people, striving to be free. This freedom may seem painful or destructive, but at this point in history it deserves to be understood.

Negro convicts, basically, rather than see themselves as criminals and perpetrators of misdeeds, look upon themselves as prisoners of war, the victims of a dog-eat-dog system that is so heinous as to cancel out its own malefactions.

Eldridge Cleaver According to Huey Newton the most telling metaphor of the life of ninety-eight percent of American blacks would be the prison. Nominally released from slavery a hundred years ago, they are still living in poverty, the victims of brutal discrimination. Interestingly enough, a college education, although it does bring a larger income, leads to greater discrimination compared to whites who have an equivalent education. The discrepancy between non-whites and whites in the areas of infant mortality, unemployment, incomplete and deserted families and income has become noticeably greater. In recent years, contrary to the popular notion of improving conditions, segregation has remained effectively unresolved and the few individual achievers who can smash down some of the barriers and ascend the class ladder must necessarily leave tlleir race and much of their heritage behind them. Integration allows for equality on the assumption that all Americans are color blind and then deprives all minority groups the worth of

their et1mic background by assimilating them into the dominant white society. One knows little about the "progress" of American society if he remains unaware of the processes which obscure social injustices without correcting them, or in C leaver's words, "The heretical mailed fist of American reality rises to the surface in the velvet glove of our every instjtutionalized endeavor."

Shortly before h e was shot, Martin Luther King said that if the Poor People's March on Washington failed to bring any concrete response from officialdom, then his form of non-violence bad failed in America. And, judging from nearly a decade of peaceful protests and non-violent demonstrations, it has failed just as miserably in the field of civil rights as it has in stopping the slaughter in Vietnam.

The few token blacks found scattered harmlessly through the high echelons of society and government mean about as much for black liberation as the publicized withdrawal of several thousand troops does for the end of the war. Camus once said, "That is just what I cannot forgive contemporary political society: it is a mechanism for driving men to despair."

A sixteen year-old black was arrested when he went beserk and started shooting wildly at passing cars on a Brooklyn highway. He had gone home to find his six-year old sister crying in the bathtub, desperately trying to scrub off her color.

A more militant stance on black liberation was taken by the late Malcolm X. He was uncompromising in his dealings with whites and white institutions, and was insistent on the separate dignity of the black man defined in his own terms.

Late in life he broke away from the antiwhite Black Muslims during a pilgrimage to Mecca, convinced that the struggle for liberation in the American ghettoes was an integral part of the global third world revolution for the liberation of people of all races. Malcolm X was openly espousing the socialism of Jomo Kenyatta and Fidel Castro when he was assassinated early in 1965. It is interesting to note that both he and King were assassinated soon after they had changed their emphasis from the black community to the oppressed masses as a whole. Following Malcolm X in his split with the racism of Elijah Muhammad were Huey Newton; Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale and the Black Panther Party for Self-defense.

Born in the West Oakland ghetto, conceived in the prisons, on the street corners and the working class colleges of Northern California, the Black Panthers realized that a man cannot hope to be black, masculine or free in a country and a world where no one is free. Freedom does not consist of lessening the burden of oppression, but of casting it off altogether.

The Panthers feel that the economic chains which bind the whole world, black, brown, yellow and white are the same ones which tie them to their own oppression. " Capitalism deprives us all of self-determination," is Huey's Newton's argument.

"Only in the context of socialism can men practice the self-determination necessary to provide for their freedom."

Why socialism? The Black Panthers believe that capitalism, which always has need of an oppressed class as a cheap labor pool, will use artificial discrimination to perpetuate that situation. In Northern Ireland capitalism uses religious discrimination to oppress Catholics in the same way America uses racial discrimination against blacks. They see these divisions in income, housing anc! working con-

51 The New Journal I October i2, 1969

ditions continuing to destroy the humanity of the oppressed and of the oppressor while guaranteeing industry a continual supply of broken, docile, subsistence-level workers. l'he Panthers also feel that white racism is so deeply inbedded in the institutions and laws of this society that it will take a complete revolution in the lives of the people to extirpate it. For this the Panthers have been painted as "antiwhite" by the national media. This just isn't true.

In fact, today the Panthers are actively fighting black racists like Carmichael and Karenga. Huey Newton has said, "We don't hate w~ite people; we hate the oppressor. And if the oppressor happens to be white then we hate him. When he stops oppressing us then we no longer hate him."

They have given up racism as a valid way of determining who their friends are. They welcome alliances with any people who are striving for the same goals which will free black people. Eldridge Cleaver said in Soul on Ice: The young whites know that the colored people of the world, Afro-Americans included, do not seek revenge for their suffering. They seek the same things the white rebel wants: an end to war and exploitation.

Black and white, the young rebels are free people, free in a way that Americans have never been before in the history of their country. And they are outraged. There is in America today a generation of white youth that is truly worthy of a black man's respect, and this is a rare event in the foul annals of American history.

j.

The Panthers believe there are as many black opportunists as white out to exploit blacks by climbing just as high as they can, getting as many crumbs from the table as possible, in a system that is built on the sweat and the tears of their brothers and¡ which will always remain in the grip of the white power structure. According to Huey Newton: There can be no real black capitalism because no blacks control the means of production. All blacks can do is have illusions.

They can dream of the day when they might share ownership of the means of production.

But there is no free enterprise in America.

We have monopoly capitalism which is a closed society of white industrialists and their protectors, white politicians in Washington.

The system, which uses unequal role values to discriminate not only against blacks, but Puerto Ricans, women, the youth and the poor, will serve only to further its own ends. To demand equality in a system that oppresses you is to upset that system and to attack the determining principle of that system. The main reason that the Panthers can be interpreted by the media as "antiwhite" is that to be truly free and equal as a black man in this white racist society is to disrupt that society.

I use the term "white racist society" not only in describing the laws and framework of our society but also the members of that society who have been enculturated into it.

It is necessary, therefore, to clear up the distinction between the words "racism" and "bigotry." I, like white intellectuals, have made a conscious effort to destroy the false consciousness which mak:es me feel individually superior to another man by way of race, class or nationality. This falls under the category of bigotry. Racism manifests itself in society when I remain strangely unaware of the choices that insured that the first man on the moon, or the

President of Yale are white Anglo-Saxons, or that determines who a man's "peers" are that can sit in judgment on him and the patterns of their thinking in that judgment. I was taught as a child that people who looked like me were "human," but that black people were "human too."

Racism is a monster that was bred within me when I was too young to be conscious of it which I must slay at every turn I make.

The obfuscations of a white intellectual's racism are not what a black comes up against in the ghetto. The bigotry and racism of city police forces are a well established fact. Mao's phrase, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," is exactly what backs up police brutality, the sneering remarks and the swaggering display of prejudice and hatred. The Black Panthers have a ten-point program of constructive demands for the black community, but to establish their presence in the West Oakland ghetto in October 1966 they chose to enforce point number seven: "We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people." Huey Newton, who was once a law student, was very careful to act within legal rights when the Black Panthers armed in self-defense. They patrolled the ghetto in armed bands to insure citizens their rights when they were being accosted, questioned or investigated b} the police in the streets. They built up a reputation for standing up to one of the nation's most vicious police departments and for awakening the public to the many instances of unjustified shootings and deliberate persecutions. This brought the police down hard on them as the most dangerous (assuming that demanding your rights is dangerous to society) element in the black community.

To fully understand this need for protection it is necessary to understand the Panther concept of the "black colony."

Early in the formation of their ideology they incorporated a lot of the thinking in Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, a book by a black psychiatrist from the French colony of Algeria who supported the rebels in the Algerian revolution. The comparison of the conditions in Algeria to the situation of the black ghettoes in America is very compelling; it doesn't take a very long walk through Dixwell or through Harlem to get the feeling of the black colony. Ghettoes are isolated from one another only by geography, but are united in the reality of their background, their vulnerability to oppression and exploitation, and their future. This encourages a feeling of brotherhood with other oppressed peoples who are fighting to be free from economic and military domination. More and more black GI's are deserting in Vietnam to go and fight for the NLF instead. They see no reason to go on defending the interests of a country which continues to mutilate the lives of their people.

The Panthers even go so far as to refer to events in the white portion of society as happening "iu the mother country."

Their analysis reflects an alienatjon and a perspective so fundamentally opposed to the present government and economic structure that they feel the two will not be able to exist long within the bounds of a single society. A major part of the Panther program is to seek a U.N. supervised plebiscite on the subject of selfdetermination for the black community.

This is not so much a separatist movement as their self-proclaimed "conspiracy to

61 The New Journal! October 12, 1969

expose America." They are working to change the government and the economic structure so that all people can work together in peace. To do so they seek alliances with other "colonized" peoples who have been concentrated geographically to serve the needs of their society but allowed little control over the course of their own lives. These groups include Indians, Latinos, Chicanos, students and poor whites.

The Panthers see the police not as the guardians of the peace but as the oppressors who are, objectively, more brutal, more derisive and more trigger-happy in the ghetto than they are when patrolling the white community. To the Panthers the police are occupation troops in the ghetto who are there to hold blacks in a position of subservience and dependence. To preserve basic human rights the Panthers feel the police must be confronted on equal terms in power and law. They are, therefore, arming in self defense.

The hysteria involved in the national media's image of the Panthers has stemmed primarily from this use of guns and from their revolutionary politics. They carry guns only when it is strictly within their rights to do so, not to intimidate but to put some power behind their rights as a citizen. For all the charges hung on the Panthers from coast to coast, there has never been any proof that a Panther has used his gun in anything but self defense. The Panthers in California have been instrumental in cooling many riots, (particularly those following the assassination of Martin Luther King), which they feel are harmful and useless expressions of the black man's rage.

An integral part of Panther policy is to "exhaust all legal means," which explains why they are spending so much time and money on legal defense. It is necessary to actively demonstrate the failure of the present system to mete out true justice in order to convince people of the pressing need for change. Revolution, to them, means nothing more than change, and involves violence only when society is too rigid to effect the necessary radical transformations any other way, only after all other possibilities have failed . "A slave who dies of natural causes," Cleaver has written, "will not balance two dead flies on the scales of eternity." A man must be free or be must fight ; the only other alternative is to be dehumanized. Huey Newton summed up the Party's proposals for change in a statement which be made while in prison: If a Kennedy or a Lindsay or anyone else

can give decent housing to all of our people; if they can give full employment to our people with high standard; if they can give full control to black people to determine the destiny of their community; if they can give fair trials in the court system t,y turning over the structure to the community; if they can end their exploitation of people throughout the world; if they can do all these things, they will have solved the problems.

But I don't believe that under this system, under capitalism, that they will be able to solVe these problems.

The Panthers' theory is that a government need never be unresponsive or slow to act for the benefit of the people t-y whose consent it derives its power; but that government in the United States is too far removed, by political machinery and corporate interests, to respond to the will of the people. The Panther program includes, as did Vietnam's Declaration of

Independence in 1945, a long and significant portion of the American Declaration of Independence, which remains one of the most revolutionary documents ever written.

The national media rarely speak of the community service of the Panthers.

This is because it is bard to reconcile the image of the serious revolutionary with that of the concerned citizen in American politics. Revolution, in the popular mind, is always the product of "pinko" agitators and hardened infiltrators rather than a constructive response to an intolerable situation. A true revolutionary, a man or woman willing to take great risks to further the cause of the oppressed masses that they have dedicated their lives to liberate, is almost inconceivable in the context of self-seeking, competitive Western society.

The Panthers are working to serve the black community, demonstrating that their programs for self-determination and liberation arise from a deep con~rn for their people's welfare and not from the bitterness of a group of vandals that happened to pick up Quotations from Chairman Mao. Their Breakfast for Children Program now feeds around 40,000 ghetto kids daily across the country who were formerly too hungry in school to function properly (which, it has been pointed out, is more than the U.S. Government does for them). They have set up free medical clinics in cities where they have become an effective political force.

They are presently campaigning for community control of the police, or rather, "to make the pigs into police." They are working on the assumption that any society will want to keep "law and order" to protect life and freedom but that police brutality and oppression would cease if the police lived and worked in the community they are hired to protect. The Panthers are also setting up black liberation schools which teach children their common heritage not only with their own race but with all struggling peoples around the world.

Increased police harassment has in part resulted from the success of these programs in uniting communities with a new dignity in their culture and their destiny. This success has also brought the Panthers into conflict with the black cultural nationalists, who take a very exclusionary racist stance toward whites and aim not for a socialist revolution, but for the cultural return to Africa. "Culture never frees anyone," says Dave Hilliard, Panther Chief of Staff. "As Fanon says, the only culture of the oppressed must be that of the revolution." The Panther liberation schools teach only the black history and culture which they see as liberating. The Panthers see the cultural nationalists as eventually increasing the stratification within the black community while insuring their own place at the top of the heap.

Not only do the Panthers reject the capitalist oppression involved, but, as past experience has shown, they feel that the mother country will never give black people any significant control over their own lives. The Panthers are the first black group who have organized and served the people on a grass roots level with a program which speaks directly to the needs of the lower classes. Black studies emphasize "soul" and heritage while they ignore the capitalist nature of black oppression. The Panthers threaten all forms of Establishment co-optation, even the

71 The New Journal! October 12, 1969

Jean Baptiste Poquelin Moliere

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black man sporting 'black capitalism,' wearing a dashiki and pulling down $15,000 frQm Community Progress Incorporated. "The cultural nationalist " according to Huey Newton, "doesn't understand the white revolutionaries because be can't see why anyone white would turn o~ t~e system. So he thinks that maybe thiS 1s .some more hypocrisy being planted by whtte people." The confiict between the Panthers and the cultural nationalists came to a head last January on the UCLA campus when Ron Karenga's cultural nationalists shot the Panther's Deputy Minister of Information, John Huggins, in the back.

Huggins grew up as a middle-class black in ~ew Haven, and, although he was intelligent, he was eventually discouraged by the discrimination and irrelevance of the education he was given. Consequently, he droppe~ out of sch.ool to join the Navy.

Fred HarriS, of the Hill Parents Association, said, "I think that the thing that really gave him a jolt was when he was on an aircraft carrier off the coast of V~et~am when the little girls got killed in Brrmmgham. He said that really blew his mind; he didn't know how to deal with it, and he just started to cry. And all the time people were giving him orders telling him what to do." ' W-orking for the Hill Parents' Association after leaving the Navy, Huggins began to find a real common bond with lower-class blacks. In November 1967 he went to Los Angeles where he joined the B~ack Panther Party. He developed a Widespread reputation as an eloquent spokesman for the freedom of blacks and was famous for the patience and gentleness with which he could make the Panther program make sense in the lives of everyone he met. As Karenga and the cultural nationalists in the Black Student Union at UCLA felt more and more threatened by Huggins' popularity and the .growing appeal of Panther politics, they trapped Huggins and the Panther poet AI prentice "Bunchy" Carter and murdered them both.

After the killing, Huggins' twenty-one year-old widow, Ericka, and their newborn baby came to live in New Haven. In February she began to set up a local chapter of the Panthers. By the middle of May they had a small group of very solid members and were moving on a number of community projects. They held a "free Huey" rally in front of the courthouse on May first. They were collecting money to set up the Breakfast for Children Pro&!am, and they held a meeting at the Medtcal School to set up a free clinic in the ghetto. That meeting was dispersed by a bomb scare. The liberation school was <?pen and teaching despite heavy police surveillance and frequent harassment.

Ericka Huggins was also instrumental on a national scale in raising the position of Panther women from the degraded position of "Pussy Power" to one of respected equality in the struggle through her enthusiasm, energy and sacrifice.

After her arrest Eldridge Cleaver wrote to her in prison : Tb.e incarceration and the suffering of Sister Encka should be a stinging rebulce to all manifestations of ma.le chauvinism within our ranks. Because the liberation of women is one of the most important issues facing the world today. Great efforts have been made in various parts of the world to do something about this, but I know from my own experience that the smouldering and

the burning flame descending for the liberation of women in Babylon [America] is the issue that is going to explode, and if we're not careful it is going to destroy our ranks, destroy our organization, because women want to be liberated just as all oppressed people want to be liberated.

We have to be careful about that and Sister Ericka Huggins is a shining e~ample of a revolutionary woman who's meted out the same kind of injustice from the pig powe~ structure that a revolutionary man receives.

So the~ didn't put her in a powder puff cell.

T_hey dtd not make life easy for her. But the p1gs recognize a revolutionary woman to be as much a threat as a revolutionary man.

Appaz:ently the Panther women in jail are bemg held under worse conditions than most of the men. Rose Smith, who is expected to give birth to a child in December, is still forced to live in a prison cell.

The Panthers are scattered throughout the state where they have been held without bail and primarily in solitary confinement for over four months. Four of the fifteen are in various stages of extradition from Denver, Salt Lake City and Detroit.

Bobby Seale is in Chicago at present, as part of the "Conspiracy 8" that was accused of conspiring to incite the riots that occurred during the Democratic National Convention. He spent a total of four hours in Chicago during that week of documented police riots.

Seiil~ lack~ the c~arisma and the rapport w1th whtte audtences which have made both Cleaver and Newton famous, but be speaks excellently to blacks and is the master organizer of the party. He and Huey Newton co-founded the Panth.ers when they both became discouraged w1th the Afro-American Society to which they belonged at Merrit College. His style expresses itself in poems like "Uncle Sammy Call Me Fulla Lucifer," which he used to recite on street corners in the ~hetto. ~e tight and effective organization of the party on a national scale is due largely to his talents and genius as a leader. Now, even if he wins his cases both in Chicago and New Haven he ~ill be incapacitated, as far as the pa:ty is concerned, for at least six months. If his efforts fail, be may be the victim of the destruction of one of the most volatile forces for liberation that has ever confronted this country.

All fifteen Panthers are in jeopardy of the death penalty. In Connecticut, murder, being an accessory to murder and kidnapping are all capital crimes. The trial might begin as early as late November or early December, but it is not likely to get started until January or February.

It may very well be that the New Haven case will be the classic trial of the Black Panther Party. It will probably demarcate the harsh boundaries of our cherished freedom of political dissent. The Panthers believe that in early December the Party will be declared illegal for being subversive, a result of hearings of Senator McClellan's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations which spent most of its time listening to police chiefs and ostracized members of the Panther Party.

Considering the political explosiveness of the issues involved, this trial will be a severe test of the American legal system.

Assuming the truth of the Panthers' contention that this is a frame-up which intends to make political repression sound like common crime enforcement, we must realize that the state has vast recontinued on page 15

TARTUFFE Comedy in Five Acts, 1669 Translated into English Verse by Richard Wilbur

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October 17-November 8 Mon.-Fri. 8:30. Sat. 4:30 and 9 p.m.

Tickets: $2.95 - $5.95 Free Limousine leaves Hotel Taft 4 P.M. Sat 222 Sargent Drive. Box Office 787-4282

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BLUE IS THE HERO ...

CRAZY for Steve Carey

leading with his chin , though bristling with military honor, camp and ora pro nobis, rolling out the red ca rpe t of chance on a plea that you might give others a front-row seat: Lady, take off your hat. So extra special. ..

Other times, it would be a roof-garden like the one Rauschenberg has,

About poetry: See I pause and then keep going beeping into your ear something naked to be named later because too plain, right?-why make everything into satisfaction you can get, can't buy, will learn, break soon to be under the right side of the (up) world-no, stop, come with me to this crowded place where all lines meet.

being no Nebuchadnezzar of the bush, or, standing on your head, feeling the earth has "hu ng" a lawn and these dogs have come to bite you "where it hurts"1 wonder if they've rea lly caught the scent, which is a poor memory in our Symbolist ears of what it must have been like to read The Hound of the Baskervilles for the first time in 1899 oh truly modern and amused and wrong, before the world, before the cold and the dry vermouth and everybody started wearing sweaters, taking pills. I confess to a certain yearning in my genes

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tonics of the drawn shade and rumpled bed, the Albergo delle Palme in Palermo, instead

(untitled) Dark cloudy sky Rain expected Ceiling low Barometer falling Wind at ten miles an hour High humidity Muggy White cloud billowy A nip Zero chance of rain Barometer rising You can see for miles Air crisp and fair A dry day Sun But cold

of hanging on the curb, learning to love each latest gem " fantastic!" as the lights go out all over the Fl atiron Building, which leaves the moon, sufficiently fa soIa, and the clouds disentangle a perfect Mondrian, pure gray, to which you give nodding assent, somewhat true-

THE COUNT

you are that helicopter, primping for the climb

A lot of smoke in the light Would seem to suggest that much Has got done But no it's mid-afternoon and one Won't do anything at all You need two Three And the might of millions More cigarettes A billion light bulbs Seventy-five watts each

into whose bed of historical certainty? the fuel streaming down the sides, like fun in the sun, air in the air.

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BlackPdnthers in Algiers

by David Matthews Schaffer

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11 I The New Journal! October 12, 1969

On Tuesday afternoon, July 22, the day after the opening of the first PanAfrican Cultural Festival, I was walking down mainstreet Algiers for the fourth time that day. The one and one-half ¡ miles from Festival Information Center, 126 Rue Didouche Mourad, towards the press center just past the Great Post Office were becoming country miles. About half-way there I passed by the Black Panther exposition center where workers behind locked glass doors had mysteriously been putting up exhibits for two days. It should have been less of a surprise when a Festival guide ran up behind me to say that the center was finally going to open officially. I turned around and hurried into the display room filled with Emory Douglass revolutionary art and Black Panther Party posters. The room was only beginning to fill up with people.

As a crowd entered I walked to the rear and found myself facing Eldridge Cleaver.

There was no planned program beyond Madame Erve's welcoming speech, stressing that the Panthers had come to the Festival to dramatize their solidarity with the oppressed people of the world and that this "historic link-up" was "beautiful." By now the room was packed and newsmen were pushing their way towards Cleaver. Near him were his pregnant wife Kathleen, Ted Joans, David Hilliard, the Party's minister of culture Ed Bullins, Skip Malone, George Black and other Panthers. An impromptu press conference began.

Eldridge Cleaver, minister of information for the Black Panther Party, had only recently flown to Algiers from Havana, where he had been in secret self-exile. For nearly two years since skipping bail in California the author of Soul on Ice had vanished from public sight. It was only towards the end of his seclusion, when a reporter from Reuters stumbled on to him in Havana, that the world found out where Cleaver had been in hiding. There was understandable excitement among the four or five American newsmen in the exposition room in Algiers, who would become the first of their country's journalists to make contact with Cleaver in two ye.a rs.

Eldridge Cleaver was first asked what he thought of the moon landing the day before. In response, he relied on Ted Joans who read his newly composed poem describing the event. "Soar Grapes."

"Into their concept of perfect blue they took millions of dollars .. ," began Joans. Cleaver himself added that "if the moon shot was calculated to help humanity it was a dismal failure!' In fact he wished that "Tricky Dick had been one of the astronauts" and that the space capsule had remained on the moon.

The crowd and the movie lights surrounding Cleaver made the heat in the room intolerable. His dashiki was dripping wet, and he seemed alone, sullen and somehow trapped-a kind of existential hero. He was a man without a country, and he made no attempt to conceal his hostility for the US press and government. An American AP reporter asked if the Algerian government helped finance the Black Panther Party. Eldridge blurted, "Identify yourself!" TI:ien he David Matthews Schaffer is a member of the Yale Daily News and a Scholar of the House in French African Literature. He travelled in Africa last summer on a R.C. Bates Travelling Fellowship.

followed, "Tell J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon and Senator John McClellan that Lady Bird Johnson finances the Black Panther Party!" Kathleen Cleaver, seated beside her husband, showed a cool disdain for the American reporters. When one of them became intrigued by the flamboyant color of her dress, he asked shyly, and innocently enough, if it were African. "Hell no," she smiled, "It's a maternity dress."

In a later interview Cleaver implied that he missed the United States and that he might like to go back and face the trial for which he had skipped bail. He explained that he was not a fugitive from j.ustice as he had never been convicted.

Maintaining that his only crime was skipping bail, he said the United States didn't want him to stand trial because it "knew" he would win.

The opening press conference left a direct discussion of the United States and turned to the crisis in the Middle East.

Cleaver said that the Black Panther Party understood the Jews' long tradition of suffering. But it distinguished between their suffering "and the problems they now cause for other people." Thus Cleaver expressed the solidarity of his party with El Fatah, the Palestinian liberation movement. Hilliard summed up Panther policy and reopened the indictment of the US by snarling, "Whatever the enemy supports we oppose; whatever the enemy opposes we support."

Throughout the Festival, Cleaver stated again and again that "culture is invalid unless political." It was the theme of the entire Festival. The Black Panthers incarnated the theme, and it was probably why they were even invited to Algiers and why the Algerian government provided them with the exposition center. In addition to the thirty-six African nations which attended, the Festival committee had invited the Black Panthers, El Fatah, the NLF and six African nationall.iberation movements: ANC (South Africa), MPLA (Angola), PAIGC (Guiney Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands), Frelimo (Mozambique), Swapo (Nambia) and ZAPU (Southern Rhodesia) . All these groups used the Festival as a forum for their revolutionary propaganda.

Ha-Xuan-Trong, vice minister of culture of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, addressing a writer's colloquiem at the Festival, expressed the solidarity of his people with the various liberation movements and presented a definition expanding Cleaver's criterion for cultural validity.

Culture is a front of struggle, and each cultural worker is a militant. True culture is above all humanistic and revolutionary, in the sense that it does not delight with the comfortable surrogate that the oppressor offers it to better incite it to the inaction and apathy that serve only his egotistical interests. It has to be dynamic and carry in it the virtue of exhorting, discovering and edifying the humane, the beautiful, the useful.

The North Vietnamese delegation headed by Vice Minister Trong later visited the Panthers at their center for a short while. David Hilliard, after first asking for someone among the spectators to translate his words into French. stated that the two movements were striving for a mutual goal, the liberation of their oppressed peoples. The two ministers then shook hands, as George Black,

Yale '66, explained that if other movements and governments could have a party hierarchy so could the Black Panthers.

In fact the Panthers could even have a foreign service, another reason why they h~d come to Algiers. It is this point of view, coupled to their cooperation with whites, that separates the Black Panthers and Stokely Carmichael.

Cooperation with whites became crucial to the Panther's legitimacy, as the opprobrium "racist," intrinsic or merely attributed, became the Achilles heel of the Black Panthers in Algiers. The Black Panther Party of today maintains that it aims at cooperation with white radicals, though it may have begun as a racist organization. When Stokely Carmichael, who still clings to black racism, flew to the Festival, he viciously attacked the Panther's claim. When Stokely first ambled down the streets of Algiers, he did not attract attention. To the few, there was the recognizable lean, mad look. At the Festival his racist philosophy drf!w little support, while it did foster among whites even more suspicion of the Panthers, who are seeking their cooperation. He was bellicose, cantankerous and more dogmatic than usual in maintaining that the Panthers had "betrayed" black men everywhere. Stokely had flown to the Festival late as a kind of self-appointed delegate, stayed at the Georges V, the best hotel in town, and returned to Guinea where he was .reportedly learning French with his new wife, Miriam Makeba.

Algerians had filled the Panther center, even if cautiously, to meet Cleaver, but they, and the Panthers, avoid Carmichael.

In the Tuesday conference, Cleaver himself dismissed Stokely with a quip about the split between the Panthers and Carrnichael-''We meet with Stokely only when we run into him." On several occasions Cleaver also felt obligated to hold special conferences to explain the non-racist policy of his party. These meetings usually ended as shouting matches with doubting Algerians. But try as they did to convince Algerians of their non-racism, the Panthers didn't succeed, because of an ironic and tragic fault not of their own making.

If the Festival revealed anything about the personality of the African continent . it demonstrated once and for all the deep racial prejudice between generally white Arab North Africa and black Africa to the south. Algerians taunted members of a black cultural delegation with "Salut Negre." A black African would retort, "Salut Arabe." In short, many Algerians seemed to dislike Negroes more than Jews. The Black Panthers were popular at the Festival often solely because they were professed revolutionaries. They were suspected on two rather incompatible counts-because they couldn't shake their former racist image, and more simply, because they were black.

This suspicion and distrust OR the part of the Algerians was countered by the fraternity with the black African Liberation Movements. At a dinner Denis Brutus, of the African National Congress, a South African poet in exile, expressed fear for Rhodesia, Australia and the United States as a result of the infectious appeal of apartheid, and casually dropped, "I hope that when the USA pulls out of Vietnam it'll have a few extra B52's for sale. By this time the only way to get rid of apartheid is to blow it out." Sirens, Knuclcles and Boots is the poet's label for his country's racial segregation and the

title for his own book of poetry which includes "Nightsong City": Sleep welJ, my love, sleep welJ: The harbor lights glaze over restless docks; Police cars cockroach through the tunnel streets; From the shanties creakiilg iron-sheets Violence is tossed like a bug-infested rag And fear is imminent as sound in the windswung bell; The day's long anger pants from sand and rocks; but for this breathing night at least, my land, my love, sleep well.

The poet also poses a question that faces the Panthers. As they popularize their movement with white radicals and become even more of a political threat to the government, will repression be initiated to end the party itself? More than a few feel this has already begun.

The Black Panther center at the Festival was a constant curiosity. But oddly it was Algerian students, and not black Africans visiting Algiers, who flocked there all day every day. Even in the evenings after the center's glass door were once again locked, one would see a group of them looking through the glass at Eldridge Cleaver, standing in the camera lights of the European press. At the close of that memorable press conference of early Tuesday afternoon, George Black hastily gathered a pile of Emory Douglass posters which ambitiously proclaimed, "Solidarity with the Oppressed Peoples of the World" and carried them outside in front of the Panther center. He climbed on a car and began distributing them to the outstretched hands of the Algerian students who were swarming around him. All of ~ sudden, as if possessed with the dream of every revolution ever made or begun, they began chanting again and again, in a roar that must have been heard down mainstreet Algiers all the way from 126 Rue Didouche Mourad to just past the Great Post Office, "Le pouvoir aupeuple."e

121 The New Journal I October 12,1969

Could it be that the force of erotic dreaming in our society is even stronger than that of public relations? Unbelievable, but so it seemed the night of the world premiere of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, with College Street muffled up tigl;lt in the red tape, ticker tape of publicity (a searchlight that must have knocked on the windows from Strathcona to the Yale-New Haven Hospital, the Yale Band, the fuzz, saw horses blocking off the street, radio announcements, TV cameras, the Taft Hotel, drooling life from every window and on and on)-one might have thought that only a C. B. De Mille, paying twenty-five dollars a day to extras and bullying them through megaphones, could have hopped up such an inconceivably roaring crowd. And yet no; in this case the Newmena outdistanced even the extraordinary squirreling PR phenomena, and one felt that if Paul Newman had come unannounced to the corner of College and Crown, only for five minutes, to pick his nose, that the effect would have been quite the same.

Oh sure, there were probably about four people there with enough distance from it all to whisper "masscult, masscult" under their breath, but for the most part the crowd, consisting of panters and droolers, many of them men (is Paul le /avori pin-up of the Mattachine Society we began to wonder?) and lots of them perfectly middle-aged, was utterly lost and gonesville under the oceanic smash of passion.

It was a crowd you could get pregnant in, just by the accident of proximity, and at any time one was ripe for the very Mopsy S trange Ken nedy is a Contributing Editor of The New Journal.

fainting from asphyxiation if not from that psychosomatic thing that buckles fans at such moments; but one was saved time and time again by the rumor that this car just now nosing ominously through the crowds compliments of the police was IT!-the crowd would repeatedly arch up (one man in particular kept on groaning " ooh, ooh" in a desperate voice) only to crash down on a decoy car full of simply no one. Was the old slyboots maybe concealed in the trunk?

After knifing your way inside with long, menacing tickets (costing five dollars, or twenty-five dollars, or fifty dollars), there you saw a black tie replica? tion of the scene outside; this was one time when privilege didn't elevate you to the cool jaded heights of anything, it just meant that the dress that got ripped here was long and silk and ex.pensive.

The lobby was full of valid grownups like the Robert Liftons and C. Vann Woodward, but the fan-mag fever of the event made the whisper of his name seem like a great "aaaaapril fool" that deflated the two-second belief that it was actually Joanne, the little woman behind the blue eyes. Photographers kept on bending back like trampled friends, in a Fellini dreamy nightmare of clickingbut whom?-it was worse than the Oscars for maddening little gray men who do all tbe work, but, alas, don't got what Paul's got.

Some usherette, as if put there by conscience to punish the crowds for their fantasies, and who kept on saying crossly, "Look I really mean it, will you get the hell over there, move!!"-was the last raging voice one heard before two extremely sweaty and cross-looking people

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appeared (Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman), snapping their heads this way and that as if looking in panic and rage for the exit in a fire. There was none of this darling, darling Janis, forever and ever yours. Bobby Vinton stuff in his demeanor-indeed he looked like the first person laboring under the influence of normalcy one had seen in the last thirty minutes. Here he was being thrown EgoDog-Yummies by thousands of people, and being swaddled by a love that our mothers and our m ath teachers warned us never to expect from life-and yet here be was in the middle of it, preserving his mental health in a cocoon of fed-up matu rity. It was most admirable, and if anyone was looking for something new in him to admire, there it was. Also one noticed that, after a lifetime of looming larger than life on the screen, that h e looked rather smaller than life in life, that he was chewing gum or perhaps some gangster toothpick, that he had this orange thing around his neck, and that despite his crises of ontology and identity on movie marquees (Paul Newman IS Hud, Paul Newman IS Harper, Paul Newman IS the Hustler) that after aU he seemed to be rather Himself.

After that, the most consciously consumed person to come in-hey! and the little egomaniac isn't even in the moviewas Barbra Streisand (yes, but she turns out to have formed a company for producing movies with Poitier and Newman "to beat down some of the old H ollywood dinosaurs" as he explained it). Some of us who know and love her for her work were forced to admit that she is probably the most photogenic person o n earth, given how much she looked like cause for teenage tears in Brooklyn

bathroom mirrors in the flesh. In photographs what there is of the belle-/aide in her achieves a crazy style-but in real life her mouth wanders all over her face like a huge snake trying to get comfortable in a small bathtu~e sort of mouth Seventeen wants you to minimize by outlining weU inside the borders-and that remarkable nose seems like some unchecked Co-op City growing disastrously in the middle of her face. And yet we absorbed this shock, grateful that looks weren't everything, Paul.

After Newman and his entourage sat down, the brazen hordes stood stock still in the aisles, sinning already with him in their hearts and staring at him as deliberately as if he were the bottom line in an eye chart-and the usherette had her work cut out for her for another fifteen minutes, slicing hopelessly through the crowds with her hoarse voice.

Yes, all right, but apart from mass sexual hysteria what was it that brought all these people so expensively and devotedly here? Something serious but swinging called the Yale Film Associates, with a board full of heavies and groovies, which is here to "support and encourage the study of film at Yale ..." for anyone " .. who believes that film is a significant and relevant subject for study...." YFA, perhaps sensing a Bonnie-and-Clyde type mythic-landmark-of-the-screen whiff in the air, and capitalizing on the fact that both director George Roy Hill and Paul Newman were at Yale in some form (the latter a drop-out from the drama school but obviously of prodigal proportions), decided to bunch itself through the medium of this benefit world premiere of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and to give suckers, the rich and the star-mad , a

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First program, 8:30pm, Friday, October 10.

Second program, 8:30pm, Saturday, October 11.

Third program, 8:30 pm, Sunday, October 12.

Yale Law School Auditorium, High and Wall Sts. General admission $1 , tickets at door.

Out-of-competition films will be screened during the day all three days of the Festival in 100 Art Gallery, High and Chapel Sts. The $1,000 prize money at the Yale presentation was donated by Hans Richter.

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The Yale Law School Film Society Presents Its October Festival Man And Revolution · Monday, Oct. 13: LaGuerre est Finie Directed by Alain Resnais, Yves Montand stars in this moving tale of a lifetime revolutionary.

101 Linsly-Chit. 6:45, 9:oo, u:15/rJrt Sunday, Oct. 19: The Organizer Marcello Mastroianni as a persecuted labor organizer at the turn of the century.

101 Linsly-Chit. 7:oo, 9:30/75¢ Monday, Oct. 20: The Battle of Algiers "The .first training film in urban guerilla warfare." Jimmy Breslin Law School Auditorium 7:00,9:30, 12:oo/75¢ midnight show free to the people of New Haven.

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chance to disguise themselves in the loftier category of lovers of art. And to add to the "big-firsts" of the evening, it was also the first major movie premiere ever held in New Haven.

There was a lot of underlying reverence and seriousness and big guns rivalling the easy attraction of Newman. One was made to feel that beyond everything visible and big going on, that there lay something bigger (that same way Vogue has of bullying you into thinking about Vidal Sassoon, "There's more at stake here than just hair"). One could even begin with PN's presence as the smallest thing going on, and ascend by steps to the movie, the seminar the next day about the movie, the seriousness given to even the light aspects of the film by having them discussed by a panel consisting of the stars, the director, the writer, Standish Lawder, etc., the movie made about the making of the movie, the Yale Film Associates with its impressive roster of names, the Art of Film-and also still feel that the ghost of the McCarthy Campaign was hovering about in the air somewhere, too.

The presentation was finally tugged back into, as McLuhan would say, a "linear" context. Spencer Berger, the president of the YFA, stood up there behind a podium bravely talking on in the method of schoolteachers, until the frenzied crowds heard that he was talking and eventually left their vigil in the aisles, and sat down and shut up. There was something wonderfully polite and superfluous about "extending a warm welcome" to this man who we'd practically winepressed out of existence, but it reminded us of a world of rationality behind it all.

Newman was to say the next day at the seminar, in response to something adulatory that had been said of him, "what he's trying to say is that the campus drunk f'mally made it." The air was thick with that sprt of myth that night (the line of privilege and talent and hot fortune forms on the right); people were being taken seriously and having fun at the same time, and they were somehow getting away with stuff on a large scale. The Yale Film Associates were blasting off with panache, certainly without stuffiness.

William ("Boys and Girls Together," "Harper") Goldman's screenplay was being talked about at the seminar as groovy innovation, loose and free and anachronistie-and scenes and themes in George Roy Hill's direction were talked about at the seminar in a way that made us feel that we'd gotten even more for our money ... that was no movie, that was our homework.

Butch Cassidy is the latest approach to the idea of hating westerns in general but liking this one right here a lot. Where your basic western (and even sometimes your basic antiwestern) tends to be boringly ballsy and afraid of displaying vulnerability especially in men, B.C. is full of cool or nervous little crimes (they rob a bank in Bolivia by reading their threats from a phrase book), awe of the other guys, self-doubt, remorse about killing, and even fear of the sort of stunts that westerns are made of (Redford tries to get out of jumping off a cliff into a fierce river because, as he finally confesses, he• can't swim). It is also elevated above the average by its similarity to Jules and J im, because of the friendship between the two men and the lyrical presence of the

girl shared emotionally, if not physically, between them. During the showing of the movie, PN took it upon himself several times to go "shhhh" in his role of the responsible member of the group surrounded by lunacy, and finally about fifteen minutes before the end he, Robert Redford, Joanne Woodward and Barbra Streisand, flanked by the ubiquitous protectors, shot out a side entrance and went off to a party being given at Mory's.

That party (although it looked like a whorehouse raid from outside, what with the cop cars) represented some kind of upward mobility in fandom. Yes, the windows were blacked out with bodies standing outside on the ledges and looking in, and yes, Paul Newman sat at the end of a long table next to Barbra and a few other insiders and was watched again as if he were the corpse in Dr. Tulpe's anatomy lesson-but at last the crowd had thinned itself out and refined itself (through tight invitations and bouncing) down to the people who realized how you possibly tell Paul Newman about how non-negotiable fan passion is. What can you possibly tell Paul Newman about himself thai he hasn't gathered through the evidence of his senses already? Here the crowd had, in some little way, grown up. Some of it may have been the compassionate looking away into the shrimp dish of people who have to put up with being stared at themselves. Some of it, inevitably, was just the bad luck of not fitting into the room where Himself was sitting.

And yet, despite the relative elegance and discretion of the starers, there they were, interrupting their own conversations with jerky eye jumps over to Newman's chair, grilling his every casual act, and studying each turn of the head for new information on his profile. When he cocked his head toward the Whiffenpoofs with a roguish, gallant, "get-this-boys!" gesture as they sang a song from his movie to h~veryone watched. When Barbra pulled out her long hands which appear to begin just south of the elbow to clap at someone else's singing-we watched. It was too hard to believe that these people who are paid to fake laughs and smiles and tears and looks of doe-like surprise can have such a thing as a real life. It was easier to imagine that we were just watching him in the performance of apparently (but not really) spontaneous acts, and to posit an offstage voice saying "OK, now Paul, as naturally as you can, · pick up a match. Now sip some beer.

Now lower your head and lift up your eyebrows-slowly, slowly-that's it."

When you're in that racket, all the world's a screen test.

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Revolution continued from page 7

sources which could be used to make the charges appear exceedingly plausible.

The news coverage of the case has been very slanted and prejudicial, and the public consciousness has not been awakened to the injustice of their present situation.

Many of the Panthers' rights were abridged during the arrest and the subsequent imprisonment. The police didn't have a warrant when they smashed into the headquarters and most of their evidence, including the now legendary tape, was seized illegally. They were denied access to an attorney both the night of the arrest and sometime afterward, and no

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1 01 Linsly-Chittenden 7:00 and 9:30p.m. (unless otherwise noted)

bail was ever set for their release. Neither the defendants nor their attorney were notified of the grand jury proceedings, nor were they represented at the inquest, which determines cause of death in the victim. They were denied a preliminary hearing and were indicted by the grand jury, the weapon of the prosecution, which met in secret. The "felons" are kept in solitary confinement for the most part and dispersed to prisons throughout the state. In a conspiracy trial it is extremely useful to isolate the defendants, especially the young ones, in order to gain contradictory and incriminating testimony.

One of the points of the defense will be the constituency of the jury and the process of selecting it. Point nine of the Panther program states "We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peers or people from the black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States."

This is intended to dispell the hoax that "all Americans are equal" whch allows, for instance, the crimes of a broken, old black man to be tried by ten middle class white businessmen, one woman and a token black from the bourgeoisie. A New Haven attorney recently stated that he was unable to remember ever seeing any black man in a New Haven jury. To combat the inherent racism of the jurors at Huey Newtons' trial, Dr. Robert Blauner, from the University of California, a specialist in racism, presented this four-point yardstick: The juror, he said, should know something about black history and culture; be should be aware of his own racism and be working to overcome it; be should have lived a life more equalitarian than segregated-one which includes experience with blacks and other minority people; and be should be actively concerned with changing the racist structure of his society, not in his spare time, but in his daily life.

Gene Marine. The Black Panthers.

The Panthers say, "We have been, and are being tried by aU-white juries that have no understanding of the average reasoning man of the black communty."

Needless to say, neither the all-black jury nor the racially self-conscious jury were accepted as models for the jury in Oakland, nor will they be in New Haven.

But the questions must be raised.

Another part of the defense will deal with the prejudicing of the case that is part of the hysteria generated by the inflammatory articles and impressions given by the national media, and particularly by New Raven's own blind spot, The New Haven Register. Evidence has been introduced and conclusions have been made in the Register, as a result of possibly intentional news leaks from police sources, which should only be maae public during the trial. The presumption of innocence which is necessary to every fair trial, the defense feels, is impossible because every newspaper reader in the New Haven area "knows" the incontrovertible "facts" about the case.

The Panthers can be expected to push their politics in relation to this trial. As a response to what they feel to be a concerted effort to destroy their organization by the government of this country, the Panthers are going to build their movement. They are involved in a vivid demonstration of the failures of the system that they are trying to destroy. They propose to show the huge injustice and inequality of the society in which we Jive by laying

their lives on the line and by encouraging others to "join them in a conspiracy to make a world in which people have control over their lives." It is necessary to discern the forces that control judgment and to interpret the facts of this case because of the huge political implications involved.

"It's not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on the outcome of what is going on in America today .... and the most serious question before the American people is who now, in this post civil-rights era, are the true patriots, the new right or the new left?" said Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on lee. Depending on your viewpoint, the Black Panther Party, as a manifestation of the heightened consciousness of the awakening black masses, poses the most serious threat or the brightest hope in this country today.lt is therefore vitally important, if we still make claim to be a just society, to ascertain whether they are on trial for their alleged crimes or for their political beliefs. The Panthers have established camp in that precarious area of the political spectrum where they find the needs of the people in conflict with the interests of the government and the status quo. We held such positions as the vanguard of freedom in countries of Eastern Europe and pride ourselves on our latitude of political stance in this country. It is necessary to guard that freedom both for ourselves and for others if this society is ever to remain flexible and responsive to our needs. Cleaver is right when he says "If we can't walk down the street in security, you can't walk down the street in security."

Thursday, October 9 Raoul Walsh's OBJECTIVE BURMA (1945) Friday, October to John Ford's SEVEN WOMEN (1965) Saturday, October 11 Jean Renoir's PICNIC ON THE GRASS (1959) Tuesday, October 14 Carl Dreyer's VAMPYR (1931) Wednesday, October 15 John Ford's THE LOST PATROL (1934) Thursday, October 16 Note: Shows at 7:00 and 10:00 p.m. (1942} Jacques Tourneur's CAT PEOPLE (1942} Christian Nyby's THE THING (1951} Friday, October 17 Kenji Mizoguchi's STREET OF SHAME (1956} Saturday, October 18 Luis Bunuel's LAND WITHOUT BREAD (1932) and MEXICAN BUS RIDE (1954) Tuesday, October 21 Carl Dreyer's PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928) Wednesday, October 22 Fritz Lang's MOONFLEET (1954)

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