had been actively involved with political activity back then but how did it come to be that you were incarcerated and unjustly so in the minds of many people who want to be shared broad general terms what it was that led to your incarceration what revolved around the fabrications of the fabrication of criminal charges the infiltration of various political organization various law enforcement agencies because the black panther party advocated on self defense against racist attack the united states government of course could not deal with any organization of oppressed people or a national minority that stood up to police attack you know of which there was a great deal didn't come out of all the civil rights history of our country but i think that when we examine the history of the united states we see that the criminalization of all resists since to rac domination on race this activity has been a clear pattern in american in the american political landscape if we go back to slavery to the antebellum south we stands up before the world and say and it says that it has there's no such thing as political prisoners within the confines of the borders of the united states and the reason why the united states government is able to say that develop the type of support that would change the nature of the dialogue yes those are words what you call it's like what is a political prisoner what is a criminal activity in the criminal eyes didn't turn it into a crime and make it not political prisoner agencies and and law enforcement agencies the st must create the impression that those who dissent are somehow outside of the pale of consideration a and militants yes to give you an example there was one kind of intelligence operation that went into that was aimed at of the black panther party and you once you define the parameters of aa of an argument that's what you define that this is the left side of an argument and this is the right side of an argument anyone that comes up with the idea or concept that does all in order to encompass facts then somehow that's supposed to be beyond the pale so radical perception or a perception that tries to get at the root causes of what's called an exactly social economic or political difficulty could be labeled that way because it's extremism and it isn't able to be idea of black self determination of african americans determining the quality and direction of the lives of empowerment of the african american community and they were running a little bit scar g of criminal activities on the part of law enforcement agencies i mean there was a whole panoply of illegal activities that were carried out by various law enforcement officials who today enjoy unprecedented credibility prestige in various positions of government and you would know that well because that was directed at you yes and we're going to spell out what it was and how it was or how can we you know what happened i mean well as i said i was a for and there were a number of police undercover agents in the black panther party well the bureau's special services the new york intelligence unit of  fabricated through it through these infiltrators certain criminal charges against the leadership they fabricated they created a scenario too that would result in the indictment and it created a great deal of it generated a great deal of sympathy for the black panther party around the world yes and so what happened was is that i was indicted i spent almost a year in prison on that indictment and under surveillance and under harassment and under under physical event even physical contact very often against would you want to try and very many cases to just physically defend yourself or those near to you right i mean people should understand that people don't understand that and i want to get to all kinds of things well i want to get back to that i'm just saying basically that's the impression people have of the black panther party if they remember it all but my point was i was as i was traveling around the country i was placed  of anyone else around me or whom and with whom i was engaged in political activity i was also placed on the security of the x their security index supposedly was an index put as many as thousands and thousands of internal security threat they were nervous i will be one of the nerds yeah sometimes that is really changed they haven't but i mean people perceive them they thought they were something or whatever they were going to extra constitutional and i think still on the books i believe well you see this is this is this is the danger and may perhaps we can talk about it later on because i don't wanna lose my twenty yeah this is not dangerous of the whole concept of the war on drugs yeah right  war on drugs provide the smokescreen to continue these particular types of activities under the guise of enforcing the law oh yeah protecting the public from a very heinous beyond the called who that was distributed to all the f b i field offices around the country so that whenever you try out to a particular city the police will be supplied with a updated photograph of you so that they could this meant that a number of counter intelligence operations were aimed specifically at myself and individuals around me one of these operations involve my relationship with the path of twenty one who remained incarcerated was attacked by the f b i they wrote letters in to certain members of the panther twenty one were in prison telling them that i had not that i was not working in their behalf while i was on the outside that the central office to the main office or central committee the central leadership of the black panther party was taking their defense money and the bill money and using it for other purposes and that they had basically were being abandoned and now they were sending these letters into the panthers in jail they were sending letters to to take it over by claiming that the west coast a leadership was stealing the money and not working on behalf of the peasants why so they used this type of divide and conquer you know it was very effective  various informants and various mechanisms that he would be killed during this east coast tour more and of course the man was appropriately paranoid he was very upset about this and he took those precautions that he thought would ensure his safety i imagine and you would have helped him in that business to see i didn't know at this particular time that there were certain individuals certain information was being given to him say saying these things about myself and other papers on the east coast i see right and then the government released a forged letter in the name of the parents of twenty  very upset with with something that had happened with a husband and someone else on the east coast on the west coast and she threatened someone over the telephone and this was recorded that threat was used as the basis to to justify a newton's attempt to kill me so i was informed of this through various sources that i had  on the west coast and i realized that if he knew came to the east coast to conduct a speaking to that that my life would be in extreme danger and so i had to jump  bail this was all planned by the way to cause me to jump bail because you see the case against them like both of the past twenty one was a very flimsy case and by this time it basically fell apart it was proven that the only physical evidence that they  convicted of a charge that put you in prison for twenty years and from your perspective in the perspective of an open view of the of the of the evidence of the situation under which you were incarcerated for lo these long twenty years as it were that you ought not to have been incarcerated that you were wrongly incarcerated that you that extra legal methods were used to a constant rate you for this long twenty year period is this more or less correct that you were all of them you served twenty years time in the united states federal prison system a state prison or a state for a prison systems for charges of which you were not guilty and you were wrongfully accused and congratulations on your release and welcome back into the you know the streets of new york as i say and so forth and i just apologize in the name of the people the united states for you having had to suffer and lose twenty years of your life that way well i think you know was known as the black liberation army whom particular time that was the name that was basically placed on it and we had began a campaign against the drug dealers in the african american community across the country and this was a physical campaign and i was arrested in june of nine thousand and seventy one organized all of their resources to convict me for the shooting of two policemen that had the two officers who were shot a week or ten days prior to my arrest and the way they did that and they conducted a public campaign of vilification they label those terrorists cop killers everything every every name imaginable much as they do much like they do today whenever the united states decides to press the police department had a public relations specialist by the name of robert daly who was a writer to build up the image of the police in the black community should remember that the police was responsible for it was murders of black people at this particular time that's why the black panther party came into existence and we see that today the police are still responsible for countless murders of black youth yeah so in many respects the lack of political empowerment of the african or just addressing of the ills that confronted the black community that time you suffered for that in a certain very real sense by having been set up by this government was a fearful of that you've been twenty year long years in prison you come out and the conditions of underlying racism continue that screw it you see any improvement you see any change do you see how do you see the difference between now and then if you want to address that issue or can you been observing things of course from inside but i wonder how do you feel now i don't want to use because you've been in touch with things you've had literature and so forth it's not as though you're not always direct and we will sleep in for twenty years over having track of things obviously been up with things but i'm just wondering how do you see things now having this being made in one thousand nine hundred you're only just out the last couple of months or so how does it seem to you particularly how does it seem to you as far as the afro american community is concerned from the you remembered it and from the way you see it if you look about what about in new york and the united states now when i've been traveling around speaking in different areas and on different campuses and i've been going through various communities in this country it is clear to me that the counterintelligence program had left a scar on the african american community it created a vacuum principled individuals who have personal agendas were opportunistic and therefore what has happened and what i have seen is that there is this great hunger in the black community for principled and militant leadership to the point where black people are willing and almost to follow any word yet that begins to address the issues you know i see that the objectives of the c revolutionary struggle any understanding of social struggle any commitment to social change these documents that was the goal of these documents it is sad to say they were very successful because what i see  of social or radical change there was a sense of commitment there was a sense of i don't know idealism is the right term but a sense of the possibility of having major change then that was in the black community when you were operate when you were you know in the in the panthers then there was also a broad among the general youth there was an anti vietnam sentiment there was resentment against the assassination of the kennedy brothers against the assassination of dr king and other kinds of acts of violence that were characterized in the united states but there was a reaction among the youth to see major changes i wonder you said you see among the black community now a lack o'neill is a most do you see it among the general society has youth in general not only black but the youth in general just seems not to be able to have some sort of a vision of ideals the means for transforming a system which you can see still continues as to be fundamentally unjust socially politically and economically i think that one of the problems here is  that the counterintelligence programs and the attempts of the status quo to quell political dissent in this country will so immensely affect you that the majority of you black and white don't know who they are now and don't have any sense of identity or direction that's the worst kind of alienation and that only that you know not only that but they have bought hook line and sinker the american dream yeah to the point where they have adopted the attitude that it's all about me yeah they have adopted the attitude of individual ism and they have basically fell into the the trap of of materialist consumption of materialism when you listen to them speak their conversation completely lacks any analysis of their situation devalues all scrambled up you know you see i mean we have black youth who we're  africa who at the same time would wear gold chains around their neck from south africa i mean after all south africa is the major producer of gold in the world and especially in the western world yeah that's right y of they could make it in this is basically saying that they're black yet you see so so you know is this type of schizophrenia yeah is this type of scrambled up politics on lack of politics that makes for the type of situation that we see ourselves in today in the society and i think there is a massive reeducation process here because our house believes the better as malcolm x once said that history is the best subject to reward all research well when you lack a historical perspective of what has preceded you then you are left to fire in your own way based on what you know and this is this is exactly what the counterintelligence program did it cut off the prior generation that was committed to struggle and social change in this country from the current generation of youth and it has left the current generation of without an anchor without information and without direction yeah that's in the black use and that's in the youth in general and to a certain sense that might be among peoples in general who are interested in seeing some sort of a qualitative transformation of the of the situation in that schizo funny condition it comes to its major focus within the black community because within the black community the greatest injustices continue to come down upon the people and is there that the schizophrenia in a certain sense or that the pressures that come out of there are probably other most acutely felt but it's characteristic of the general society and you think well yes but i think you are a great deal of the general sense yes but i think what we need to understand that is a historical continu  of of of this country that was being colonized by europeans once that agricultural base had developed to the point where industrialization started from the northeast in the northern becoming in a certain sense and if we look at the broad development of the american economy might be seen as wage slaves within the one generally way slaves slave it's a white slave system that is characteristic of the system people trying to work and they can't even work they work full time in they still can't get above the poverty line exactly can't get a bit of that wage law passed and that sort of thing you know but i would like regulate wage slaves yes but i would like to take that even further because the race this nature of this country of this nation  manifest from the very beginning and it became more in demick in the culture in the euro centric culture in order to justify real dehumanization of africans and indians and other people of color yeah and the exploitation so my point was not to get that as the urbanization process intensified and industrialization process developed black people african americans gradually as a result of technology technological developments have become  longer viable in terms of the economy to society so now america has to figure out what to do with their solution is to put them in prison prisons are full prisons go but the prison system then has to prisons private industry yeah and i have seen from personal experience like in new york state for instance in this day for instance we could see their fully seventy percent of the prison prisoners in the state come from seven  answer is to try and get another bill passed build more prisons exact if they can exactly so when we this brings us to what i was saying about the war on drugs because the war on drugs today is used in much the same fashion th the across the nation essentially brought home to white people that there was this huge churning mass of blue that discontent right in the midst of the american dream well there's now still what what what is the prognostication well of reaction there might be able to be indicated i would hate to get into prognosis but i would say that we have today  situation and again we need to understand the nature of racism in this is i absolutely the nature of the finding the argument that the media engages in the media and gauges it today racism is not being dealt with was being bandied about by the media is racial problems racism is not being dealt with the terms like reverse discrimination y reverse racism these terms of constantly thrown about by various white commentators and by various a step in the figures i wanted to get away from the very real fact that racism in the united say well of individual person if a black person says that they hate white people then he's a racist ok i would beg to differ because racism in order to be defined as such has to have the you are labeled a racist yeah because you defend yourself against that yeah then i will say that those individuals are blaming the victim absolute scapegoating exact legendre of blaming the victim of the crime for the crime so we need to be very clear about that that there is this whole move afoot to be absolved racist carved up on the part of the majority culture by labeling people of color oh yeah no question on that a toff but it doesn't it we still have to address the basic racial racist nature of the society which hasn't been addressed disgrace the blacks hispanics also no asiatics to a degree and this is all evidence of a culture let's say a white dominant culture that perhaps is in securing and i'll be itself what causes this kind of a thing to it's particularly prevalent here in new york city at this particular time but it's indicative of a dominant culture that is not at all secure of itself in terms of being able to handle in the best of its constitutional view of society these major problems that are intrinsic to it well i think that resorting to a racist stance yes well i think that until the majority culture and specifically those individuals in positions of power and responsibility and those individuals in academia and in media that are responsible for defining arguments and developing ideas until there is this then told is that broad spectrum of participation in a the american people confront their own racism confront the truth of their history there are no solutions possible yeah there's a broader metaphors in the right term as an example of the united states being euro centric as you say or being a wasp in his background and so forth but now that there has been detente or beyond the town with the soviet union people begin to look at where the new dialectic might develop with the capitalist countries of the north the richer the well developed countries of the north and this attitude which has been altogether too prevalent in terms of the history of this country of racist attitude toward blacks in this country into what could become prevalent of our attitude toward the broader world the rd world the developing world and that we have a problem of being able to develop some sort of not having a philosophy not having an economic political or social system that allows us to address the needs of the least advantaged people within our own society we allow our streets to be filled with homeless people and so forth here in the united states and on a world scale we don't have a system that allows us to address to feel we're addressing the needs of the developed of the people of the the the poor people of the world because we lack this because we lack this system of of addressing that collectively the political leadership the economic leadership of this country this cunt three is is a very very dangerous force in the world because we don't have a system that allows us to address the fundamental needs of the vast majority of  friendships other than friendships that are useful to you and so therefore in essence our relationships are reduced to to this to the values of the marketplace yeah right but a much deeper level though i think we need to really understand that the dichotomy between rich and poor you know but we powerful in power less is a dichotomy that we'll see that the whole idea and the whole concept behind the so called quote nation state has evolved out of the cockpit of european history that has been now have which has europe in a leadership position in controlling the technology of world and directing the technology of world so the contradiction in my view the primary contradiction that has confronted  our societies a modern society in the last fifty or so years the primary contradiction had always been couched in terms of east west conflict yeah has always been couched ever since the end of world war two capitalism communist kept capitalism coming into yeah ok well there are definite differences between the two economic approaches to develop and i would be want to say that they are the major nations or the former colonial nations yeah that's going to become the principal problem as we begin to look i think is the principal problem and so therefore when we deal with the issue of homelessness bringing it back home yeah we deal with the issue of homelessness we are dealing  with the principle that property rights human rights that one has a property right supersedes your human right to decent housing well ok right now i mean that's the basic premise that we're talking about where we almost had it written into our constitution the right to write  that in any event the the fact is that in a modern technologically oriented society the means of production the technological means of production the infrastructure the the buildings the roads the technology and so what is all owned in that private property sense forty percent of it is owned by the upper one percent of our population five percent owned virtually all of the technology nonresidential assets in our economy so the ownership class is a relatively small class and the non ownership class or wage slavery some of them are very highly paid and sycophant and think they're doing well in individual in so what but they are they are on the other side of of that dialectic the ownership of the means of technology are so narrowly held within the economies of the developed world and this also is a question that at some level has got to be addressed technology increasingly will become part of the productive process ownership of that technology could these particular onus of technology yeah i guess i was just saying the technology like there is a factory and in the soviet in china and japan they produce a television set that's all robot run not a human being in the question of who owns that robot is one that could be legitimately bell brought up in terms of the people who do not have any ownership of that as a way of distributing income it seems not to be brought up most people saying if we can just have full employment or employment opportunities for people to become wage slaves or sycophant bureaucrats within the system owned by a few people but the demand legitimate demand of people to say there should be a space expanding of ownership of the means of production if we're ever to answer an answer to fundamental sense this question of arriving at some just economic political and social system on a world scale if you could or domestically and on a world scale well i think that clearly i've come to the conclusion from what i can see that the modern nation state is the enemy of all people and that we need to really understand that and begin to come to come to grips with that because the modern national security state  poor education right we need to really understand that the situation that confronts us with homelessness is essentially a situation in which our society has made certain decisions but on a certain people in the society have made certain decisions they have made certain judgments that a certain segment of society will be they poor or be they black be they female that they are to be considered we need to understand that poor people are being penalized and being poor more and more people are going to become poorer robbi potter says he thinks we're heading for a great depression the dow jones is doing well the people at the top the upper five percent are doing very very well much of that is being drained upward from the lower classes certainly and from the middle classes and that there's going to be a dialectic built between the between the people who own the technology at the top and the mass of the people who see a mass movement that's going to have strong political almost revolutionary connotations that is likely to become well known of the of the american scene and we only have about two minutes left well i think that that will not occur unless we  they come for you is if they come for me and in the evening they'll come for you in the morning absolutely you know set up debtors prisons around the country and they will call it internal security or something of that sort it's great well we've only just got started and talking all i can just say here is  welcome once again out into the world as it were and i'm glad that you've been able to come back and as you say that we need some leadership and some ideas and may you be able to bring a great deal of the wisdom of you to comment you had a cumulative before you were unjustly cars rated and that what you've been able to build up while you were able to bring it out to help give some notions and leadership to the people here now in the african american community but the whole of the american community and maybe your influence and your your good word to be able to spread as widely as possible throughout our society to help bring just economic political and social change to the society to the world and i want to thank you very much for coming in and participating have really been a pleasure it's been a pleasure for you then also have had the perceptions of  our guest here we thank you very much for viewing we invite you to tune in again next week we'll be coming back again next week on conversations that