Rabbi Arthur Waskow : Thanksgiving, My Yarmulke, and Alice's Restaurant

Rabbi Arthur Waskow (not in 1970!) wearing rainbow kippah.
You can get anything you want:
Thanksgiving and my yarmulke

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / November 28, 2010

Thursday, a little before noon, my phone rang. I knew at once who it was: my old friend Jeffrey Dekro (founder of The Shefa Fund, which gathered millions of dollars of Jewish money to invest in American inner cities and to reconstruct New Orleans), calling me and several other members of a long-ago, long-scattered men’s group, reminding us to turn on the radio.

For every year at noon on Thanksgiving, WXPN Radio in Philadelphia plays Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant," about a Thanksgiving dinner in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1967; about obtuse cops; and about nonviolent resistance to a brutal war.

And every year, this seemingly non-Jewish set of rituals stirs in me the memory of a moment long ago when my first puzzled, uncertain explorations of the "Jewish thing" took on new power for me. And when I came to understand the power of a yarmulke.

Sharing this story has become a ritual for me. Welcome to the campfire!

In 1970, I was asked by the Chicago Eight to testify in their defense. They were leaders of the movement to oppose the Vietnam War, and they had been charged by the U.S. government (i.e. the Nixon Administration and Attorney General John Mitchell, who turned out to be a criminal himself) with conspiracy to organize riot and destruction during the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968.

I had been an alternate delegate from the District of Columbia to the Convention -- elected originally as part of an anti-war, anti-racist slate to support Robert Kennedy. After he was murdered, we decided to nominate and support the chairperson of our delegation -- Rev. Channing Phillips (alav hashalom), a Black minister in the Martin Luther King mold.

Our delegation made him the first Black person ever nominated for President at a major-party convention. The following spring, on the first anniversary of Dr. King's murder, on the third night of Pesach in 1969, his church hosted the first-ever Freedom Seder.

AND -- I had also spoken the first two nights of the Convention to the anti-war demonstrators at Grant Park, at their invitation, while the crowd was being menaced by Chicago police and the National Guard. The police finally did explode in violence on the third night of the Convention, when the crowd tried to march peacefully toward the Convention as it began voting on presidential candidates.

Although the main official investigation of Chicago described it as a "police riot," the Nixon Administration decided to indict the anti-war leaders. So during the Conspiracy Trial in 1970, Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, et al., figured I would be reasonably respectable (as a former delegate) and therefore relatively convincing to the jury and the national public, in testifying that the anti-war folks were not trying to organize violence but instead were the victims of police violence.

As the trial went forward, it became clear that the judge -- Julius Hoffman, a Jew -- was utterly subservient to the prosecution and wildly hostile to the defense. (Some of us thought he had become possessed by the dybbuk of Torquemada, head of the Inquisition. How else could a Jew behave that way? We tried to exorcise his dybbuk. It didn't work.)

Judge Hoffman browbeat witnesses, ultimately literally gagging and binding Bobby Seale, the only Black defendant, for challenging his rulings. Dozens of his rulings against the Eight were later cited by the Court of Appeals as major legal errors, requiring reversal of all the convictions the prosecution had achieved in his court.

So when I arrived at the Federal courthouse in Chicago, I was very nervous. About the judge, much more than the prosecution or my own testimony.

The witness who was scheduled to testify right before me was Arlo Guthrie. He had sung "Alice's Restaurant" to/with the crowd at Grant Park, and the defense wanted to show the jury that there was no incitement to violence in it.

So William Kunstler, z'l, the lawyer for the defense, asked Guthrie to sing "Alice's Restaurant" so that the jury could get a direct sense of the event.

But Judge Hoffman stopped him: "You can't sing in my courtroom!!"

"But," said Kunstler, "it's evidence of the intent of the organizers and the crowd!"

For minutes they snarled at each other. Finally, Judge Hoffman: "He can SAY what he told them, but NO SINGING."

And then -- Guthrie couldn't do it. The song, which lasts 25 minutes, he knew by utter heart, having sung it probably more than a thousand times -- but to say it without singing, he couldn't. His memory was keyed to the melody. And maybe Judge Hoffman's rage helped disassemble him.

So he came back to the witness room, crushed.

And I'm up next. I start trembling, trying to figure out how I can avoid falling apart.

I decide that if I wear a yarmulke, that will strengthen me to connect with a power Higher/Other than the United States and Judge Hoffman. (Up to that moment, I had never worn a yarmulke in a non-officially "religious" situation. I had written the Freedom Seder in 1969, but was in 1970 still wrestling with the question of what this weird and powerful "Jewish thing" meant in my life.)

So I tell Kunstler I want to wear a yarmulke, and he says -- "No problem." Somewhere I find a simple black unobtrusive skullcap, and when I go to be sworn in, I put it on.

For the oath (which I did as an affirmation, as indicated by much of Jewish tradition), no problem.

Then Kunstler asks me the first question for the defense, and the Judge interrupts. "Take off your hat, sir," he says.

Kunstler erupts. "This man is an Orthodox Jew, and you want... etc etc etc." I am moaning to myself, "Please, Bill, one thing I know I'm not is an Orthodox Jew." But how can I undermine the defense attorney? So I keep my mouth shut.

Judge Hoffman also erupts: "That hat shows disrespect for the United States and this Honorable Court!" he shouts.

"Yeah," I think to myself, "that's sort-of true. Disrespect for him, absolutely. For the United States, not disrespect exactly, but much more respect for Something Else. That's the point!"

They keep yelling, and I start watching the prosecutor -- and I realize that he is watching the jury. There is one Jewish juror. What is this juror thinking?

Finally, the prosecutor addresses the judge: "Your Honor, the United States certainly understands and agrees with your concern, but we also feel that in the interests of justice, it might be best simply for the trial to go forward."

And the judge took orders!! He shut up, and the rest of my testimony was quiet and orderly.

It took me another year or so to start wearing some sort of hat all the time.

For years, it was a Tevye cap. For years, and some of the time now, a beret. Sometimes a rainbow kippah. Sometimes in a rough winter, an amazing tall Tibetan hat with earflaps and wool trimming that I found in a Tibetan Buddhist harvest festival that came right during Sukkot (when else??!!).

And whatever its shape, the hat continues to mean to me that there is a Higher, Deeper Truth in the world than any judge, any Attorney General, any President, or any Pharaoh.

It's my -- our -- "Alice's Restaurant." Or maybe "Alice's Restaurant" is Arlo's yarmulke. If you want to watch and hear Arlo singing the song, click here. [Or play embedded video, below.]

Why listen to it? Not just nostalgia or historical curiosity about the long-gone ‘60s. Here we are, so many years later, in the midst of another brutal, unwinnable war, in the midst of many other restrictions on our civil liberties, in the midst of other judges who bow down to super-wealth and super-power, in the midst of damage to our earth we couldn’t even imagine in 1967. It’s not just judges we need to go Beyond. It’s Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Banking, the bullies of Talk Radio, all the Big Guns.

Beyond them. We all need a hat, a song, a “men’s group” -- something that renews our inner sense of the Unity Beyond. And laughter.

Blessings of shalom, salaam, peace.

[Rabbi Arthur Waskow is the director of The Shalom Center. He is co-author of The Tent of Abraham: Stories of Hope and Peace for Jews, Christians, and Muslims; author of Godwrestling, Round 2 and Down-to-Earth Judaism; and editor of Torah of the Earth (two volumes, eco-Jewish thought from earliest Torah to our own generation). These pioneering books on eco-Judiasm are available at discount from “Shouk Shalom,” The Shalom center's online bookstore.]



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FILM / William Kunstler : Disturbing the Universe

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe...

Remarkable film tells story of
Famed civil rights attorney

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / October 28, 2009

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, a film by Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler, premiered as part of the Austin Film Festival Wednesday, Ocober 27. The film, which was also selected for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, has it's public premiere in New York, November 13-15.

The ninety-minute documentary is the story of a larger than life attorney -- a man who left his Westchester suburban home, his wife and his children for a journey to the south of Jim Crow and lunch-counter sit-ins. He never returned to the comfortable suburbs.

Along with Leonard Weinglass, Kunstler was defense counsel for the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial. The eighth defendant, Bobby Seale, was bound and gagged in the courtroom for demanding to speak in his own defense. Kunstler was sentenced to 40 months for contempt by Judge Julius Hoffman. Out on bail and fighting appellate battles, he waded into negotiations at the Attica Prison uprising.

He stood outside the gates listening to the gunshots as 31 inmates and nine guards were killed by police fire. He was counsel for the Catonsville Nine, Catholics who burned draft records with homemade napalm. He traveled to Wounded Knee to defend the American Indian Movement.

These legendary legal battles are documented with remarkable footage and interviews with many of the principals, including Bobby Seale, Tom Hayden, Nancy Kurshan, Dennis Banks, an Attica guard and many of Kunstler’s colleagues. But, it is the tender family scenes with his second wife and young daughters (the filmmakers) that add depth and subtlety to this portrait.

As young girls, Emily and Sarah Kunstler were raised to admire their legendary father. But Kunstler’s later years took him into high profile criminal defense of clients accused of gang rape, cop killing and the assassination of a Jewish Defense League leader. These cases brought angry protests to the daughters’ front door. In many ways the film is the effort to reconcile the legend with the man, the lawyer with the father, the civil rights defender with the attorney for murderers.

This is a film about the uprising of the 60s and 70s told from the perspective of a generation that had to live with a larger than life luminary of those times.

Members and friends of the 12th Street Law Collective in Austin held a reunion Oct. 4, 2009. On sofa, left to right, are Jim Simons, Brady Coleman and Cam Cunningham. On chair to their right is Bobby Nelson. John Howard is deceased. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag blog.

The film underscores the critical role that attorneys played in the uprisings of those times. On October 4th in Austin, there was a reunion for a law office that took on its local share of 60's and 70's defendants. The 12th Street Law Collective principals were Jim Simons, Cam Cunningham, Brady Coleman, Bobby Nelson and John Howard.

Jim was a co-counsel at the Wounded Knee takeover and defender of GI antiwar activists in Killeen. Cam and Brady defended the Gainesville Eight, Vietnam Veterans Against the War accused of conspiracy. Bobby blazed legal trails for women barred from employment as bus drivers, emergency medical technicians, and telephone cable splicers. She took UT to court for sex discrimination and was an early defender of the rights of gays and lesbians.

Those of us who were clients during those years owe a deep debt of gratitude to the attorneys. Their legal fees were often cobbled together through benefits or not at all. Like Kunstler, they used their skills and gave their hearts for the cause.

[Alice Embree, a long-time Austin political activist and writer, was a leader in the Sixties New Left and women's liberation movements and was a founder of Austin's The Rag and New York's Rat, trailblazers in the Sixties underground press.]

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Tom Hayden : Chicago 1968 / Denver 2008

Veteran activist and former California state Sen. Tom Hayden. Photo by Chris Schneider © The Rocky Mountain News
The New Left leader from four decades ago thinks Denver should be skeptical of federal authorities’ warnings about violent protest.
By M.E. Sprengelmeyer / August 8, 2008

CULVER CITY, Calif. — On a steamy spring day, in a cramped office that hot air can't escape, the archetypal child of the '60s does something truly radical.

He wears a necktie.

This is not the hairy, scary leader of the New Left who had Chicago locking up its daughters for the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

It's a clean-cut Tom Hayden, retired California state senator, prolific writer, blogger and sage to a whole new generation of street activists.

Still, he knows most people still picture him as a sort of cartoon version of himself: shirtless, shouting down authority or scuffling with cops on the streets.

"I can't get past that," he says of the stereotypes. "I can't help them with their problem. They can't see me. I can be, like, 68 years old and I'm still trouble, because they're thinking about something in Vietnam or they're thinking about Jane Fonda. Or they think I slept with their daughter. They think I burned my draft card. It's like a big Rorschach of things that I did or did not do."

If speaking out still means "trouble," then maybe Hayden really hasn't changed that much.

Forty years after he helped lead the anti-war protests that ended in violent confrontations outside the '68 convention, he just put out a new book, Voices of the Chicago Eight, about the circus-like conspiracy trial for protest organizers and the consequences of attempts to come down hard on dissent.

He offers regular takes to Huffington Post readers and was an early member of the group Progressives for Obama. He lectures on college campuses and offers an updated version of the Port Huron Statement — the 1962 manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society that challenged young people to boldly venture into "participatory democracy."

And behind the scenes, Hayden closely monitors protest plans for the upcoming Democratic and Republican national conventions, advises organizers and warns that authorities appear to be falling into a predictable pattern of hype and overreaction.

"I think that Denver officials would be well-advised not to believe everything that the FBI warns them about," Hayden says. "That's how things can get out of hand, due to fabricated, exaggerated projections about violence or protest."

As the convention approaches, federal dollars pour into the security effort and law enforcement agencies flex muscle with high-profile exercises.

"They don't learn," Hayden laments. "What you saw in 2000 was the claim that 75,000 anarchists were descending, the secret funding of permanent police equipment, the denial of permits for protesters. You saw the same thing in 2004. You will see the same thing in 2008."

He thinks Big Brother posturing helps scare away peaceful protesters, gives the community a false sense of security and can, in some cases, provoke confrontations at demonstrations that would otherwise be routine and mostly peaceful.

"So they have their view," Hayden says of security planners. "They've learned nothing from 1968."

Nation, party were both divided

As demonstrators get ready for Denver 2008, 40-year-old memories are front and center. One coalition operates under the "Re-create 68" banner, conjuring images of the street clashes that overshadowed the Democratic Convention itself, galvanizing the anti-Vietnam War effort and undermining Democrats' hopes in that long-ago fall.

But Hayden was there in 1968. And there's really no comparison to 2008, he says.

True, there was a war then and there is a war now.

But back in 1968, the country — and the Democratic Party — were more starkly divided over the battle waging overseas.

The Tet offensive by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces at the end of January obscured the light at the end of the tunnel in the war. Hundreds of young U.S. troops were dying every week. Facing a rising voter backlash, wartime President Lyndon B. Johnson was forced to prematurely end his re-election bid at the end of March.

Within days, the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. caused rage to explode into riots, arson and looting in 75 cities. Robert F. Kennedy calmed a shocked crowd in Indianapolis, telling them his brother, too, had been killed by a white man. But weeks later, the younger brother, too, was shot dead, fraying emotions even further. The nation was on edge heading into the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Until then, some protest organizers held out hope of getting the needed permits to avoid confrontations at marches and park demonstrations. But Hayden says he knew trouble was inevitable.

"I planned for multiple scenarios, not knowing which one would play out," he says, sitting in the cramped office while his research assistant continues working nearby. "But certainly, after the murder of Kennedy, coming on the murder of King, to me it was in the air that we were going to be busted and face serious harm unless we surrendered and left the city and simply went along with the plan . . . just go along with our own disappearance."

They didn't, even though they knew — from personal contacts — that the FBI was tracking their every move, around the clock.

One declassified FBI memo included in Hayden's new book expresses anger that bureau officials were unaware of his involvement in a student occupation of buildings at Columbia University until after his picture appeared in Life magazine.

"In evaluating this case, you should bear in mind that your prime objectives should be to neutralize him in the new left movement," the memo states.

Clashes played out on TV

Other organizers still held out hope of getting permits for access to streets and parks for demonstrations. But Hayden says he was pessimistic — and in the end proven correct.

The city rejected permits for the Youth International Party — the so-called "Yippies" led by the late Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman — to hold a massive "Festival of Life" concert.

Some thought permits would come through at the last minute — a way of giving a nod to free expression only after turnout had been dampened. But that didn't happen, either.

Hayden says Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was "hoodwinked" into believing that "thousands of hairy Yippies were going to have sex in public while drinking from the LSD-laden waters of Lake Michigan. They actually believed that. And this sex in the parks on acid would occur at roughly the same moment that black revolutionaries would storm the convention with guns."

So the stage was set for constant confrontations, games of cat and mouse between police and protesters, and then bloody clashes on television, just as Democrats also were struggling to show they could maintain order among squabbling delegates inside the convention hall.

It culminated on Aug. 28, when Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota was to accept the presidential nomination. That afternoon, while delegates waged a contentious debate over Vietnam War planks in the party's platform, police allowed a "legal" anti-war rally at Grant Park.

Things broke loose after a shirtless teenager climbed a flagpole, ostensibly to turn the flag upside down as a distress symbol. Police swooped in to make an arrest, the crowd surged and some threw stones or dirt clods at a police car, and the scene quickly deteriorated. Thousands of police, soldiers and National Guardsmen surrounded the area. Calm was restored, but by twilight, many protesters were more determined to make unsanctioned parades to reach the convention site or the Hilton hotel, where delegates were staying.

That night, after moving through the city disguised with a fake beard, Hayden ended up in a police skirmish at the hotel's Haymarket Lounge — "named, strangely enough, in memory of Chicago police killed by an anarchist's bomb during a violent confrontation between police and protesters in 1886," Hayden writes.

By the time the week's convention ended, 668 people had been arrested, 101 people were treated at local hospitals for their injuries, and hundreds more reportedly received first aid or treatment by protest medics.

And the Democratic Party's hopes of retaining the White House were the ultimate casualty. Republican Richard Nixon was elected with more than 100 electoral vote margin.

"It simply didn't have to happen," Hayden says of the Chicago chaos, 40 years later. "It takes two for a riot to occur. And if it wasn't for the FBI advisers, Chicago '68 would not have happened — repeat, would not have happened."

City's posture sparks concern

Despite the "Re-create 68" sentiment of some Denver protest organizers, Hayden saw little chance of a chaotic rerun when he sat down in April in his Culver City office to discuss the upcoming Democratic National Convention.

Back then, when the battle between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton still raged and there was talk of superdelegates throwing the nomination to Clinton, Hayden imagined there could be some sort of drama on the streets if people thought the election had been stolen. But it never came to that.

More likely, he predicted, were smaller demonstrations to keep up the pressure for Democrats in Denver to take tougher anti-war stands, with more fierce protests against the "war-makers" at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota.

By early July, however, Hayden said he was growing concerned about the city's posture toward protesters and the worst-case scenario security exercises, with black helicopters roaring through the downtown skyline.

The ACLU and protest organizers went to court challenging the location of a so-called free-speech zone on the far edge of a parking lot. Planners of "Tent State University," who hoped to use City Park to house tens of thousands of anti-war activists, were told they would have to clear the park at 11 each night. The ban on camping and curfew enforcement raises the specter of the nightly crackdowns at Lincoln and Grant parks in Chicago '68.

"I do think they are playing around unnecessarily with the rights of protesters to protest," Hayden said in a follow-up interview. "I don't know how the negotiations will come out, but you know, naming something a protest zone but then not allowing it to be heard or seen, it's a mockery of the First Amendment. Most importantly, it's not necessary.

"It does seem to me there's a legitimate right to protest at stake," he said. "I don't think the protests will be very large if Obama is the nominee. I don't see the point in interfering with them . . . It's particularly crazy because most of the delegates at the Democratic convention have been in many demonstrations themselves."

The security exercises, with helicopters buzzing the city, reminded Hayden of something out of the movie Dr. Strangelove.

"The implication is very unsettling," he said. "The message was that the people coming to protest deserve this kind of repression if they get out of hand . . . They're just trying to scare the public into justifying more tax dollars for a false sense of security — more gadgets for the police department."

He said people don't realize that in Chicago, the initial protests were rather lightly attended, with about 1,500 people in the parks. But the numbers swelled to an estimated 10,000, in part as a reaction to the police crackdowns, Hayden says.

"If they had given us permits . . . I doubt there would have been much confrontation at all," he says. "What caused the rioting in the streets was the lack of permits and the lack of a place to stay. Too much order creates disorder is the way I've always put it."

One might think that Hayden, one of the pre-eminent social activists of the '60s, would be disappointed with the anti-war efforts and the other movements of today.

He isn't.

"I think it's a remarkable peace movement," he says. "You don't have the draft. You have one-fifteenth of the American casualties now that you had at this point during Vietnam. The establishment is doing everything it can to keep this war from impacting the American people. And yet, people have seen through it."

The public at large turned against the Iraq war by the end of 2004, he says, "which I think means the ghosts of '68 are still with us. People know a quagmire when they see one."

Source / Rocky Mountain News

Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

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Bobby Seale : Still Revolutionary After All These Years

Former Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale. Photo By Adam Wallacavage.
An interview with the former chairman of the Black Panther Party
By Kam Williams / July 20th, 2008

Robert George Seale was born on October 22, 1936 in Dallas, Texas where, from the age of six, he was raised by his father to be a carpenter-builder and a hunter-fisherman. During WWII, the family migrated to Northern California where Bobby graduated from Berkeley High with plans of becoming an architect.

However, those plans were put on hold when he instead enlisted in the Air Force, serving for almost four years, till being discharged for insubordination. He then moved to Los Angeles to take a shot at showbiz as a stand-up comedian and as a jazz musician, before returning to the Bay Area in 1961.

The next year, while working the night shift, full-time in the aerospace industry, Bobby attended Merritt College as an Engineering Design major. It was during this period of his life that he would meet Huey Newton and develop a passion for grassroots organizing and progressive politics. After identifying some pressing needs of Black America, the two decided to create a grass roots community-based organization. On October 15, 1966, they founded the Black Panthers, outlining the new political party’s 10-Point Platform, and naming Bobby its Chairman, and Huey its Minister of Defense, after flipping a coin.

The organization membership rolls surged in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, when most young African-Americans began to question the wisdom of the late civil rights leader’s philosophy of civil disobedience and passive resistance. But the government would come down hard on the Panthers, using the FBI’s notorious Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) along with local authorities to discredit, kill, frame, imprison and otherwise neutralize its members and sympathizers.

Although Bobby would himself spend over two years in jail on a variety of trumped-up charges, he was ultimately vindicated in every case. The most famous trial he was ever associated, dubbed the Chicago 8, began after his arrest along with 7 other activists for conspiracy and inciting to riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago during the Summer of 1968.

The proceedings became something of a shameful spectacle when the judge had Bobby bound, shackled and gagged in the courtroom for repeatedly demanding that he be allowed to exercise his Constitutional right to represent himself. Here, he reflects on the new animated docudrama about the trial called Chicago 10, and on his enduring career as an unwavering advocate of the rights of the disenfranchised and the downtrodden.


So, what did you think of the film, Chicago 10?

BobbyS: Well, it needed my voice.

I take it you would’ve preferred to do your own voice for the animation, instead of having Jeffrey Wright do you.

BobbyS: Sure, the director [Brett Morgen] has since admitted to me that when he heard I was 70 years-old, he didn’t even consider me. He expected that I was going to be an old guy with a shaky voice going, “Well, you know, back in the day…” I said, “No, brother,” and got to reciting strings of historical facts about the Black Panther Party, and he said, “My God! You run off at the mouth like you’re 19!”

I guess it must be strange to hear someone else doing you, especially since you have such a distinct and recognizable voice.

BobbyS: Well, it’s alright, thought I feel he should have at least made a better effort to contact me and consult me about the film and about the history, regardless of how he ultimately made the movie. Plus, I had produced my own documentary, so I’m aware of a lot of the factors that go into making a halfway decent movie. I think I could’ve made a hellified contribution in terms of the storyline.

I even had a problem with the title. I felt it should be called The Chicago 8, as the defendants were known collectively, not Chicago 10.

BobbyS: I think it was a bad title, too. It should have been The Chicago 7 or The Chicago 8, preferably, the latter, because that’s the historical reference point for the average person who knows something about the Sixties. It reminds me how in 1988 I put a bad title on my own cookbook, calling it just “Barbeque’n with Bobby.” Only in small letters at the bottom did it say “recipes by Bobby Seale.” The title should have been Barbeque’n with Bobby Seale, because 100 million people know my name. So, that was bad marketing on my part.

Other than the title and not using your voice, what did you think of Chicago 10?

BobbyS: I thought it was pretty good, for a doc. It could have been about ten minutes longer to include more about what happened to me when I was in lockup, because I was in jail the whole time of the trial. The other seven defendants were out on bail, except for Jerry Rubin for three weeks.

Why do you think Judge Hoffman had you bound and gagged, and had your trial separated? Do you think he got an order from above, from someone like J. Edgar Hoover?

BobbyS: Nah, he just couldn’t handle me. He kept trying to say that William Kunstler was my lawyer. I kept telling him that Kunstler was not my lawyer. He and I went around and around arguing about that.

Charles Garry was your attorney, right?

BobbyS: Yeah, but Charles Garry was in the hospital recovering from a gall bladder operation. So, I had made a motion to defend myself at the beginning of the trial, before the jury had heard even one shred of evidence, since my lawyer wasn’t there. Every time anyone would mention my name in the courtroom, I would jump up out of my chair and yell, “I object! I object, because my lawyer, Charles R. Garry, is not present.” He’d order me, “Sit down, Mr. Seale.” And I’d respond, “No, I want the record to reflect that I am objecting, and I am going to continue to object because you denied me my right to defend myself.” So, he chained, shackled and gagged me for three days, until finally the press went against him.

Did you behave yourself after the restraints came off?

BobbyS: No. For instance, after the defense attorneys finished cross-examining an FBI agent on the witness stand, the judge would say, “Are there any more questions?” I would jump up and say, “Well, I want to cross-examine the witness.” And I’d walk over to the lectern and say, “Looka here, what the hell were you doing following me around in the first damn place?” I wasn’t a learned lawyer, but I but I was still doing my best to defend myself by asking logical questions. The judge would interrupt and say, “No, no, no, you don’t have to answer him” And I’d ask, “Why not? Why shouldn’t he have to answer the question? I’ve been denied the right to defend myself. Somebody has to answer these pointed questions if I’m going to be given a fair chance to prove my innocence.” At that point, Hoffman decided to charge me with 16 counts of contempt, and to sever my trial from that of the others. So, really, he got rid of me because he couldn’t handle me.

Do you think he would have had you bound, gagged and shackled, if you weren’t Black?

BobbyS: I don’t know. That’s hard to say. The fact that I was a Black Panther, a political revolutionary, had a lot more to do with the mentality of Judge Julius Hoffman, and his, quote-unquote, putting Bobby Seale the Black Panther leader down. In other words, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, the right-wing, the prosecution, the Nixon Administration, etcetera had all declared me and the other defendants a threat to the internal security of America. The government hated us. And Hoffman knew this. So, his thinking in gagging me was “I’m going to gag this Black Panther.”

I was fifteen in the 1968, and like the typical Black teenager, the Panthers became my heroes after Martin Luther King was assassinated. We saw where non-violence and passive resistance would get a pacifist begging for equality in a racist society.

BobbyS: Before King was killed, my friend Huey was in jail. To that point, I had only organized about 400 Black Panther Party members up and down the West Coast, between San Diego and Seattle. There were no other branches or chapters elsewhere in the country. All right? Then, in April, 1968 King is murdered, and by late May, when schools start letting out, I begin getting a flood of people into the organization, folks flying from cities all over the nation into Oakland to talk to me and the central committee about setting up new chapters in their hometowns. Young Black people were reacting to the fact that Dr. Martin Luther King had been killed. That tragedy enabled my organization to spread across the country. By November, I had 5,000 members and 49 branches. That’s 49 cities that we operated offices of the Black Panther Party in. We had the Free Breakfast for Children Program, free Sickle Cell Anemia Testing and Free Preventative Medical Healthcare Clinics in every last one of them. These programs organized and unified people on the grassroots level in the Black communities where we operated. And it is a real threat to the power structure, when you can organize and unify people around something concrete. Do you see what I’m getting at?

So, here is the Counter-Intelligence Program of the FBI (COINTELPRO) doing everything it can to distort and stereotype us. They don’t tell you that I was an engineer on the Gemini missile program, and an architect, and a stand-up comedian. All they said was that I was a hoodlum and a thug. They never said that Huey Newton had finished two years of law school by the time that we created the Black Panthers. They don’t say that I was actually employed by the City of Oakland when we created the Black Panther Party.

Do you think the Panther 10-Point Program is as relevant today as it was then?

BobbyS: Yes, as profoundly relevant. In fact, Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who worked with my organization for five years, back then, says that the Black Panther Party’s 10-Point Program is just as relevant today as it was years ago. And we could add some points to this son of a gun.

The big sister of a friend of mine was married to one of the Panther 21 arrested in NYC in 1969. I remember him telling me they had all been framed on bogus charges. Did you ever determine exactly when the FBI began infiltrating the Panthers and to what lengths it went to bring down the organization?

BobbyS: First of all, let’s say it this way. The FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program would work hand-in-hand with police departments, literally planning attacks on Black Panther Party offices throughout the United States of America. They did this over a period of time. They also used provocateurs, and had agents infiltrating the organization. And they would issue press releases every month or so which they would send to politicians and the press in cities where we were operating. But the most profound thing the FBI did was being complicit in the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, working with a special police division. The FBI was complicit in setting up that operation in December of 1969. A former FBI Agent named Wesley Swearingen even admitted it in a book published by South End Press called “FBI Secrets.” He also shows how the FBI was involved in the killings of Black Panthers John Huggins and Bunchy Carter at UCLA in January of 1969. COINTELPRO was trying to terrorize us out of existence. They didn’t say you’re under arrest on a bullhorn and ask for us to surrender. They just came in shooting. By the end of ‘69, every Black Panther Party office in this country had been attacked.

In 1969, there was also a lot of tension in L.A. between the Panthers and Ron Karenga’s Black nationalist organization, US.

BobbyS: It was half generated by COINTELPRO. The FBI admitted it in the Senate investigation hearings.

Would you say the FBI succeeded in bringing you down?

BobbyS: No, we weathered everything they threw at us. At a certain point, the U.S. Senate started investigating their attacks on us. When the FBI couldn’t give a good explanation as to why they were attacking all our offices, the raids finally stopped.

Meanwhile, how were you holding up behind bars?

BobbyS: In the end, I won all my cases. They had to let me out after holding me for two years in jail without bail. Lots of people think I went to prison. I never went to prison. I was in jail without bail. After I won all the cases, they had to release me. And from 1971 to 1974 there were no shootouts. We maintained our programs and ran for political office. So, the Black Panther Party was not destroyed in that sense, but our Constitutional, democratic, civil, human, and life rights had been violated.

What would you have done differently, had you known the government was going to come down on you like that?

BobbyS: What would I have done differently? I don’t know. I’ve tried to assess that. You know that racists are going to attack you. When we started out, we accept the fact that sooner or later they were going to try to kill us. But we decided not to let that deter us. We chose to stand on the right to self-defense as best we could. And it just so happened that they came down on us. Ultimately, 28 of my Black Panther Party members were killed in various attacks by or shootouts with the police. And in those confrontations, at least a dozen black police officers were killed. I still have 10 political prisoners in jail to this day behind some of those dead cops, when they were just defending themselves against those policemen. They were convicted of first-degree murder, but they were really only defending themselves. I wish I could get amnesty for them, and get my political prisoner friends out. At any rate, I can’t obsess about what I would have done if I knew they were going to come down on me, because I did kinda know they were going to come down on us. They were coming down on the Black community in the first place via institutional racism, rampant police brutality and so on.

What do you think of the New Black Panthers? Their philosophy strikes me as being totally different from yours.

BobbyS: Thumbs down! They hijacked our name. They do not represent what we represent. Our program was about all power to all the people. We had a progressive program, a relevant humanistic program, a true human liberation program. I have no time for the so-called New Black Panthers. We have invited them to three different Black Panther reunions, and every time they act stupider and stupider. I’m tired of them and have not time for them. It’s gotten to the point where we believe that their leadership is nothing but government operatives. They spout stuff that we were not about. The rank-and-file New Black Panthers probably don’t even know this. It’s like a COINTELPRO operation. I think the leadership is working for the government to spout a bunch of Black racist remarks and attitudes, saying they support Al-Qaeda and that sort of crap. I’m very skeptical. I feel for the young brothers who don’t know this is what’s happening. They should get out of that group. They act so silly and stupid. For instance, they took that famous picture of me and Huey standing in front of the original Black Panther Party office, and cut my head off and replaced it with Brother Khalid Muhammad’s. In other words, they want to hijack our reunions. They’re arrogant, and I have no time for that. So, I told them, “Don’t talk to me. And don’t try to act bad, just because you’ve got some little pistols under your coats there, because if you jump up in people’s faces here, they will defend themselves.” In fact, I said, “Your damn leadership ain’t nothing but a bunch of CIA a-holes.” That’s what I believe.

Yet, I always see some spokesman for them on Fox.

BobbyS: Fox News never calls up Bobby Seale to articulate a stance in opposition to right-wing conservatives. To me, giving the New Black Panthers a platform on Fox is a subtle tactic to scare people. As far as I’m concerned, any extremist organization whether it’s Al-Qaeda, the Ku Klux Klan, or any other a-holes who indiscriminately murder and blow-up innocent people, need to be routed out and dealt with. If they claim to be fighting for human liberation, they’re liars, because when you start killing indiscriminately on that level, you have totally stepped outside the civility of what human liberation is all about.

Were you politicized while serving in the Air Force?

BobbyS: Oh, no. I didn’t know politics back then. They put me in the stockade twice. I had been an honor student. But I ran into racism in the military and didn’t know how to handle it. I’d knock a racist out. So, they put me in the stockade.

So, what would you say politicized you?

BobbyS: The first thing that began to politicize me was Jomo Kenyatta’s “Facing Mount Kenya.” I started reading that in the Spring semester of 1962. From there, I went to hear Martin Luther King speak. In the early part of ’63, I was working on the freedom of Nelson Mandela and on ending apartheid. Next, I was listening to Malcolm X after he’d left the Nation of Islam. I was thinking about joining his new organization, the OAAU, but that never happened, because he wound up getting assassinated before I had an opportunity. I was steeped in African-American history and in and out of many different organizations in the Oakland area. I was a programmatic organizer. I quit my engineering job after three years to work at the grassroots level. I wasn’t married and had no kids, so I was able to do those things.

What was at the heart of your and Huey Newton’s creating the Panthers?

BobbyS: Patrolling the police, the breakfast and job programs were all political moves, but our overall objective was to organize a mass membership organization and to evolve a political, electoral, community unity in the Black community. That was my objective.

Do you think the government would have come down as hard on you if you hadn’t exercised your right to bear arms?

BobbyS: Yeah, because they came down hard on peaceful protesters. They were already shooting, killing, murdering and brutalizing peaceful protesters, so what’s the difference?

How do you think you managed to survive the Sixties when so many Black leaders either ended up dead, in prison or in exile?

BobbyS: I think they thought it was best to put Bobby Seale in jail and to try to convict him than to kill him, because killing him might make him a martyr and cause his organization to grow some more.

What do you think of Barack Obama?

BobbyS: I like Obama very much. He’s representative of a lot of changes which are necessary for the country. He might just be another guy who has been handed the keys by the corporate establishment. But if he can make it to President and actually use the bully pulpit to become a driving force for some progressive legislation related to human liberation, then that’s all the better.

How would you describe yourself politically today?

BobbyS: I am still a progressive, political revolutionary. I am a revolutionary humanist, like I was in the Sixties. Do you understand what I mean by revolution? Revolution is about the need to re-evolve political, economic and social justice and power back into the hands of the people, preferably through legislation and policies that make human sense. That’s what revolution is about. Revolution is not about shootouts.

Is there any question no reporter has ever asked you, that you wished one would?

BobbyS: Yeah, Where’s my eldest son?

Where is he?

BobbyS: In Iraq. He just got shipped there on June 19th. He’s been in the Army Reserves from the age of 18 to 30. He was going to leave, but he agreed to reenlist if they would make him a Military Police Officer, because that would help him get a higher paying job he wanted as a security guard with a bio-tech company. And right after that Bush started that damn, dumb-ass Iraq War. And my son just got shipped to Iraq for the first time.

Are you able to sleep, or are you always worried now?

BobbyS: Sure, I’m able to sleep. But I got a kid in Iraq, and I just don’t want him to be killed over there. I call him and email him and tell him I’m behind you and the troops, but not behind Bush. I also have a son who’s a doctor, and a daughter who’s 30. She’s finished school and needs to get married. I’m hoping she’ll find somebody really nice soon. But she’s got her job, and her principles, and her independence, which are all important in terms of her personalized liberation.

So, what else do you want ask? How much my income is?

How do you think I survive?

By giving lectures and writing books.

BobbyS: Yep, college lectures. I do about 20 lectures a year. I haven’t written any books for a while, although I have two books in the works. I’ve almost finished “The Eighth Defendant.” I’m looking for a top publisher who’ll give me a half-million dollar advance for it. I need a big advance to make my family secure. Are you going to write include that in the article?

Source / Black Star News

Also go to Bobby Seale's website.

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