Dear friends,
I was quite
incensed both yesterday and today as some clown, on Facebook, masquerading as an African
American, posted a picture from 1970 where some Philly Panthers stripped for
authorities after a raid that was led by super-scumbag Frank Rizzo, the top cop
back then who later became mayor.
Nevertheless, it's a hugely false abstraction to compare the a displaying of the
Emmett Till horror, as well as lowlife Frank Rizzo's stripping Panthers in
1970, within the context of exposing it to people of today, just as it is with
the murder of Dr. King, without
revealing the relationships between all of those occurrences and their
connection with the continuation of both local and federal government actions
to demean and humiliate, especially African American people.
Moreover, as
someone who had to walk around in the daytime with a pistol on my waist, and
sleep at night with a shotgun beside my bed and the pistol under my pillow,
while police cars surrounded our offices, and occasionally helicopters hovered
above as they routinely performed “combat exercises”, it angers me that that
photograph is not accompanied by the question "why did those Panthers
undress?". After all, we were always ready to fight!...Consequently, I
always saw it as an inside job.
That is, I always thought to myself that the
Philadelphia Police Department had infiltrated a local Panther branch (since there were about seven of them all over
Philly)...worse yet, since there were females there too, I can't imagine an
African American woman stripping naked in public, as some of them
did...therefore, whoever pulled his or her clothes off first was the police
informant\collaborator who got the others to join in.
Finally, jealous of the
Panthers, many self-hating black journalists and college professors have brought that
incident up as an excuse to snicker at the Panthers, when in fact their
cowardly selves, including my old friend Cornell West, were too scared to stand
up to our oppressors.
Liberation!
G. Djata Bumpus
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