Still A Revolutionary
Will We Resurrect the Revolutionary Struggle for Black Liberation?
WILL WE RESURRECT THE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE FOR BLACK LIBERATION?
Remembering Bunchy and John
In this time of the U.S. Empire’s urgent, brazen moves to complete the construct of fascism inside the U.S. and take over the world order, Blacks seem reduced to Black Lives Matter chatter while Negroes stand down, going along with the go-along.
It’s as though we have forgotten the blood. It’s as though we don’t remember there once was a Movement, a Movement for Black Liberation. I remember. Oh yes, the courage and commitment of the partisans of that Movement—including the great Black revolutionary Martin Luther King, Jr., not the namby-pamby, non-violent Negro the State would have us officially celebrate.
I remember Alprentice Carter—called Bunchy, like a “bunch of greens,” he told us. Fine and black and brilliant and conscious. Before he organized the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party, which was the first Chapter, he was called “the Mayor of the Ghetto.” And, he was the leader of the 5,000-strong Slausons street organization, which would splinter into a thousand pieces of Crips and Bloods.
And I remember Captain John Huggins, who could fool you with his genteel manner and strong bass voice. He always reminded us we had to “educate to liberate.” He became my personal hero, saved me from my miseducatio. He was always in the neighborhoods, becoming a street mentor. There was 17-year old Tommy Lewis—who became a Panther who fought police to the death on a street corner in LA. in August of 1969. And there was Danifu, one of the founders of the (original) Crips, as they came into being intending to carry on the Panther legacy until the CIA dumped crack on Blacks.
Bunchy and John. Not just bold and brave and beautiful, but ready to die for the People because they lived for The People. The FBI understood—perhaps what we don’t understand today. They were a threat to the government, to the status quo, to the capitalists, to the racists. They were organizing thousands of bad Blacks in the streets of South Central L.A. and Watts and Compton, demanding Brothers and Sisters settle their differences, unite against their common oppressor, know who were their enemies and their friends. They were serving The People “body and soul,” and leading us to join them in a powerful struggle for freedom.
Yes, the FBI understood. On January 17, 1969—J. Edgar Hoover having promised America that 1969 would be the last year of The Panther—Bunchy and John were shot down and killed at UCLA by FBI operatives under the control of FBI agent Ron Karenga—plagiarist of the Ujamaa/Umoja principles set forth by the great Julius Nyere. I was there—in the same building, at the same time, heard the shots, went to jail with John’s wife, Ericka, my Captain, along with their three-month old baby, Mai, and all the other Panthers who were in the area in that horrible moment. But we knew we had moved the agenda, and we lived and kept struggling there in L.A. and organizing in the name of John and Bunchy and The People. And soon there were over 40 Chapters of the Black Panther Party.
Bunchy and John
Walked through this maze
They touched a million lives
In a thousand ways
Three-score-and-ten
Never knew them
26 and 23 is all they were…
Oh, can’t you see, and
Didn’t you hear The People say
What will you give in your way?
I saw them turn, stop
And listen to The People cry and say,
“Just a life is all I got….”
Elaine Brown
Oakland, California
January 19, 2026
Trump Done Bitch-Slapped The World!
TRUMP DONE BITCH-SLAPPED THE WORLD!
Early on January 3, 2026, Donald Trump, President of the United States, ordered the bombing of four Venezuela cities, including the capital of Caracas. The operation involved 16,000 US troops and 150 US aircraft. At the end of the day, the Trump administration violently captured the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. Later, Trump announced that he had formed a Committee that would now “run” Venezuela, and that he had the accord of the current Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez (which she soon denounced as a lie). Moreover, the Committee would include some of the best oil industrialists in America to take over the “failing” oil industry in Venezuela—which owns the largest oil reserves in the world!— and sell that oil to the world and make “a lot of money” that the U.S. would share with the people of Venezuela.
My former comrade and leader Huey P. Newton certainly foresaw this in his theory of Intercommunalism. He argued, at the time, that the Vietnam War was an example of how the world had become a collection of “communities,” not sovereign nations, operating under the absolute authority and power of the American Empire. When anti-war activists challenged the Vietnam War as “illegal” as Congress had not declared it, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed that Congress had not declared war in Vietnam, and, therefore, the invasion was not a war but a police action—which Huey would compare to police bearing down on Watts back in the day or, today, we could compare to the ICE takeover of “sovereign” cities in the U.S. This global status was, Huey asserted, “reactionary intercommunalism.” Our goal was to bring about “revolutionary intercommunalism.”
Remember when Obama killed Qaddafi because he was organizing an African economic independent union a la the European Union. At the time, Libya had the largest oil reserves in Africa?
Remember when George W. Bush invaded Iraq and ultimately killed Saddam Hussein? Iraq at that time had the fifth largest oil reserves in the world?—The only person in Congress who opposed that invasion was Oakland’s-own Barbara Lee.
Remember when George H. W. Bush invaded Panama, using his boot licking general Colin Powell to murder thousands of (mostly black) Panamanians in order to capture his former CIA friend Manuel Noriega on charges of drug trafficking?
Our effective silence on those past U.S. power grabs certainly emboldened Trump to straight up bitch slap us today, to unabashedly cut back survival benefits to the poor, to unapologetically cut out all those “special treatment” funds and programs for people of color, to demonize and remove immigrants, and to invade any so-called country in the world he wanted to, whenever he wanted to—and those fascist facts were that. Yet, even now, in the face of this blatant violation of social and moral laws, right now, rather traditionally, the Congressional Black Caucus is silent. The Progressive Caucus is spouting legal gobbledygook. The Congress is essentially silent.
So Trump bitch-slapped all of us. He’s got control of more organized guns than anybody on the planet. But we’ve got all the people.
Down with the U.S. takeover of Venezuela!
Restore the oil to the People of Venezuela!
Bitch slap Trump!
All Power to the People!
Elaine Brown
Oakland, California
January 3, 2026
Rap Brown Has Passed On!
RAP BROWN HAS PASSED ON!
Long Live the Spirit of Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin!
The great Black revolutionary leader H. Rap Brown has passed out of this life. He was in captivity in a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, and died of cancer due to the long-standing medical neglect of the prison system. He had been languishing in that system’s dungeons for 25 years, after the government “finally” captured him and falsely charged and convicted him of the murder of an Atlanta deputy sheriff back in 2000. At the time of the conviction, the lead prosecutor in the case stated, “We finally got him!”
He was building a Black community economic stronghold in Whitehall, Alabama, back then, an expansion of his Muslim community in the West End of Atlanta, where he had led the drive to completely destroy drug dealing in that community—at the height of the “Crack Epidemic”—to the gratitude of the People and the chagrin of the police who characterized his removal of drugs from the Black community as “vigilantism”—until they “finally got him.” By then, he was Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, Rap Brown still standing, elevated by his belief. When captured that last time, he succinctly explained, he was targeted by the government “for reasons of race and belief.”
He was our hero, early on when the Freedom Movement heard the clarion call for Black Power that he and his close comrade Stokely Carmichael—who would become Kwame Ture—issued. Black Power shocked white America and woke up Black America. Like Stokely in Lowndes County, Alabama, Rap organized and registered Blacks to vote under the banner of the Greene County (Alabama) Freedom Organization, with a black panther as its symbol, when and where Blacks could get killed just talking about voting. He became a leader of the transformed, all-Black SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) organization. Soon, he was recruited into the Oakland-based Black Panther Party for Self-Defense as Minister of Justice. Soon, he became a primary target of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations.
He spoke with fire, demanding we rise up and fight for our freedom. He acted with urgency and took all the blows with dignity and fierceness. He adhered to the ideal of the Movement for Black Liberation every day of every year of his life—even when they “finally got him.” After the Georgia conviction, the FBI ordered the state prison system to move him to a federal maximum security facility because he was “radicalizing” the Black prisoners. Still he stood strong in his commitment to the People. Even now, in the silence of his passing, I can still hear him: “If America don’t come around, burn it down, burn it down!”
H. Rap Brown lives! Long live Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin!
A Luta Continua!
All Power to the People!
Elaine Brown
Oakland, California
November 24, 2025
Assata's Gone
ASSATA'S GONE
Assata Olugbala Shakur died yesterday, September 25, 2025. She was a Black woman revolutionary. There are no new Assatas that I see.
Assata was the first woman on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List. Convicted of killing a cop (New York State Trooper) in 1977, she courageously escaped a lifetime in prison, prison itself, in 1979, and went into exile in Cuba, where she remained for the rest of her life, where she died.
She had been a Panther for a minute, a member of the Black Panther Party, but joined a rogue offshoot of the Party invented by Eldridge Cleaver, who had become an enemy of the Party—the Black Liberation Army. In any case, she came to be, more than anything, a Cuban, a Sister committed to the global revolutionary struggle for an end to capitalism and racism and oppression of all forms. She never wavered. She held up the blood-stained banner.
There is a poster in the ether world of social media called “Set It Off, 1970s,” named after the film, showing four Black women revolutionaries: Assata, Angela, Kathleen Cleaver and me. However inconsequential the poster might be, I’m proud to be linked to my Sisters in struggle. Assata’s death is my death in so many ways. I look to find her in the whirlwind.
All Power to the People !
Elaine Brown
Oakland, California
September 26, 2025
Fred Hampton's Way
FRED HAMPTON'S WAY
The legacy of Fred Hampton is to fight fascism toward the liberation of Black and all oppressed people. If we honor our beloved Comrade Fred Hampton, we will not only memorialize his name on this street where he was assassinated by the government of the United States, we will pick up his blood-stained banner and continue the struggle! We will march forward carrying the truth Fred left for us, that you can kill a revolutionary but you cannot kill The Revolution!
When I met Illinois Chapter Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton in October of 1969, the Chicago “hawk was talking.” That apartment on Monroe could not get warm enough for me. But there, in that little place where Fred and Mark Clark and other Black Panther Comrades lived, was Fred talking through the night with Black Panther Party Chief of Staff David Hilliard, convincing David of his correct position. Fred’s pregnant wife, Sister Deborah (now Njeri), and I, also pregnant, were provided the only bed—which seemed but a big mattress on the floor—to lay down our big-bellied bodies. It seemed we had taken only a cat-nap when Fred woke up everybody and put out the call to gather in a school yard in the freezing Chicago early morning darkness to get prepared for the morning’s Free Breakfast for Children program.
“I am a revolutionary,” he called out to all the ex-gang bangers and others now turned revolutionaries under his leadership standing at attention there ready to prepare and serve hot breakfasts to children in Cabrini Green and elsewhere. I am a revolutionary, came the mass response. “I ain’t gonna die slipping on no ice.” …Slipping on no ice. “I ain’t gonna die in no airplane crash.” …No airplane crash. “I’m going to die for the People!” Die for the People! “Because I live for the People!” …Live for the People! “Because I love the People!” …Love the People!
I could still feel the sting of frozen tears on my face from that moment when I returned to that little place on Monroe Street in December of 1969 to touch the blood of Chairman Fred still soaking that bed where Deborah and I had slept one night—thousands lined up outside waiting for a chance to pay homage to Chairman Fred, Panther bullhorns blasting through the streets of Chicago playing the popular song that Fred had given new meaning to, Diana Ross and the Supremes singing, “Some day we’ll be together.”
And as we gather together today on Fred Hampton Way, let us remember Fred’s way, to be willing to die for the People because we love the People!
All Power to the People!
Elaine Brown
Oakland, California
August 30, 2025
The Legacy of George Jackson
THE LEGACY OF GEORGE JACKSON
Lest We Forget
August 21 is the date the State assassinated George Jackson at San Quentin prison, in 1971. The final bullet ripped through the top of his head. George was the Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party. 10,000 came to his funeral.
We who knew him wept. We who called him Comrade George pledged our lives to his legacy, a legacy Black Panther Party leader and co-founder Huey P. Newton defined in his eulogy for George:
… And we will raise our children to be like George Jackson, to live like George Jackson, and to fight for freedom, as George Jackson fought for freedom… George once said that the oppressor is very strong…and he might beat us down to our very knees, he might push us to the ground, but it will be physically impossible for the oppressor to go on. At some point his legs will get tired, and when his legs get tired, then George Jackson and the People will tear his knee caps off….
George was murdered by San Quentin prison guards, on behalf of the State of California and the United States government and the corporations that control the government, because he had taken center stage in the struggle for the freedom of black and all other oppressed people. Millions of people in the United States and in China and in Cuba and in South Africa and elsewhere in the world were listening to George Jackson. Millions were studying his book Soledad Brother, which magnificently and clearly articulated that prisoners like him, the black and brown and poor, were only living in a prison inside a prison—the racist, capitalist Empire of the United States of America. Millions saw that George was setting the example, that it was the duty of prisoners on both sides of the Wall to “settle our differences” and unite in a struggle, an armed struggle, to liberate ourselves from poverty and hunger and all other forms of our suffering and oppression, and take down the source of our misery, the American Empire, “thoroughly, wholly, absolutely, and completely.”
Lest we forget.
All Power to the People
A Luta Continua
Elaine Brown
Oakland, California
August 21, 2025
Juneteenth or Coon-teenth
“JUNETEENTH OR COON-TEENTH”
Headquarters District of Texas
Galveston Texas June 19th 1865
General Orders
No. 3
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.
The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
By order of Major General Granger
F.W. EMERY
Major A.A.Genl
The Resurrection of Huey P. Newton
THE RESURRECTION OF HUEY P. NEWTON
Today, February 17th, is the birthdate of Huey P. Newton, Co-Founder, Chief Ideologue and Leader of the Black Panther Party. We who believe in Black Liberation celebrate his life! We continue to hold up the banner of the Panther until we’re free. We must.
Through words and actions, Huey urged black and all oppressed people to recognize that our freedom required revolutionary change in America. A complete dismantling of the American social structure toward development of an egalitarian society, inside the U.S. and globally. He taught that the U.S. is an Empire, the only true empire in the history of the world, one that controls indirectly and directly all the territories and societies of the world.
The imperialist Trump and his Afrikaner cohort Musk have torn off the veneer of democracy with which the American government has cloaked itself since its genocidal war on the native peoples and enslavement of the African, and fully revealed the face of America’s capitalism, racism and fascism. Now is the time for the oppressed, inside and beyond the borders of America, to seize the time. Trump’s totalitarian consolidation of America’s so-called democratic institutions—which always belonged to the rich and white—under his and Musk’s boots, ala Hitler in 1933, should enlighten us to see that we can strike one powerful blow, take down the apparatus of this Empire and institute a new and egalitarian world where we can live in harmony with each other and Nature.
Instead, Blacks and others are silent, a terrified giant silenced by a paper tiger. Let us rise up, celebrate and resurrect the revolutionary spirit of Huey P. Newton, and seize the power that belongs to the People!
All Power to the People!
Long Live the Spirit of Huey P. Newton
Elaine Brown
Oakland, California
February 17, 2025
Long Live the Spirit of José “Cha Cha” Jimenez
LONG LIVE THE SPIRIT of JOSÉ “CHA CHA” JIMENEZ
José “Cha Cha” Jimenez was indeed a Young Lord, a leader of the Lords, a soldier for the oppressed, in Chicago, in Illinois, in the United States, throughout the world, in the tradition of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ. He was a general in a revolutionary army, comrade in arms of Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, a revolutionary urban guerrilla, a nonfictional Don Quixote “willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause,” a man who offered his whole life to the People. In a word, Cha Cha Jimenez was a hero.
We who were graced to know him, work by his side, live in the same time and space as Cha Cha are weeping for our loss, even as we too reside in the twilight of our own lives. There are millions of his contemporaries and in the generations after and those to come who did not know him or even know of him but have and will benefit from his courageous actions to tear down the walls of oppression and build a new and egalitarian society. I believe Cha Cha would now say, quoting Che Guevara, “Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons and other men be ready to intone the funeral dirge with the staccato singing of machine-guns and new battle cries of war and victory.”
We will miss you, Comrade Brother, but we will always know that your revolutionary spirit lives on in our ongoing struggle for Freedom.
All Power to the People!
Long Live the Spirit of Cha Cha Jimenez
A Luta Continua!
Elaine Brown
Oakland, California
January 12, 2025
Commemoration of Bunchy Carter & John Huggins
COMMEMORATION OF BUNCHY CARTER & JOHN HUGGINS
Thank you, Dr. Charles Alexander and Chanté Henderson and the AAP for continuing this important commemoration of the lives and legacies of Black Panther Party leaders Alprentice Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, assassinated at Campbell Hall 52 years ago now.
As you know, the Academic Advancement Program grew out of the High Potential program in which Bunchy and John were enrolled in 1969, and we must recognize that their deaths at Campbell Hall and what they fought for established the AAP as a legacy for black and other students of color at UCLA.
The primary goal of the BPP, founded in 1966, was to create the conditions for the liberation of black people and, by right and reason, all other oppressed people. First point of our 10-point platform/program: “We want freedom. Power to determine the destiny of our black communities.”
As Party founder HPN stated, the Party was a Marxist-Leninist organization. Our fundamental ideology was creation of an egalitarian society, eliminating poverty and racism and all forms of oppression and exploitation of human beings and nature itself, toward a distribution of wealth and resources according to “ability and need.”
We engaged in a wide range of activities toward creating the conditions for this revolutionary change, from sponsoring our well-known social service programs—Survival Programs, “Survival Pending Revolution”—like Free Breakfast and Clinics; to addressing police brutality in word and deed, from our early armed community patrols to defending our persons, homes and offices against police assaults; to creating model institutions like our school and affordable housing.
By 1968, the Party had been identified by the FBI as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the U.S.” We were essentially deemed the “terrorists” of our time. The entire government, led by the FBI, its director J. Edgar Hoover, primarily through its COINTELPRO program, targeted the Party for elimination. The FBI directive was to “discredit, disrupt, destroy” the BPP.—1969 was slated by Hoover himself to be the last year of the Panther.
In early 1968, while Party founder and Min. of Defense HPN was in jail waiting trial on charges of killing an Oakland cop and the accompanying “Free Huey Movement” was exploding all over the nation, the Party’s first chapter, the Southern California Chapter, was organized by Bunchy Carter, formerly head of one of the largest street organizations in America, the 5,000-strong, LA-based Slausons.
When I joined the Chapter in April 1968, on the heels of the King assassination and the first police murder of a Panther, Lil Bobby Hutton in Oakland, Ericka Huggins was my captain. Bunchy was the head of the chapter as Deputy Min. of Defense, and John Huggins soon became the Chapter’s Deputy Chairman.—Later that year, Bunchy, John, Party member Geronimo Pratt and I enrolled in UCLA’s new High Potential Program.
By the end of 1968, the FBI was in full battle mode to destroy the BPP in 1969.—Our Southern California Chapter would come to bear the brunt of that campaign. The LAPD formed the nation’s first SWAT team for the express purpose of wiping out the Chapter, hundreds of SWAT members assaulting our offices in L.A. in December 1969, days after the FBI-orchestrated assassinations of Illinois Party Chapter Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton and member Mark Clark. Indeed, during 1969, the Southern California chapter suffered the police murder of at least one member a month, and one of our former members, Chip Fitzgerald, who was imprisoned that year, remains in prison to this day.
Beyond academics, the Party members at UCLA operated under the slogan “Educate to liberate.” Among other things, we pushed to get rid of the CIA recruiting office on campus; supported and directed anti-war activity; supported the resurrection of the Black Student Union; secured food from Weyburn Hall dormitory for our free food program in South Central L.A.
The so-called conflict that culminated on January 17, 1969, then, must be seen in this context—the FBI’s targeting of the Party.—There is no such FBI record relating to Ron Karenga or his organization at all.—This was about discrediting and destroying the BPP.
Whatever vignettes others claim about January 17th, I bear witness that John Huggins was shot in the back by a member of Karenga’s US organization in an FBI operation, and that when Bunchy turned toward the shooter, he was shot by the same in the chest.
There are no “alternative” facts. There is no other story. Ongoing COINTELPRO scenarios are just that. This wasn’t about control of a Black Studies program, for the Party had no agenda for that, there was no money promised to the Party by the then-Chancellor to create such a program, we advanced no person to head such a program. Our only position was that it be student controlled.
___________
It is critical to understand today that the government’s agenda to destroy the Black Panther Party has left us in a neoliberal vacuum. No matter the rallies for Black Lives Matter, the anti-police marches, there is no organized freedom movement for black people in America today, no organized revolutionary agenda.
Yet black people remain oppressed: highest poverty rates, highest cancer and coronavirus death rates; lowest education levels; only 1% of all business revenues are from black businesses; and we represent nearly half the prison population of America.
This commemoration/celebration—the first one of which I am proud to have assisted in developing—was co-founded and begun by two UCLA students in 2008: Sikander Iqbal and Kendra Arsenault. The purpose was to celebrate to educate to liberate. One of the goals was to change the name of Campbell Hall to CARTER-HUGGINS HALL. That was 13 years ago now.
If we would celebrate the lives and legacies of these two heroes, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, let us get back to the freedom agenda! Let us no longer be distracted by the “identity agenda” where the individual persona is more important than the freedom of our people, and let us move to create a new social structure, where poverty, racism and human exploitation are eliminated.
For today, this day, though, let us pledge to fulfill the promise of the first commemoration, to rename Campbell Hall CARTER-HUGGINS HALL—lest we forget.
All Power to the People!
Elaine Brown
Oakland, California
January 14, 2021