There's no place to be right now but in it.
But fry the pigs?
If they attack --
Dr. King --
Is dead!
There's no one in the Black Panther Party
who would have spoken to the chairman
of the party that way.
Period.
So that's No. 1.
My name is Elaine Brown.
I am a former leader of the Black Panther Party
in the years 1974 to 1977.
I've been asked to take a look
at some Hollywood films
where the Black Panther Party is depicted
and to give my thoughts and a review of those films.
Shut that blind, man.
And get your white a-- away from that window.
Don't you know we in a war here?
Hey, man, he's cool. He's cool. He's one of us.
Let me tell you about us.
Everybody in America loves "Forrest Gump."
And so the shame of it is
that this one encounter that Forrest Gump has
is with this insane cult group of people
that doesn't like white people.
Well, of course it was a caricature,
and it was certainly demeaning,
not to count inaccurate.
Well, nobody walked around wearing that stuff.
Every once in a while we'd have those rallies
in the early days where people would wear,
you know, the black leather.
That was our sort of uniform.
But nobody would be walking around the office
with that clothing on.
The Black Panthers are against the war in Vietnam.
Yes! We are against any war
where Black soldiers are sent to the front line
to die for a country that hates them.
The Vietnam War was launched in 1965
by Lyndon Johnson.
The party itself started in 1966.
We were the only Black organization
that was actually a part of the antiwar movement.
But then in my particular case, in 1970,
I visited Hanoi and other places
and did a radio interview
with a figure called Hanoi Hannah.
And we urged our Black brothers
to throw down their weapons and come home.
Sorry I had a fight
in the middle of your Black Panther party.
So, to make light of it,
to make a joke out of us,
then we become a caricature and a joke.
There's nothing you can say about it that's good at all,
as to what was the Black Panther Party
and any depiction of it.
And if you were to rank it, which, you know,
is just so typically American, Western thinking,
that everything has to be ranked,
but if you were to rank it,
I don't think it's on the chart.
It would be below one.
There's no place to be right now but in it.
But fry the pigs?
If they attack --
Dr. King --
Is dead!
Bobby was very dynamic.
Bobby Seale was the chairman
and cofounder of the Black Panther Party.
But I can tell you this:
There's no one in the Black Panther Party
who would have spoken to the chairman
of the party that way.
Period.
So that's No. 1.
But I can't imagine anybody,
any sister or brother, telling the chairman
of the Black Panther Party what to do or not do.
I said it would be impossible for me
to care any less what you are tired of
and I demand to cross-examine the witness.
And the fact that he would have spoken out
in this style, it would have been absolutely true.
There's no way you would have told Bobby
not to speak up in the courtroom,
because that was almost the style
of the Black Panther Party.
And not for arbitrary reasons.
Don't be afraid to speak.
Don't be afraid to not follow their rules and so forth.
[chains rustling]
We were pretty pissed off about it
when Bobby was gagged and bound.
He was treated so incredibly differently than the others.
I thought it wasn't a bad film, as a film,
because it was more in tune with the times.
We just need to make sure that Nixon Black power
doesn't equate Nixon with the Black Panthers.
Have you lost your mind, man?
Did you read Hoover's last memo on that?
Ehrlichman: That's my point.
Goddamn terrifying.
No, no, no. I gave him the green light
to gut those sons of bitches.
Ehrlichman: Good, good.
I had forgotten about "The Butler."
I had written that out of my memory,
because that was another one of those films
I refuse to see.
Why don't we just put Aunt Jemima back on the pancake box?
Or Uncle Ben back on the rice box, you know?
This time, we take a stand against these injustices
that have plagued our community.
They take one of ours,
we taking two of theirs.
"If they kill one of us, we kill two of them."
I mean, this kind of simple-minded rhetoric,
this is not something anybody would have ever said.
Why would we never have said it?
Because it didn't make any sense.
That didn't mean we wouldn't defend ourselves,
but nobody's going out and saying,
"Well, we gonna kill two of them for every one they kill,"
all this kind of stuff.
And we're not gonna allow the police
to come to our communities and shoot people.
We will move on them, and we will do that,
but that wasn't the essential thing.
We ain't seen this boy --
I'm gonna snatch the life out of you, boy!
Now everybody just sit down.
I'm sorry, Mr. Butler,
I didn't mean to make fun of your hero.
[slaps]
Everything you are and everything you have is
because of that butler.
Now, this wouldn't have happened
in anybody's universe, period.
Period. You hear me?
The idea that
this woman,
Oprah,
can play a role
where she slaps a member of the Black Panther Party
gives Hollywood and white people such comfort,
knowing, "This isn't the way Black people are.
We don't like them either.
Even now we don't like them.
We don't even like what they stood for.
They were wrong.
They were terrorists.
They were killers.
This man was a good solid brother
who took care of his family
and didn't bother anybody,
and he should have been respected
by his disrespectful son
who joins the Black Panther Party."
It's just so shameful
to try to show and to embrace the idea
of the good Black versus the bad Black.
And in this case, the bad Black, what's the worst?
Oh, Black Panthers.
So, the point is,
there are so many inaccuracies in this concept,
not to count that the boy of that man
was never in the Black Panther Party.
But the main purpose of that stupid film
was to elevate the role of the good servile Negro.
Overall, pretty bad.
I pledge to develop...
Crowd: I pledge to develop...
Hampton: My mind and body to the greatest extent possible.
Crowd: My mind and body to the greatest extent possible.
I will learn all that I can.
The Black Panther Party Breakfast for Children Program
was not the centerpiece of the Black Panther Party,
first of all.
It was a tool -- the ideological underpinning
was to bring people together
and to recognize that they had a right to eat.
You have a right to food.
And we still see that today.
We talked about the right to medical care.
We talked the right to food, clothing,
all these things that, right now, are still a problem.
So, as a Black person,
when you look at the situation then as now,
you find that we have the highest rate
of prostate and breast cancer deaths in America.
And then we said, well, people are dying
because they have no access
to even the most minimal medical care.
And so we said, we have to put clinics up,
we have to show people that you have a human right
to access to healthcare.
And the reason we said "free"
is because we wanted people to conceptualize
the idea that in a humane society,
we're not going to make people pay
for those things that keep you alive.
So I think that Fred Hampton recognized that,
because he was ideologically very strong, as I knew him.
Unlike the director of this film
and his friend, Ryan Coogler,
I knew Fred Hampton.
And I knew that he was very much ideologically aligned
and understood the purpose of all of these programs.
This is why the Chicago police
would come in and assault our clinics.
You know, there in Chicago,
they took some very heavy hits
on breakfast programs and so forth.
Because the fear of J. Edgar Hoover,
which he stated openly,
it wasn't that we had guns.
Nobody was afraid of our guns.
What do we have compared to the Chicago PD?
Or the Illinois State Police that murdered Fred?
Or the United States Army,
or the United States Navy,
or the United States Marine Corps,
or the United States Air Force,
or the CIA, or the FBI, or the ATF,
and all the other agencies of this government
that are armed to the teeth?
Now, you know the Black Panther Party
did not represent a threat on the issue of guns.
What was the threat that we represented?
We had an agenda to understand
that the reason we remained oppressed in America
was because there was this fundamental
400-year-old existing system
that had oppressed us as a group in the beginning,
and so, therefore, the only way that we could be free
was that this whole system had to be dismantled.
Now that's what we understood
and I absolutely know that Fred Hampton understood.
So, the limitation, the narrow, pathetic,
two-dimensional characterization of Fred,
oh, that was nothing compared to who Fred Hampton was.
To put Fred into any context
with this piece of garbage,
William O'Neal --
and this guy was on screen as much as Fred Hampton.
So what you've done is make him
like the other side of Fred Hampton.
Like there's Fred Hampton,
and then there's William O'Neal.
William O'Neal had no such significance
in the history of either the party or Black people.
And this is so insulting to the history of Fred Hampton,
much less the Black Panther Party,
to equate these men
as though they were two sides of the coin.
You know, "Well, one turned out this way, one..."
No!
This was a fight for Black people
and our liberation.
If you had been respectful of that history,
then you might've shown more respect
to not only Fred Hampton,
but to the Black Panther Party.
We want full-fledged membership
in the Black Panther Party.
And none of that, "OK, sugar.
As long as you play the background,
getting my beer and rubbing my feet"
bulls--- either. You dig?
Those sisters standing there looking tough,
"We're gonna be in the party,"
who the hell did that?
It's just downright silly.
Nobody did that.
And to make the point that women were equal,
I mean, it just wasn't something that even came up.
There were women in the Black Panther Party from day one.
Ericka Huggins was one of the first members in LA.
And when I joined, she was my captain.
So we had women in leadership
almost from the beginning, that I can recall.
I don't know where that's coming from.
And it's kind of insulting
to both the men in the party
and to the party's fundamental belief system and ideology.
Absolutely not. We're here to send a message.
The Black Panther Party for Self Defense
calls upon the American people in general
and Black people in particular
to take careful note of the racist California legislature
now considering the Mulford Act.
So, this was the first and only time
the National Rifle Association
supported a gun-control bill.
[laughs] Which is very funny.
As soon as some Black people
started talking about carrying guns.
And all this was, was what is now called open carry.
Because at that time in California,
you could carry a shotgun.
That was part of our organizing.
To say, "We have the right to bear arms."
You want to say white people have the right to bear arms?
So as soon as we assume that second amendment right,
as all of these organizations like to claim,
"Oh, also, we got to have gun control."
So it was an impressive moment,
and a lot of people were shocked by it,
that Black people, not only that we had guns,
but we were not there as thugs.
We were there with an ideological drive.
As Huey Newton used to say,
the gun is not necessarily revolutionary,
because the police have guns.
So we know it's not a revolutionary act.
But in this case, it's the ideology behind the gun,
and that ideology is a championing
of the right of self-defense, under the larger agenda
of seeking liberation for Black people.
[cameras flashing]
I love Jean Seberg.
And I knew her very well. Very well.
I saw pieces of this stupid movie,
but the scenes I saw were just so inaccurate
and so disrespectful of Jean and who she was.
Hollywood was a big supporter
of the Black Panther Party.
In our chapter in Southern California,
we knew every Hollywood star,
because at that moment we were
the flavor of the year. You know?
And one of our biggest supporters
was a guy named Bert Schneider,
who made a film called "Easy Rider."
And, of course, Jane Fonda.
So, the LA chapter,
we were sort of assigned to go and see her,
because this was money that could come
into the Black Panther Party.
So that's why I know so much about Jean Seberg.
I remember when ultimately my baby was born,
she sent me a card and some baby clothes, stuff like this.
She was a really genuinely decent and good person.
If bringing them here raises their profile
and it draws attention to the cause,
then I've done my job.
She said she wanted to support us.
But she didn't want to be open about it,
because she felt that if she were,
that she would never get work in Hollywood
and that she would not be able to support us, therefore.
And so she would give donations
of $10,000 to $15,000, you know?
Which would go to the Northern California,
up to Northern California and be spent on, you know,
food, production of our newspaper, what have you.
They've tapped our phones in Los Angeles.
They're listening.
I can hear these little clicks on the line.
I mean, we were all aware --
we assumed phones were being tapped.
Nobody was unconscious.
But I don't think we understood
the magnitude of what we were up against,
which was the entire United States government.
And there was a paranoia that,
if you want to call it that,
but, you know, paranoias were being raised
that we were afraid of imaginary things.
This was nothing to -- nothing imaginary in it.
But she definitely lost everything.
And their point was to discredit the Black Panther Party.
Jean was certainly, you know,
collateral damage, a casualty.
I don't think this film, in any way,
gives credibility to Jean's commitment
to the ideals that the party espoused.
That's why I have problems with these films.
It's because that, even though they get Black people
to sort of take over the film,
the Black Panther Party remains demonized,
mischaracterized
in the public imagery that Hollywood produces.