Article, Picture & Caption reprinted from the March 16, 1973 edition of Muhammad Speaks Newspaper
...After Cleaver's curse; Hanrahan's bestiality
By Donald Mosby
CHICAGO - December 4, 1969 is one of the most significant dates one can recall in the Black liberation struggle, in America. On that date Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered, during a pre-dawn police weapons raid, by a hail of police gunfire, in a Westside Chicago apartment.
ALL THE SHOUTHING and tumult has died, and all the captains have departed.
Fred and Mark are dead. But what of the Black Panther Party they died believing
in? Muhammad Speaks got the answers to the above questions and a great
many more during a recent interview with Boby Rush the man who stepped into
Fred Hampton's 'shoes' within a few minutes of the young Panther leaders
death.
The death of Hampton and Clark, it now appears, ended an era in the then violence fillied short life of the Panthers. Sardonically, it seems the death of the two young revolutionaries gained the Panthers a respectabillity which up to the time had escaped them.
The Black Panthers literally burst onto the American scene with their now famous "shotgun" invasion of Sacramento, Calif. Legislative session. Legions of words have been written about this event already, but it quickly became a topic of discussion during this writer's visit with Bobby Rush as we delved into what he termed the "return to the original vision."
"The invasion," Rush stated, "was a military act for political reasons."
Rush insisted that the Panther Party was organized to fill a political void at the "grass roots" level. And the "invasion" of the California capitol was designed to capture the minds of Black people and make them aware of both the Panthers and what Black people could opt to do if they chose. At the same time Rush states the "invasion" was designed to make Black people aware of the fact that the system was bent on disarming the Black community.
One person whom Rush states lost the meaning of the "invasion" and got "hung up" on the image of Black people with guns is Eldridge Cleaver.
"Huey was in jail," Rush said, "and Eldridge became a dominant figure in the party. He went on an ego trip and defected from the Black community. He began to 'trip' off the publicity the party was getting and started doing things just to get the publicity."
Rush says Cleaver turned the party away from its original goal of organizing grass roots Black people into a political force, to merely "battling" with the police. He says that this occured because Cleaver never had an understanding of the 'true' politics of the party.
According to Rush the deaths of Hampton and Clark, along with a number of other police-Panther confrontations during 1969, exposed the viciousness of the system towards Blacks, and cause Black people to reexamine the Party and what it was doing in the community.
At the same time he insists that many persons, who disagreed with the Panthers did so purely from a philosophical point of view.
Rush states quite candidly, however, that at one point the Party, under Cleaver, abdicated its responsiblity to the Black community; and that it took Hampton's and Clark's deaths, plus the return of Huey Newton to cause the Party to begin to return to the original vision. This return to the 'original', Rush states, led to the schism which saw Cleaver and Newton servering bonds that held the two together almost from the inception of the Panthers.