Seize The Time
If you have 10-20 minutes, please read this chapter from Bobby Seale's Seize The Time: The Story of The Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton.
Huey Backs The Pigs Down
Huey was on a level where he was ready to organize the black brothers for a righteous revolutionary struggle with guns and force. It came to a point where, every day, we walked in and out of the Black Panther office, around to my house or around to Bobby Hutton's house, or somebody's house, with guns on our sides, and got in a car or two or three cars, or four or five cars as it built up, and patroled [sic] the pigs on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes when we went to a meeting during the week we patroled the pigs. We had a camera or two, a law book, and were working on getting some tape recorders in patroling [sic] the pig cops.
One day, as we were walking out of the office (I guess we'd been there about a month or so), a pig passed by. He saw us coming out with shotguns and pistols on our sides. About six or seven of us came out of the office there, in the daytime, and we looked at the pig as he passed by, and he jumped on his radio because he saw us coming out of the office with those pieces and stuff. We had just finished field stripping weapons, learning about double 0 buckshot, learning about the 9mm and the .45, and having a political education session.
We had a .45 and a .357 Magnum in the group, and a couple of M-1's. We had three or four shotguns by then. We bought up guns like a son of a bitch then. The pig went down two blocks and turned around, came back up the other side of the street. They were building rapid transit, BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit], right down Grove Street there, and he went up the other side of the boulevard and came back. We readily assessed that the pigs were ready to see what the fuck was happening, that this pig had radioed in, and he was running it down how he had "seen some niggers come out of a place here with some guns and blah blop de bloo, etc., etc., come out of this office with guns" and stuff. He was radioing to other pigs to help "get 'em."
Huey had his father's car that day. I think he had just finished paying some bills and he stopped by the office for about a half-hour. By the time we got in the car, the pig was back around down the street and he drove up behind us. And Huey told everybody to remember what he'd said-that nobody in the car should say anything. Only the driver should do the talking, and Huey happened to be the driver. He said, "I'm the driver. Nobody else say anything; and remember the legal first aid." This was the legal aid information that we had printed for the brothers in the Party, and we were teaching them thirteen points of basic, legal first aid, legal and constitutional rights.
Huey used to teach the brothers on that; he wouldn't let them get around it, because Huey understood that the brothers had no guidelines about how to deal with the pigs. So Huey went off in the area of law and he found out the brothers respected law. Huey knew something about law, and he could use it to make it serve him. That's all he was doing, he was bringing them basic things in everyday life about law. That's what Huey dug; he understood that shit. Huey would take those thirteen basic points and try to show a dude where he was fucked up at in the ghetto. That's very important in understanding how the Party first began to function.
So he said, "Nobody say anything, because the minute somebody says something the man is going to try to arrest you. And he's going to arrest you for some jive about interfering with an officer carrying out his duty. He's going to try to prove to all the people who are subject to gather around us here that we have no right with a gun. And he's going to arrest you on a traffic ticket and the people out in the community will think he arrested you because you've got the gun. We want to prove to the people that we've got a right to carry guns and they've got a right to arm themselves, and we will exhaust our constitutional right to carry these guns." That's what Huey was trying to exhaust. Boom. Which he did exhaust, ultimately, when we look at the power structure's moves against the Party over the years.
Huey got in the car and the pig came up to the window. "You have any driver's license?" So Huey rolled the window down. There wasn't more than about a three- or four-inch crack int he window.
Huey handed his license out the window. "Is this your true name?" the pig said. And Huey said, "Yes, that's my true name, Huey P. Newton." "Is this your true address, 841 Forty-seventh Street?" And Huey said, "That's my true address, 841 Forty-seventh Street." "What are you doing with the guns?" And Huey said, "What are you doing with your gun?" This particular pig decided he wasn't going to argue, so he went back and got his little writing pad where they fill out shit.
"Your true name is Huey P. Newton?" Huey said, "That's right." The pig wrote this down.
"Your true address is 841 Forty-seventh Street?"
Huey said, "That's right." The pig then looked at his license. "What's your phone number?" And Huey said, "Five!" and stopped and wouldn't say anything else. And the pig said, "Five what?"
This is when all the shit between the Party and pigs began. Huey said, "The Fifth Amendment. You ever heard of it? Don't you know about the constitutional right of a person not to testify against himself? Five! I don't have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address so therefore I don't even want to talk to you. You can leave my car and leave me alone. I don't even want to hear you."
"What do you mean?" the pig said. And Huey said, "Just what I said. The constitutional right of any man is that he doesn't have to testify against himself." And Huey had a big M-1 sitting to his right with his hand on it. I had this 9mm sitting beside me, and Huey had this M-1 at his side. Huey was driving. Four other brothers were in the back seat, and one of them was Bobby Hutton. They were being quiet because Huey told them to be quiet. And the pig is going crazy. He's by himself and Huey had all these black niggers in the car going for a motherfucker.
Meanwhile, while the pig is trying to get bad, three cars drove up in back of us, and one in front. Some more were in the driveway. Blop, blop, blop de bloo. Then another car came up in front of us. A pig jumped out of his car, walked up to our car, and said through the crack in the window, with a hogish [sic] voice, trying to sound intimidating, "What's going on here?" And Huey said, "The same basic procedures that are supposed to go on!" Huey rolled the window down another five or six inches. The pigs were looking at the guns in the car.
"Can I see that pistol there?" one of the pigs said. "No, you can't see it!" Huey told him. I was beginning to get skeptical about what was happening because he pointed to my 9mm pistol. Huey was on probation, and if they thought that this was Huey's pistol . . . I didn't know this law stuff the way Huey knew it, so I moved the pistol over beside me real close. It had been lying in the middle of the seat. I said, "No you can't see it." Huey said, "No you can't see the pistol, nor this (pointing to his rifle), and I don't want you to look at it. You don't have to look at it."
"Is that your pistol?" he asked Huey. And I said, "No, it's not his pistol, it's my pistol!" I said that because I was thinking the man's gonna jump on Huey because he already told me about the probation law-if he gets caught with a pistol he's burned. But if he gets caught with a rifle, the man can't mess with him because his probation officer told him he can carry a rifle or a shotgun, and he couldn't stop him. The pig said, "Can I see it, or not?" So Huey said to me, "I'll talk." And then to the pig, "No you can't see the pistol. Get away from the car. We don't want you around the car and that's all there is to it."
"Well, I can ask him if I want to see his pistol or not," the pig says. So I said, "Well, you can't see the pistol!" The motherfuckers try to get indignant. They were blabbing and oinking to each other about who in the hell we thought we were and, "Constitution, my ass. They're just turning it around." Then a pig said to Huey, "Who in the hell you think you are?"
"Look, dammit," and Huey just opened the car door, and this is where Huey got mad. I mean you have to imagine this nigger. He got mad because these dogs were going to carry on and they were bracing up like they were bad. Huey didn't go for this at all. Huey got very mad. He opened up the door saying, "Who in the hell do you think you are? In the first place, this man (pointing at the pig) came up here and asked me for my license like he was citing me for a ticket or observation of some kind. This police officer is supposed to be carrying out his duty, and here you come talking about our guns." Huey put his hand around his M-1 rifle and continued, "We have a constitutional right to carry the guns, anyway, and I don't want to hear it."
The pigs backed up a couple of steps, and Huey was coming out of the car. Huey had his hand back in the car, getting his M-1, and you know, if you've ever seen Huey, he gets growly, but articulate. He came out of the car with his M-1. Huey knows his law so well that he wouldn't have the M-1 loaded inside the car. When he came out of the car, he dropped a round off into the chamber right away. Clack, clup.
"Who do you think you all are anyway?" Huey said to the pigs. And the other pigs are on the sidewalk harassing all the brothers and sisters who have gathered around: "You people move on down the street!" Huey started interrupting. "You don't have to move down the street! Don't go anywhere! These pigs can't keep you from observing. You have a right to observe an officer carrying out his duty." And these pigs, they listened to this shit. See, Huey's citing law and shit. "You have a right to observe an officer carrying out his duty. You have a right to. As long as you stand a reasonable distance away, and you are a reasonable distance. Don't go anywhere."
The pigs kept trying to move the people, saying "You're gonna get under arrest." So Huey just went over and opened the door to the Panther office and said, "Come on in here. They can't move you out." He took his key, opened the door, and let the people go in. "Now, observe all you want to!" The pig said, "What are you going to do with that gun?"
"What are you going to do with your gun?" Huey said. "Because if you try to shoot at me, or if you try to take this gun, I'm going to shoot back at you, swine. Furthermore"-and he just got off into it-"you're nothing but a sharecropper anyway. You come from Georgia somewhere, you're downtown making $800 a month, and you come down here brutalizing and murdering black people in the black communities. They gave you some sergeant stripes and all I say is that you're nothing but a low-life, scurvy swine. A sharecropper from racist Georgia in the South somewhere.
"So if you draw that gun, I'll shoot back at you and blow your brains out!"
"You, you, you . . ." the pig was mad. "You're just turning the Constitution around." This is the pig trying to slough it off.
Huey said, "I'm not turning anything around. And I got my gun. What are you going to do with yours?" This blew the pigs' minds. They didn't know where to go, man. Huey just walked on around the front of the car. Got on around the front of the car, talking, then went on and opened the office door again, and let some more people in, telling the people they didn't have to go anywhere, citing their constitutional rights and all this stuff, then just jumped on out of the office again and said, "Now what are you going to do?"
Another burly kind of fat pig walked up to about five yards in front of Huey with his hands in his belt, the front of his belly falling over the belt. He asked Huey, "Are you a Marxist?" Huey asked him, "You a fascist?" "Are you a Marxist?" the pig asked in a louder tone of voice. Then Huey got louder. "Are you a fascist?"
Then the pig asked it in a very loud, demanding voice. Lifting his hand out of his belt, the pig said, "Are you a Marxist?" And Huey, louder, "Are you a fascist?" The pig asked three more times in a softer tone, and Huey repeated his question.
Then the pig said, like a stupid fifth-grade kid, "I asked you first."
Huey shook his head unbelievingly and said, "I asked you second. Are you a fascist?" Everybody laughed at the pig.
I was sitting in the car with the hammer of my 9mm cocked back. I said, "These pigs are going to be wild-eyed. I know they're gonna be crazy." I rolled the window down. "What's your name?" I say, "My name is Bobby Seale. Why?" "Want to check you out. Got any identification?" I laid my pistol down, gave them identification; I picked my pistol back up. I said, "My name is Bobby Seale, as it says in my identification. Want to check me out?"
"You were arrested for armed robbery at seventeen."
I said, "You're a goddamned liar. I've never been arrested in my life. I've never been arrested for armed robbery." They didn't even check me out. "You were arrested for armed robbery when you were seventeen. But since you were a juvenile, we can't arrest you for possessing a gun now." I said, "You damned liar. I've never been arrested for armed robbery. I don't want to hear it. Fuck it."
And Huey out there, man, he's calling the pigs swine, dogs, sharecroppers, bastards, motherfuckers, with his M-1 in his hand. And daring them, just daring them! "You don't pull your gun on us." And that's where Huey began to show us. You tell some motherfucker, and you mean it. This is what I remember. Huey was relating to one thing. When he told me, a long time ago, to remember that we might not ever come back home one day, I said, "I'm with you, Huey." I remember that. I remember I might not ever come home one day. "Fuck it, I'm with you."
We were sitting in the car, and Huey made us all stay in the car and be quiet. He was out there, the baddest motherfucker in the world, man. Huey and ten pigs. Three or four of them trying to run kids off bicycles and tell the people they didn't have the right to stand around, and Huey was going out there, interrupting, "No! Come in the office." Little kids on bicycles got inside the office. We had a big, wide, clear picture window. Niggers just got all over the front of the window, man. They were leaning on it, kissing the window just to listen to this shit. And they would holler, "Go 'head on brother," and "Run it on down. You know where it's at," and "I can dig it," all the while Huey was letting these pigs know where it was at. The brothers observing would see that those pigs were scared of that big gun that a a bad black but beautiful nigger had in his hand. Every time Huey would say, "If you shoot at me, swine, I'm shooting back," niggers would have to holler something like, "Tell it, do it, brother." That would let Huey know that he was revolutionizing our culture; educating black people to be revolutionaries; that the gun is where it's at and about and in. A white man two doors down smiled. He was the only one around but he seemed to respect Huey.
Then some people came up after that, after Huey had made this display of going into the office. Other people were standing around and the pigs weren't even moving anymore. And Huey just daring them to do anything. Huey had an M-1 with him, one of the eight round clips in it. What do you do, man? All you do is back up a nigger like that. You do nothing else but that. Anything that happens, this nigger's the baddest nigger you ever seen. Because this nigger is telling ten pigs, "I don't give a damn what you do," and making us all shut up and be disciplined. And we have our shit ready, sitting in the car.
So I said to myself, this is the baddest motherfucker in the world! This nigger is telling pigs, "If you draw your gun, I'll shoot you." Telling this to the pigs standing there. When the pig says, "You're just turning the Constitution around," Huey says, "I'm turning nothing around. I'm exercising my constitutional right. I've got the gun to back it up!" And the pig sees the gun. The nigger told the pigs that if they act wrong or get down wrong, I'm going to kill you. I'll defend myself!
So what do you do? You say, this nigger is bad. This nigger is crazy. But I like this crazy nigger. I like him because he's good. He doesn't take bullshit. You back him up.
So that was the very major incident that happened with the Black Panther Party in front of the Black Panther Party office. And after that, we really began to patrol pigs then, because we got righteous recruits. I think ten or twelve, maybe thirteen extra members in the Party that day, just came and put applications in. We went down to the poverty office again-I was still working there-and drew up a a formal application form for enrollment to get into the Black Panther Party. And from there, what did we do? We just patroled pigs.
Huey Backs The Pigs Down
Huey was on a level where he was ready to organize the black brothers for a righteous revolutionary struggle with guns and force. It came to a point where, every day, we walked in and out of the Black Panther office, around to my house or around to Bobby Hutton's house, or somebody's house, with guns on our sides, and got in a car or two or three cars, or four or five cars as it built up, and patroled [sic] the pigs on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes when we went to a meeting during the week we patroled the pigs. We had a camera or two, a law book, and were working on getting some tape recorders in patroling [sic] the pig cops.
One day, as we were walking out of the office (I guess we'd been there about a month or so), a pig passed by. He saw us coming out with shotguns and pistols on our sides. About six or seven of us came out of the office there, in the daytime, and we looked at the pig as he passed by, and he jumped on his radio because he saw us coming out of the office with those pieces and stuff. We had just finished field stripping weapons, learning about double 0 buckshot, learning about the 9mm and the .45, and having a political education session.
We had a .45 and a .357 Magnum in the group, and a couple of M-1's. We had three or four shotguns by then. We bought up guns like a son of a bitch then. The pig went down two blocks and turned around, came back up the other side of the street. They were building rapid transit, BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit], right down Grove Street there, and he went up the other side of the boulevard and came back. We readily assessed that the pigs were ready to see what the fuck was happening, that this pig had radioed in, and he was running it down how he had "seen some niggers come out of a place here with some guns and blah blop de bloo, etc., etc., come out of this office with guns" and stuff. He was radioing to other pigs to help "get 'em."
Huey had his father's car that day. I think he had just finished paying some bills and he stopped by the office for about a half-hour. By the time we got in the car, the pig was back around down the street and he drove up behind us. And Huey told everybody to remember what he'd said-that nobody in the car should say anything. Only the driver should do the talking, and Huey happened to be the driver. He said, "I'm the driver. Nobody else say anything; and remember the legal first aid." This was the legal aid information that we had printed for the brothers in the Party, and we were teaching them thirteen points of basic, legal first aid, legal and constitutional rights.
Huey used to teach the brothers on that; he wouldn't let them get around it, because Huey understood that the brothers had no guidelines about how to deal with the pigs. So Huey went off in the area of law and he found out the brothers respected law. Huey knew something about law, and he could use it to make it serve him. That's all he was doing, he was bringing them basic things in everyday life about law. That's what Huey dug; he understood that shit. Huey would take those thirteen basic points and try to show a dude where he was fucked up at in the ghetto. That's very important in understanding how the Party first began to function.
So he said, "Nobody say anything, because the minute somebody says something the man is going to try to arrest you. And he's going to arrest you for some jive about interfering with an officer carrying out his duty. He's going to try to prove to all the people who are subject to gather around us here that we have no right with a gun. And he's going to arrest you on a traffic ticket and the people out in the community will think he arrested you because you've got the gun. We want to prove to the people that we've got a right to carry guns and they've got a right to arm themselves, and we will exhaust our constitutional right to carry these guns." That's what Huey was trying to exhaust. Boom. Which he did exhaust, ultimately, when we look at the power structure's moves against the Party over the years.
Huey got in the car and the pig came up to the window. "You have any driver's license?" So Huey rolled the window down. There wasn't more than about a three- or four-inch crack int he window.
Huey handed his license out the window. "Is this your true name?" the pig said. And Huey said, "Yes, that's my true name, Huey P. Newton." "Is this your true address, 841 Forty-seventh Street?" And Huey said, "That's my true address, 841 Forty-seventh Street." "What are you doing with the guns?" And Huey said, "What are you doing with your gun?" This particular pig decided he wasn't going to argue, so he went back and got his little writing pad where they fill out shit.
"Your true name is Huey P. Newton?" Huey said, "That's right." The pig wrote this down.
"Your true address is 841 Forty-seventh Street?"
Huey said, "That's right." The pig then looked at his license. "What's your phone number?" And Huey said, "Five!" and stopped and wouldn't say anything else. And the pig said, "Five what?"
This is when all the shit between the Party and pigs began. Huey said, "The Fifth Amendment. You ever heard of it? Don't you know about the constitutional right of a person not to testify against himself? Five! I don't have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address so therefore I don't even want to talk to you. You can leave my car and leave me alone. I don't even want to hear you."
"What do you mean?" the pig said. And Huey said, "Just what I said. The constitutional right of any man is that he doesn't have to testify against himself." And Huey had a big M-1 sitting to his right with his hand on it. I had this 9mm sitting beside me, and Huey had this M-1 at his side. Huey was driving. Four other brothers were in the back seat, and one of them was Bobby Hutton. They were being quiet because Huey told them to be quiet. And the pig is going crazy. He's by himself and Huey had all these black niggers in the car going for a motherfucker.
Meanwhile, while the pig is trying to get bad, three cars drove up in back of us, and one in front. Some more were in the driveway. Blop, blop, blop de bloo. Then another car came up in front of us. A pig jumped out of his car, walked up to our car, and said through the crack in the window, with a hogish [sic] voice, trying to sound intimidating, "What's going on here?" And Huey said, "The same basic procedures that are supposed to go on!" Huey rolled the window down another five or six inches. The pigs were looking at the guns in the car.
"Can I see that pistol there?" one of the pigs said. "No, you can't see it!" Huey told him. I was beginning to get skeptical about what was happening because he pointed to my 9mm pistol. Huey was on probation, and if they thought that this was Huey's pistol . . . I didn't know this law stuff the way Huey knew it, so I moved the pistol over beside me real close. It had been lying in the middle of the seat. I said, "No you can't see it." Huey said, "No you can't see the pistol, nor this (pointing to his rifle), and I don't want you to look at it. You don't have to look at it."
"Is that your pistol?" he asked Huey. And I said, "No, it's not his pistol, it's my pistol!" I said that because I was thinking the man's gonna jump on Huey because he already told me about the probation law-if he gets caught with a pistol he's burned. But if he gets caught with a rifle, the man can't mess with him because his probation officer told him he can carry a rifle or a shotgun, and he couldn't stop him. The pig said, "Can I see it, or not?" So Huey said to me, "I'll talk." And then to the pig, "No you can't see the pistol. Get away from the car. We don't want you around the car and that's all there is to it."
"Well, I can ask him if I want to see his pistol or not," the pig says. So I said, "Well, you can't see the pistol!" The motherfuckers try to get indignant. They were blabbing and oinking to each other about who in the hell we thought we were and, "Constitution, my ass. They're just turning it around." Then a pig said to Huey, "Who in the hell you think you are?"
"Look, dammit," and Huey just opened the car door, and this is where Huey got mad. I mean you have to imagine this nigger. He got mad because these dogs were going to carry on and they were bracing up like they were bad. Huey didn't go for this at all. Huey got very mad. He opened up the door saying, "Who in the hell do you think you are? In the first place, this man (pointing at the pig) came up here and asked me for my license like he was citing me for a ticket or observation of some kind. This police officer is supposed to be carrying out his duty, and here you come talking about our guns." Huey put his hand around his M-1 rifle and continued, "We have a constitutional right to carry the guns, anyway, and I don't want to hear it."
The pigs backed up a couple of steps, and Huey was coming out of the car. Huey had his hand back in the car, getting his M-1, and you know, if you've ever seen Huey, he gets growly, but articulate. He came out of the car with his M-1. Huey knows his law so well that he wouldn't have the M-1 loaded inside the car. When he came out of the car, he dropped a round off into the chamber right away. Clack, clup.
"Who do you think you all are anyway?" Huey said to the pigs. And the other pigs are on the sidewalk harassing all the brothers and sisters who have gathered around: "You people move on down the street!" Huey started interrupting. "You don't have to move down the street! Don't go anywhere! These pigs can't keep you from observing. You have a right to observe an officer carrying out his duty." And these pigs, they listened to this shit. See, Huey's citing law and shit. "You have a right to observe an officer carrying out his duty. You have a right to. As long as you stand a reasonable distance away, and you are a reasonable distance. Don't go anywhere."
The pigs kept trying to move the people, saying "You're gonna get under arrest." So Huey just went over and opened the door to the Panther office and said, "Come on in here. They can't move you out." He took his key, opened the door, and let the people go in. "Now, observe all you want to!" The pig said, "What are you going to do with that gun?"
"What are you going to do with your gun?" Huey said. "Because if you try to shoot at me, or if you try to take this gun, I'm going to shoot back at you, swine. Furthermore"-and he just got off into it-"you're nothing but a sharecropper anyway. You come from Georgia somewhere, you're downtown making $800 a month, and you come down here brutalizing and murdering black people in the black communities. They gave you some sergeant stripes and all I say is that you're nothing but a low-life, scurvy swine. A sharecropper from racist Georgia in the South somewhere.
"So if you draw that gun, I'll shoot back at you and blow your brains out!"
"You, you, you . . ." the pig was mad. "You're just turning the Constitution around." This is the pig trying to slough it off.
Huey said, "I'm not turning anything around. And I got my gun. What are you going to do with yours?" This blew the pigs' minds. They didn't know where to go, man. Huey just walked on around the front of the car. Got on around the front of the car, talking, then went on and opened the office door again, and let some more people in, telling the people they didn't have to go anywhere, citing their constitutional rights and all this stuff, then just jumped on out of the office again and said, "Now what are you going to do?"
Another burly kind of fat pig walked up to about five yards in front of Huey with his hands in his belt, the front of his belly falling over the belt. He asked Huey, "Are you a Marxist?" Huey asked him, "You a fascist?" "Are you a Marxist?" the pig asked in a louder tone of voice. Then Huey got louder. "Are you a fascist?"
Then the pig asked it in a very loud, demanding voice. Lifting his hand out of his belt, the pig said, "Are you a Marxist?" And Huey, louder, "Are you a fascist?" The pig asked three more times in a softer tone, and Huey repeated his question.
Then the pig said, like a stupid fifth-grade kid, "I asked you first."
Huey shook his head unbelievingly and said, "I asked you second. Are you a fascist?" Everybody laughed at the pig.
I was sitting in the car with the hammer of my 9mm cocked back. I said, "These pigs are going to be wild-eyed. I know they're gonna be crazy." I rolled the window down. "What's your name?" I say, "My name is Bobby Seale. Why?" "Want to check you out. Got any identification?" I laid my pistol down, gave them identification; I picked my pistol back up. I said, "My name is Bobby Seale, as it says in my identification. Want to check me out?"
"You were arrested for armed robbery at seventeen."
I said, "You're a goddamned liar. I've never been arrested in my life. I've never been arrested for armed robbery." They didn't even check me out. "You were arrested for armed robbery when you were seventeen. But since you were a juvenile, we can't arrest you for possessing a gun now." I said, "You damned liar. I've never been arrested for armed robbery. I don't want to hear it. Fuck it."
And Huey out there, man, he's calling the pigs swine, dogs, sharecroppers, bastards, motherfuckers, with his M-1 in his hand. And daring them, just daring them! "You don't pull your gun on us." And that's where Huey began to show us. You tell some motherfucker, and you mean it. This is what I remember. Huey was relating to one thing. When he told me, a long time ago, to remember that we might not ever come back home one day, I said, "I'm with you, Huey." I remember that. I remember I might not ever come home one day. "Fuck it, I'm with you."
We were sitting in the car, and Huey made us all stay in the car and be quiet. He was out there, the baddest motherfucker in the world, man. Huey and ten pigs. Three or four of them trying to run kids off bicycles and tell the people they didn't have the right to stand around, and Huey was going out there, interrupting, "No! Come in the office." Little kids on bicycles got inside the office. We had a big, wide, clear picture window. Niggers just got all over the front of the window, man. They were leaning on it, kissing the window just to listen to this shit. And they would holler, "Go 'head on brother," and "Run it on down. You know where it's at," and "I can dig it," all the while Huey was letting these pigs know where it was at. The brothers observing would see that those pigs were scared of that big gun that a a bad black but beautiful nigger had in his hand. Every time Huey would say, "If you shoot at me, swine, I'm shooting back," niggers would have to holler something like, "Tell it, do it, brother." That would let Huey know that he was revolutionizing our culture; educating black people to be revolutionaries; that the gun is where it's at and about and in. A white man two doors down smiled. He was the only one around but he seemed to respect Huey.
Then some people came up after that, after Huey had made this display of going into the office. Other people were standing around and the pigs weren't even moving anymore. And Huey just daring them to do anything. Huey had an M-1 with him, one of the eight round clips in it. What do you do, man? All you do is back up a nigger like that. You do nothing else but that. Anything that happens, this nigger's the baddest nigger you ever seen. Because this nigger is telling ten pigs, "I don't give a damn what you do," and making us all shut up and be disciplined. And we have our shit ready, sitting in the car.
So I said to myself, this is the baddest motherfucker in the world! This nigger is telling pigs, "If you draw your gun, I'll shoot you." Telling this to the pigs standing there. When the pig says, "You're just turning the Constitution around," Huey says, "I'm turning nothing around. I'm exercising my constitutional right. I've got the gun to back it up!" And the pig sees the gun. The nigger told the pigs that if they act wrong or get down wrong, I'm going to kill you. I'll defend myself!
So what do you do? You say, this nigger is bad. This nigger is crazy. But I like this crazy nigger. I like him because he's good. He doesn't take bullshit. You back him up.
So that was the very major incident that happened with the Black Panther Party in front of the Black Panther Party office. And after that, we really began to patrol pigs then, because we got righteous recruits. I think ten or twelve, maybe thirteen extra members in the Party that day, just came and put applications in. We went down to the poverty office again-I was still working there-and drew up a a formal application form for enrollment to get into the Black Panther Party. And from there, what did we do? We just patroled pigs.