Definición del SLA

A colossal event had occurred, that Huey P. Newton had put in motion. A colossal event had occurred that had significant meaning to the Black Panther Party. News of the existence of the Party went all the way around the world. A few days after we came back from

Sacramento, Huey found out that the fact that we went to the Capitol was plastered across the front pages of the London Times. Things developed from there. We now had a case where some twenty-four brothers were charged with conspiracy: $2,200 bail apiece. When we tried to raise the money at the time, we found that the Black Panther Party was known everywhere. After we brought the brothers home from jail, we went over to the Black House, which had actually been named and established as the San Francisco headquarters of the Black Panther Party. Eldridge Cleaver had named it that, and Huey and I had agreed to it. Black House was where brother Eldridge had been living.

The objective was to get out The Black Panther.

Huey and I had been around the Black House all day, that third day after Sacramento, and news reporters were calling us and trying to get in touch with us, and calling Eldridge Cleaver. Everyone was trying to vamp in on us to see what was going on. They called all day. One call told us that the next morning they wanted us on Channel 7, on the "A.M."

program. We agreed to be there. That night, we got set to lay out the ten-point platform and program for the Party Newspaper, and to lay out the second issue of volume one of The Black Panther, Black Community News Service.

We had a lot of things set up to lay out The Black Panther. Emory Douglas, who's now our Minister of Culture, had brought over all his materials and Huey was explaining to him about revolutionary culture, explaining that the only real culture is revolutionary culture. Huey told him that if he was going to be an artist for the Black Panther Party, he had to relate

specifically to the revolutionary culture, the black people. Emory explained that he had related to revolutionary culture.

I asked him a couple of questions myself. I remember trying to explain to Emory that culture is basically learned behavior, and what is involved in learned behavior, especially when you speak of black people and a revolutionary culture. The Molotov cocktail had become a significant part of black people's culture, and now Huey P. Newton had brought forth the meaning of guns, organized guns and force as a significant part of black people's culture. They had to graduate from rocks and bottles and Molotov cocktails, Huey was saying, to a level where they understood the proper use of organized guns and force, and where they understood what a political party represented when it started to go forth to liberate black people. I was hoping that he understood that the Black Panther Party was concerned

specifically with the basic political desires and needs of the people and seeing that those be answered in a revolutionary fashion. The brother was all head-shaking and yeses saying, 'Yeah, I can understand it, I can dig it. He just wanted to do some art.

So we sat up that night, and I sat down myself and laid out the first little Black Panther headline - THE TRUTH ABOUT SACRAMENTO.

Many people ask us where we get our money from. The power structure has been accusing us of being robbers and thieves. This is not the case. A large portion of our money comes from many groups and people who support us. That includes different sources: lawyers groups, church organizations, other types of organizations, and many people who sympathize with the Party because they have taken time to read our newspaper.

Speaking engagements are another way we get funds. Sometimes we get $500 and $1,000 for speaking, especially when Eldridge, myself, and Kathleen were moving around, but they still are being given to other leaders of the Party and these funds help the Party function. One of the main sources of funds is the Party's newspapers. It is an organ which lumpen proletarian brothers and sisters produce. Eldridge Cleaver is the chief editor of the paper, but the quality and development of that paper has come from brothers who have previously been in jails, brothers who have previously just been on the block, lumpen proletarian everyday Afro-American brothers who became politically organized and politically conscious, and learned their skills in producing that paper.

The brothers in the Party don't receive any kind of salary from the Black Panther Party, but for every paper that they sell, they keep ten cents. We give a lot of the young brothers, the little brothers in the community, ten cents for every paper they sell. Some of the brothers were able to buy themselves bicycles from selling so many papers. This is very good because it's constructive, it helps them work, and at the same time it helps the Party get correct

information about the Party to many more people.

The paper has the highest circulation of what are generally called "underground newspapers" although we are not really underground. We're very much on top of the ground.

Underground is a way to distinguish us from the Establishment press. Our circulation is 125,000 copies per week at present and is rising rapidly across the country. The brothers in the Party, the paper's staff, and all the brothers and sisters who work to help produce that paper are the ones who deserve credit for seeing to it that that paper consistently moves, for gathering the news, and for becoming reporters of news in the community where they can serve the people with the truth of what's happening.

So it's not a case of some white people behind the scenes putting our paper out or some special Jewish money being the sole source of the Party's existence. This is not the case at all. It's a thing where the Afro-American lumpen proletarian has become the vanguard, and the newspaper in itself is key in teaching the people that the brothers in the community who are revolutionaries, who want revolutionary change are not about to step back from the power structure, but in fact the Party's going to go forth, and is consistently going forth. Some very tricky methods have been used to try and stop our paper from being published. We received a letter from the Printers Union of America, which stated that since our paper had become of such "professional quality" they demanded that we have our paper printed and put together in a union printers shop. We understood that this was part and parcel of FBI and police attempts to try and stop the Black Panther Party news-newspaper. Howard Quinn, the place where we print the paper, is a union shop, but the Printers Union was referring to the people who lay the paper out, the members of the Black Panther Party. Since we understand the workers and we understand that we are workers, four or five of the brothers and sisters who actually do the layout of the paper, and who are Party members, joined the Printers Union, and that stopped all of that noise.

In the past, a large number of papers have been stopped, and thousands of issues were received soaking wet. This went on for a year off and on. In the process of shipping the papers, the airlines would hold them up in their freighting operations for a week or two. This included American Airlines, TWA, and United. We've got the records to prove it. We also have records of the notices we sent to the airlines saying we were going to sue them for holding our papers up like that and sometimes causing fifty or sixty thousand papers not to show up at all or to show up when they couldn't be sold, two and three weeks after the date on the paper.

There were also numerous attempts to factionalize the workers inside of the Howard Quinn Printing Company where they roll our paper off the press. Half the workers got on our side and the other half were on the side of this CIA-FBI operation, who said they were going to quit Howard Quinn if they didn't stop printing the Black Panther Party paper. The other half, the workers who were on our side, were the ones who run the press downstairs. They were getting along fine with us because we were helping them make more money. We were running off more papers than any other underground newspaper printed at Quinn's. They said they would quit if Quinn didn't continue printing the Black Panther Party's newspaper. Well, we survived through that and we finally started sending the papers on a C.O.D. basis

so as to be able to collect insurance from the airlines. Suddenly a lot of our papers began to arrive on time, although there are still some cases where they're holding them up. In the past there were actually cases where the police department would be out at the airport waiting for the particular plane that our papers were coming in on. The airlines were checking out the papers and giving them to the police, and the police would take our property somewhere and destroy it.

It costs about eight cents to produce the paper, but with mailing and shipping costs it comes to about ten cents a paper. The paper sells for twenty-five cents but we only receive about five cents from every paper. This money goes back to pay rent on our offices, phone bills, and other expenses. We are very proud of our paper. It comes from the hard core of the black community, the grass roots.

This should let people know that we have a national organ that they can read to keep themselves informed about the Black Panther Party and what's going on in the world, in these changing revolutionary times.