NEWSLETTER

Do you think that influenced you later, when you got into self-defense and started the Black Panther Party?

Oh, my self-defense had more to do with my father. My father always taught me, you don’t let nobody jump on you. If somebody jumps on you, hits you… My father, his phrase was—and it was in an ordering, directive tone—“You go get you some, and you knock the shit out of them, keep them off you, boy, you hear me?” And I’d say, “Yes, sir.” You know, I was scared of my father.

When I turned 13, a man tried to kill him. My father shot him. And I was there, know what I mean? He didn’t die, but my father shot his arm off with a Savage high-powered rifle. He had that hollow-point ammo, and you could knock an elephant down with that. My father fired one shot that dug up the ground, and the guy’s running with this knife in his hand, and my father cut loose another shot, and his left arm, as he’s running, was hit, and it spun this guy around and threw him to the ground. He got up and started crawling with his other hand, and let his knife go. He was trying to get to his car, he finally got in, my father shot again and it went through the back window of the car. My point is, that’s where I learned that I must defend myself, to the point that if you have to kill a person...

I was raised a hunter and a fisherman, OK? My father bought me my first .30-.30 Winchester high-powered rifle when I was 12 years of age. He had seven or eight guys, and they’d go hunting up in Northern California. We hunted deer and bear. And so that was how I was raised.

In the 60s, once you had started the Black Panther Party, was there a lot of barbecueing going on then?

Oh my God. That was a mainstay! I did barbecue fundraisers in Oakland where we sold 3,000 plates at $2 a plate. We got most of the meat and the food and stuff donated, because we already had free food programs. We were starting up a free breakfast program. My God, those rallies I used to organize, me and my Black Panther Party members would have barbecue out there all over the place. We’d tell the people how the money goes to the free breakfast program, the free preventative-medical-health-care clinic, and so on. We’d have a flatbed up there with entertainment, speakers, microphones, the whole caboodle.

Weren’t Bobby Hutton and Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver on their way to help out with a barbecue in ’68 when they got into a shoot-out with police and Bobby Hutton and a policeman were killed?

That’s what Eldridge Cleaver said, that they were picking up stuff, because there was a barbecue fundraiser rally the next day or something like that. But I’ve since found out that was a lie. That was just his slick little way of saying that they didn’t ambush the cops, the cops shot at them. But in fact, I found out that they shot first at the cops. Martin Luther King had just gotten killed, so my problem there was trying to stop riots. In fact, I stopped all riots in the San Francisco Bay area. I didn’t believe in riots. That’s flat, straight out. I was supposed to be going to Martin Luther King’s funeral, and Eldridge Cleaver took David Hilliard and four or five guys out and in effect they ambushed the cops, I have since found out. That’s really what happened. They got in a shoot-out situation, they got dispersed, they couldn’t shoot, they weren’t trained, trying to run around and do some old guerilla bullshit. And you know, I always was pissed off with them about that. I’d had military training, and I knew the difference between a domestic-style situation and a military situation. And Eldridge just turned out to be a goddamn anarchist, you know what I mean? But at any rate… bang, bang.

So Eldridge and Hutton and those guys were just pissed, and wanted to go get some?

Yeah, because Martin Luther King was killed. And I’m saying all over the place, “No rioting, we’re not going to do anything,” blah blah blah. But they didn’t listen to me.

Actually, I also read where Minister of Defense Huey Newton wrote somewhere that in 1967, when he got shot and shot a cop, he was on his way to get barbecue in Oakland.

That’s a lie. He wasn’t going to get no goddamn barbecue. But Huey’s situation was different. Frey, the police officer, really did try to kill Huey. Frey had ordered Huey to walk to the police vehicle. And Huey always recited the law. That was his strongest articulate advocacy point. Anytime a police officer moves a person from one spot to another, technically that person is under arrest. I ask you, “Am I under arrest? I demand to know what I’m being arrested for.” So Huey stopped and turned around right in front of the police vehicle, and Frey had his gun out. Huey grabs at the gun, y’know—I had seen Huey do this before, when we got into a fight with police. So what happened is Frey pulls that trigger and shoots Huey right in the thigh. Now, Officer Heanes, the other police officer, the shot goes off, he’s looking at Huey grabbing Frey, and he’s trying to shoot Huey, but they’re rolling and moving. It was told in court that the first bullet that hit Officer Frey was from Heanes’s gun. This is the real situation. Huey hits the ground, and Huey pulls his own gun out and fires back at Heanes and wounds him. Huey shoots Frey more, because Frey is moving and not dead, and then falls down, because he’s shot. The other guy, Gene McKinney, who had got out of the car and ran, came back and helped Huey get away from there. Huey wound up in the hospital, and that’s where the police arrested him. Huey’s situation was different from Eldridge’s.


TO BE CONTINUED:
LABOR DAY BOBBY-QUE | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |

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