HASSANI SCOTT: Good
evening, everyone.
AUDIENCE: Good evening.
HASSANI SCOTT: Wait.
Ma, could I see my
phone real quick?
Sorry, [INAUDIBLE].
OK.
I'm not the selfie type, so--
[LAUGHTER]
Oh, my phone.
Good evening, family,
friends, folks, and faculty.
Thank you for coming out
tonight to reflect, interrogate,
celebrate, and visualize
new ways to advance
the black freedom struggle.
Tonight's audience,
including those joining us
via live stream--
thank you for tuning in--
possesses an immense amount of
intelligence, wisdom, and power
that I believe that together--
I'm gonna start
that sentence over.
Tonight's audience, including
those of us who are joining via
live stream-- thank you--
possesses an immense amount
of intelligence, wisdom,
and power.
And I believe that
together, we possess
not only the diverse
brain power, but also
the goodness of heart and the
collective hunger for change
to affect impactful action.
My name is Hassani Ronae Scott.
I'm a senior at Brown University
from Los Angeles, California.
[CHEERING]
That's right.
And I concentrate
in Africana Studies.
Welcome to Brown University.
Welcome to LIST 120.
And welcome to Black Power 50th,
Affirming Yesterday, Today,
and Tomorrow, featuring
Miss Elaine Brown.
Today is a monumental day.
On this day in
history 50 years ago,
Stokely Carmichael, Kwame Ture,
gave a speech on black power
at UC Berkeley.
And in his speech he
proclaims the following.
How can we begin to
build institutions
that will allow people
to relate with each other
as human beings?
This country has never done
that, especially around
the country of black or white.
Man is born free.
You can enslave a man
after he is born free,
and that is exactly
what this country does.
It enslaves black people
after they're born.
It should be noted that this
speech occurred two weeks
after Huey Newton and Bobby
Seale established the Black
Panther Party, a prolific
organization which
tonight's guest speaker
is very familiar with.
On this day 47 years later in
2013, former NYPD Commissioner
Ray Kelly, a huge proponent
of stop-and-frisk,
which is a policy which
legalized racial profiling,
he stood in this very
room, at this very spot.
And he gave a speech on--
or attempted to give a speech--
on proactive policing.
[LAUGHTER]
And despite the fact that
Kelly didn't get to say much,
I remember.
I remember sitting in this room
in that vicinity and feeling
shaken to my core by his
presence, what he stood for,
what he represented, and the
fact that he had a platform
to speak at this University.
I remember the feeling
of disempowerment
and never wanting to
experience it again.
Of wanting to leave this school,
and indeed, leaving this school
and spending a semester at
Tougaloo College in Jackson,
Mississippi.
So with the gift
of hindsight-- yes,
and after Tougaloo College--
I can tell you that
three years ago today,
I embarked on a new chapter
in my life's journey,
one that involved concentrating
in Africana Studies--
shout out to Mama
Hamlin in the audience--
[LAUGHTER]
--concentrating in Africana
Studies as part of a quest to
empower myself and others,
and the pursuit of freedom,
liberation, and power.
And to also think through
Stockley's question
of how we can begin
to build institutions
that will allow us to
relate with each other
as human beings.
So this day has significance.
And as we gather
tonight to celebrate
the 50th anniversary of
the Black Panther Party
and the call for
black power, I hope
to preserve the
events of October 29,
and Brown's history and
institutional memory as a day
about and dedicated to
black power and empowerment.
It is my pleasure to introduce
Miss Elaine Brown to Brown
University, and to welcome
her into this space, because--
well, first off,
I feel that this
is someone who is
more fit to speak
to the issue and implications
of proactive policing.
But beyond that,
she is someone who
prompts keen listening,
fruitful discussion,
and impactful action.
In short, she's
contributed a lot
to the struggle and the
fight for black power.
So before Elaine delivers
tonight's address,
I want to share the story of
how this event came to be.
So after leaving Tougaloo
College last winter,
I returned home to Los
Angeles, and while there,
I would frequent
this bookstore--
how many folks here from LA?
The Last Bookstore, part
of downtown Los Angeles?
I would frequent
The Last Bookstore.
And one day I just
happened to be perusing
the African American
literature section,
and I came across A Taste of
Power, A Black Woman's Story.
I picked it up, because
I felt like it, you know,
might have pertained
to me, and I bought it.
And I remember just being
so engrossed in your story.
The next day, I
signed onto Facebook
to see that a good
friend of mine at UCLA
was actually hosting
Elaine Brown.
So I canceled my
plans and I went.
There's nothing
quite like hearing
from the lips of
a legend herself.
And when Elaine spoke, you just
knew she was keeping it real.
She was consistent,
and she was powerful.
I told her I wanted
to bring her to Brown.
She said, make it happen.
Nine months later, we're here.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
So I urge you all to sit
back, listen carefully,
and cherish this moment.
Again, thank you for your time
and your presence, sincerely.
And without further
ado, I introduce
to you Miss Elaine Brown.
[APPLAUSE]
ELAINE BROWN: Thank you,
everyone, for coming out,
and I want to especially
thank my sister Hassani
Scott for bringing me here.
That's exactly what happened.
She said, I want you
to come to Brown.
I said, OK.
And she messed around
and made this happen.
It was a lot of
work on her part,
and I certainly appreciate it.
I was thinking about
Brown coming to Brown,
reading about the slave
trade that the Brown
family was involved in.
I was wondering, wait a minute.
Hold on.
There might be some 40 acres
over here for me, because I
came from the Brown plantation,
or the Brown something--
you know, slaves sold
all over the country,
and I believe the Brown part
of me came out of Virginia.
And so when you get
the slave ships coming
in through the port here,
through the Brown family,
then you find that these
slaves went a lot of places.
According to your own record,
you had over 1,000 voyages
coming out of Rhode Island,
and 100,000 African slaves
were brought here--
the African people
were brought here
and put into slavery out of
Rhode Island, which apparently
was the hub of the Atlantic
slave trade for some time.
So I am looking for my 40 acres.
I'll take it right
here in Providence.
[LAUGHTER]
You think I'm kidding,
but I'm actually not.
[LAUGHTER]
I didn't think about
it until I really
started to realize I was
coming to a school named Brown,
and what the Brown people did.
So when my daughter got
married, she changed her name
as such to her
husband's last name,
and a bunch of sort
of Bourgeois feminists
wanted to know why she changed
her name to her husband's name.
And I said, well, first of
all, that wasn't her name.
We don't know whose
name Brown was,
so it wasn't her name so
she just changed her name
and did what she wanted to do.
In any case, over
this last week we
commemorated the
50th anniversary.
It was the founding
of the Black Panther
Party in Oakland,
California, and it
was a fantastic four-day event.
Our theme was Where Do
We Go From Here, which
was the theme of the last
great-- well, not the last,
but certainly one of
the greatest speeches
I believe that Dr. King
ever gave in August of 1967.
Our intent was not only to
exploit the history and legacy
of the Black Panther
Party, but also
to use whatever lessons were
available during that period
to resurrect the
spirit of the Panther,
and perhaps give new life to a
new movement in America today.
Our revolutionary
ideology and the practice
of, quote, unquote, "serving
the people, body and soul,"
of waging struggle on every
front, from the ballot
to the bullet, have left
a lasting, a legacy.
Our struggle we recognize--
I'm just going to give you a
quick overview of the Black
Panther Party
struggle, our ideology.
We first recognized
that our freedom was
tied to the freedom
of other people
and we formed coalitions with
other press groups in America,
including the American
Indian Movement, the Brown
Berets, the Young Lords,
and the Young Patriots,
who were young whites who were
a part of coming up and calling
themselves hillbillies
from Chicago,
coming out of
Appalachia and so forth.
And that was an
organization with which
we had a very serious coalition,
along with the Red Guard
Chinese organization.
Beyond the United
States, we had alliances
with any number of revolutionary
liberation struggles.
And my young sister I met today,
Gwen, Zimbabwe African National
Union, ZANU, with the
Mozambique Liberation Front,
FRELIMO, Pan Africanist
Congress of South Africa,
PAC, the Irish
Republican Army and Sinn
Fein, the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine,
the PFLP, as well as the PLO.
We created international
organizations
that were affiliates of
ours and factions of ours,
like the Polynesian
Panthers in New Zealand.
We had put relations,
strong relations,
with any number of
revolutionary governments
from Vietnam, to North
Korea, to China, to Cuba.
We formed partnerships
with women's liberation
and gay liberation
organizations,
with labor unions, including
United Farm Workers,
especially perhaps.
With the efforts of seniors for
their own rights to be heard
and for help to form
the Gray Panthers.
With people who are
disabled, talking
about disabled independence,
and made a coalition
with the Center for
Independent Living.
With environmental
activists, starting a program
called Gardens in the Ghetto
with the Trust for Public Land.
We instituted nearly 50 programs
that we call survival programs,
under the slogan Survival
Pending Revolution,
everything from our free
breakfast for children's
programs, and free clinics, and
ambulance service, free food,
and groceries, free clothing and
shoe programs, free legal aid
and busing to prisons, free
plumbing and maintenance,
pest control.
You name it, we attempted
to organize people around
and serve the needs of people
for their most basic needs
in effort to create
a revolutionary force
inside the United
States of America.
And at the same time, we
produced books, and artworks,
and music, and poetry,
and a newspaper
that lasted for 13 years,
which we published and printed
ourselves.
We maintained our
revolutionary agenda in
despite and in the
face of the greatest
onslaught of any of this
government against any one
organization.
The United States government
mounted a campaign against us
to destroy us.
The FBI identified us
as the greatest threat
to the internal security
of the United States,
and succeeded in killing
any number of our people
from Fred Hampton
and Mark Clark,
to Bunchy Carter, and
John Huggins, and George
Jackson, and Johnson Jackson,
and Bobby Hutton, and so forth.
In 1972 the party reorganized.
We shut down the
40-some chapters
that we had around the
country, brought everybody
to Oakland, California
under the theory
that we would be able to
create a base of revolution
inside the United States
by organizing every force
that we had, and we launched
electoral campaigns.
Bobby Seale ran for
mayor of Oakland.
I ran for city council.
We didn't necessarily
win the elections,
but we succeeded in galvanizing
the black and poor Latino
vote, et cetera.
We put forth a number of
original theories, including
and especially one called
revolutionary intercommunalism.
Huey Newton asserted,
and I would assert today,
that technology had
allowed the United States
capitalist to create
a global empire,
and that had reduced the rest
of the world to basically
a collection of
communities no different
from the black community in
America when we go into Panama
and say we're going
to arrest Noriega,
there's no difference in
arresting someone in South
Central Los Angeles.
And we call that reactionary
intercommunalism,
but we felt that because
of technology, technology
would bring people together,
because of the need
to sell products and distribute
goods all over the world.
And that technology
would provide
a tool that would allow us
to create global revolution
and bring about what we called
revolutionary intercommunalism.
So that was basically the big
part about the Black Panther
Party, the party that died.
You can ask me some
questions about that,
but we dead around
1981, but we'd
like to think that the
spirit of the Panther
is still alive today.
So where are we now
in terms of the legacy
of the Panther in
terms of where we are
in terms of social movements.
What we see is a number of
police murders and people
of color, mostly black people,
and we see protests all over
the country, but these things
are often countered by people
saying, well, yeah,
but, you know,
you're talking about
the police killing,
but what about all these
gangsters in Chicago and all
this black-on-black crime--
a discussion that we could
have, and I'll get back to it
in a minute.
And you have a
situation right now,
the neoliberal agenda that
was introduced by Wall Street.
They brokered a number
of systemic changes
so that we now no longer
have social programs,
and what social programs
there may or may not be
are being privatized every day.
So that what we have is what
I call a social Darwinist
cesspool where you can sink or
swim, but that's the way it is.
And now we are choosing between
a racist, ignorant capitalist
named Trump, and a
warmonger who supported
the very legislation that has
led to mass incarceration named
Clinton.
We have a national dialogue
that is overwhelmed
by neoliberal
propaganda where we
blame the victim for the crime.
We say that people are
poor because they're lazy,
or there are no poor people,
but if they are poor,
it's something wrong with them,
some self-inflicted wound,
and that's what
we generally say.
I would assert that that
arose in the Clinton
era, the first Clinton
era, as it may be.
Bill Clinton, one year after he
was elected president in 1993,
in October, November,
Clinton went
to speak before a black audience
at the very church in Memphis,
Tennessee where Dr. King
gave his last great speech
where he talked about "I've
been to the mountaintop, seen
the other side.
I'm not fearing any man tonight.
I know that we, as a
people, will get there,
even if I don't."
And so we have a situation where
Clinton is now standing there
in November of 1993, standing
before this black crowd
of people, deemed the
first black president--
I guess you know that
Obama really wasn't.
According to some
people, Clinton
was the first black president.
I'm not one of those
people that thought that,
but some people did,
including some very prominent
black people thought
that about him.
I don't know what it was.
Maybe it was his lips.
Maybe it was his hair.
Maybe it was because he ate
watermelon, or what have you,
from Arkansas.
But in any case, he was
deemed by some people
as the first black president,
so he felt comfortable standing
in this pulpit.
And after thanking bishop
somebody for the barbecue,
he went on to launch
the main theme,
and that was what would Martin
say if he were alive today?
And Clinton proposes
to speak for Dr. King
by referring to him as
Martin, and he says,
Martin would say if he were
alive today, he would say,
I died for your freedom, but
look what you've done with it.
All this black-on-black crime,
all this unwed teen mothers,
all this breakdown
of the black family.
And all the black
people in the audience
would say, oh, you right.
You right, master Clinton.
We done messed up freedom.
[LAUGHTER]
We done messed up freedom.
We were free.
Now, none of you was around--
maybe might be one or
two, but I don't see you--
in 1968 when King was killed.
But I was around, and I can
recall that in April the 4th,
the day he was
assassinated, he was still
talking about freedom.
Matter of fact, he was building
up a Poor People's Campaign
talking about the wealth
disparity in this country,
and talking about economic
justice, and so forth,
and identifying black
people as not being free.
So I'm going to assume,
because we really believed him,
that we were not free on
April the 4th of 1968.
And then Bobby Hutton,
the first Black Panther
to be killed, and killed in
Oakland, California in April
the 6th of 1968.
I joined the party
right after that.
And I fought for what
I thought was freedom.
You going to open it for
me, because I can't ever
open stuff.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so--
OK, thank you so much.
I just don't want to
stand up and start
coughing or something.
So King died, or he was killed,
and I joined the Black Panther
Party and we thought we
were fighting for freedom.
And I spent the next
10 years in my life
in the Black Panther Party.
And then we went on to do
a number of other things.
And I just can't
remember that moment
when we were free
and messed it up,
unless I slept through freedom
on the night of April the 4th,
and it happened.
We messed it up between April
the 4th and April the 5th.
I don't get it.
So Bill Clinton says we messed
up our freedom, as though we
were free, or as though Dr.
King had died when in fact we
know he was assassinated,
and most probably
by the very government that
Bill Clinton was representing
when he made that statement.
And so what is this question
of black-on-black crime?
This is our way of
saying, well, we no longer
are responsible
for the conditions
of black people in the
ghetto, and the poverty that
has brought about these
kinds of conflict and rage.
This is your fault. There's
something wrong with you,
committing all this crime.
White people aren't killing you.
You're killing each other.
We say that today.
That's how we get
around police brutality.
No.
What about all those
people in Chicago?
They always go back to the
Gangster Disciples in Chicago.
They don't talk about the
biggest gangster in Chicago
whose name is Rahm Emanuel.
He's the mayor.
[LAUGHTER]
So I won't even go off into
Rahm Emanuel's history,
because it's pretty serious.
And so what's this question
of black-on-black crime?
First of all, crime is
a political question.
It's not a moral question.
You can kill someone
with impunity, right?
Someone comes into your
house, tries to kill you,
bang, you blow them away,
that's the end of it.
Nobody's going to
charge you with murder.
Any number of reasons now.
You might go to the war and
kill some people in Afghanistan,
nobody's charging
you with murder.
So we know that
killing is not a crime.
It's just a crime when the
people that are in charge
of the system say it's a crime.
So this question of
black-on-black crime,
but the statistics are that
the greatest amount of crime
is committed by white
people on white people.
So white-on-white crime is
actually the biggest amount
of crime, because white people
are the majority in America.
It's not very complicated.
[LAUGHTER]
And so we could go on about how
we can frame the type of crime,
and so there's something
particularly vicious about
quote, "black-on-black" crime.
But this is our way of
deflecting any questions
about why black people
continue to die in the streets,
and so forth, and so on.
And then there's this unwed
teen mother and this breakdown
of the black family.
And I say, well,
the black family
was broken down back in
the 1600s when you start
dragging African people
from the continent
here to act as slaves.
We didn't have
families for 250 years.
Weren't even allowed to.
The law provided for us
to not have families or do
anything else that
other human beings did.
So this was a way, though,
for Bill Clinton to introduce
the idea of the
"three-strikes" crime bill.
It's your fault you've
got so much crime,
so I'm going to help you.
And black people
ourselves started saying,
we thank you for that.
Because yeah, these
bad boys walking around
with these sagging
and wearing a grill.
This is the problem.
We would be free if it wasn't
for those people listening
to that gangsta rap.
We would all be free.
So we're going to
help you, and we're
going to start putting people
in prison for that third strike,
and we're going to
create this legislation.
And that legislation
is going to go not only
to the third strike,
but we're going
to dismantle the
entire juvenile justice
system, because we're going
to put these little bad boys
in prison.
We don't care how old they are.
We are sick of them running
around here and scaring us,
these little super predators.
That's what they were
called, super predators.
That's some oddball term that
was coined by some guy named
John Dilulio who wrote
a book with a guy
named William Bennett,
who used to be
the Secretary of Education,
called My Black Crime Problem
and Yours, and this
is where we get
the idea of the super predator.
But in any case, we're
going to put forth
the three-strikes crime
bill, and black people
in the Congressional
Black Caucus
not only supported,
but Clinton said,
if it hadn't been for
Kweisi Mfume-- he was then
the chair of the
Congressional Black Caucus--
this would have never passed.
We wanted to see these young
black boys put into prison.
And so we went along with
that, and so now we're
not responsible
for their behavior,
and we don't have to have
any program about poverty,
about ghettoization.
We don't even have
to speak about it
because this is their problem.
It's some kind of criminal
problem they have.
And then about
these teen mothers,
we're going to fix this, too.
We are not going to pay any more
money for these lazy Shaniquas
that lay up there and have
all these babies while we're
out here working hard.
You know, I don't know who "we"
are, but we're working hard,
and we are sick and
tired of Shaniqua being
up here having these babies.
But we forgot that there are
white women in Appalachia
and other places in the
country that were actually
the majority of people
who ended up on welfare.
And so Clinton ends
welfare as we know it.
And so we still have
the welfare reform bill.
Nothing has been
done about that,
criminalization of poor women.
And so I say that this herald
brought in this age of what
I would call neoliberalism.
And then that was that,
and that's where we are.
But one of the things
that Clinton doesn't do
is he quotes what King
might say if King were here,
but he could have just used
King's own words in the speech
that I mentioned, "Where
Do We Go From Here?"
First he talks about the
achievement of the movement,
and the movement
according to King
and according to us wasn't
the Black Power Movement,
it wasn't the Civil
Rights Movement.
We didn't really
speak like that.
We thought of it as
the freedom movement,
the idea being for the
freedom of all people,
including other people of
color, and what have you.
So King talks about
the achievements.
He said, where are we?
We got the 1964 Civil Rights
Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act.
But where are we now?
And he says, I asserted that the
black has double of what is bad
and half of what
is good in America,
so we have many
other things to go.
And he delineates
some of those things,
going on to talk about how
we have substandard housing,
and how we have half the income
and twice as many unemployed as
white, and so forth, and so on.
This is where we are, he said.
In order for us to know
where we have to go,
we have to know where we are.
Are we all right with this?
And so what we tried to
do today, those of us
who still live to
tell the story,
is they asked a question
of where we are today?
Where do we want
to go from here?
Maybe everybody's all right
with the society as it is.
Some of us are not.
When we look at black
people as a measure
for where this society
is, we can look out
and see several things.
We see that we represent
25% of the poor in America,
even though we're only
13% of the population.
We have an unemployment rate
that is double that of whites.
We have black-owned
businesses that revenues
that are less than 1% of
all business revenues.
We have the lowest home
ownership, the highest
homelessness.
Half the percentage of blacks
have college degrees as white.
We have the highest infant
mortality rate, the highest
maternal mortality rate,
highest breast cancer
and other cancer death rates,
especially prostate cancer.
And we represent 50% of
the prison population
in the United States of America,
which is the highest prison
population and
percentage of people
in prison of any country
in the entire world.
Why?
Something wrong
with black people?
Maybe we have a criminal gene.
There are people that
have done studies on this.
There was a study done
at Columbia University--
you know, prestigious
schools like Columbia--
that actually tried to
put together a concept of,
well, let's find out if
there's a genetic connection
to this criminal behavior,
knowing that crime
is a social/political
question, and certainly not
a genetic question.
Are we lazy?
That's why we don't have
jobs, because we're lazy?
Stupid, backward, simple-minded,
don't want to be educated?
Now, either we believe
that, that something really
is wrong with black people.
We don't know why.
Something must be wrong
with black people,
because why aren't we
achieving at the same rate?
Even people coming from the
African continent will say,
look--
they say, look, these
people, they did all right.
Nigerians and other
people coming here,
they did all right.
People coming from
Korea did all right.
What's wrong with you?
Something must be wrong
with black people.
I would assert there's either
something wrong with us
inherently, genetically,
or there's something
wrong in the scheme of things.
And if there's something
wrong in the scheme of things,
we'll have to review
that a little bit.
And I'm going to review.
Now, a lot of
people get nervous.
They're like I know we're not
going to sit up here and talk
about slavery.
This is so boring.
I've heard it.
Can we turn the page?
Can we go forward?
Can we, like, move on?
Black people say that,
as well as white people.
I lived in France for a
period of time, and in 1995--
one of the years I
was living there--
there was a guy named
Paul Touvier who
was dragged out of some
area near Bordeaux, France,
and was brought to trial
in Paris for war crimes,
being a collaborator
with the Nazis.
And he was like 90 years old.
And You know, the war
had been over, obviously.
It was 1994.
So everybody's like,
why are we doing this?
Let's turn the page of history.
You know, the man is
old, the war is over.
He only killed seven or
eight people that we know of,
except for the several thousand
that he put on this train
to Auschwitz.
Why are we continuing
to talk about this war
because the French
were embarrassed,
because they have a very
strange relationship with Jews
and with Nazism they can't
quite explain historically,
but that's another conversation.
So they're like, why can't
we just turn the page?
And the prosecutor,
the French prosecutor
said, we can turn
the page of history.
We must turn the
page of history.
But we have to write the
page before we turn the page.
We have got to look at what
goes on in this country
and stop act like
we don't notice.
And I see people
trying to get up.
You can get up and
go, I don't care,
because I'm here for whatever
I got to say, and this is me.
This is my speech.
And so what I'm saying is this.
If we don't look at
what this country did,
then we won't understand
what's going on today
or why we're even talking
about the Black Panther
Party in the first place.
So we just sit here
myopically saying, oh,
isn't that wonderful,
the '60s, whatever,
flower children, something.
We won't know.
So we have to then go back
to the very beginning,
so we don't have to take
a long time because we
ought to know all this stuff.
We ought to know that
the first colony,
the first American colony, as
we know the United States, which
was an English colony
called Jamestown in Virginia
founded in 1607 or so.
And we have to know that
that was founded because
of the complete genocide of
the Powhatan Confederacy, which
was the father and all 30 tribes
of the Powhatan Confederacy,
the whole tribe, the
whole Confederacy being
led by Pocahontas's father.
You know, the one who was all
in love with John Smith and all
that, that mythical tour that we
like to take how they just sort
of gave us the land--
gave them the land.
And this is before the
Mayflower, of course,
and we have Africans being
brought in as slave population
within that same time period.
This colonization,
and the beginnings
of colonization coming out
of Virginia led to a, quote,
"need" for slaves.
We'd already known about
slaves in this hemisphere
from Columbus forward,
which had been
a hundred or so years before in
the Bahamas and South America,
and so forth.
But now we're talking
about this settlement
here in what we're
calling North America,
or in the United States--
what would become
the United States of America.
So this increase need for
slaves led to, of course,
the big Atlantic
triangular slave trade,
and I've already talked about
Rhode Island's participation.
Like so many of the
other Northeastern states
that like to think they were
clean, their hands were clean,
and it's only those Southern
states that used slave labor.
But everyone in the
country was property,
and no one in the country,
when it was founded in 1776,
was opposed to slavery.
As a matter of fact, it was
written into the Constitution.
This country was founded as a
slave-holding country in 1776.
Just about all of the signers,
with a few exceptions,
were slave holders, and nobody
was opposing forming a country
that had, as a foundation,
a slave population,
that by that time had created
such wealth that South Carolina
rice planters and Georgia
cotton planters-- or growers--
were among the richest
men in the world.
And Thomas Jefferson himself
justifies not much after 1776.
He writes a book called Notes
on the State of Virginia
where he talks in pastoral terms
about the beauty of Virginia,
talks about the
native people, how
they're interesting sort of
savages, which actually he does
say not sort of but they are.
And that they are interesting.
But he said, the
question will arise
as to why the black
hasn't been included
in this equation of equality?
How come we didn't
include the black?
How come we actually said
that the black will be counted
for the purposes of
represenational government
will be counted as 3/4 of
a man, but other than that,
we had no actual citizenships
or rights or anything else.
And people continued
to hold slaves,
including, and especially,
Thomas Jefferson.
And he writes in Notes on The
State of Virginia, he says,
the thing is, there are
differences between us that
are serious.
Scientific differences like
the color of their skin.
It's that immovable veil
of black that they have.
It's not beautiful
like our skin,
the admixture of white and red
that the white has in his skin.
And these are his
words, not mine.
And he says, and their hair is
not long and flowing like ours,
and they have a odor, a distinct
odor that is disagreeable.
And they are lazy, and they
lust after their women.
They don't have
love in them there,
like animals who, like an
orangutan he actually says,
who just lust after their women.
And they have no music, or
art, or literature in them.
And I assert it,
Thomas Jefferson
says, in Notes on the
State of Virginia,
that the black is inferior to
the white in the endowments
of both mind and body.
So we cannot bring
this inferior body,
this person into our
beautiful society.
Although, it was interesting
that by the time Jefferson runs
for president-- and, you know,
we talk about the presidential
race today--
Jefferson did not win the
popular vote-- the popular vote
being only for white men.
But he did not win
the popular vote.
Aaron Burr won that election.
And Jefferson then goes
to the Electoral College--
the beginning of
using the Electoral
College-- he says, hold up.
I'm representing these states
in the South that hold slaves.
You didn't count my 3/4
of a person, my slaves,
because my Electoral College
numbers will be bigger.
And as a result, Jefferson
became the president,
and became, by some people,
called The Negro President,
a wonderful book
written by an author
that I can't remember--
a well-known historian--
called The Negro President.
So all of this time now,
the slave population grows,
and the country expands, and the
country is really, really rich.
By 1860, the United States
was manufacturing goods,
and second only to Britain
and France in economic power.
Lincoln, of course,
represented the industrialists,
and the industrialists
were a rising class
of robbers, [INAUDIBLE],, with
the rise of the steam engine
became the rise of the
kind of manufacturing
that didn't require human labor.
Which is a side
note, but we should
remember that right now we
are entering a new phase.
We're in a technological
economy where we now
know that goods can
be manufactured,
things can be done at speeds
that we can't even imagine.
So when the rise of
industrialization,
there was not necessarily
a need for slave labor,
as much as there is maybe a need
for people to operate machines,
and a whole new class
and growth of people,
which Lincoln
promoted because he
was representing the railroads.
He was a lawyer
representing railroads,
and he was basically put
in by that group of people.
But the Southern Agrarians,
the capitalists in the South
said, wait a minute.
We're not going for this.
We're making too much money
out of this Agrarian economy.
Just like people saying
they're crying about coal--
you know, people
talking about oh my god,
we're going to get
rid of coal mines?
Yes, they're going down.
Forget it.
There's not going
to be any more coal.
There's new things happening and
new technologies, and so forth.
So we have to make a shift, and
that shift is very difficult.
That shift took place
in the United States
and it went to the
question of slavery,
but it had to do
with the question
of a fundamental economic
base that the country had.
So the Southern Agrarian
people, the rich people--
which always makes me laugh.
I lived in Georgia
for a long time.
You know, you get these
guys walking around
with the Confederate flag.
A lot of people are offended.
I just find it to be
humorous that you're
walking around this flag.
You've never benefited
from slavery,
and you never benefited
from the Civil War.
You were out here living
in a trailer park talking
about that's your heritage.
[LAUGHTER]
I would be embarrassed by
that being my heritage.
But go ahead.
You don't have
any money, but you
feel like your heritage
will somehow translate
into a bank card or something.
So when the South
started separating,
these 11 states got
together calling themselves
a confederacy, the state of
Mississippi, for example,
in its secession statement
said the following, partially.
Our position, which represented
just about all [INAUDIBLE],,
Mississippi said, "Our
position is thoroughly
identified with the institution
of slavery-- the greatest
material interest of the world.
Its labor supplies
the product which
constitutes by far the largest
and most important portions
of commerce on earth.
These products have become
necessities of the world,
and a blow at slavery is a blow
at commerce and civilization."
That's deep isn't it,
"a blow at slavery
is a blow at civilization."
And so the war breaks out, the
Civil War in April of 1861.
And by 1862, things are not
looking good for the North.
The Confederacy is moving along,
and Lincoln pulls together
a number of these black
so-called leaders--
I don't know if you could
really call them leaders,
but they're the more educated,
the few educated blacks--
and he offers them a deal
to lead their people out
of America.
He says, we suffer
by your presence.
Look what is happening.
We have a war over you.
Can't you just leave
and go to Hispaniola,
and we'll finance, give
you a little colony.
I don't know what's
going to happen
to the people who
are already there,
but this is another discussion.
Because nobody left, the
Confederacy was winning.
And he started
telling them, he said,
look, if you continue to rebel
against the United States,
I will free the slaves
in the seceding states.
Now, this is an
interesting proposition
because the Confederacy
had a president.
His name was Jefferson Davis.
So really, Lincoln
wasn't the president
of this new group that had
just formed and broken away.
But he said he was going to
free the slaves in the seceding
states.
If they would come on
back home, he still
wouldn't have a problem with
the question of slavery.
As Lincoln said, I like any
man believing the superiority
of the white race.
But the tide of war changed when
the blacks said, wait a minute.
You mean we don't have
to be slaves anymore?
And so they undercut the
labor force that bolstered
the southern Civil
War, the Confederacy,
and within a couple
of more years,
or less than a couple of
years, you had Grant leaving
and Sherman coming in with
the scorched-earth policy--
burned everything he could see.
Burned all of Atlanta.
I always like to go to
Atlanta and remind them
that they were burned down
to the ground by Sherman.
But anyway, and all these
slaves, a million slaves
following him to the
sea, Sherman to the sea--
the March to
Savannah, war is over.
Sherman says, what are we going
to do with all these people?
Sherman was not an
abolitionist, he was a general.
He said, you've
got to do something
with these four million and
some people that are now loose.
Give them 40 acre plots
and let them start
a life in the United States.
And so he issued Field
Order, Number 15.
They start handing out
little pieces of paper.
People are like, oh, I
see my plot right now.
I told you I got one
here in Providence.
I'm--
[LAUGHTER]
--Brown.
You know, brown.
So he started doing
that, and then,
of course, the new
president-- by this time,
Lincoln had been killed, so the
new president Andrew Johnson
said, you must be kidding?
We are going to
reconstruct this country
and it is not going to be
with black people having
these little plots of land.
By Christmas these
people better be gone.
He sent in the Army
to remove people
from their little plots of land.
And so that was the
last time anybody
thought blacks
should get anything
from anybody in any real way.
That coming out
of slavery, we had
to have some way to
start, having been nothing
or less than nothing,
having no right to have
a family, no name, no song, no
flag, no anything, no religion.
Just these non-persons
who were chattel
listed on people's holdings
as part of their cows,
and their land,
and their slaves.
How were we going to
start all over again?
And those 40 acres,
that's the dream.
Some black people still
dreaming about 40 acres
and a mule, which actually
wasn't in the bargain,
but what the heck.
[LAUGHTER]
The 13th Amendment was
the abolition of slavery,
or at least it was the abolition
of involuntary servitude,
except as a
punishment for crime.
So the 13th Amendment was
passed but not ratified,
was written but not
ratified by the time all
the 11 Confederate states formed
something called collectively,
the black codes.
And the black codes
governed black life.
Now you are not a
slave, so you have
to have special laws and
crimes that you commit that are
peculiar only to black people.
And the biggest
one was vagrancy.
You're not working.
Who is working?
Yesterday I was a
slave, and where am I
working in the South?
There's no place to work.
And so people got
arrested in large numbers,
ending up in chain
gangs, helping out with--
not helping out, but helping to
develop coal mining and steel
production, believe it
or not, and railroads.
And of course, a lot being
sharecroppers, meaning you
got this little plot of land,
but you then had to pay back,
and they never could
get ahead of the game.
And so these black codes
invented a new class of people.
Black people in America went
from being a slave class--
something that Marx
himself missed--
to a criminal class.
Kind of sounds familiar.
We were like criminals
because we didn't
have jobs in 1865 and 1866.
And then by 1896,
we were just looking
to figure out how
to survive, and you
had this guy named Homer
Plessy in New Orleans,
and Homer Plessy was what was
called an octaroon, meaning
that he supposedly only
had one-eighth black blood.
He was so white.
Nobody knew he was black.
He had to say he was black
for people to believe it.
And Homer Plessy got on a train
and sat with white people.
And there was
division of trains,
so the blacks had to
sit in these bad cars,
and white people
paid the same price,
they sat in very
nice seats and all.
And Homer Plessy got there
with his hat and gloves
and everything.
And they said, no, Homer,
you've got to get off.
You are black.
And so he sued, and
finally, ultimately, we
have the case of
Homer v. Plessy--
Plessy versus
Ferguson-- I'm sorry.
And in Plessy versus
Ferguson, which
reaches the Supreme
Court in 1896,
his first argument is that if
he was only one-eighth black,
then he should be deemed
white, and therefore, he
shouldn't have to worry about
sitting in the white car
because he was white.
He was more white
than he was black.
And the court said, we are
deeming you black, Plessy,
do you have anything else
you want to say to the court?
And he said, yes.
I paid the same price.
Why should I sit
in an inferior area
when I paid exactly the
same as the white people?
And the court said, well,
you're right in many ways.
If you paid the same
price, you should
have equal accommodations.
But we just can't make
these white people sit here
with you, because just
yesterday you were their slave.
So we can't just socially
engineer America.
We'll just say that as long as
the accommodations are equal,
they can be separate.
And everybody thought that
was a good idea, at least
a lot of people.
Some people still do.
Except for black people
didn't have any train cars,
and nobody was making
any train cars.
You had people like Booker
T. Washington saying,
I'm all right with that.
But I will have to have the
money to build my own trains,
and build my own banks, and
build my own businesses.
I'm happy over here.
Some people thought of
that as a compromise.
If that had gone
forward, we might
have a different
situation in America.
So we began the long
march of post-Plessy
during the whole Jim Crow
period, trying to find housing,
trying to find
employment, trying to find
education and food
and health care.
Where everything was
separated, but separation meant
we had nothing,
because we didn't
have any equal accommodations.
So we fought to do
a number of things.
In the case of Marcus
Garvey, following
in the footsteps of
Booker T. Washington,
we fought just to get
independent economic base.
So we have our own money,
but we had to have something
to start with.
And you had, as I say,
Garvey, and before that, you
had Booker T.
Washington, and later you
had a Nation of Islam
talking about do
for self, as they said.
You had the integration as
the NAACP and WEB Dubois
talking about we can't
get anything on our own.
We're going to
have to integrate,
and that means we going to
have to improve ourselves,
Talented Tenth, if
anybody knows that theory.
Good thing Dubois
lived long enough
to renounce that
ridiculous statement.
But in any case, we've talked
about the integration of blacks
into the system.
And so we went
through all of this.
And then we had the
first great migration.
Talking to this
young woman today
from Detroit where black
people walked from the South
to Detroit.
Henry Ford said, come
on up here and let's
get on this assembly line.
This is the first big,
major manufacturing
plant in America,
Ford cars in Detroit.
The whole color of Detroit
went from white to black
after Henry Ford called
all those black people
from the South.
The first great migration.
So we tried to get jobs.
We did anything we could.
Second great
migration, Henry Kaiser
calling people from
Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma
into Oakland, California to
build up the ships, the Kaiser
ships, for the war effort.
And after the war,
we thought, OK.
We had the Tuskegee Airmen,
our own black Air Force people,
and they were killing Germans,
and they never lost a plane.
They had all these
good things, and we
knew there was going
to be a double victory.
There's going to be victory
abroad and victory at home.
And we would come home and life
would be better because now we
had all participated
in the war, and that we
were going to be equal.
And of course, we know
that was a joke, right?
We were never equal.
And equal meant something
because it meant I can now
go to a hospital,
I can go to school,
I can do all these things.
And so at the end of
the war, we realized,
black people realized
that we were not equal.
And there was a big boom,
an economic boom-- you know,
Levittown, stuff like this.
Washing machines for all.
Televisions coming around.
And black people could never
access those things, much less
the most basic things.
Still living mostly in the
South, sharecropping, et
cetera.
So by 1954, we launched
a campaign for education.
Maybe we could find
freedom through education.
Little Linda Brown trying to
go to school in Topeka, Kansas.
No, we don't want any
little nigger children
in our school, and
little Ruby Bridges
in New Orleans being spat in mud
so bad you could take the spit
and ring it out of her dress.
You know the famous
Norman Rockwell painting
where she has to go
to school and she's
the only little child
sitting in school,
and her mother says,
"Be strong, Ruby.
Be strong."
Six years old sat there a whole
year just to get an education.
It makes me laugh
when people say
black people don't
want to be-- you must
have forgotten about Brown.
We died for Brown.
We bled for Brown.
And in places like Boston,
one of the most vicious
fights over
desegregation of schools.
I remember seeing a
famous picture of a guy
with a flag and he
was going to pierce
the back of this black man
because he's trying to--
with the flag pole.
You know, the pole has a
little point at the end.
Anyway, so we thought
maybe education.
And then in 1955 we had the
NAACP's heroic Rosa Parks
who said--
like Plessy said all
those years before--
I paid the same price.
I want a seat on the bus.
A seat on the bus in 1955.
That's all I want.
I paid the price, now.
I just want to get on the bus.
They said, no, we're not letting
no colored women on no buses
here with these white people.
And blah, blah, blah.
And so black people start
riding the bus in Montgomery.
You had the big
boycott, and then you
get the moral voice of King.
And now you have television
showing the world, wait
a minute, you mean to
tell me black people
can't get on a bus?
In America?
This gives us every reason
to criticize America.
We're so glad to have something
to criticize America for.
So they were happy.
The dogs are now
biting people who
want to sit in and eat
at a lunch counter.
They want to go to Woolworth's.
I mean I'm embarrassed
that it was
Woolworth's, but nevertheless,
they went to Woolworth's.
[LAUGHTER]
Equal right to eat a hot dog
and a root beer, you know.
And then we developed
that freedom movement
as it evolved because of all
this mass public knowledge.
The world was seeing
this country, land
of the free, home of the
brave, with black people
at the very bottom of life.
So you had the
development of a movement.
It wasn't just SCLC,
Dr. King's organization,
Southern Christian
Leadership Conference.
You had SNCC,
Student Nonviolent,
which became Student National
Coordinating Committee.
You had the Fannie Lou Hamer,
and the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party of
Fannie Lou Hamer saying,
"I'm sick and tired of
being sick and tired."
In 1963 you had the March on
Washington, several hundred
thousand people marching.
That's that speech that
we all know, you know,
where Dr. King talks
about having a dream.
We don't know what the dream
was, something about going up
a hill, holding hands, little
black children, white children
sitting together.
We don't know what it was.
But it was a dream.
[LAUGHTER]
But it definitely yielded
the '64 Civil Rights
Act under Lyndon Johnson.
And it yielded the '65
Voting Rights Act--
that and a lot of marches,
including the march
across the Edmund
Pettus Bridge from Selma
to Montgomery in 1965.
And by 1968, Dr. King is asking,
where do we go from here?
Because when I look out, I
don't see any real change.
Yes, we can vote.
Yes, we can vote, and
yes we have our rights.
We can use a public
toilet with white people
and drink out of a fountain.
But we don't have any money,
we don't own anything.
We're poor, bah, bah, bah.
And so King says, we need to
mount a new kind of campaign,
a poor people's
campaign, and we're
going to go to Washington, and
we're going to get our money,
and we're going to
cash that check.
We need, as he says in his
speech, "We need guaranteed,
annual income."
This was some
revolutionary talk here.
This is not the little
mamby-pamby King
we like to remember
who was nonviolent.
Just remember black people,
King was nonviolent.
Now, everybody else
can be strapped
to the gills, but black
people, don't come out here
talking about no guns, right?
And so he talks about
a guaranteed income.
And he talks about
the restructuring
of the entire American society.
King says, we must question,
quoting the capitalist economy.
We've got to begin
to ask questions
about the whole society and
see that the problem of racism,
the problem of
economic exploitation,
and the problem of war
are all tied together.
We are dealing with issues
that cannot be resolved without
the nation undergoing a radical
redistribution of economic
power.
This is Dr. Martin Luther
King that we erased.
This was in 1968, months
before he was assassinated.
The Black Panther Party
was formed in 1966
with the idea in mind
that we recognized
that we wanted to be free,
but that our freedom could not
be had without a fundamental
change in the scheme
and the system of
things, and we called
for a revolutionary change.
We were Marxist-Leninist.
We did not think
of ourselves as--
we were not black nationalists.
We didn't say that black
people needed to be free
and we needed to have
our own little thing,
and let the native
people just go to hell,
and everybody else,
we don't care.
We want to be the oppressor.
You know how some women,
so-called feminist,
they just want to break
through the glass ceiling.
They want to be the men
that they always hated.
I want to be the one to
oppress women, not you.
I want to be a general in
the Army that can go and kill
some people and order
people to be killed
and tortured in
Abu Ghraib prison.
I want to be that person.
So we said we had an
agenda, and our agenda was
not just for black liberation,
but for revolutionary change,
and that was the only way we
felt that we would be free.
And we identified the fact that
we felt that we were not free.
We organized ourselves around a
10-point platform and program,
calling for freedom
as our first point,
calling for full employment,
an end to what we
called capitalist exploitation.
Calling for reparations,
decent housing,
exemption of black
men from the military,
because we're not
going to fight in all
these wars of aggression.
Called for an end
to police brutality,
and urged all black
people to arm themselves
for self-defense.
We called for the freedom of
all black people in prison
because they had not been
tried by jurors of their peers.
And we called for land,
we called for housing, we
called for education,
clothing, justice, peace,
and people's community
control of modern technology.
We organized armed
self-defense patrols in Oakland
against the police.
We stood there.
We didn't take film of them.
We didn't Twitter, Facebook,
or send that stuff out.
We stood there on those
streets and told the police,
we're here to observe what
you're getting ready to do.
You're getting ready to
shoot Oscar Grant in the back
without any probable
cause, et cetera.
And we struggled on, and we lost
a lot of people to the grave
or to the prison-- some still in
prison today, some still there.
We made some headway, but we
fell down in the end in 1981.
And what replaced
us was what we can
call what a wonderful writer
named Gary Webb called
a dark alliance.
And that alliance is
between the CIA and a number
of cocaine producers in
South America and Colombia,
and so forth,
including in Panama.
And we had the sudden
influx of cocaine,
ultimately crack cocaine,
as it became to be known,
in the black
community of America.
That's what replaced
our struggle.
And what has replaced it
now is a proliferation
of what I call little Bs.
I wrote a book called The
Condemnation of Little B,
and little B was a little young
boy, 13 years old, black boy
in Atlanta, Georgia in 1997.
His name is Michael Lewis.
He was charged with
murdering another guy.
You know, black-on-black crime.
Everybody cried out,
oh, this is the problem
with the black community.
These bad boys, these
super predators.
That's what he was,
a super predator--
identified as.
Nobody thought that maybe
he didn't kill this man.
He was said to have killed
a good, black father,
so here we had this tension.
And now he's been in
prison now for 20 years.
He's like my son.
I've been fighting
forever to get him out,
but that's not the story.
The story is that little B grew
up in an environment like this.
So he grew up in a place
called "The Bluff."
And there probably
is a place like that
here in good old Providence.
I used to tell people
you're not going
to be a vegan in the hood.
It's going to be
difficult for you.
[LAUGHTER]
You'll just have to
think about that.
Veganism will be--
unless you want
to buy some beans in a can,
maybe, or just some cookies
that you hope won't have
any certain kind of flower,
and you won't be
able to do that.
So anyway, so he lived in
an area called The Bluff.
Everybody in Atlanta knew it.
It's right near the
Atlanta University Center
where you have Spelman
College, and Clark Atlanta,
and Morehouse, and so forth.
And you also have right down
the street Georgia Tech.
It's a pretty
prestigious school.
So people from all
over, young people,
especially, all over the
city go through The Bluff
to buy drugs, at
least at that time.
You could buy
everything from powder
to crack cocaine,
which really is only
difference in formation.
You could buy all kinds of weed.
You could buy just about
anything-- heroin, ecstasy.
You name it, you could
buy it in The Bluff
within a certain
number of blocks.
And so this boy was born
into that environment.
His older brother was slinging
dope at the time, as they said.
He became the parent to himself
and his sister by the time
he was eight years
old, because his mother
was strung out on crack.
He didn't go to
school for a while
because he was embarrassed
by what he had,
so he went out and tried
to make a little money.
By 11 years old, a court
declared him deprived.
And he said to me, yeah,
my mother smoked up
all-- my mother
smoked up the water,
meaning that everything
went into the crack pipe,
and even the water
was turned off.
How did they live?
I don't know how they survived.
I don't know.
But by 11, he was on
the street by himself,
and so he joined
his brother in that.
And because he was
small, called Little B,
he could run around
and do a lot of things
other people couldn't do.
And so then there's
no more story to this.
I mean he was just convicted,
wrongfully convicted,
of a murder he didn't commit
by four drug dealers who were
making deals for themselves.
And two crack-head women
who were high on the stand.
And that was the end of it.
And now, here he is.
He's in prison for 20
years and we don't even
think about people like that.
These people need to
be in prison forever,
that we with that.
There are millions of Little Bs.
If he were one case,
I would say, OK.
But there aren't.
So if we were to
look at the situation
and where we are
today in America,
not our own little
individual situations.
Because I know that
for myself, I probably
can manage because I can manage
and manipulate and navigate
this system because
I've done it.
And I'm one of these
people that says
I will never be
homeless because I'm
going to come into your home.
You know what I mean?
And you can be
homeless and get out,
or we're going to share
and have a wonderful--
[LAUGHTER]
So we have where
do we go from here?
Do we remain oppressed?
And see all these people we
criticize that are supporting
Donald Trump.
And I don't even want to
talk about Donald Trump
because it's bizarre.
But the fact is that there
are people supporting him,
and I would say the
people we generally
identify are that dying
working class white man.
And we all know that.
And that's because
there's, first of all,
there's the race question.
I always thought
this was our country,
meaning white man's
country, and too
many of these people
of color and immigrants
coming over here messing up
my money, as though that's
who messed up your money.
No Mexican coming here
messing up your money.
They never owned the
coal mines, you see.
You have to have a
correct analysis.
But the bottom line is we
have a large number of people
in this country, I
would say the majority,
who are just operating
on a thread--
we said during the
Occupied period 1% and 99%.
And so I would say that
the majority of people
in this country are
yearning for a better life,
but not necessarily
thinking that there's
something systemically wrong.
They know something is wrong
but they're not sure what it is.
And so people are reaching
out to something as ridiculous
as Donald Trump for an answer.
We don't have education
and housing that we need.
We are still paying.
Why are we paying tuition to
go to Brown or anywhere else?
I don't know.
Civilized countries don't
charge money to go to--
And I don't mean like reduced
thing, better loan packages.
No.
You don't pay to go to school
through the 12th grade.
What, and now as a freshman
you have to pay money?
What, to learn?
We really want
people to be stupid?
We don't want them
to learn anything?
You don't have to go to college.
Maybe there's other
stuff you want to do.
But there's a lot
of stuff out here
that you might need some
training and education for.
Why are we paying
to go through this?
So education is a big deal.
And if you don't
have any money, you
can kiss this school
goodbye, period.
That's the end of it.
And your whole
little life plan will
be out the window, and
all that other stuff.
We don't have housing.
We have tremendous
homelessness in this country,
and black people are
at the top of that.
We're waging these
wars around the world,
and we don't even know why.
We don't know where
Afghanistan is.
Most people can't even
spell Afghanistan.
[LAUGHTER]
And I'll bet you,
if I put it on a map
and wrote the word
Afghanistan, they
would still have
difficulty finding it.
Why are we there?
We don't know.
We're just there
killing people, getting
killed, all this other stuff.
We could take that war
money, as Dr. King suggested,
and be using it for free
education and free health
care for everybody.
Why are we paying for Obamacare?
No Obamacare.
I don't care what
it is, I don't think
we should pay for anything.
I don't have the money
for cancer treatments,
and so I should like get
my insurance plan together
and I should live like
that for the rest my life?
We had free health clinics
in the Black Panther Party
because we believe that
health care is a human right
and no one should be
denied it because you
don't have any money.
Basic right.
We could use those billions
to get decent housing
for everyone.
We could use those
billions of war dollars
and begin to demand that the
country begin to redistribute
the wealth of the country.
There's no reason
for so many people
to be hoarding
things, exploiting
other people to make money,
and all the other things
that we know.
So we're saying
that, and I'm saying
that when we look over this
history of the Black Panther
Party this 50th year, and
we realize that we did
have this movement, what
was the relevance of it?
I think it is relevant today
because the conditions are
essentially the same.
And we should not
be able to rest
until we can see that black
people, and brown people,
and other oppressed
people in this country
and around the world
are in fact truly free,
and that should be our
motivation for going forward
together, that we would
all be free, free at last.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
HASANNI SCOTT: OK.
So we'll transition into Q&A, so
people can start forming lines
and just make sure to
speak directly into--
Yes, we have two
mics in the aisles.
Please project.
Thank you.
ELAINE BROWN: If I
don't get any questions,
I'm going for the martini.
[LAUGHTER]
You got about two more minutes
to get up here with some ques--
[LAUGH] Look at
her, embarrassed.
[LAUGH]
OK, do we have a question or no?
Everything's good.
I guess everything's
[INAUDIBLE]..
Here we go.
How you doing?
AUDIENCE: Welcome to Providence.
ELAINE BROWN: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Al Cabral.
I'm a citizen of the town.
You mentioned something
about health being a right.
ELAINE BROWN: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Now that is--
that's major.
Because in this
country they always
say we have the best health in
the world if you have money.
ELAINE BROWN: Right.
AUDIENCE: You don't
have money, you're dead.
ELAINE BROWN: That's right.
AUDIENCE: So I'd like to hear
you speak a little bit more
on the right for health.
ELAINE BROWN: Thank you.
You know, listen, if somebody
puts a price on your head
and says, OK--
I had a friend--
I mean I'm sure everybody has
had somebody who has cancer.
Isn't that amazing?
We have a high cancer
rate in this country.
That's another
whole conversation.
Black women dying of breast
cancer at a higher rate,
double the rate of white women.
Why is that?
Because something wrong
with black woman's breast?
No.
We don't have any money.
We can afford to
maybe get detected.
And then now you
know you have cancer.
My friend Rashida who
died of breast cancer,
she could afford the
cancer treatments
because her insurance covered
it, but she wasn't getting
paid any money and she
didn't have the money
to pay for her children
to live every day.
So it was like do I
trade off my income--
you know, I have
to go back to work.
So these are the kinds
of choices that we
make all the time, don't we?
It's like should I go get
my tooth pulled, whatever,
or should I pay my rent?
This stuff is crazy.
Now, I lived in
France, as I mentioned,
and I will tell you
that-- and France
is not the ideal anything,
but they did at least have
health care for all, including
people who weren't even
citizens.
And a friend of mine, a young
black woman and her husband,
a young black man,
from the United States,
they got married in France.
He was a designer.
She had been a model.
They got married,
she got pregnant,
and all of her
prenatal care was taken
care of by the government.
And she was there on what would
be a vicarious green card.
He was the one with
the green card.
She had nothing but that
she was married to him.
And she went in the hospital,
she stayed for five days.
Who does that?
Nobody in America.
You have your baby,
it's like are you OK?
See ya.
Look like you're breathing,
so we will kick you out.
You have to be half dead to
stay in a hospital today more
than 24 hours, or 24 hours.
And so she got that.
But one of the
things that she had
was free diapers, food for
the baby for the first year,
a crib, a little
thing you roll down
the street, a stroller, car.
You know what I mean.
I just couldn't
think of the word.
So my point is all of that.
So you're not going
to have what--
what is infant mortality?
It's death in the first
year of life, right?
You're not going
to have children
being smothered because they
don't have a bed to sleep in.
The heat-- all these
different conditions that
create problems
for young mothers,
or prenatal care,
or post-natal care.
All of this is assumed to
be what every French person
expects to get.
And then you can take
your child to the creche,
as they call it,
meaning the nursery.
Oh, that is free.
Child care.
Who is asking you to pay--
what do people pay for
child-- $500, $600 a week,
stuff like this.
Some ridiculous amount of money.
So you either drag your child
around, or if you're on welfare
you can't afford to get
off because you can't
afford to pay the child care.
This kind of stuff, but all
this goes to your health,
and whether or not you can
get minimal health care.
There is no reason why anyone
who doesn't have the money--
and we could talk about
the systemic piece.
But right now,
right here, no one--
it's not just a matter of being
denied when you have cancer.
People have, it's called
preventive medicine.
We do things like we need--
nobody gets dental care
on their little insurance.
You ever notice that?
You can't get your eyes-- we get
like $75 for a pair of glasses,
if you can find a pair for $75.
You know it's that
kind of stuff.
And it's always
you're negotiating
your own human existence.
No one should be worried
about whether or not--
this is a human right, and
why is it a human right?
Because to deny me this
means to take my life.
You are putting a gun to
my head, just like food,
and saying I'm denying-- unless
you got this, you can't eat.
I will die.
And so if I will die, this
is my human right to live.
I have a right to live
and pursue happiness.
I cannot, if you're forcing me,
to pay money that I don't have
for health care.
So I'm still an advocate
of free health care,
and I believe we have
the ability to do it.
So this country says we
have the best health care
system in the
world, which may be
true in terms of
technological advances
and all kinds of stuff,
but the distribution of it
and the fairness and equity
of it is absolutely horrible.
So I think that's
one of the things
that we ought to all be
fighting for at every turn.
And want to say one thing
about poor white people
because this is what happens.
If you are living
in rural America,
and many poor white people
are, even if you had $1,
you can't find anywhere to go.
There's no clinics,
there's no hospitals.
I just had shoulder
surgery-- what
do you call that, rotator cuff.
It was horrible.
I had a rotator cuff--
but I live in Oakland.
I just take a Uber
to the hospital.
[LAUGHTER]
That's what I did.
Took a Uber to the hospital.
I got an operation, bah,
bah, because I had insurance
and I had the money
to pay for an Uber.
Even if I had had
everything else in place,
if I lived in some rural
area where there is no place,
I would just be out
of luck, wouldn't I?
And that's the kind
of thing we need
to look at and consider as a
part of a fundamental change.
Yes?
Yes, go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I would like to thank you
for a very breathtaking view
of American history.
I wanted to bring up a party
that was inspired by the Black
Panthers, because within
the state of Israel,
which also has a history of
oppressing people of color,
all sorts of people of
color in all sorts of ways.
And the State of Israel
has a little known legacy
of occupational racism,
and medical racism,
and just denying the agency
of Jews from North Africa.
The Black Panther Party
inspired a party in Israel
called the Israeli Black
Panthers because Jews
from North Africa,
even if in the United
States wouldn't
present as black.
In Israel they were
racialized as basically black.
And even though the party
was way more short-lived
and had probably less
of a global impact
than the Black Panther
Party, and I'm not
aware of the history of
communications between the two,
I would like to know how aware
you are of them, and to speak
about them a little bit.
ELAINE BROWN: Well, I think
that's a really interesting
question, one I've never had
before, because a lot of people
did not know that we
had relations with Jews
in Tel Aviv, especially,
but they were all sabros.
And they had been there
before the European
Jews came in and
created a Zionist state,
and they opposed the Zionist
state, which is something
that people don't realize,
that there are people
and there were people.
And I do know the
person who formed--
I don't know if he called
themselves the Panthers,
but they had a
Panther support group
and they used to distribute
our newspaper, was a man named
Yuval Golan.
And he and his
wife and children,
they lived on the kibbutz.
And they absolutely supported
the Black Panther Party's
agenda.
And of course, they attempted
to talk about integrating Israel
from just coming out
of a European thing
and denying North Africans.
But of course, nobody was
ready to talk about the return
to Palestine, and so
that's another conflict
that people have to wrestle
with, because there's
no justification for the
existence of the State
of Israel, given that it
was land that belonged
to another group of people
that was robbed and murdered
in tremendous number, and remain
an oppressed class and group.
As a matter of
fact, you can't even
say Palestine today in Israel.
So Israel is a complicated
story, but within that context
you're absolutely right.
And I do know about the
sabros, the Jews who
were in Israel who were opposed
to the Zionist government,
and who supported the
Black Panther Party.
So it is quite amazing
that we had anybody there,
but it was true.
Even though we were supporters,
of course, not only of the PLO,
but to the left of the PLO was
an organization headed by Dr.
George Habash called the PFLP,
the Palestinian Liberation
Front--
Popular Front for
Liberation of Palestine.
And so we were very big
supporters of theirs.
They were the ones who were
doing a lot of the hijacking
and all that sort of thing.
But in any case, it
is a whole thing.
End of this point,
though, is there
was a point at which Huey
Newton issued a statement,
and all we have is the
Black Panther Party,
and we took the position
that the State of Israel
was a fait accompli.
And that what we felt was
because the other Arab peoples
were doing nothing for the
Palestinians-- you know,
the Saudis, what have you,
they just let them get killed,
didn't come in-- you had
100 million Arabs and, what,
10 million Jews, or what
have you, in Israel,
and they didn't do anything to
help their Palestinian brothers
and sisters.
So we called for the
complete dismantling
of all those governments-- the
Israeli, Zionist government,
and all the sheikdoms.
And for the people of Palestine,
and the people of Israel,
and the people of
the Middle East
to hold hands, gather together,
and share that milk and honey
that they're all living off and
get rid of all those sheiks.
So we called every
single government
in the Arab world a
reactionary government
and denounced them all,
and we denounced that,
and we supported, of
course, the return
of the State of
Palestine, but we
accepted the fact it was
probably never going to happen.
But there was a way to dismantle
the reactionary government
and install one where
people could live together
in some sort of harmony
and share all that wealth,
and that was our
position, ultimately.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
ELAINE BROWN: Thank you
for asking that question.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: Hello.
My name is Carrie
Hampton, and I am
a product of Tougaloo College,
and currently a second year
medical student at Brown.
And--
ELAINE BROWN: Yeah!
AUDIENCE: --I could talk a
lot about the matter of health
care, and a lot of
it, I think, too,
from what we've learned
at the med school is--
well, they didn't say this part.
But I think the
thing with America
is the country doesn't
like to be second.
America likes to be
first in everything,
right at everything.
And to follow a country
like Scandinavia
who has the best health
care in all of the world
would be an insult
to this country
because this country
can't come second.
So to follow something
that's already working,
you know, America's
not going to do that.
But my question is pertaining to
being a black woman in America
trying to become a physician.
And I think that a
lot of the times,
it's a barrier that we're
overcoming and we're achieving.
But a lot of times people
don't see how difficult
it is to be a black
woman in a suit
where you have to act as
a future physician in.
People read your clothes
and say, oh, you're
going to school to be
a nurse, and clearly it
says medical school.
Some people aren't appreciative
of you staying up late hours,
not sleeping, just to learn
how to help someone else, when
people may look at you and
always question everything
you say, and not appreciate
what you say because
of the color of your
skin, especially
you being a black woman.
And I experienced that
when I was at a conference
this past weekend where
my research was wonderful,
and the work I did was
amazing, and people admired it.
But when they saw a black
woman stand to that post,
no one asked questions and no
one wanted to talk about it.
But they would read it when
they saw Brown University,
and they saw how nice
the research was.
And my question is--
and even if any of you
have heard about the black
woman on Delta Airlines
where she was a physician
and nobody believed her.
You know, I could
easily wake up one day
and be in that situation.
So what advice do you
have, as a black woman,
trying to do something
to help someone else,
giving everything you have,
every ounce of your strength,
you're living your life
to commit and devote
that to making sure that the
well-being of someone else
is better, and only for it to be
instances where people question
everything you do, and you're
often trying to just prove
your worth and that you are
capable of being in a capacity?
ELAINE BROWN: Whew.
[APPLAUSE]
The first thing I would
say is that you'll probably
have to get away from
worrying about proving
your worth to people that
are not worthy of proving
your worth to.
In other words, on
a personal level,
you can't make me
mad because you
don't give me a seat in
the restaurant, something
like this.
Or you don't think I'm
worthy of sitting next to you
or something like that.
I'm not looking
for your blessing
because I don't need you to
give me and to validate me.
You don't need anyone
to validate you.
So that's number one.
So if they didn't get
it, they didn't get it.
But you already know you're
dealing with a racist society,
so this is not shocking, OK?
It's just that day-to-day
thing that gets irritating,
like they don't appreciate me.
Who are they?
They are white people
and a few Negroes.
And they are like, I want
to go to a real doctor.
A white man is a real doctor.
So we have all
that, but that comes
from a history of slavery.
I mean that's why I went
through that whole history.
It wasn't just to go
through an exercise,
but to say how did we get here.
How did we get this
cultural mindset
that you're talking about.
But there are several things
that you ought to think about
in your own psyche.
One of them is--
I want to talk about--
boy, it's hard for me to
talk about Henrietta Lacks.
AUDIENCE: Mmm.
Um-hmm.
ELAINE BROWN: Every single--
if you don't know who that
is, quickly Google it.
Henrietta Lacks
was a woman-- and I
believe they experimented on
her after they didn't treat her.
I mean it's like there's this
whole thing, like she suddenly
died of cervical
cancer, and there's
a whole conversation about
black women cervical cancer,
being sterilized, and a
whole bunch of stuff that
goes on there.
Very deep.
Mississippi Fannie Lou Hamer,
all kinds of experiments.
So as a black woman,
you have to know
that the case of Henrietta
Lacks, which is just
coming forward
thanks to some woman
who did a great book on her,
Immortal Henrietta Lacks,
you have to know that
it's important that you
step in the game seriously.
You cannot allow yourself to
be distracted by social image,
because you have a job to do.
Now, I have a friend, and I hope
she's still alive, actually.
I don't know.
Her name was Francine
Bowden when I knew her.
She went to Girls High
with me in Philadelphia,
which was like this
prestigious little school.
And she was like the
poorest of the poor.
Even the black girls
didn't like her,
plus she was too dark,
if you follow me.
That's a shame, isn't
it, but let's go there.
So the middle-class Negroes
that were at the school--
you know, all eight of them.
Ever Francine was poor.
She was so poor she
lived in a neighborhood
people from my
neighborhood didn't go to.
You know what I mean?
I lived in a very
rough neighborhood,
but that's like really
bad across town.
Anyway, I don't
know how she did it.
She couldn't get
her hair pressed,
because in those days,
that was like-- so she
was looking rough.
And she went to Girls High,
and the reason I became friends
with her because my name was
Brown, her name was Bowden,
B-O-W-D-E-N. So she was sitting
next to me and I was like, oh,
look at her doing this
math like it ain't nothing.
Like I know nothing
in logarithm.
What?
I can't even tell
you what that is.
So she's like, yeah, you
just go like this and this.
OK, fine.
Can you do that
for me right now?
So she was like the smartest
person in the class,
really, truly.
I have no idea how
she stayed at home
and went through
all the hell she
went through in her
own personal life,
because she wasn't
deemed beautiful enough
by black people
and white people.
You know what I mean?
She wasn't Beyonce, if
you follow what I mean.
And Francine Bowden finished
Girls High number one
in the class.
She was a Latin scholar, math
scholar, science scholar--
wasn't nothing she didn't do.
She had 10 scholarship offers.
And she couldn't afford to go to
Vassar, Wellesley-- that set--
Barnard.
She couldn't go there
because you've got
to have money just to be there.
Do you know what I mean?
Even though she had
a full scholarship.
This is a black woman in 1961,
you don't get full scholarship.
1964 she goes at Temple,
she gets a full scholarship
to medical school.
Who gets a full scholarship
to medical school?
She was a genius.
She ended up at Princeton
with her own lab,
looking at how children
develop in the womb,
and what the nutrition
of the mother is to this.
And so she just kept going, and
that's what you've got to do.
You've just got to say, I
don't have to prove myself
to these people.
You are definitely
smarter than most of us,
because I can tell
you right now,
I can't take science courses.
I'm one of those
people stereotype.
Girls don't know science,
I'm one of those people.
I don't know this.
OK, I can write books, come on.
So I type fast, I play
the piano, I write songs.
Everybody can't do everything.
So what I'm saying to you is
you've got to buck up, Bucky.
Don't even worry about it.
Because Francine,
everybody had to bow down
to her at the end of the day.
Everybody had to
bow down to her.
[APPLAUSE]
And everybody will bow--
So you do your research, and
what you need to remember
is Henrietta Lacks,
because otherwise there's
going to be a whole bunch of
Henrietta Lacks that are going
to be worked on,
and we're not even
going to know how it happened
because nobody like us is
in the labs and doing the work.
We need you as a researcher,
we need you as a doctor,
we need you in the community
to help Miss Jones--
you know, we had our clinics
and we had our free clinics.
A lot of the clinic work-- you
know, clinics are just clinics.
They're not big
treatment centers.
But it was really nice to have
someplace around the corner.
And you know Miss
Jones, she's going
to come and talk about girl,
you know my knee is bad.
Because she needs a note
getting her out of that work
that she didn't want to
do in the first place--
she's not getting paid
enough money, right?
So it's like yeah, Miss
Jones, your knee looks
bad to me-- you know, whatever.
A lot of it is psychological.
It's like just having
somewhere to come to,
and the reward of that.
When we formed our first clinic
in Los Angeles, the Black
Panther Party Southern
California Chapter,
we got a lot of doctors to come
in and give us an hour here.
Now, that's how we staffed it.
We had volunteer doctors from
different medical schools.
We couldn't find
one black doctor
that wanted to come down
there and work with the Black
Panthers.
All young whites would
come from the schools
and want to work with us.
Same time we had a
woman, one woman,
and she was a professor of
nursing, black women, at UCLA.
And she lost that job ultimately
not because of the Black
Panther Party, but because
UCLA teaching hospital,
she was a professor
at the Nursing School,
they were giving Latino
women who could not
speak English hysterectomies.
Knowing this was
against their religion
and against their whole thing.
They would say you
just sign this paper.
And she blew the whistle on
that and she lost everything.
So you are needed,
and that needs
to be your focus,
that you are needed.
We so need black
doctors and people
who are committed
to the communities.
Who will say, why do we
have cervical cancer?
We do need to do-- we did pap
smears on the spot in the Black
Panther Party in 1970--
pap smears on the spot.
All it is just a swab
and go to the lab, right?
This ain't complicated.
Right now we're dying of
cervical cancer at the highest
rate because we can't
get a pap smear.
That's the work you
need to focus on.
You do not need to
worry about what anyone
thinks about you on a plane.
I wish somebody would
say something to me
on a plane about anything.
There'll be like
snakes on the plane.
[LAUGHTER]
I'll be the snake.
So you hear how
everybody applauded you.
We're looking to
you, young sister.
You are our hope.
We're looking to you
to help us and bring us
the medical care that our
people desperately need.
So that's what your mission is.
Don't you worry about
those other people.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ELAINE BROWN: Become
another scientist.
Go ahead.
We got some more
scientists in the room.
Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Miss Brown.
Thank you so much for being with
us today, and for all the work
that you have done, and all
the sacrifices you have made.
I am so thankful to
be hearing from you.
I wanted to ask
you about something
that you had mentioned at
the beginning of your talk
with your piece revolutionary
intercommunalism,
and in that, you kind of
segmented into technology.
And I've thought about
technology specifically
as a computer scientist from
the framework of accessibility
and how do you
make products that
are accessible for other folks.
But something that
has fascinated me
since you said it today at
lunch was using technology
as a tool for global revolution.
And I was hoping to hear
from you about what structure
you think could be
created for that,
and what are the major
barriers that you
think would be associated
with creating that structure?
ELAINE BROWN: Well, the first
thing I'd do is that we did--
I learned in the
Black Panther Party
I'm not worried about
obstacles, because I'm
going to assume there are
going to be obstacles.
So we can't get involved
in that because what
happens if this happens?
I did go to law school
for about 10 minutes-- no,
more than that.
But in any case,
what ifs are myriad.
What if the sky falls?
What if, what if, what if.
There's a million
of those, so you
have to just eliminate those.
The question is what can we do?
I have an organization
called Oakland & the World
Enterprises, and our
mission, as we say,
is to launch and sustain
businesses, for-profit business
for formerly
incarcerated people,
to be owned by former
incarcerated people,
because they're never
going to get a job.
So you might as well
just give that up.
Create your own business.
That's it.
So we have some businesses.
And one of the
businesses I have now
is a farm, believe it or not,
in the hood, in West Oakland.
I have an urban farm.
We got 10 workers, $20 an hour.
But it's their farm.
They've got to build it up.
But our job is to
sustain and hold
until they can turn the profit
turnaround, turn the corner.
So one of the businesses
that we're going to have
is what I'm calling tech design.
And once I saw a 3D printer, I
was like, OK, that's it for me.
That bad boy could
[INAUDIBLE] me.
I'm not interested in
the Facebook thing,
although I do believe that you
can flip that around and trick
it out the way we
do, and probably
flip it into something else.
It's just that we
don't have access.
It's like the Uber guy.
Here's a guy who comes up with
a-- at least he's a coder,
though, right?
Unlike Zuckerberg--
not even a coder.
Just a little ugly guy
looking for a woman, right?
[LAUGHTER]
That's all Facebook is anyway.
Oh, I want to meet someone.
Tell me about your play cousin.
I don't care, OK.
People be posting
pictures up of stuff
that nobody on the planet--
And this makes them feel good.
Like people say to me,
I'm your Facebook friend.
OK.
I have no idea what that means.
And I tell people don't put it--
So Facebook is not
the issue, is it?
That's a communication tool,
though, and it is a tool,
and it could be used.
But we could come up with
some other ideas on that.
But right now I'm on the
mission of the 3D printer.
And the reason is this.
Once I saw that you could build
like a house, body parts--
where's our doctor-- body
parts being replicated.
In Germany they just did an
entire human body, the colors
and everything.
And so people who
happen to be-- say,
Muslims are people who
don't want to actually cut
a human cadaver can now see
what the human body looks like,
literally perfectly.
That's the kind
of stuff we need.
And we need to get into that.
And the only way
we do that is we
have to figure how
to finance that.
But we can create it
because we're not stupid.
You know we're not--
I know Mark Zuckerberg
is not smarter than I am.
I absolutely know
that for a fact.
It's not even possible.
[LAUGHTER]
It's not possible.
So I know that he
just had some little--
it's like Donald Trump
is smarter than who?
You get $3 million
from your dad, who
was a greedy real
estate operator,
it's not going to be difficult
for you to get some little head
start, so forth and so on.
So what I'm trying
to do is do that,
and I want to use
quick manufacturing
to build up money.
Because I want people to make
a lot of money as a group--
they're all cooperative
businesses, just so you know.
They can't get to
that capitalist model.
They're like, oh, no,
we're not going to fight.
If you don't want
to be in this group
you don't have to
be here, but you've
got to get the stuff that
if you're going to be here,
you have to do this.
And my experiment is
cooperative ownership.
I don't say cooperative workers
because that sounds communisty,
and so people get nervous.
So I just go it's
cooperatively owned.
[LAUGHTER]
And that's better, isn't it?
But the owners do have to work.
[LAUGH]
[LAUGHTER]
But they get it and they like
it because it beats a blank,
you know what I mean?
And it beats going back
to the joint, especially.
And so with this,
it's not-- you don't
have to be a coder to
operate a 3D printer, right?
And coding is going to be like
nothing in about 10 years,
less than 10, right?
Have you heard of a book
called The Second Machine Age?
Anybody heard of this book?
It's two MIT professors,
Second Machine Age.
It's like my little
bible right now.
And these guys assert--
and these are fundamental--
it's not even a theory,
it's an observation-- one
that all things that were made
on the planet for, let's say,
all of human history as we know
it, 10,000 years-- however
many years we know it--
was all made by
human labor, right?
Everything, unless we
can figure out something
about the pyramids, because
that's like the little mystery.
Which ain't really
that mysterious,
but people would
like to think it is.
But OK.
But barring all of
that, for thousands,
thousands, thousands
of years, all that ever
was made by human beings--
clothing, housing--
everything that we ever did
was made with human labor.
And then came the steam engine
and everything shifted, right?
I don't have to sit
and go like this
to make one little dress, right?
One little piece of cloth on
the loom or whatever it is.
I've got machines to do that,
and that shifted everything
in the entire world.
And the shift now is technology.
And you're going to
have to live with it.
You can go we know this
is going to lose jobs.
That's right.
Do you really want to
be the operator that
answers all the calls
from somebody complaining?
You know what I'm saying.
We already know many, many
jobs, and most jobs in America
right now will be gone
within 20 years, 50%.
Their prediction
is 50% of the jobs
as we know them will
be gone in 20 years.
And that's really
probably a big--
it should probably be less.
Isn't that something?
So we have to adapt
and adjust to the fact
that there are machines
that can do things.
The question is, how do
we access the things?
How do we make it work for us?
How do we distribute the wealth?
How do we stop
manufacturing stuff
in Bangladesh and exploiting
the women of Bangladesh,
as Phil Knight and all these
other reactionary manufacturers
do, including Jay-Z. Malaysia.
You're going to make all
your clothes in Malaysia?
You could have gone to
Brooklyn and paid some people
to make clothes, and give
them a little bit of money,
where you claim to come
from, to [INAUDIBLE]..
But you didn't do that.
You chose to exploit
some Vietnamese women,
and the Malaysian women,
and some Indonesian women
or something.
We're paying them $1 a day to
make some nasty shoes that are
going to cost $250 or whatever.
[LAUGHTER]
Now that's where the game is.
So we have to find
out how can we--
the good thing for
black people is this.
We never had a job in
the industrial world.
We don't owe nothing.
We ain't got to worry about
dismantling the steel mill
because we didn't have one.
Don't have to worry about the
Buick plant, didn't own it.
Don't have to worry about
the coal mine, never
got until after we built
them up, then we got a job.
So we can now start
anew and say what is it.
Now, why is technology
important, though?
Because if I can
in one second pass
on some information to
anywhere in the world, which
we can do right
now, any information
to anyone in the world has got
access to the other part of it,
right?
This builds up the ability
of people to communicate.
Now, we don't always have
to be talking about our play
cousins' birthday party, right?
We could be talking
about some other stuff.
The people who run the world,
Coca-Cola for example--
largest private employer on
the continent of Africa--
they need this technology to
sell the world a Coke, right?
They need this technology
to sell people Ford cars
and everything else.
So the whole economy is global.
It really is global.
Where do we jump in on that?
Well, we've got to have some
way of poor people developing
an understanding of
technology and using it.
We need more technological
development in medical care.
I mean I had a surgery that I
don't think could have happened
five years ago where they
[HASANNI GIVING A NOTE]----
It's time to go?
OK.
I mean I had a shoulder surgery
that was just phenomenal.
I couldn't even believe
the stuff that they did
and how fast they did it
and all this other stuff.
But that wouldn't have
happened even five years ago.
We want to see
stuff to advance it.
In North Korea, or
as people call it
in North Korea, in
Pyongyang when I was there,
spent a month in
Pyongyang back in the day.
And they said, we're
working for the day
when we can free man
from arduous labor.
Do we really want to
grovel for a potato,
or are we just happy
having a potato?
That doesn't mean you
won't have a potato that
was made by the chemical.
All of these things
are necessary,
but we have to move forward,
and it's very important
that people begin to
understand computer science,
and to understand
language of the computer,
and so forth and so on,
so we can figure out ways
that human beings
can live better.
Because right now,
technology is bonding
the capitalist structure
of this country
so that it can do anything
in a matter of minutes.
I mean jet planes-- and we don't
even know what kind of weapons
are out there.
Half the stuff is out there,
we don't even know what it is.
We've got to get
involved in that
and stop just worrying
about little mundane stuff.
But of course, if
you don't have food,
if you don't have
housing, then you're
stuck worrying about
just surviving, so we
have to work on two
things, and that's
what we did in the Party.
And we thought, we want
to know about the stars.
We want to know about
the other planets.
That's the stuff
we want to know.
I want to talk to
Stephen Hawking.
I don't want to sit
around here groveling
for housing for the homeless.
Why am I dealing with some
potatoes for people to eat,
or tomatoes, we don't
have any good vegetables.
This stuff ought to be
resolved so we can get on
with big stuff, like what
is this universe that we're
in, and so forth.
So technology is
critical to our future,
and I think that
everyone at least
has to be computer
savvy because that is
the language of technologies--
language that you have to have.
I work with a group called
Black Girls Code and all
this other stuff that
we just try to roll hard
so everybody can get ready.
These girls are 10, 11 years
old, and they are doing stuff,
I'm like huh?
I don't need to know it because
they know it and I know them.
[LAUGHTER]
So we've got to do it
and we have to remember.
But that's the
technology question
is that technology has produced
the ability of human beings
to produce materials
and goods and services
in a manner in which
we never even imagined.
Who thought I could
hold a handheld device--
I don't need a
thesaurus anymore.
I can get on there and
go into the dictionary
and say, how do I say hello,
how are you in Japanese?
In French?
In Arabic?
And bam, dictionary will
pop up and will say it
for you-- spell it for you, say
it for you and everything else.
Who knew?
Who imagined such a thing?
We couldn't imagine.
I love it.
Why would anybody reject that?
We love that stuff.
So we need to be thinking
ahead of the game
and thinking on
how we can use this
in the interest of the people.
Lastly, we had a workshop at
our Black Panther Party 50th,
and was called Mastering
Technology as a Tool
for Self-Determination.
And that's what we have
to do, master technology
as a tool for
self-determination.
That's what I believe.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much.
ELAINE BROWN: I'll take
a couple more questions.
Yes?
Because otherwise,
people get bored.
AUDIENCE: I'd like to ask
if there's a Black Panther
Movement nowadays,
a revival, and there
is if you would tell
us more about it?
ELAINE BROWN: Not
that I know of.
There just isn't one.
I don't know of anything.
I mean there's these
people calling themselves
the New Black Panthers.
And there's Black Lives Matter.
There's all that.
But remember, we
had several things
that none of these groups has,
and that is we had an ideology.
We were Marxist-Leninists,
we were communists,
we were leftists,
whatever you want to say.
We studied Marxist study,
and we studied in Kruma.
We were Maoist.
We were everything,
because there
was no blueprint for
what to do in the United
States of America.
But we know there were
fundamental issues
that we agreed with with the
other liberation struggles,
and so forth--
other thinkers.
I don't see anyone out here in
a cohesive, organized fashion
with that kind of ideology.
Secondly, we had an
agenda, like this is
what we're going to be doing.
And we had a structure,
and we lived somewhere.
We weren't living
in the ether world.
We had places in LA that
people could find us.
You didn't have to look for us.
So I think all of those things
I'm hoping they will come back.
I don't think they're
old-fashioned.
I think they're
necessary, that people
have an ideological structure,
that they have a structure.
I'm not a great
believer in this kind
of so-called liberal
democracy or what have you.
It's like now we're voting, and
what is in the end of the day?
You've got two very,
very rich people.
If you're not rich,
you've got to have access
to a lot of money to
be president, right?
I mean that's it.
There's nobody
else going to win.
You're going to have a great
idea and going to be president.
Goody.
You're not going
to be president.
You better have some
money out there.
So we're down to two
people, and I don't know
what democracy this is about.
We're down to two people who
are not going to do very much,
either of them, for any of
us in the end of the day.
So we do need organizations
that are here,
there, and everywhere, maybe
dealing with local politics,
dealing with local issues,
or dealing with local issues
with a global perspective.
All of that.
But I don't see that right now.
I don't see that anywhere.
I don't think that people
are doing anything wrong.
I just don't see that
level of commitment
that we had where our
lives were on the line,
and we accepted that.
That was part of the
surrender to the movement,
to what was greater
than we were.
So I don't see
anything like that.
AUDIENCE: Who do you support
for president if I may ask?
ELAINE BROWN: I'm
not dealing with--
I don't support
anybody for president.
I don't see that
there is anybody.
I don't think the presidency
is relevant to us.
The Black Panther Party
called for the dismantling
of the presidency as an
interim step to revolution.
But right now, there's
no particular reason
to have a president.
The president doesn't
really run the Army.
Who is the president?
A figurehead, maybe, maybe not.
I don't know.
But what do we really have
to do with the president?
Really nothing.
What does a president do?
We elected Obama, and we have
what, Obamacare to show for it?
We still got mass incarceration,
poverty, ongoing conditions
that we had under Bush.
We elected him because
he wasn't Bush.
And that's it.
And we don't want to admit that
because then that's to say--
But it was always predictable,
because the person that
fills that slot
is going to go I'm
the commander in chief
of the armed services.
What am I going to do?
Shut down the war
in Afghanistan?
No.
Everything going to stay in
place no matter who you got.
Because the machinery
is in place,
and that machinery doesn't
exist in Washington, DC per se.
So we have to keep it
moving on our own levels
until we get to that place
where something as big
as the presidency matters.
I don't really think
it's going to make
that much difference, other
than we'll be embarrassed
if Trump wins.
It's just like global
embarrassment for me.
That would be my opinion.
But as people say,
well, Hillary Clinton
didn't do the
omnibus crime bill,
but she certainly supported it.
But what she did do for me--
this is like you go
to hell directly--
she killed Muammar Gaddafi,
and that's my opinion.
And the reason is because
Muammar Gaddafi was the only--
well, not only, but he was
certainly one of the leading--
Africans-- not to be
confused with an Arab--
who is an African out
of the country of Libya,
although some people like to
say Egypt is not in Africa.
Because whenever you talk
about the origins of the world
and they go back to
Egypt, then they go,
well, no, that's not
really in Africa.
People say these words
out of their mouths.
Have anybody ever
heard that when
they say Egypt is not in Africa.
And Gaddafi was
attempting to organize
an African economic union, very
much like the European Union.
So that all those resources
that have been ripped off
for all these hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of years
would be united under
one economic union,
and they could then move
as one, because no country
in the African continent
rises to anything
near the most minimal--
Poland or somewhere.
You know what I'm saying.
So Gaddafi was an
important person
in the continent of Africa,
and he was murdered by the CIA.
And he was murdered by that--
everybody talks about
the little Benghazi thing
where four people are killed.
But they don't talk
about wiped out the--
you have just walked
into somebody's country
and wiped them out.
And Hillary Clinton
now says, yes, I did.
I felt there should
be regime change.
First it was an Arab
Spring that was all done
by phones-- remember that one?
Remember the era
of we all thought
the phones were the reason
why you have revolution?
So Hillary Clinton did that.
I don't forgive her
for that, because we
black people in America, we
need a relationship with a very
strong power.
I mean Sierra Leone is the
poorest country in the world,
according to the United
Nations' definition of poverty.
Poorer than Haiti, and that's
kind of hard to think about.
Sierra Leone is the poorest
country in the world,
and yet it has the
richest diamond deposits
of any country in the
world, to the point where
the Queen of England
says she will not
put a diamond in her crown
unless it's from Sierra Leone.
How is that possible?
How is it possible that the
poorest country in the world
has the richest
diamond deposits?
I mean how does that work?
So we have to have a
global view of this.
It's not just Hillary
Clinton, I like her,
she's going to be the
first woman president.
I don't care.
I don't feel better being
shot by a black cop.
You know, that's like,
oh, well, black cops
killed Mary Woods, and what?
I know that he was killed
because he was black.
If a black guy joined in, that's
like saying Clarence Thomas is
black, and what?
He's Clarence Thomas.
He's just Clarence Thomas.
So we have to know that
the presidency, what
is the value of the presidency
to us at this point?
We really won't have much
control over our lives
because we voted for Hillary,
or we voted for Jill Stein,
or we voted for whatever
that other guy's name
that nobody can remember.
Johnson.
What's his name,
something like Johnson.
AUDIENCE: Gary Johnson.
ELAINE BROWN: Yeah.
I mean what difference is
it going to make to us,
even if they could
win but they're not.
We already know there's
only one of two people that
will become president of
the United States, right?
Unless every morning
I get up and go
is Trump dead yet, or what?
So assuming that he
lives to the presidency,
he's going to be president,
or Hillary Clinton's
going to be president.
The only other option
is that the current vice
presidential candidates
will be president or not.
So basically, you
have no choices.
Where does this
change your life?
How does this affect
your life meaningfully?
Is this going to really
bring a manufacturing base
back to the US?
No.
Is this going to wipe out NAFTA?
Ain't going to be no
wiping out of no NAFTA.
There's going to be expansion.
We're going to be
into AFTA soon,
and SAFTA, and every other
kind of trade agreement, right?
Why?
Because we're trying to move
product in this country.
Who's going to sit there and
say let's dismantle NAFTA?
If people believe Donald
Trump on that, they're crazy.
Donald Trump ain't trying
to dismantle NAFTA.
This means I can
ship my goods back.
I don't have to pay
taxes on this and that.
It comes through
Oakland is a big port.
That stuff comes through.
Nobody even opens
those containers.
Did you know that?
You hit the Port of Oakland
and you keep on moving to Iowa.
And here we are being
searched at the airport--
oh, wait a minute, you got
something on your shoe.
Now I've got to
take off my shoe,
it has to be examined,
have to be patted down.
But a whole container
comes into the Port
of Oakland, Port of Los
Angeles, Port of everywhere,
and nobody ever searches
those containers.
Did you know that?
Can you imagine that?
They don't even-- what
are they going to do?
Put a metal wand on the stuff?
It's metal inside.
It's crazy.
So they don't do it because it's
too much money moving goods,
and moving goods is part
in producing and selling.
This is the fundamental
issue of capitalism.
I make it, I sell it
to you, and you buy it.
And all I want the
rest of the world to do
is be a consumer of
all American products.
If they're not all
quite American,
that's really not that relevant.
If some are made in China or
wherever, that's not relevant.
It's American as far
as I own it, right?
Right?
No?
You don't agree?
AUDIENCE: Once more.
What'd you say again?
ELAINE BROWN: I
said, we don't care
if it's made somewhere
else, and the parts, the car
is like 75% made somewhere else.
It's still Ford, right?
And I'm selling Ford
cars to everybody.
I'm going to build roads for
you to have a Ford car in it.
Look, I'm selling
cars to the Chinese.
They want bikes.
I'm trying to help them to get
off the bike and get in a car.
And if you want
Mao's picture on it,
you're wanting
Kruma's picture, you
want to call it a communist car.
I don't care, because
all I want to do
is see that profit margin.
I want see it those
numbers line up.
So if you think a
Trump or Hillary
Clinton's going to
change that dynamic,
then we're living in dreamland.
That's in place.
That is in place.
That's why you kill
Martin Luther King.
You don't want anybody
talking about that piece.
That's where the
road gets rough.
It's not going to
matter to any of us.
Our lives are not going to be
any worse off or better off
at my prediction.
Because what are they going
to do to upset the system?
And even if they wanted to--
people telling me,
oh, I never thought
a revolutionary
would run for office,
and I thought they
were talking about me.
They were talking
about Bernie Sanders.
You call Bernie Sanders
a revolutionary?
When did that happen?
[LAUGHTER]
Bernie Sander's just
another democrat.
His program is down
to lower tuition.
He started out with
like we're going to have
a revolution, a revolution.
OK, Bernie.
But Bernie's not-- even if he
wanted what he said he wanted,
he couldn't do it.
That's my point.
It is the structure
is so powerful
that even if there
were a good candidate,
it's not really going to matter.
Even if Obama were a
guy with great intention
and no intention of having Rahm
Emanuel as his chief of staff.
[LAUGHTER]
He couldn't do anything.
What are you going to
do, say I want to let
the black people out of prison?
It's not going to happen.
So we have to have
a realistic analysis
so local stuff can be done.
Where you have control
is where I want to play.
I don't want play where--
I can't fix that.
That's like saying I'm going
to fix the sun coming up.
I hope it doesn't rain tomorrow.
It's not within my power.
So what we want to do is seize
power within the places we can
so we can build up the momentum
to get to the big question.
OK, I'm finished.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
ELAINE BROWN: OK, we're
going to close it down.
AUDIENCE: Close the line?
ELAINE BROWN: Oh, the
line is still very long.
We've got three over
here, and three over here.
OK, those three and three.
That's a lot.
I'll try to go fast.
HASSANI SCOTT: [INAUDIBLE]
ELAINE BROWN: One answer
for a couple of questions?
HASSANI SCOTT: No, no, no.
ELAINE BROWN: I'll
just be brief.
I'll try to be brief.
If you're brief, I'll be brief.
Bye, everybody that's leaving.
[LAUGHTER]
So go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Good evening.
My name is Falatine.
I'm a Oakland native, actually.
Just recently graduated
from Howard University.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
So my question
is, can you repeat
the list of organizations that
the Black Panther Party was
partnering with to provide
the free lunches for children
and the free health
clinics, please?
ELAINE BROWN: Well, we
weren't partnering with them.
We all had our own things.
So when I talk about the
Brown Berets, for example,
they were the Mexican,
Chicano group/organization,
came out of Los Angeles.
They had their own programs,
but they were like our programs,
and we were sort of the
vanguard organization.
So if we said, OK,
let's have free clinics,
then everybody would probably
agree to have a free clinic.
But they would be in
the Latino community,
and we would be in
the black community.
So we didn't partner
with them on that piece,
but we had a coalition around
the ideal of revolution.
So if we had an action,
we want to all protest,
then we could all pull
our own people out, right?
So it was a working
coalition, not a partnership
where we did things with them.
We had our own
agenda and we did it,
and they basically
followed our agenda.
AUDIENCE: OK.
I had just another question.
Sorry.
ELAINE BROWN: Oh, no, no.
You don't get it.
You blew that one, brother.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
I'm going to go fast.
No, I can talk to you
after if you like.
Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Thank you
so much for coming.
My name is Moe, and
I was born and raised
in Southern Illinois,
all white town.
And since I was little
I've been reading books
on the Black Panther Party.
I mean there's been a poster
of Fred Hampton in my room
for my entire life.
And that was just
always something
that was within me to
kind of search for answers
of why there's so much
injustice in the world,
and trying to understand my
role as a person of color
in this all white town.
And coming to Brown,
you learn a lot more,
but you still can't
change anything
because the point of it being
Brown is it's an institution,
and the definition
of institution
is that it doesn't change.
And so my question
is how can someone
like me and my peers
who are well-educated,
and those who don't have
the opportunity to seek out
the same kind of education as
I've been blessed to seek out,
how can we inform ourselves,
how can we spread the word, how
can we build each other up and
make each other feel respected,
feel like there's
justice in the world?
How can we build this--
ELAINE BROWN: I
think what you've
got to do, though, is
decide what your goals are.
In other words, is
it that you want
to be sort of loved
and respected yourself,
or as I was telling
this young sister who
is going to be a doctor--
was studying to be a doctor,
going to be a doctor--
what do you want to do?
And what we did in
the Black Panther
Party was we started our
own school, for example.
And all that will
go out the window,
everybody's going to feel good
if you get a school going--
after school program right here.
Aren't there some
little children
that probably could use
after school care for free?
Right?
Am I making this stuff up, what?
Yeah.
So it comes down to doing work.
That's what you have to do.
You have to put in work.
And one of the
things that I always
recommend to college
students is that when
you have a big campus like this
and you have a lot of money,
you don't have to go
crazy and get put out,
and you don't have to worry
about, oh, I'll get put up,
I do this.
But there's a lot of
food here, for example.
You know, seriously,
there's a lot of food.
I can tell you about how much
food went out the window today.
We ought to snatch that food.
It's like you took
the food back,
and you're going to
actually throw it away?
A friend of mine was in a
hotel in Atlanta yesterday,
and she was on
this fabulous floor
and they had all this food, and
every single thing that they
didn't eat was thrown out.
And this is like salmon,
and meat, and salad.
You know, all this food.
And there's food.
Just that alone, if you were
to go into a community here
in Providence and say we want to
start a program to at least do
some after school work with
some kids-- we can tutor,
we can feed them--
you could do that without
even breaking a sweat.
And that's the kind
of thing that you
can do that will transform you
and your peers that, as you
say, are privileged.
But you're not that privileged,
because in the end of the day,
it's like talking about
the black capitalists.
Like even Oprah,
any time she decides
to step out of her role,
whatever it might be,
she won't be able
to sustain that.
She doesn't even own OWN.
That's owned by the
Discovery Channel, right?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
ELAINE BROWN: That's
sad, isn't it?
But it's true.
It's true.
So we have to look at are
you really a [INAUDIBLE]..
Don't get too gussied
up about being
privileged because in a minute,
you're not that privileged.
But if you want to use this
opportunity that you have like
I do.
I feel like I'm in a
privileged position.
I have food and a car
and a place to live.
You know what I mean?
I have the things I need to get
through and navigate my life,
and I'm not sweating about it.
And so for you, I would think
that a bunch of young students
here could put together
a very quick program.
You could ask for all
the extra food from--
I don't know, do you have
dormitories here at Brown?
They have a dormitory life here?
AUDIENCE: We have a food
recovery network that
takes a lot of our extra
food that we normally
would throw away--
ELAINE BROWN: OK, well,--
AUDIENCE: --distribute.
ELAINE BROWN: --then
you have that going.
Well, then do something else.
Let's not be bored by
it, let's enhance it.
Let's do something else.
That isn't enough.
I was just giving
you a quick idea.
You can flip that idea
around any way you want to,
but I'm saying there are things
that you can do right now.
You can go into some
neighborhoods in Providence
where people don't have
a child care program,
and you could do a
child care after school.
Do you have a pool
here at Brown?
AUDIENCE: Um-hmm.
Yeah.
ELAINE BROWN: Well,
don't nobody know
if there's a pool at Brown?
AUDIENCE: We have a pool.
ELAINE BROWN: You could
bring some kids in here
during the summer, in a
season teach them swimming.
I mean there's just
like a bunch of things
that you could do that would
be very quick and meaningful
and not-- pardon me?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
ELAINE BROWN: No, no, no.
Let me tell you about
liability insurance,
because I know this stuff.
I just about know a little
bit about everything.
That's called a generalist.
OK, McClymonds High
School in West Oakland.
Where is my West Oak--
you know McClymonds.
All right, so they have
a swimming pool there,
am I right?
When's the last time
you saw it used?
10 years ago,
something like this.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
ELAINE BROWN: And it's a
three-quarter olympic-sized
pool.
Beautiful pool.
It's in the hood.
Nobody uses it.
It's been cordoned off, and
it's been sitting there.
So we go-- people that
I'm working with said,
why is the pool open?
The kids can't swim.
They're right there at the
high school-- you know,
black children have
a high drowning rate.
Did you know that?
We're the highest death by
drowning rate, black children.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
ELAINE BROWN: What?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
ELAINE BROWN: Water blocks?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
ELAINE BROWN: No,
well, we know why.
There's nothing wrong
with black people,
that's like we die of breast
cancer at a higher rate.
I'm just saying we have a
high drowning death rate.
So we need to teach
children how to swim.
That's just a quick--
these are thoughts, right?
They're just popping
off the top of my head.
So I'm going to McClymonds High.
It's an all-black
high school, and it's
considered inferior and all this
other stuff, blah, blah, blah.
And I said, why can't
you have the pool open?
It's an insurance problem.
So OK.
Now, I'm working with a
guy named Keith Carson.
He's a county supervisor.
So I say, well,
Keith Carson's office
will pay for the insurance.
What's the problem now?
Oh.
Now they don't have a problem.
So then nobody wanted to do it.
So I go to the school
district, bring
in the associate chief council
or whatever she was, and she
says, oh, well, the
district is supposed to pay
for the insurance anyway.
Now, who knew that?
All these years,
the pool is closed.
So what did it take?
We had to get little chemical
things, we had to look around,
had to put up some little
stuff saying this is deep
end, repaint.
I'm serious.
We had to just clean things up.
This took all of about
maybe, what, $10,000.
We bought all the children
swimsuits and stuff,
which was like another
$5,000, $6,000.
Gee, that was a lot
of money to get kids
in the swimming pool
who needed to swim,
and in the neighborhood who
could use the swimming pool.
So when people tell
me well, that's
being done, well, if
it was being done,
then we wouldn't have
hunger in America.
So it's not really
being done, is it?
So whatever that was
you were talking,
so I'm going to just get real.
So if you want to do something,
I'm giving you things to do.
You don't want to do those
things, do something else.
You know, take
children ice skating.
I don't care, but
you could be doing
stuff that will use
your privileged position
to transform some child to
say, gee, I don't even know
there was a Brown University.
I have taken children in
Atlanta, who live in the hood,
to Spelman.
They didn't know black
girls had a college
and that they wanted
to be doctors.
They didn't even know.
They didn't dream such a thing.
They didn't look
at the Cosby show--
thank God for the little things.
They didn't know that.
[LAUGHTER]
But they went there
and they went, wow!
These are black
girls in college?
They didn't know
anybody like that.
So that's the point I was
making, that there's things
that you can do now within
the framework of this school.
If the insurance
is a problem, you
can either resolve it
or move to something
where it's easier to do.
I'm not trying to find obstacles
because everybody always--
as Huey Newton told
me, everybody's
always bringing me a problem.
I know what the problems are.
What's the solution?
So if that's not a workable
plan, then do something else.
That's my position.
But do something.
In my words of my friend Bunchy
Carter, "If you only spit,
something got to get done."
And you can use your
position to do that.
I'm going to take
these last questions.
Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Hello, Miss Brown.
ELAINE BROWN: Yes.
AUDIENCE: You spoke on medicine
and technology and business.
But what can a public policy
or a political science student
do to help contribute
to the black community?
ELAINE BROWN: Well,
if you understand
that public policies are
really political policies,
it's political as it's
going to get, right?
Right?
It just means that we don't
even have to have a law.
We just create a
policy to do x, y or z.
The question is, can you use
that political machine to,
for example, snatch
money from the state,
the federal government or
somewhere, and build housing.
What do you want to
do with public policy?
Do you want to just study?
Like what are we going to
do about mass incarceration?
Can we change that?
We have a policy where the
executive of the state, which
is the governor--
the governor, executive branch,
that's the highest executive
branch-- the state has
the power to conduct,
to run the prison system.
So that means there are
never any checks and balances
on the prison system.
None.
Zero.
None.
Believe me.
So the governor
appoints the head
of the Department
of Corrections,
or whatever it's called
in this particular state
versus that one.
And that person does whatever
that person wants to do.
When it gets down into
the day-to-day life
of the prisoner, the
prisoner is there,
so guard x that's finally got
a little bit of power can say,
you better clean
that little corner.
And they say no, and
you go to the hole.
So those kinds of--
that is a small policy that's
affected by the big policy.
Why does the governor have
that kind of absolute power
to decide?
And so a prison guard can
say, you were rude to me,
and I didn't like the
way you rolled your eyes.
I'm writing you up.
Now you got 10 write-ups.
You go to the parole
board, it's a wrap for you.
Do you understand what I mean?
All those things are
in play all day long.
And we don't even know where
half this stuff came from.
And it's policies that people
put into place that nobody ever
challenges.
So if you're ready
to challenge that--
but I'm not sure how that goes--
but you could
begin to understand
what are the policies
that affect prisons
and affect hunger.
Why don't we have more food?
Why don't we have a policy
where everyone has a home?
I mean I don't know, do you?
You know what I'm saying?
I honestly don't know.
Why don't we have a
commitment to a policy,
and then people say, well,
that requires a budget,
and the budget requires this.
It goes on and on.
So I think that there is
something for everyone
to do within every
sphere of study
and every sphere of information.
I'm going to go and finish.
Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: Hello, ma'am.
ELAINE BROWN: How are you?
I saw her hair--
I'm not lying, this is so funny.
I saw her hair on your head.
I know that sounds really weird,
but her hair was on your head.
AUDIENCE: She has nice hair.
ELAINE BROWN: No, really.
When I turned around--
I'm sorry but if you were
sitting where I am it's
like he had hair
coming out here.
You had blonde
hair a minute ago.
AUDIENCE: She has nice hair.
ELAINE BROWN: No,
but anyway, go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Thank you
for your talk tonight.
And also more
specifically, thank you
for the survival programs
of the Black Panther Party,
including the free breakfast
program that fed me plenty
of mornings in Mississippi--
ELAINE BROWN: Well,
I'm glad to hear that.
AUDIENCE: --going to school.
ELAINE BROWN: Especially
since you're not
as old as some of the people
that tell me they were fed.
I'm like you were fed by
the breakfast program?
Wait, no, I'm saying I see these
people looking like they're
old, and I'm like,
oh, I must have
been 12 when I was working
in the breakfast program.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: So I am currently
attending Providence College
for my Master's in Education,
and I'm a sixth grade
teacher at an all-male school.
ELAINE BROWN: Are you
a fifth grade teacher?
AUDIENCE: Primarily sixth grade.
ELAINE BROWN: Oh,
oh, wait a minute.
Oh, sixth grade.
AUDIENCE: I mean they're
from about sixth grade.
ELAINE BROWN: But
you know one thing?
You do know that's the
most important job,
other than a doctor
I would say that--
AUDIENCE: And that
was my question.
ELAINE BROWN: Truly,
other than a doctor,
I would say elementary
school teacher is probably
the most important job
anyone could do right now.
That's just my assessment.
AUDIENCE: It's a blessing
I get to work with them.
ELAINE BROWN: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Can you
speak more specifically
to schooling and
literacy instruction
by the Panther Party?
ELAINE BROWN: Yes, I can.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
ELAINE BROWN: Because
we created a school,
and we had a school in East
Oakland, it was a model.
Everything we did was
like a model, because we
can be the school system.
We couldn't be the
food program, you know.
But we'd like encourage
people to see that this
is what you could have.
And our school, we
bought that school.
We paid cash for this building.
It was very beautiful.
And the story is, the
first thing we did was we
took care of--
I mean I hate these
kinds of conversations
that has this kind of
jargon, but the whole child
kind of concept.
People say now, the whole
child, as though you
could separate out the child.
I don't know what the
whole child means.
[LAUGH] I'll just
take half the child.
You know, you got children
that don't have anybody
at home, right?
Or they really don't have home.
I mean there's a lot of people--
how many people
know somebody that
calls himself having
a place to stay,
but they're really couchsurfing.
I consider that
to be a euphemism.
Do people know people like that?
They don't really
live anywhere, right?
They're living in
somebody's house,
you know, somebody's
play grandmother's house.
And she's going to get mad
because you're eating out
of the food, and
you're not cleaning up,
and whatever, I just don't
like you, or whatever it is.
But there's a lot of homeless
teenagers in America.
And I'm working with a lot
of them in West Oakland.
And I'm like, you don't
live anywhere, brother.
I'm sorry.
Do you have a key somewhere?
No, you don't live there.
You have to wait till
that person gets home.
So what we did was we said,
in order for you to learn,
we have to create the
conditions for learning.
You cannot be distracted by
things like hunger, you know.
But when you're hungry,
you're not really
thinking about
whether or not it's
a black poetry session or not.
You don't care, right?
You're looking for a
burger or something, right?
You don't care.
And you not worried
if it's a vegan food.
It's like there's this place
near where I am on 7th Street--
you know where the Bart
is over on 7th Street?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
ELAINE BROWN: And they had this
place called Mandela Foods,
and it's like vegan--
you can buy kale
chips for $5 a bag.
$5.
$5.
But next door is
the dollar store
where you could buy two
big bags of Funyuns for $1.
Let me think.
Am I going with
kale chips or I'm
going to two big
bags of Funyuns,
because I ain't got no
money because I have
to feed four children,
and I'm going
to make a meal out of Funyuns
and some hot dogs and a can,
right?
And people can say, oh,
you're not eating healthy,
which I think is an
incorrect adverb.
It seems like it
should be healthfully.
But anyway.
[LAUGHTER]
We fed our children
three meals a day.
This cut down on
all absenteeism.
We never had absentee children,
because even the worst person
on the planet were going
to kick their children out
to go to that school because
that's breakfast, lunch,
and dinner.
We combed people's hair.
We brushed people's teeth that
had never brushed their teeth.
We gave people showers.
We bought clothes for them.
We got glasses for people
that couldn't see because we
tested everybody coming in.
We had hearing stuff
that we found out.
Children had infection.
You're poor, you're living
where you have mold,
you have all kinds of asthma,
hearing, and other problems,
right?
AUDIENCE: Um-hmm.
ELAINE BROWN: Then you
have problems at home.
Somebody's beating
you every day.
Your cousin came over and
raped your other cousin,
and all these other
things that go on that we
act like black people don't do.
Have you noticed how
we don't do that stuff?
No, no, black people
don't do that.
Yes, we do.
We do it.
And so we got all
in your life, and we
let everybody know you're
here, and you are loved,
and you are going to be OK.
So that first thing
is, I am really
comfortable in this school.
Secondly, we never had more
than 10 children in a class.
Thirdly, we fixed up every
single thing in the school.
We painted that
school every year.
We put carpeting on all
the classroom floors, which
we thought was fabulous.
We had a fabulous auditorium,
and the children had a--
they had Wednesday
night teen club, Sunday
they had the Son of Man temple.
Every day you could
come to our, what
we called the learning center,
but it was also our school.
And the next thing we
did was we expected you
to learn how to read and write.
No matter where you are, you're
going to finish up that year.
And some children read
at different levels,
and we didn't put children
in that read or did things.
We took them where we
got them, and we tried
to bring everybody up to speed.
We had one boy-- that I just
want to say this very quickly--
and he was like
fifth grade student,
and he was actually classified
by the public school system
of Oakland as uneducable.
What does that even mean?
You've heard that before, right?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
ELAINE BROWN: Isn't that insane?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
ELAINE BROWN: So what does that
mean, he doesn't have a brain,
because that would be the only
way you could be uneducable,
right?
Like I don't even
understand that concept.
So anyway, he was one of
those boys-- you know,
we feminize
education in America.
I know a lot of people won't
like that that I say that,
but it's true.
We want boys to sit still.
Boys cannot sit still.
Am I right or wrong?
AUDIENCE: You are
absolutely correct.
ELAINE BROWN: Do boys have
to get up and jump around?
AUDIENCE: Yes, they do.
ELAINE BROWN: They
got to have a cape,
and they got to jump
down the stairs.
Boys cannot walk
down a set of stairs.
They have to jump and hit
their head or something.
Girls can just sit there
all day long and chatter.
Boys cannot sit like that.
They need to run around.
This one old teacher told me
they have ants in their pants.
Go on out there, run around.
And we don't even have
recess anymore, right?
I mean a lot of
schools don't have it.
So what we did was we tried
to have this one boy--
we tested him.
He was pretty average in
reading and everything
else, but in math he did
stuff so fast that we had--
We said, OK, well,
try this, try that,
try that. we had this
guy Amar Casey, who's
now a professor at San Francisco
State, and the boy was just--
he was up into algebra
and anything else.
And so we're like he's
the only person going
to be in his class.
He's going to be bored, and
that's what was happening.
You know, the reckless
eyeballing where
you get put out and you get
in the pipeline for that one,
don't you?
AUDIENCE: Um-hmm.
ELAINE BROWN: Am I
making this stuff up?
AUDIENCE: Not at all.
ELAINE BROWN: You're
going in the pipeline,
sitting up there talking
about [HEAVY BREATHING],,
or throwing stuff,
or doing spitballs--
whatever goofy stuff kids do.
You're going in the pipeline
for that one, right?
So this boy was in a
pipeline of being uneducable.
They didn't come up with the
police program at that time.
They didn't have police in
school like they did now.
We found that he was
just bored, and I
know you know that, right?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
ELAINE BROWN: He was just bored.
And the only way
he wasn't bored--
And we bought a
computer in 1973.
We were like the only
school with a computer,
and we bought it for
that boy, because he
was only one that
could really appreciate
how to begin to do
math and whatever
it was on this-- it was a very
rudimentary thing in comparison
to today.
My point is we had to take
everything into consideration.
Every single thing.
And we created the
conditions for you to be--
We took you back and
forth to school from home.
We had kids who
were beaten at home.
We threatened the parents, too.
Oh, no, I know you're not
beating up little Donte,
because see, we'll beat you.
We would say stuff like that.
[LAUGHTER]
And we would actually
mean it, too.
But see, you can't get away
with that in a public school.
AUDIENCE: No, not today, no.
[LAUGH]
ELAINE BROWN: But you
could look like that.
You could go--
You could do a evil
eye or something.
But my point is we took
care of every single thing
in your life.
And once we got you
into that school--
It's a no-brainer to learn.
It ain't hard to learn.
But it's hard to learn.
When I was in North
Korea they had
if you have five imperialists
that you kill for,
how many will be alive?
It would be stuff like this.
So we did math like that, too.
[LAUGHTER]
Some strange math examples.
AUDIENCE: Can't do that today
in public school either.
ELAINE BROWN: It wasn't
a James Brown reader,
I can tell you that right now.
So we did all that, and we
tried to make it relevant.
But the most important thing
was that you were safe,
and you were whole, and
you knew people loved you,
and you knew that no one could
come in there and hurt you.
We had kids that
would be running in,
they come for
dinner-- the kids that
didn't go to the school, older.
And they would run in there,
running from the police.
They'd run into school.
They knew nobody--
You're not going to
come past that door
unless you got a warrant,
and even then it's
going to be a question.
We had people on the roof.
We were serious.
That's in East Oakland.
And so I say all
that to say is we
built in all of those things.
I think we created
a great model,
and I would love to see this
happen again in public schools.
And we wanted it to
be a public school
model where the school
becomes the base
of the whole community.
How many mothers did
I meet that could--
One woman said to
me, well, I know
he got a problem writing curpis.
I said, oh, I see the problem.
He's writing curpis.
What is that?
It's cursive, right?
And here is this mother
that doesn't know.
So we started a program for
parents to learn to read.
And we did a fundraiser
and we gave away food.
We did a lot of stuff with
the family kind of thing,
you know what I'm saying,
what families there were.
We had a woman that was
shooting-- had her son shooting
her up for heroin.
And we just took him from her
and put him in our dormitories
and sent her on to
Synanon, or whatever
that was called at the time.
What you going to do?
Please, call the
police and tell them
we took your child because
you're shooting up heroin.
I'm sorry about the heroin,
but we can't have it.
So we're going to have
to take you somewhere.
We took that boy, and we did
that to a lot of children,
believe it or not.
But we had to find the money,
and that was the hard part.
And we found the money,
and we worked really
hard to keep that school going.
And we kept it for, I
would say 12 years maybe
it was in full operation.
We were right across the
street from one of the worst
public housing projects.
Still pretty rough area, 65th
and East 14, Havenscourt.
The home of Felix Mitchell.
So that's what I think has
to be done with education.
We have to know that we
love these children so much.
I don't care if your
mother is this or that.
We're like, his mother
should have done that.
What kind of
conversation is that?
You know, everybody
can have a baby.
We have a duty to our
children, all of our children,
and we have a duty
to take care of them.
And that's what I meant by
going out and using whatever
resources could
be here that would
be available for the children.
And I think that that's
the most important job.
And I have to say
that beyond a doctor--
and I do think if
you ever get sick,
you ain't going to be
calling for no teacher.
You certainly not going to
look for no hip-hop artist
or basketball player.
You'd be like, doctor, save me.
Because the doctor is the only
thing standing between you
and the end, right,
outside of other things
that may intervene.
But you know what I'm saying.
So I think being a doctor
is a noble profession,
but I think the other great
profession is elementary--
not just any teacher,
but elementary school
because that's where
the rubber meets--
I mean it's over by the
time you get to junior.
Kids going to McClymonds
ninth grade, can't read.
It's a wrap.
You gotta start
all over with them.
I mean you can do
it, but they're not
going to be able to make
it out of high school,
and then they'll
just quit, right?
So you're doing a noble work,
and just keep on doing it,
and try to maybe develop
some other programs that
will supplement what the
public school system is
failing to do as a system.
OK.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
ELAINE BROWN: I'm leaving.
She gave me the evil eye.
You said the last people.
One here, one there.
That's it.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
ELAINE BROWN: You have to
make your questions short,
because you can see how I
briefly answer question.
AUDIENCE: I'll be quick.
So you spoke beautifully
in A Taste of Power
about George Lester
Jackson, and--
ELAINE BROWN: Yeah, thank you.
AUDIENCE: Yes.
I was wondering if now,
all these years later,
you could speak to the continued
life, legacy and spirit
of George Jackson in both the
inside prison and the larger
outside prison?
ELAINE BROWN: Wow.
Thank you for that question.
George Jackson was
Huey Newton's hero.
There was no one
that he probably
admired more than George.
And certainly, in my case-- and
George Jackson was a prisoner.
He was arrested at I think
18 or 19, and he was--
well, I know he was 18 because
he did 11 years in prison.
He went down on a $70
robbery at a gas station.
At that time, they had this
thing, something called
the indeterminate sentence.
So he was given a
sentence of one to life.
So that means that every
year he comes up for parole,
he's never going
to get out, or it
depends on how well you do
with the officers and all
that stuff.
That's what I mean about
that policy question
where they get to make a
decision on your whole life
just because of whatever
they feel like doing.
So George decided to
organize prisoners
in what we call a
prisoner movement,
because we don't think
about that anymore.
We just think about
mass incarceration.
We have some kind of
just generic terms
and we don't really know.
And George, the important
thing about George
and why he got
killed was very much
why Fred Hampton was, because
George Jackson organized
not just black prisoners, but
Latino and white prisoners.
I mean under George's
authority, we
could say, you had people
from the Aryan Brotherhood,
people from the Mexican
Mafia, what have you.
And one of the things that
he said that I like to quote
was, "settle your differences--
settle your differences
and recognize who
the common enemy is."
And George fought to do that.
And he was, at one point,
soldered in his cell
because he was
becoming a Marxist,
and he was soldered in his
cell for four years, never left
his cell.
I mean sealed the cell up.
He set an example for everyone
and created one of the biggest
prisoner movements.
He had the Folsom manifesto,
which I don't talk about,
but there was.
And all the prisoners
really wanted
was the same thing
they want now,
which is they're not
even saying let us out.
They're saying can we just
have like decent housing
so we're not freezing
in winter and so forth.
Can we have health care?
The California prisons
were just about
emptied out because of the
failure of health care.
And so prisoners fighting
for their own rights
was what George--
And he said, but
remember, we are
prisoners who are in a
prison within a prison,
because those of you on
the other side of this wall
are also prisoners.
And it's not that you have
necessarily a duty to us,
you have a duty to all of us
because this is all one thing.
When George was
killed, of course,
the response was the uprising
at Attica State Prison
in New York, which
everybody should know
was just a horrific moment.
They took over that
prison for maybe eight
days, a bunch of prisoners--
black, white, Latino,
what have you.
And Rockefeller, the then
Governor of New York,
called an end to it and
they shot down 40 people--
blowed them down in
a matter of seconds.
And that kind of ended
the prisoner movement.
I think that brought
a pall on everybody.
And so somewhere in
these different pockets
we still have people fighting.
We need to get back
to that concept.
We need to get back
to prisoner rights.
I tried to be a part of a
effort in Georgia in 2012--
no, 2010 now.
In 2010, wow-- and in December.
And my boy, who's been in
the hole ever since that,
was deemed one of
the leaders, and they
shut down work-- stoppage, did a
work stoppage at eight prisons.
And the spirit of George
was a part of that.
And they just said
we're not going to work
unless we're working for free.
It's really slave labor.
And it definitely goes
against the 13th Amendment,
not that that really
matters, but it does.
And so they refused
to work for one day.
There were eight prisons.
All of them.
And it was every single group
of people that was there.
And people were told
don't even think
about working if you
could not-- you know.
So they didn't work,
and the prison guards,
they started burning
up stuff in the prison.
They were hosing people down,
they were beating people badly
to make them work, amazingly.
I mean it's not like
they did something.
They refused to do something.
So it was really peaceful,
really nonviolent,
and they were beaten badly.
But it went on for
almost eight days.
And about four of the prisons
held out for quite a while,
but people were--
There was one guy that
was beaten so badly.
I mean there are people with
real severe injuries just
because of that, but they
still continued that spirit.
And in California, the
spirit of George Jackson
is almost palpable on
the yard at San Quentin.
But at the same time there was
an organization called No More
Tears that formed in the
prison, and one of the founders
is working with me and my
Oakland & The World thing.
And No More Tears,
the idea was that they
were killing and stabbing
each other so much,
Crips and Bloods.
We have gangs in
the joint, right?
Crips and Bloods,
and these people
identify as that, like
whatever that means.
Like what, you're getting
money from the Crips society?
No.
There is no money.
They just identify
as Crips and Bloods.
They're killing each other.
Mexicans.
You've got Northern
California Mexicans don't even
talk to Southern California.
It's horrible.
And so No More Tears said
we're going to stop, finally.
And it was Jerry Elster, this
brother that I'm speaking of,
and another guy who was a Blood.
Well, he was--
yeah, he was a Crip
and the other guy was a Blood.
And they basically
put the word out
that we're gonna stop this, and
they used George's statement,
"settle your differences."
So I think that spirit is there,
but it's not organized anymore
than anything else is, but
I'm glad you mentioned,
because George Jackson remains
one of my personal heroes.
And every August the 21st,
I send a text message
to Angela Davis and
she sends me one back.
And we cry over
George every year.
Thank you for asking about him.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
ELAINE BROWN:
You're the last one.
Is this going to
be a good question?
AUDIENCE: I'm hoping.
ELAINE BROWN: So we can wind
up with a really positive.
Look at the weight I put oh her.
Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Thank you
all for waiting.
My question is also
about A Taste of Power.
So upon reading it, one of
the things that struck me most
was your focus and emphasis
on the relationships
that you had with
people, and bringing out
what they meant to you and how
they influenced your decision
process.
And that blew me away
because I'm so used
to hearing men
tell their stories,
especially men in politics
and in leadership positions
describe their choices as
being separate from the people
around them and
distancing themselves
from emotional
connection and perceived
weakness and emotional bias.
And I was just
wondering why you chose
to include that emotional
vulnerability in the book?
And if you think there is
any power behind doing so
as a black woman?
ELAINE BROWN: I could
give you one example.
For example, like Huey?
You mean my relationship
with Huey [INAUDIBLE]??
AUDIENCE: Or with your daughter,
and how caring for her inspired
you to like-- or helped
inform your decision to like
[INAUDIBLE]--
ELAINE BROWN: Well, we do,
we are inspired by things,
aren't we, in our lives.
Most of us are--
Everything that
we've experienced
becomes the experience.
You know, it's like if mom
made the best something,
then you can't even
imagine anything
being better than that.
You know, that kind of thing.
And I felt that
this was my story.
It was a political story
in a certain sense,
but it was like how did
some woman become the head
of the Black Panther Party?
You know I would get asked
that question all the time.
And people ask me,
well, I heard you
slept with this one,
this one, and this one,
and that's how you became
the head of the Black Panther
Party.
So there was, first of
all, some big pay-off.
And second of all, as
though Huey Newton was
some kind of idiot,
and as though he hadn't
been with 80 million women.
You know what I'm saying.
So that's going to
be the criterion.
I don't think so, because
that wasn't there.
But I felt it was necessary
for me to be cathartic,
and also to be somewhat honest.
I don't mean like I
was brutally honest.
There were things I
didn't talk about.
But everything I talked
about was true, as far
as I recalled, as I said.
But that was important,
first of all,
because I was in so much pain
after I left the Black Panther
Party.
I probably cried for
the next 10 years,
and my daughter suffered
tremendously because of that.
All I wanted to do was just die
after I left the Black Panther
Party.
I felt there was no
point in my life.
And you have to get
in touch with that,
and just go ahead and say
that's what's happening,
as opposed to I can do
this or I can do it.
We all suffered.
We had tremendous pain that we
suffered, even in the Party,
emotionally.
Somebody asked me
about that today,
and I don't know how
to necessarily resolve
that or address that because
it's really not that deep.
But I did think
for myself it was
important to just be cathartic
and just say what I had to say.
I mean I felt one of the
most difficult things,
outside of talking
about how I wanted
to be white-- that was hard.
People were like, well,
why did you tell that?
Because it's true, and I know
a lot of black girls growing up
that have to deal
with that question
every day, whether or not--
We make a decision.
I'm a black person
in America, but that
takes a lot of decision-making
in the sense of when
white people say,
well, you're not
like the other black people.
You're special.
And you're articulate, you know.
And you don't even
look like black people.
And we really like you.
And black people like that.
It matters, if you'll
pardon the use of the term.
You follow me?
It matters.
So what do we do about that?
And I felt in my journey--
People were mad with me
about the white man that
was in the beginning
of my book, and I've
been attacked for that, but I'm
still standing and they're not.
So I told my story.
And you know what?
My book has never
gone out of print,
and I think it's because a lot
of young women, especially,
and I still get a lot of
letters, believe it or not,
who feel like the
book affected them.
Like finally somebody said
what they were thinking
and they were scared to say it.
And in some of the other
books that come out
of this period or
any period, there's
always this black and white.
No, I mean I did some stuff
that was really horrific.
For me to show my
daughter that book was,
I couldn't even think about it.
It was hard to show
my daughter that book.
And she had her
judgments about it,
like why did you sleep
with all those people?
It was the time, what can I say?
And that wasn't even the half
of it, you know what I mean?
It's like this was the
cleaned up version of it.
She was embarrassed.
My daughter was very
embarrassed by that.
But I couldn't allow
her to be [INAUDIBLE]..
My mother, who didn't have
sense enough to be embarrassed,
I didn't speak about
her very positively,
but people think I did
because they don't read.
They think that she was
this wonderful woman that
sacrificed for me.
But she was something
other than that.
So all of those elements, those
were the themes of the book.
But it was my one
story as it crossed
into this incredible whirlpool,
vortex of revolution,
and how it came to be there.
So if that touched
you in some way,
as it has touched
a lot of people,
then that may have been the real
reason I had to do it anyway.
That people said,
wow, this brought--
I didn't come on like I came out
the womb, power to the people.
[LAUGHTER]
I didn't.
I grew up in America,
and all these things
were influences on what I
did and what I didn't do.
And I made decisions not based
on like I made a bad choice.
No.
I had the choice of A and B.
I didn't have C, D through Z.
You know what I mean?
It's like people are like,
this person made bad choices.
Like let me see, I'm
offered to be a millionaire
or I'm offered to stay in
the hood and sling dope.
I'm going to say no, I'd
rather stay in the hood
and sling dope.
Really?
I don't have the other
offer on the table.
These are the offers I have.
Zero or slinging.
You know what I'm saying.
I'm going with slinging.
So those are the
things that I do,
and I appreciate you're
asking me about it,
and I hope people do read it.
And we're going to do a
book signing, Miss Hassani.
And I think it is, I really
know that I worked hard.
It took me eight years.
I cried over that book.
I broke out into hives.
It was so hard to admit
some of that stuff for me.
And then I had this wonderful
mentor named Calvin Hernton--
I don't if anybody's
ever heard of him.
He did a book called Sex and
Racism in America, and he said,
are you going to cry or are
you going to write this book?
I was like, [SAD FACE]
I'm gonna write the book.
[LAUGHTER]
But it was really
hard, and I had
to admit things, and look at
myself, hold up that mirror.
But I think I did it--
A lot of other young
women and women like me
could identify with.
And I really, truly--
the book is now an e-book.
It has never gone out of print.
So I'm very proud of that.
And hopefully we'll
have a movie one day.
And maybe my little daughter
Alicia Keys will play me, huh?
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
She and I identify on--
I always tell her
that I intended
to be her when I played
piano, sing my little songs.
Kind of be cute and just
play piano and sing songs.
And she said, well,
you know, if I
had been around when you were
there, I'd have been you.
So we always say, I
would have been you.
She's a very cool, good person.
So let's see, maybe we'll
get a movie out of that.
All right.
Thank you so much--
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
ELAINE BROWN: --for just--
[APPLAUSE]
ELAINE BROWN: What are we doing?
We going to sign books?
Thank you.
HASSANI SCOTT:
Thank you, everyone,
for coming out tonight.
Hold up, y'all.
Thank you.
Before we transition
into the book signing,
I would like to make
a few acknowledgments.
I organized this
event independently,
which means that I
had a lot of support,
and I think it's very necessary
for me to acknowledge that.
So Black Power 50th, Affirming
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
featuring Elaine Brown was made
possible through the generous
support of the Office of
Institutional Diversity,
the Undergraduate Student Event
Fund, the Dean of the College
at the Taubman Center for
American Politics and Policy,
the Center for the Study
of Slavery and Justice,
the Department of
Africana Studies,
the Rights and Reason
Theater, the C.V. Starr
Program in Business,
Entrepreneurship
and Organizations, the
Cogent Center for Humanities,
the Pembroke Center for
Teaching and Research on Women,
the Department of Modern
Culture and Media,
the Center for the Study of
Race and Ethnicity in America,
the BCSC, specifically
the Black Heritage Series,
and the Lambda Iota Chapter
of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority
Incorporated.
Thank you to each
of my co-sponsors,
and the team members who
offered support and helped
bring BP-50 into fruition.
I would also like to thank
Elaine Brown, Dr. Anthony
Bogues who provided a lot of
support, intellectual as well.
Yes.
I'll keep it at that.
Shina Want-- Shana
Weinberg, my apologies.
Dr. Liza Cariaga-Lo, Margo
[? Swarett, ?] Anne Marie Pont,
Joshua [? Siggee, ?] Shelley
Adriance, Marguerite Joutz,
Dean Maud Mandel, Barbara Sardy,
Dr. Mama Francoise Hamlin, Dr.
Tricia Rose--
seriously, Dr. Francoise
Hamlin, thank you.
Dr. Tricia Rose, the
Shomburg Center for Research
and Black Culture, Dr.
Sylviane Diouf, Sonia Sanchez,
Dean Maitrayee Bhattacharyya,
Dr. Brian Meeks,
Karen Allen Baxter, Alonzo
Jones, Kathleen Moyer,
Deborah Bowen--
a lot of people, y'all.
Jordan McCracken-Foster--
I'm going
to make you stand,
because Jordan
is responsible for
the poster designs.
We went to middle
school together,
we went to high school
together, and he's at RISD now.
[APPLAUSE]
ELAINE BROWN: So it's
Sat out for Jordan.
Warren Harding, Lydia
Kelow-Bennett, Amory Bennett,
[? Tobe-- ?] I may be
mispronouncing her last name
and my apologies in advance--
[? Baser, ?] the Brown
Bookstore, Diana Richardson,
Brown Graphic Services Copy
Center at the Brown Faculty
Club, Cheryl Carberry,
Brianna Peters, Melissa
[? Vigilance, ?]
to [? Rolodox ?]
from [? Jay ?] Wu.
Antoine Matthews, Media
Services, Event Support,
Bluestockings Magazine,
Brown Dining Services,
to everyone who
shared and publicized
this event, to those whose
names I have failed to mention.
Two of those names
are [? Kaylee ?] Wyatt
and Dominique [? Balu, ?]
to [? Zorno ?] Hurston,
to Shante Taylor, my mom, my dad
who's not here with us tonight.
He's back at home in LA.
And my brother Ethan
who looks like he's just
waking up from his slumber.
[LAUGHTER]
And to God.
I am deeply grateful.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you for your presence.
[APPLAUSE]
And the book signing is outside.
[APPLAUSE]
